|
an ACADIAN EXILE article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, March 30,1999
Smallpox decimated Acadians sent into exile
Crowded ships, unsanitary conditions contributed to outbreak of disease
by Jim Bradshaw
Simon LeBlanc and his family, even though they lived in poverty in Massachusetts, were among the luckier of the Acadian exiles. Most of their family was close by and they had the good fortune to find a friend and sympathetic advisor, Rev. Ebenezer Parkman.
For one thing, the Acadians continued to be plagued by disease, particularly smallpox, which spread throughout the population when they were crowded together aboard ships.
As Carl Brasseaux points out in his books, "Scattered to the Wind,' Dispersal and Wandering of the Acadians," "Most of the British Transports carried approximately one-third more passengers than they were designed to hold, resulting in rapid depletion of the ships' stores. The detrimental effects of overcrowding and poor diet had devastating effects upon the formerly robust health of the exiles'...well-being was exacerbated by the detrimental effects of stress and seasickness produced by the storms and heavy seas that plagued the crossing. It is thus hardly surprising that, almost without exception, epidemics (usually typhus and smallpox) broke out among the exiles either during the crossing or upon their arrival at an English colonial seaport."
Even those who fled to Quebec were hard-hit by disease.
Gen. Louis Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon wrote from Quebec on Dec. 7, 1757, "Small pox (sic) keeps on doing great ravages among the Acadians. These miserable victims of their attachment to France, from eighteen hundred that they were, the number will be reduced to very little if this frightful sickness keeps on. In recent days, fifteen and twenty are buried at a time."
Father Jean-Felix Recher, who was pastor at Quebec, wrote in his journal, "Since the beginning of November 1757, till the 1st of March, 1758, small pox (sic) has brought death to around 300 Acadians, young and old, out of the 1,300 that they were in town."
Historian Pierre-Georges Roy, thinks Father Recher's numbers were too low. He reported in the Bulletin des Recherches Historiques in 1930, "We think that the Cure Recher is under-estimating the truth deaths among the Acadians.....This epidemic of small pox (sic) from 1757to 1758 must have taken at least five hundred Acadians in the town of Quebec alone"
Some of the Acadians in Quebec fled there before the actual deportation, but some of them were deported from Port Royal and were to have been sent to North Carolina. For example, Pierre-Jacques Gourdeau, one of the smallpox victims in Quebec, was among 232 Acadians, 30 families, who were aboard a British ship commanded by "Capt. Milton" that left Port Royal Dec. 8, 1755. While en route, the Acadians "through the treachery of some of the crew, took possession of the vessel and carried her into St. Mary's Bay, when, after lying a month, they sailed for St. John's, there burnt the vessel, and delivered the people into the hands of the Indians." according to the Pennsylvania Journal & Weekly Advertisers of Thursday, March 18, 1755. The Acadians then made their escape toward Quebec. Other accounts of the episode say that the Acadians, under the direction of Charles Belliveau, son of Jean Belliveau, seized the ship and took it directly to Quebec.