|
an ACADIAN EXILE article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, March 30, 1999
Pierre Vincent was among Acadians sent to France
Odyssey took 30 years before he could come to Louisiana
by Jim Bradshaw
Pierre Vincent was just seven years old in the autumn of 1755, so he was not among the 418 men who assembled at the church in Grand Pre in Acadie on Sept 5. The order from the British governors of Nova Scotia instructed that "both old and young men, as well as the lads of ten years of age ... attend the church at Grand Pre, on Friday the 5th instant, at three o'clock in the afternoon, that we may impart to them what we are ordered to communicate."
But Pierre and his family were about to begin a forced journey that would bring him to Louisiana 30 years after the exile.
Pierre, his father (Joseph Vincent), his mother (Marguerite Bodard), and his sister (Marie), were placed aboard a ship to be sent to the British colony in Virginia. But officials in Nova Scotia did not tell the Virginians that the Acadians were coming and the authorities in Virginia would not accept the exiles. When smallpox began to run rampant through the ships in the Williamsburg harbor, the fate of Acadians was sealed. The ships and their cargo were sent to England. Hundreds of Acadians died of disease en route. Joseph Vincent, Pierre's father, died in prison in Southampton England. The family stayed in England for eight years.
In 1763, France and England ended the feud that finally brought about the Acadian exile. As part of the peace treaty, they negotiated and accord that would allow the repatriation of Acadians to French soil. During May and June, Pierre, his mother and his sister, and some hundreds of other Acadians were again crowded onto British ships and ferried across the English Channel to France. Things were not much better there; living conditions were wretched from the outset.
The Acadians had been separated from France for generations. They spoke a different French because their language and that of France had evolved differently. They were an agrarian people without urban skills, but were dumped in French ports where they became trapped in city slums. They were still abjectly poor and they were still proudly independent. It was a bitter pill for them to find themselves on the royal dole, and overburdened taxpayers soon grew tired of supporting these "foreign French."
French officials were as much at a loss over what to do with the Acadians as the English had been in the Atlantic colonies of North America. At first the exiles were put into barracks where smallpox once again claimed hundreds of lives. Some of them found menial work, most of them didn't. Like the British of North America, the French authorities thought it best if the Acadians were sent away.
Etienne Francois de Choiseul, was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1763. He wanted to revitalize what remained of the French overseas empire and he saw the Acadians as potential colonists to be sent around the world.
In late 1763, he began a propaganda campaign designed to entice the displaced Acadians to the jungles of Cayenne (French Guiana) on the north coast of South America. Several hundred Acadians were lured there by descriptions of a tropical paradise. Almost all of them died from diseases brought on by the heat and humidity.
In 1765, Abbe Loius-Joseph LeLoutre, the former vicar general in Acadie, proposed to the French government that the Acadians be sent to Belle-Isle-en-Mer, a windswept and rocky island off the coast of Britian. That didn't work, either. The colony was plagued by drought, crop failure, livestock epidemics, and high taxes. The French wanted the Acadians to pay for their own resettlement through taxes on their produce. But when the crops failed there was no way to pay. The colony failed and, in 1772, the families were moved back to the maritime ports of France. Pierre Vincent's mother was one of the Acadians who died at Belle-Isle-en-Mer. Those who came back to France once again were rejected by the general population. They sank even deeper into poverty.
The disillusioned Acadians grasped at every opportunity to leave France for any foreign country or colony that might offer them a chance to be reunited with their families and former neighbors. In late 1763, and early 1764, hundreds of them moved to the Falkland Island off the coast of Argentina, which was then a French possession. Most of them soon returned to France, as penniless as before.
New hope appeared just as the idea of leaving France seemed to be dying. In September 1776, Jean Baptiste Semer, who had settled the Attakapas District of Louisiana, wrote to his father in France and described the "benefits extended by Lousiana's newly installed Spanish administration to him and all his comrades."
Word of Louisiana's apparently thriving Acadian community spread rapidly. The Acadians in France asked to be sent to Louisiana but the French government said it would cost too much. The Acadians appeared to be trapped in poverty with no chance of reunion with their friends and families in Louisiana. Many of them began to work small, poor plots on large estates in France, hoping to sharecrop their way to a piece of of land of their own. In the cities, they continued to be regarded as parasites, because they had few urban skills.
About 1776, a plan evolved to settle 2,000 of the Acadians on 15,000 arpents of land in France owned by the Marquis de Perusse des Cars. It was pitiful land. There was no fresh water. The crops failed, and by mid-year there were fewer than 200 Acadians still on the land. Most of them moved to Rouen, Caen, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, or Nantes.
Next came a plan to place the exiles on the island of Corsica. Then, hoping that the American Revolution might oust the British from Canada, the French government planned to send the exiles back there. But when the war ended, the British still held Canada, dashing that hope.
Finally, in 1783, Henri de Peyroux de la Coudreniere, a Frenchman who made and lost a fortune in Louisiana, provided the catalyst to bring the Acadians back to North America. The Spanish were seeking Catholic settlers for Louisiana and paid a commission to anyone who could supply them. Peyroux swa a way to rebuild his fortune.
Peyroux was married to an Acadian but the Acadians in France were suspicious of him. To gain credibility among the exiles in France, Peyroux launched his resettlement program through an Acadian intermediary, Oliver Terrio, who was working as a cobbler in Nantes.
The Acadians were still suspicious. A petition was circulated among them asking the king for permission to emigrate. It traveled through Nantes, Morlaix, Renne, St. Malo, Caen, and Cherbourg. Only five Acadians signed it.
Peyroux persevered. On Sunday, May 10, 1785, 30 years after the Acadian exile, and after involved negotiations with the Spanish government, he was able to send 156 Acadians from France to Louisiana. The broke the logjam. By the end of the year, seven ships carried more the 1,500 Acadians, Pierre Vincent among them, to a Louisiana that, was still French in flavor and name though Spanish in title.
Pierre settled on lands at the intersection of the Vermillion River and Bayou Queue-de-Tortue, near what is today the town of Milton, almost the dead center of what we call Acadiana. He finally found a home.