The Acadian Diaspora by Hodson Christopher

Author:Hodson, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Acadians in the southernmost European settlement on earth. A View of Fort Saint Louis at Accaron Bay (1766). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Even farming had gone surprisingly well. “Our agriculture gives every hope of success,” noted Nerville, understandably proud of the little patches of grain and peas that adorned the settlement’s outskirts.108 Louis-Antoine’s satisfaction was shared by the Acadians who came with him in 1765, a group that included Jean-Jacques Cyr and Marie-Josèphe Hébert, eight of their children (two of whom were themselves married), and four grandchildren, along with single Acadian men such as Paul Babin, François Henry, and Félix Breau.109

These Acadians had allowed Louis-Antoine to put forward ambitious plans for the Falklands while in France between voyages. He counted 333 Acadian families in Saint-Malo, totaling more than thirteen hundred people. Although neither he nor the crown could cobble together the funds to ship them all off, he remained convinced that a “considerable part” of the port’s refugees would eventually make the Falklands “the key to the South Seas.”110 In fact, their presence was downright necessary. Far removed from any other French possession, with only the Spanish at Montevideo and the natives of Tierra del Fuego within hailing distance, Port Saint-Louis had to be self-sustaining. Moreover, Louis-Antoine’s vision of the Falklands as a whaling, fishing, and sea-lion-hunting hub (and, of course, as a launching pad for missions to terra australis) required a source of provisions. For that reason, Louis-Antoine “consecrated” his return trip to Port Saint-Louis to “different experiments on agriculture and the natural produce of the new colony.”111

The Acadians succeeded admirably. “Everyone was happy,” explained a naval commissioner in Saint-Malo. “The work had been considerable, but with [the colonists] well paid, well clothed, well housed, received with kindness and humanity when sick, treated mildly but firmly, everything went perfectly well.”112 Administrative exuberance, perhaps, but arrival of Acadian children in quick succession suggests that the settlers may have shared it. Three were born to Geneviève Thériot and Frenchman Guillaume Guichard, three to Anne Cyr and Georges Charpentier from Ile Saint-Jean, and three to Marie Cyr and Joseph Granger, all within a few years. Compared to what some of their former neighbors were enduring on the Kourou River, these Acadians had found a good, safe place.

But on January 12, 1765, just days after Bougainville’s second landfall at Port Saint-Louis, Captain John Byron, the grandfather of the romantic poet of the same name, guided the Dolphin and the Tamar into a harbor on West Falkland, seventy miles from the French settlement. A few months later, an officer stationed at the British settlement of Port Egmont found a discarded bottle indicating that “some other Frenchmen had lately been here.”113

Word of the dueling colonies reached Europe in 1766. By then Louis-Antoine had returned to France, but soon Nerville welcomed Captain John MacBride to Port Saint-Louis. Straightforwardly enough, MacBride stated the British intention to “sustain their rights … to the Falkland Islands, discovered by that nation during the reign of Elizabeth.

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