Acadian Driftwood by Tyler LeBlanc

Author:Tyler LeBlanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773101194
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2020-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Jean Baptiste

It was difficult to feel lucky stuck in the filthy hold of a ship, but Jean Baptiste did. In his thirty years he had never seen such chaos, but when they were waiting to be loaded on the ships at Grand Pré, he and his wife, Marie, had stuck together, ending up on either the Sarah and Molly or the Endeavour. His sister Cécile and her family were among those they shared the hold with. The rest of his Grand Pré family — his brothers Jacques and Bénoni, his sisters Anne and Madeleine, and his parents, François and Jeanne — had been put aboard other ships. He had no idea what had become of the rest of his siblings and their families.

For seventeen days, he and Marie shared the dismal rations they were given: tough salt pork and flour. They suffered storms together, face to face in the black bottom of their floating prison. The ship stopped once at Boston, where the crew picked out a few of the deportees and removed them from the ship. The air warmed as the days passed. Smells of human waste and rotting flesh ripened and split the air. After nearly three weeks of enduring travel below deck, their ship’s anchor finally dropped for good. They had arrived at Hampton Roads, Virginia, their final destination.

Hampton Roads derived the name from its position at the confluence of three major rivers that drain into Chesapeake Bay: the James, the Elizabeth, and the Nansemond. A roadstead (or roads) is a body of water sheltered from currents and ocean swell. Hampton Roads was one of the finest harbours in British North America. Upriver was Jamestown, Britain’s first permanent settlement, founded in 1607. Slightly inland was Williamsburg, the stately capital of the Virginia colony. Virginia was then a vast tract of chartered land spanning from the Great Lakes in the north to the known limits of the western frontier. The lieutenant-governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, was ostensibly second-in-command to Governor John Campbell — who, like most governors, was rarely in the colony he theoretically administered. Dinwiddie was the administrator who would ultimately decide the fate of the Acadian prisoners brought to his shore. But Charles Lawrence had not thought to warn Dinwiddie that fifteen hundred Acadians were on their way, and like Robert Morris in Pennsylvania, Dinwiddie didn’t know what to do with them. So at first he did nothing.

At the time of Jean Baptiste’s arrival, Virginia was entangled in the war in Ohio Country. The French forts in the Ohio River Valley that so irked the British stood within disputed territory. England claimed the land the forts occupied was part of the vast Virginia colony, while France insisted that they were well within lands the French had claimed nearly a century earlier. In 1754 Dinwiddie had decided to act on the British claim. He called on a promising young Virginian officer named George Washington to lead a military force into the valley and establish a British presence.

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