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Nova Scotia

Through an Acadian landscape

By Peter Neville-Hadley

Meridian Writers’ Group

GRAND PRE, Nova Scotia—It’s a short drive across slender Nova Scotia from the blustery, Atlantic-facing capital of Halifax to where the hamlet of Grand Pré overlooks sheltered Minas Basin. This is a key point on a route called the Evangeline Trail, which passes through lands originally settled by the French, whose descendants developed their own culture and called themselves “Acadians.”

The land is still cross-hatched with the dikes they used to turn marshes into highly productive farmland, but there’s little sign of their Norman-style farmhouses and granaries today. The real drama of the Acadians is not one of arriving and creating a paradise, but of eviction from it. The Evangeline Trail runs through the land that was once theirs.

Considered a threat to British interests and occupying prime farmland, the Acadians undid themselves by refusing to take an unqualified oath of allegiance to the British crown once European treaties made this region of New France permanently English in 1713. “Le grand dérangement” saw families broken apart and sent to the American colonies, Louisiana, France, French Guiana and the Falkland Islands. More than 14,000 were deported.

Their expulsion had almost been forgotten when, in 1847, the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a rather maudlin epic romance called Evangeline, A tale of Acadie , a story of doomed love based around the deportations.

Founded in 1682, the original Grand Pré is now a national historic site. In the centre of what was once the town (burned by the English) the stone church where the first deportation order was read out has been rebuilt. Nearby in the garden is a statue of Evangeline who, although fictional, became the romantic heroine of the Acadians (and the subject of Hollywood movies).

A short walk from the historic site, an iron cross marks one of the points at which several thousand Acadians were marshalled for transshipment to waiting British vessels in 1755.

Further west along the trail the coast’s first permanent settlement of Port-Royal has been recreated from contemporary diaries and diagrams. Completed in the early years of the Second World War, it’s already appealingly weathered and is appropriately staffed in part by descendants of the few Acadians who were eventually allowed to return. Dressed in the clogs and homespun woollens of the period, some can point to neighbouring lands first brought to order by their forefathers.

A narrow entrance beneath the coats of arms of successive governors leads to a courtyard with doors to smithy, bakery, refectory, dormitories for the men with windows of oiled sheepskin, and finer quarters for the officers, properly glazed.

At the hamlet of Grosses-Coques, named for the local giant clams, restaurant Chez Christophe occupies a modest farmhouse of 1837 and serves Acadian dishes. The key item on the menu is pâté à la râpure au poulet , or rappie pie, alien to the delicate, decorated dishes we now associate with France, yet an authentic French import nonetheless.

The trail continues through a series of little towns and lonely, lighthouse-tipped points that offer postcard-perfect views every few minutes. Even today, Acadia is hard to leave.

 

ACCESS

For more information on the Evangeline Trail visit the Evangeline Trail Tourism Association’s website at www.evangelinetrail.com .

For information on travel in Nova Scotia visit Nova Scotia Tourism’s website at www.novascotiatourism.com .

 

 

PHOTO CAPTION

The fortress of Louisbourg recreates the fortified town as it would have looked in 1744, the year before the British first took it.

PHOTO CREDIT

John Masters/Meridian Writers’ Group

 

18 th Century lives again at Louisbourg

 

By John Masters

Meridian Writers’ Group

LOUISBOURG, Nova Scotia—The fate of the fortress of Louisbourg is a perfect example of what happens when people learn nothing from history.

In 1745 a ragtag army of New Englanders attacked French-held Louisbourg in what has been called the “Campaign of Amateurs.” They figured out that coming at the fortress by sea was a mug’s game, so they snuck up by land on the Royal Battery, a smaller position across the bay.

The battery was only built to withstand seaside assaults. It was indefensible from its land side so the French abandoned it, spiking the cannon before they left. They should have destroyed them. The New Englanders unspiked the guns and turned them on the fortress, which surrendered after a six-week siege.

Louisbourg’s 3,200 people were deported, but three years later France and Britain signed a treaty that restored the fortress to French hands. Its inhabitants returned.

A decade later the French and British were fighting again. In 1758 the British attacked Louisbourg with a much stronger force than the amateurs of 1745, but took it using exactly the same tactic.

There would be no third time lucky for Louisbourg. The British blew it up and for 200 years the headland site was tended only by wind and fog.

In 1961 the Canadian government committed $26 million to rebuilding one-fifth of the site. The job took years to complete and costs millions to maintain, but the result is one of the largest and most beguiling chunks of historical recreation in the New World.

Because there was very little development nearby, the view from the fortress is of the same wilderness the French knew in the 1700s. “On a foggy day,” says Louisbourg park interpreter Karen Pink, “you can’t even see the modern town. It’s like going back in time.” Even on a clear day, if you stand at the corner of rue Royale and rue Toulouse, it’s the 18th century every way you turn.

There are more than 25 buildings to visit, from seaside taverns to the imposing governor’s house. So meticulous was the rebuilding that at the corner of the Quay and rue St-Louis is a bricked-up entrance.

Karen Pink explains that in the 1740s this was a passageway to a house behind, but when the house burned down the entrance was blocked. Historians knew the story, so they included it in the reconstruction.

Historians know quite a bit about the fortress, in fact. The French were great at keeping records — there are more than a million documents from Louisbourg, plus journals and letters from the 2,500 civilians and 700 soldiers living there in the 1740s. In summer, 150 people in costume recreate the lives of some of those inhabitants.

Besides the rebuilt part, you can also take a self-guided tour through the other four-fifths of Louisbourg. In the wind-blown fields you can see where the hospital, breweries and executioner’s house stood. You can look back at the spires of Louisbourg and enjoy this history lesson, thanks to people who never learned their own.

 

ACCESS

The fortress of Louisbourg is open daily from June 1 to September 30; reduced services Oct. 1 to 15.

For more information visit the University of Cape Breton–maintained Louisbourg website at http://fortress.uccb.ns.ca/ .