Huguette Gougeon was born about 1655 in Port Royal, Acadia, to Antoine Gougeon and Jeanne Chebrat, almost exactly a century before the Acadians would be permanently rounded up and expelled from Acadia. Huguette didn’t know it, but she was giving birth to the expulsion generation – her children, and theirs.

Huguette’s mother was a widow with at least two children who had married Antoine about 1654, sometime after her former husband, Jean Poirier, had died. There’s substantial confusion surrounding the Poirier connection, though, and we’ll discuss that in Jeanne Chebrat’s article.

Assuming Huguette’s mother was Jean Poirier’s widow before remarrying, when Huguette was born, she had a sister, Marie Francoise Poirier, who was about 7, and a brother, Michel Poirier, who was about 5.

In the 1671 census, Antoine Gougeon, a farmer, was 45, and her mother, Jeanne Chebrat, was 45. They have one child, Huguette, who is 14, which puts her birth at about 1657. They have 20 cattle, 17 sheep, and are living on 10 arpents of land.

I’m guessing that Huguette had several siblings born between her birth and about 1669 when her mother would have been about 43. They were probably all buried in the local cemetery beside the Catholic church.

Huguette and her parents lived two doors from Michel Poirier, a bachelor, age 20, son of the deceased Jehan Poirier. Michel had 2 cattle, but no other livestock and no cultivated land. I wonder if this meant that Michel was living where his father lived, although you’d think if that was the case, he would have had some land under cultivation too.

There’s another question as well. Twenty is VERY young for an Acadian male, let alone a single male, to be living outside of a family unit – the youngest I’ve ever seen by a substantial margin. This is a real head-scratcher with his purported mother living nearly beside him.

Based on the neighbors, as shown at MapAnnapolis, they are living upriver at Belle Isle and probably had been for some 15 or 20 years. Many Acadians moved upriver after the devastating English attack in 1654, which means Huguette had never lived anyplace else. In fact, she never would.

The next census was taken seven years later, in 1678, and Huguette had married Guillaume Blanchard. They already had three children, two boys and a girl, suggesting they married at least five years earlier, which would have been around 1673. Huguette would have been about 16 at the time, a typical age for an Acadian bride.

The couple is living with Guillaume Blanchard’s parents upriver at Belle Isle. Huguette’s father has died, and Huguette’s mother, the widow Gougeon, lives nearby.

The 1686 Census

Eight years later, in the 1686 census, Guillaume Blanchard is shown as 35, and Huguette Goujonne (sic) is 27, which puts her birth about 1659.

For the first time, we discover the names of Huguette’s children.

• Marie is 12, so born about 1674 – this is the daughter in the 1678 census
• A son born before the 1678 census, so probably in 1676, has died before 1686
• Son Rene is 8, so born about 1678 – he would be the son in the 1678 census
• Antoine is 6.5, so born in 1679 or 1680
• Jeanne is 5, so born about 1681
• Huguette may have lost a child born about 1683
• Anne is 2, so born about 1684

They are farming 5 arpents of land.

1690 – An Extremely Rough Year

The Acadians who lived upriver at Belle Isle were somewhat protected from whatever was going on at Port Royal – at least physically and in the short term.

A bend in the river at Port Royal, combined with extreme tidal fluctuations – as much as 25 feet – prevented large warships from traveling upriver beyond Port Royal.

Belle Isle, another 9 miles or so upriver, was protected from immediate incursions and attacks by the English. They weren’t, however, immune to the results.

Huguette wasn’t unfamiliar with the English. They had taken the fort in 1654, the year before she was born, and control of Acadia wasn’t returned to the French until 1670, after the Treaty of Breda, when she would have been about 15.

While the English controlled Acadia during this time period, they were not part of the Acadian community. Amazingly little intermarriage occurred, in part because the Acadians were staunchly Catholic, and the English were equally as staunchly Protestant.

So, while Huguette would have been familiar with English soldiers and administrators, living upriver, she would only have seen them occasionally, and from a distance. They were probably a curiosity.

From 1670 until 1690, life in Acadia, under French control, was relatively peaceful. I say relatively, because Acadia was never truly peaceful.

By 1690, tensions between the English and French had escalated again, and in April of 1690, English warships, with 42 cannons and more than 700 men, descended upon Port Royal.

The entire 1686 Port Royal census counted only 592 people in 95 families, meaning roughly 100 men and a few older boys. The Acadian families only had 75 guns between them.

The English fleet entered the basin several miles downriver, but the sentry and grapevine system would have delivered word quickly so that the upriver families could prepare in whatever way they did.

The fort at Port Royal was in a sad condition, decrepit and crumbling, and it was impossible to defend either the fort or the town. Port Royal was the capital of Acadia, so if Port Royal fell, so did Acadia.

The fort had no defensively mounted cannons, and only about 70 of the 90 soldiers stationed there were present. Worse yet, they only had 19 guns in the entire fort. Unprepared is an understatement.

Even with all of the French and Acadian forces combined, the situation was still hopeless, at least militarily. The fact that 42 Acadian men were absent, and when French Governor Meneval sounded a cannon as an alarm, only two men showed up to help, made an already impossible situation hopeless. 72 men with 19 or 20 guns against more than 700 men with guns and cannons.

The English demanded surrender, and the French had little choice. Thankfully, the English didn’t fire on the fort and small town of Port Royal, or it would have been a massacre.

The 1686 map shows us how small Port Royal actually was. Port Royal was the administrative, military and financial center of Acadia, but the farmers who lived up and down the river and farmed the salt marshes were the workhorses, the backbone of the economy, producing the food and agriculture that sustained the Acadians, Port Royal, and the fort.

The Acadian governor negotiated surrender terms that provided:

1. For the Acadians to keep their possessions, undamaged.
2. That the Acadians could continue to practice their Catholic religion.
3. For the French soldiers and administrators to be unharmed and transported back to France.

All things considered, this was the best the French governor could possibly expect, under the circumstances.

However, after it was agreed upon, the English refused to sign the agreement, and as soon as the French surrendered, the English fleet commander unleashed those hundreds of men upon Port Royal.

They rampaged, stole, plundered, and burned the town.

They did not venture upriver, where their lack of warships and cannon for cover would have made that endeavor MUCH riskier.

Huguette would have been about 34, had 9 or 10 children ranging from infant to 17, and may well have been pregnant. An Acadian mother’s fertile years consisted of either being pregnant or nursing.

While there was no warfare close enough to hear, the upriver Acadians would certainly have been filled in by messengers.

As Huguette stood near the river, outside her home or in the fields perhaps, she would have seen the smoke begin to rise over the river in the distance. First wisps, then rolling plumes reaching to the Heavens, obstructing the sun. There was no question. Port Royal was burning.

What did Huguette do?

There’s no record of action the upriver Acadians took to shield themselves, but given what we know about the landscape, their Native allies, and their knowledge of the terrain, my expectation would be that the women took the children and retreated into the woods in the mountains. They could have taken some supplies with them, but they weren’t exactly expecting or prepared for warfare.

These mountains behind the Blanchard’s stream at present-day Marshland Road represented safety and survival.

It would have been better to be safe and hungry than dead – and Huguette and the other upriver Acadians had no idea how far the marauding soldiers would venture.

The English were now in charge. They rounded up the Acadian men, held them in the church at Port Royal, and forced them to sign an oath of fidelity to the English crown.

Then, the English soldiers and warships left. Yes, Acadia was now in English hands, and the upriver farms hadn’t been burned.

Yet.

A few months later, English pirates returned and finished the job. They killed the Acadian families’ livestock and took anything they could find. There’s no record of them venturing upriver either, but we don’t actually know. They could have killed their livestock, but not burned the farms, although that’s unlikely.

We do know that the Acadian way of life was disrupted.

Their church in Port Royal was burned. Many families were going without. Livestock was limited, and much of the harvest was ruined. They were headed into a very lean fall and winter.

1697 – Acadia Officially Returned to France

While Acadia was officially in English hands, functionally, not much changed. England wasn’t prepared to suddenly have possession of Acadia and had made no plans to govern it.

Following Sir William Phips’s 1690 capture and plundering of Port Royal, Massachusetts briefly claimed jurisdiction over the territory. However, because Phips left no garrisoned troops behind to enforce English rule, French authorities, led by Governor Joseph Robinau de Villebon, actually re-established operational control on the ground as early as 1691. International and legal sovereignty was formally restored to the French Crown when the Treaty of Ryswick was signed on September 20, 1697.

Regardless of who officially, or unofficially, controlled Acadia during this time, the Acadians had lost the spiritual anchor in their community – their church.

The Church

The Catholic church and associated rituals were the spiritual foundation of Acadian life, and the church was the hub. Both in France and after families began arriving in Acadia more than half a century earlier, the Acadians had battled and fought the English for their Catholic existence, both figuratively and literally.

When we think of the church in Acadia, and more specifically in Port Royal, we think about the physical Church of Saint John the Baptist that stood near the fort in Port Royal itself.

This 1686 map clearly shows the church in front of a fenced cemetery with little crosses marking graves. This is where the Acadian people worshipped and laid their family members to rest before the 1690 fire.

No church stands there today, but the location of the original church is marked between the fort’s garrison and the Garrison Cemetery, on one of the ramparts.

Evolution of the Church in Port Royal

The history of the church in Port Royal is an important part of understanding the lives of Acadians. While the church was a physical building, it was also a living thing. Understanding the evolution of “the church” in Port Royal is essential to understand Huguette’s life at Belle Isle, and the lives of all Acadians up and down the river valley.

Unfortunately, many records don’t survive, and there are no registers before 1702, so we have to gather information from other sources.

The first known surviving church record from Port Royal is the baptism of Marie de Menou, daughter of Governor Charles de Menou d’Aulnay and Jeanne Motin, on September 21, 1639. Witnesses were Claude Petitpas and Mr. Boudrot, the first syndics of Port Royal, along with Pierre Cachet, son of Pierre Cachet, and Jeanne Trahan, age 10, the daughter of Guillaume Trahan, who served as the baby’s godmother. This clearly occurred in Port Royal given that d’Aulnay had just recently moved the seat of Acadia from La Hève to Port Royal.

Syndics were appointed by the heads of households within the community to address parish concerns and represent interests to the seigneur and state.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the church building itself had been built. Priests held services wherever they were, made notes, and recorded baptisms, marriages, and burials in the parish register later, when they could.

Capuchin friars were brought in 1641 by d’Aulnay and were active in Port Royal during the 1640s. They instructed both Acadian and Native American children and established a monastery at Port Royal. In 1649, a monk consecrated a new church there and was the same priest who officiated a few years later at the 1653 marriage of Jeanne Motin and Charles de la Tour.

Based on this information, we can infer that residents who lived in or near Port Royal between 1649 and 1654 worshipped in a church building, and people prior to that worshipped someplace in Port Royal, perhaps at the monastery.

In 1654, Port Royal fell to the English, and both the church and monastery were burned. La Société historique acadienne tells us that the English banned worship at the fort, so the Acadians built the chapel in the woods at Belle Isle to avoid detection. Many would have attended church and maintained their customs and rituals, as much as possible without a priest, during this time.

A decade later, in 1664, a Franciscan friar was reportedly sent to Acadia, but other records suggest that Port Royal lacked a priest until after France regained control of Acadia in 1670.

Given that the English controlled Port Royal, including the fort, where the Catholic church had been located, they would never have allowed a replacement church to be built there.

During that time, “church” was not being held in a church building in Port Royal.

Brenda Dunn in her book, A History of Port Royal, tells us that:

“In June 1673, men from the St. Jean Baptiste parish in the Port-Royal area met at the request of their church trustee, Abraham Dugas, to organize funding for construction of a parish church. Mass was being held in a borrowed room. The Acadians had maintained their faith throughout the long period of English rule.”

While they may have had a priest in Port Royal, there is no evidence of a church until 1673 or later.

In a letter dated October 2, 1685, Father Trouvé described Port Royal as a community of “at least 600 souls,” noting that despite being spread over five leagues along the river, residents attended church in large numbers on Sundays and holidays. Five leagues is 12 or 14 miles, which reached far upriver. He was clearly including most if not all of the settlements near Port Royal, although if one measured from the most distant settlements in each direction, it would probably be further than that.

In 1686, Bishop Jean-Baptiste de La Croix of Quebec visited Port Royal and participated in sacraments for the Feast of Saint Anne on July 26 and praised the congregation’s sincere piety.

In 1690, the English took Port Royal and burned the church again.

The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Catholic church would never be rebuilt here.

In 1693, a new priest was assigned. We know there was no church because in 1701, the priest was recorded as being upset because the stones of the ruined church were being used for the new fort being built to defend Port Royal.

In 1699, a visitor noted that the makeshift church resembled a barn more than a church.

In 1701, a nun lamented that the impromptu church had a straw-covered roof, log walls, and paper windows. There was no bell, and the people were called to mass with the beating of a drum. She was clearly not happy about this state of affairs.

Earlier parish records were lost, and the incomplete register we have begins in 1702.

In 1704, Father Justinien Durand became the parish priest. He lived at the monastery, adjacent to the former church that also functioned as a rectory.

The location of the original church was incorporated into the fort.

The congregation had no means to build another church and gathered in “a dwelling house” until they pooled their funds and obtained a building sold by Claude-Sébastien De Villieu in 1704 or 1705 for 4,000 écus and turned it into a church. This site is located at 208 St. George St. today, further from the fort, although the present building is not the original.

Conflict

It’s at this point in history that the Blanchard family encounters the brutal intersection of religion, politics, land, money, and expansionism. While the mother church in Port Royal struggled and the congregants purchased Villieu’s building to transform it into a much-needed church building, Huguette Gougeon’s husband, Guillaume Blanchard, was engaged in a personal war with Villieu over the frontier land he had developed at Petitcodiac.

Blanchard won a battle, but Villieu won the war, and Blanchard lost his entire investment and that of his family members as well.

While Blanchard won the right to remain on the land he had dyked there, Villieu retained seigneurial rights, meaning Blanchard would have been forced to pay retroactive rents and taxes to his bitter rival, wiping out his investment and making life in Villieu’s shadow unbearable.

If Huguette and Guillaume had been attending the church at Port Royal for any reason by that point, their attendance would have ceased abruptly. They were not going to worship in a building funded by the very man who broke them financially. I doubt they ever set foot in that particular church again.

They had probably been attending church upriver at Belle Isle for 20 years by that time. Their local chapel was labeled as the Mass House on maps but was named St. Laurent. Maybe they attended the central church at Port Royal on holidays, Christmas and Easter, at least when there was a church there.

That particular church building didn’t last long.

Another Fire

The church and monastery at Port Royal were destroyed again during one of two attacks on Port Royal by the English in 1707.

The French government had provided compensation to rebuild the monastery, but a two-year dispute arose over whether to rebuild the monastery or the church. The dispute ended with the capture of the town by the British in 1710, so neither was ever rebuilt.

The Acadians tried to recover by adding a chapel to the fort in 1709, but when Fort Port-Royal was surrendered to the English in 1710, the fort chapel was turned into a barracks for British troops.

The layout is shown on the sign above at present-day Fort Anne, with red building #9 being the 1709 church-turned-barracks.

By 1713, in order to keep the peace, parishioners local to Port Royal were allowed to participate in mass at the nearby Mohawk Fort, as the British permitted a parish priest to reside there.

But Acadians were far from compliant.

Resistance at Belle Isle

In January of 1711, Father Justinien Durand was captured by the English, held hostage and taken to Boston until he returned in a hostage exchange in December of that year.

After his return, he was operating clandestinely out of the St. Laurent Church in Belle Isle, serving his parishioners there and up and down the river as best he could.

A new church was reportedly built on the other side of the river in Granville Ferry at an undetermined location that served the local population who were too distant from Belle Isle. Another church, La Croix du Cap, is found on a map at Lequille. Yet another, Sainte-Anne at Pointe-aux-Chênes, met near today’s Stoney Beach near the Melanson settlement. Services were probably held in other homes as well.

It’s no wonder that the parish records are so fragmented and incomplete.

All Catholic churches and chapels in Acadia were destroyed when expulsions occurred, beginning in 1755.

However, the St. Laurent church, first referred to as a “Mass House,” where Huguette and her family had probably been attending since the 1650s, was located at Belle Isle and became the spiritual heart of that community.

St. Laurent Church

Note that the “Mass House” church or chapel, St. Laurent, is very close to the LeBlanc Village and their neighbors, the Blanchard family. Transporting a body all the way back to Port Royal by canoe for burial, especially in the winter, seems both unnecessary and risky, if it were even possible.

We know that Acadians settled at Belle Isle between 1651 and 1654 when the English burned the church at Port Royal. They would have needed someplace much closer to worship, so they would have built their local chapel, a satellite of the official mother church at Port Royal.

There are at least 20 burial records that specify St. Laurent in the Registers of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, 1702-1755. This list is not at all complete since most burial records did not specify any burial location, and the parish records prior to 1702 no longer exist.

We know that in 1711, after the English took Port Royal for the last time, Father Durand was holding mass at St. Laurent upriver at Belle Isle, and burials took place there too.

While births and deaths were unplanned events and had to be dealt with in a timely manner, marriages had the benefit of being planned. Bound by religious dictates of the Catholic Church, publishing marriage banns was required. These canonical laws mandated that before a couple could be legally and sacramentally wed, their intention to marry had to be publicly proclaimed by the priest on three consecutive Sundays or major Feast Days during public Mass.

The purpose was to allow community members to come forward if they knew of any roadblocks, such as an existing marriage elsewhere, a lack of parental consent for minors, or if a dispensation for consanguinity was required.

Sometimes the banns requirement was waived in the case of visiting priests, remote locations, or other mitigating circumstances.

When the Acadians could no longer hold services in Port Royal, the St. Laurent church at Belle Isle would have fit the bill. Although it began as a chapel of convenience, it eventually became more.

Given what we know about the church at Port Royal, Huguette could have been baptized in Port Royal if she was born before the church burned in 1654, or at Belle Isle, which is more likely, given that she was probably born in 1655.

Her family lived less than a mile from St. Laurent, and many miles from Port Royal. Even when the family had a choice, the most reasonable and expeditious choice would have been the chapel at St. Laurent.

Huguette and Guillaume were probably married at St. Laurent around 1672 or 1673, given that the church at Port Royal was not rebuilt until sometime after mid-1673. As each child arrived, they were probably baptized at St. Laurent too.

By 1692, when Huguette’s eldest daughter, Marie Blanchard, married Charles Bourgeois, the only church available would have been at Belle Isle because the church in Port Royal by the fort was burned for the final time in 1690.

Saint-Jean-Baptiste Church History

The history of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church in Port Royal, while long and complex, is essential for understanding the lives of Acadian families, especially the upriver families.

The name of the “church” never changed, and all baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parish register. The building was burned at least three times in two locations, and “church,” write large, was held in many places. Satellite churches, such as St. Laurent, were built, but they were still chapels of convenience for people too distant from Port Royal.

Of course, during times of strife, and particularly when the English were in charge, St. Laurent became the face of Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

This table summarizes what we know about “the church” and the associated chapel at St. Laurent. Bolded years are when a church building of some sort existed at Port Royal.

The Catholic church, as well as the neighborhood chapels played an outsize role in the lives of the Acadians. Perhaps it was their irrepressible faith that helped them survive.

The 1693 Census

In the 1693 census, Huguette Gougeon is listed with Guillaume, age 42, and their children, except her name is now spelled Agate Goujon and she’s 37, which places her birth about 1656. Perhaps Agate sounded something like Huguette.

Huguette’s children begin with her married daughter, husband and their baby, who are living in the same household with Huguette and Guillaume:

• Marie, 19 and married to Charles Bourgeois, 20, along with their one-year-old daughter, Jeanne.
• Rene, 16, so born about 1677
• Antoine, 14, born about 1679
• Jeanne, 11, born about 1682
• Anne, 9, born about 1684
• Missing child, born about 1686
• Jean, 6, born about 1687
• Elisabeth, 4, born about 1689
• Guillaume, 3, born about 1690
• Magdeleine, 1, born about 1692

In 1693, Guillaume and Huguette were doing well with 30 cattle, 40 sheep, 15 hogs, and 3 guns. They now farm 30 arpents of land, which is more than most Acadians. They only had five arpents seven years earlier in 1686.

They may have inherited Huguette’s parents’ 10 arpents of land and may be farming the six arpents of land owned by Guillaume’s parents.

Four families have more than 30 arpents of land, and nine others have exactly 30 arpents, a rather common amount to have been granted upriver.

Daughter, Marie Blanchard and Charles Bourgeois

In the 1693 census, Huguette’s married daughter, Marie, 17, and her husband, Charles Bourgeois, 22, are also shown in Beaubassin, where their baby, Marie, is recorded as 4 months old. Clearly, the couple has relocated between the baby’s birth and when the census was taken in both locations. The discrepancies in names and ages illustrate the differences between census takers and their varied levels of accuracy. I bet the little girl’s name was Marie Jeanne.

Marie Blanchard would go on to have 10 known children. Their destinies are inextricably tied to the horrific 1755 Expulsion.

• One died before 1752, probably in Tintamarre.
• One in South Carolina.
• Three in Quebec.
• One, along with his family, perished on the ship Duke William that sank in the North Atlantic on December 13, 1758, while forcibly transporting exiled Acadians to France.
• One probably in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), where his son is later found marrying.
• One in St-Jean-du-Perrot, France.
• One in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon Islands off of Newfoundland after being a refugee in Baie-Verte, then deported to Georgia.
• One in La Rochelle, France, after first being sent to Georgia, South Carolina, Boston, then Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, where their homes were again destroyed before they went to France in 1778.

My heart aches for Marie’s terribly fractured family, torn so ruthlessly from each other.

Marie herself died sometime after 1733, when two sons married and she was alive, and before 1748, when Marie’s daughter married and both of her parents are noted as deceased. I’m glad Marie didn’t live to see what would happen just a few short years later.

While Huguette would have missed Marie when they settled in Beaubassin, she clearly had her hands full with her own large family, including a new baby. Still, it’s sad that Huguette didn’t have the opportunity to know her first grandchild for more than just a few weeks.

Grandchildren can be one of life’s greatest joys.

The 1698 Census

In the 1698 census, Huguette is listed as age 43, which puts her birth about 1655. Her children are now:

• Rene, 21
• Antoine, 19
• Jeanne, 14
• Anne, 14
• Jean, 11
• Elisabeth, 9
• Guillaume, 8
• Madeleine, 6
• Pierre, 3
• Charles ½

Huguette and Guillaume have expanded their property under cultivation to 34 arpents of land. They have 26 cattle, 24 sheep, 12 hogs, and 3 guns.

Additionally, they have 12 fruit trees, which would be apples.

Their near neighbor, Pierre Martin, is said to have planted the first apple trees at Port Royal, and apple trees still grow in abundance at Belle Isle today.

Marie, Huguette’s married daughter living in Beaubassin, is now 18 and has three children. Jeanne, 5, Charles, 3, and Marie, 2.

The Next Frontier – Petitcodiac

We don’t know how much Huguette was involved with Guillaume’s investment at Petitcodiac, and the resulting legal battle. Between 1698 and 1699, Guillaume set out for the next frontier and established the Village des Blanchard, hoping to build his own seigneury where he could grant land and benefit from the rents paid by fellow Acadians who would work the land. That’s exactly how French property ownership worked, and Guillaume had spent his life at Belle Isle as one of the farmers.

Now, he dreamed of more and set out to turn those dreams into reality.

In 1698, Guillaume and fellow Acadian Pierre Thibodeau set out on an exploratory journey, scouting for a suitable location with marshes similar to those at Belle Isle.

Correspondence from that time makes it clear that Guillaume requested a massive tract of land, half a league on either side of the river for an unstated distance. His request was sent to France for processing, but another man, Claude-Sébastien de Villieu, who lived at Port Royal, claimed that the land Blanchard requested belonged to his father-in-law, Michel Leneuf de La Vallière, as part of his already-established seigneury at Beaubassin.

In 1699, Guillaume, two of their sons, René and Antoine, and one son-in-law began clearing the land and dyking the fields to keep out the salty river water to prepare them for agriculture and settlement. That process took three years until enough salt had leached out for the fields to be productive.

Huguette would have been about 44 or 45 at that time, with nine children at home ranging from about two to 22.

She would not have accompanied Guillaume on either the scouting trips or the trips to dyke the river and prepare the land for habitation. Someone had to stay home to care for the family and tend to the crops and livestock at Belle Isle. That’s exactly what Huguette did – without the help of her two eldest sons, who accompanied Guillaume on their grand adventure.

Did Guillaume plan to move his family to Petitcodiac when the fields were ready, sometime around 1702, or was the plan to manage his seigneury from a distance, with his wife and children remaining on the land at Belle Isle? An October 1702 paragraph in a letter by Mathieu de Goutin reporting about the founding of Les Mines may provide the best insight into that question.

“The said Blanchard has a sailing vessel, and grown sons, sons-in-law, and nephews, who will put the Petitcoudiac land along the Petitcoudiac River to use and will settle there many people, and in three years the colony will draw support from them.”

Guillaume’s Petitcodiac colony was meant to be an investment.

Those two sons and one of Huguette’s daughters and son-in-law, although we don’t know for sure which one, spent the winter there in 1701, so they had every intention of establishing permanent homes at Petitcodiac.

By 1702, 5 families with 13 people lived at Petitcodiac. We know that Huguette was not among them, because there weren’t enough people listed to include Huguette’s children. It’s probably a good thing she hadn’t uprooted and moved, because trouble was on the horizon.

On March 20, 1703, a royal decree was issued from the Conseil d’État in Paris that tried to balance the interests of both parties in the land request. It stated that the Acadian settlers could retain possession of the land and improvements, granting a “censitaire du seigneur,” essentially making them tenant farmers with the right to pass the tenancy of the land to their descendants. But it also established that La Vallière was to have seigneurial rights over the land.

This ruined Guillaume’s plans, but he apparently appealed, with the same verdict being repeated in 1705.

However, the events that occurred in 1704, with Benjamin Church attacking and burning Village des Blanchards at Petitcodiac and ruining the fields, probably resolved that still outstanding question in a different manner.

The Blanchard family returned to Belle Isle, and the 1705 decision simply put the final nail in that coffin.

I’ve always wondered how Huguette felt about this entire episode.

For six or seven years, from 1698, when the planning and scouting began, through the development stages, into the full-time residency, and beyond the fire, she had been Guillaume’s partner. We don’t know if she was excited and an encouraging partner, or if she was simply relieved when it was finally over, and her now-adult children came back home and settled at Belle Isle.

The 1700 Census

In the 1700 census at Port Royal, Huguette Gougeon, aged 45, lived with her husband, Guillaume Blanchard, aged 49, and their children. This census was compiled before Huguette’s daughter, Jeanne, married in August.

• René, aged 23
• Antoine, aged 21
• Jean, aged 13
• Guillaume, aged 10
• Jeanne, aged 18
• Anne, aged 16
• Élisabeth, aged 11
• Madeleine, aged 8

Pierre and Charles, who would have been five and two and a half, respectively, are missing in the census, but they had not died because we find records of them as adults.

Daughter Marie had already married.

The family owned 3 guns and lived on 30 arpents of cultivable land with 26 cattle and 39 sheep.

Jeanne Blanchard and Olivier Daigre

Daughter Jeanne Blanchard married Olivier Daigre on August 8, 1700. Given that Olivier lived even farther upriver, and the church in Port Royal was meeting in a “borrowed room” in Port Royal at that point in time, they almost certainly married at St. Laurent.

They could have been the daughter and son-in-law who overwintered at Petitcodiac in the winter of 1701.

Jeanne’s children were born beginning in 1701, so Huguette would have been able to watch them grow up. She had six children with Olivier Daigle, although the youngest was born five months after his untimely death on September 22, 1709.

• One died in Beaubassin.
• Three died in Cornwall in 1756 after the Expulsion.
• One died in Liverpool.
• One probably died in Connecticut.

All of Jeanne’s children with Olivier Daigle settled in Beaubassin or Grand-Pré.

In 1755, the Grand-Pré men were gathered in the church where the Expulsion decree was read to them. Their property was stripped away and forfeited to the English crown, and they were to be removed. The men were held captive while the women gathered their children and a few things.

They were herded at gunpoint with whatever meager belongings they could carry onto ships for deportation to random, scattered locations. Many Acadians never knew what happened to their families. Many didn’t survive.

The cruelty was astounding. How could humans intentionally treat other humans that way just because of who they were?

Anne Blanchard and Claude Bourgeois

Anne Blanchard married Claude Bourgeois around 1701. Her sister, Marie, had married Claude’s brother, and the couples initially settled side by side at Beaubassin.

It would have been difficult for Huguette to say goodbye, knowing she would probably never see another daughter again, and she would miss out on knowing her grandchildren. At least both daughters were together.

Anne had 10 children between 1704 and 1732, and eight survived to be exiled by the English.

• Two died in Beaubassin.
• One in the refugee camp at Miramichi.
• One in Quebec after being deported to Connecticut.
• Two in Mole-St-Nicola, Haiti, after being deported to Georgia, South Carolina, then New York.
• One may have died at Miquelon or, after 1767, in Cocagne and Richibouctou-Village, NB, after making their way back.
• One at Miquelon or near present-day Hillsborough, NB, after making their way back.
• One possibly at Halifax, where they were held after being deported to South Carolina, then returning to Camp Miramichi before being held at Halifax.
• One in Louisiana after leaving Halifax.

We know that Anne Blanchard, who was about 71 in 1755, lived to see the horrific Expulsion. She and Claude are listed in the last census at Baie-Verte in 1755 after their homes were burned in Beaubassin in 1750 and the forts in Chignecto fell. After that, the families were loaded onto ships for deportation to random colonies. Some escaped into the woods, assisted by the Mi’kmaq, where the escapees faced dense forest and grueling treks. Some mounted guerrilla offensives. Their fate is unknown.

1701 Census

In the 1701 census at Port Royal, Huguette Gougeon, age 46, is living with her husband, Guillaume Blanchard, age 51, and their children.

• René (surname mistakenly recorded as Richard), 24
• Antoine, 22
• Jean, 14
• Guillaume, 12
• Isabel (Élisabeth in other records), 12
• Madeleine, 9
• Pierre, 6

Charles is missing but is not deceased. He would have been 4.

The family owned 5 guns and lived on 20 arpents of cultivable land with 25 cattle, 25 sheep, and 17 hogs.

The Parish Register

Fortunately, beginning in 1702, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parish register is extant, and we can begin to track births, marriages, and deaths, although the register is not complete.

I can’t help but reflect on how fortunate we are to have this register and the effort it must have taken from the priests serving the region to preserve it. They must have kept it at their residence or squirreled away someplace safe, because it didn’t burn in the 1707 or other fires.

The opening page shows both a French and Latin paragraph.

“Registers of Baptisms, marriages, and Burials of the parish of St. Jean Baptiste of Port-Royal, beginning the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred two in the month of September.”

This tells us when this register was begun. Unfortunately, earlier registers do not exist. So, what happened to the earlier registers? We have a clue.

Father Abel Maudoux, a secular priest working under the Bishop of Québec, had shepherded the Port-Royal church through an extremely turbulent decade beginning around 1693.

In 1702, the Bishop recalled Father Maudoux and officially transferred the territorial assignment and spiritual authority over the parish to the Franciscan Récollet order.

Following this institutional shift, Father Félix Pain, a Récollet missionary, was assigned to take over the parish duties.

While both men were Catholic, they belonged to completely different administrative branches of the Church. Father Maudoux was a secular diocesan priest who answered directly to the Bishop, whereas Father Pain belonged to a monastic order with its own internal rules, funding, and communal archives.

Because secular priests during this era typically treated their day-books and sacramental records as personal operational property rather than a permanent localized archive, Father Maudoux probably took his loose papers and registers back to Québec with him when he departed.

Arriving to a blake slate, Father Pain, thankfully, created the parish register that exists today and is preserved at the Université Sainte-Anne.

“Father [Felix] Pain, priest, inscribed and gave this book: pray for him; may he who wrote this be inscribed in the book of life, aided by your prayers.”

This Latin paragraph on the first page, written in his own hand, asks us to pray for Father Pain who kept this register. Indeed, I’m eternally grateful.

1703 Census

In the 1703 census at Port Royal, Huguette Gougeon, who would have been about 48, lived with her husband, Guillaume, and their 6 boys and 2 girls. The family included 5 arms bearers. Unfortunately, in this census, neither Huguette nor the children are listed by name, and individual ages are not recorded.

All of the 1703 children map to the 1701 children, including Charles, who is counted in 1703 but was missed in 1701. The five arms-bearers would be Guillaume and the 4 oldest boys. René would have been 26, Antoine, 24, Jean, 16, and Guillaume, 14.

Son Jean is accounted for in this census, but is not found in 1707, so he died between the ages of 16 and 20. I can’t help but wonder if he died in 1704 in Petitcodiac.

Was Huguette able to wash and dress her son’s body, and bury him in the nearby St. Laurent cemetery, or was he simply lost to her?

Benjamin Church Destroys Village des Blanchard

By 1704, Queen Anne’s War was two years old, and Acadian settlements became English targets.

We can surmise from other records that Huguette’s two oldest sons would have been living at Petitcodiac, and possibly one of her daughters with her young family as well. Based on the 1703 information, there were two additional families living there too, but we don’t know who they were because those villages were not enumerated separately.

In July, Colonel Benjamin Church sailed into the river basin at Port Royal under the cover of darkness and sailed up to Port Royal. The English planted themselves in front of the fort with their massive fleet of warships and transport vessels fully on display.

Tiny Port Royal would never be able to defend itself against more than 1000 soldiers and sailors. The upriver Acadians were safe for the moment, but of course they had no idea what would happen.

Church captured an Acadian family near Goat Island and forced the wife to act as emissary, hand-delivering a request for surrender. The fort commander refused, and a 17-day standoff ensued.

Once again, Huguette would have set about preparing her family for certain defeat and possible destruction.

Would they have headed into the woods?

Of course, Huguette had no idea that it was actually her family members living at Petitcodiac who were in danger.

While the fort at Port Royal and the Acadians there were pinned down by the looming warships, preventing anyone from leaving, the rest of the English fleet made its way to the other Acadian settlements, including Petitcodiac. They switched to smaller boats to navigate the bore tides and make their way up the river.

Proud of his accomplishments, in his 1716 memoirs, Benjamin Church tells us in his own voice what happened at Petitcodiac, and to the neighbors slightly downstream at Chipoudy. They were clearly taken by surprise.

Church recorded that as they approached Chipoudy, a few Frenchmen and an Indian guide were spotted on the shoreline and his soldiers immediately pursued them into the woods.

He recalled that the settlers had built their homes and outbuildings with distinct frontier craftsmanship. Following his orders to “leave no habitation standing,” his men systematically went from house-to-house, torching them all.

Church then specifically boasted about burning the newly constructed homes and barns at Chipoudy and that the inhabitants fled into the woods or marshes rather than barricading themselves in their homes.

He then recounted moving on upriver where the Blanchard Petitcodiac settlement would have been. He killed their cattle and sheep, destroyed their homes, and tore down the dykes, allowing the salt tides to wash back over the land.

Church bragged that it gave him great satisfaction to break the “substance” of “the French” inhabitants, systematically destroying everything, hoping to also neutralize the assets of their allied “Indian Rebels.”

It was Huguette’s children and grandchildren who were living there – who ran into the woods, thankfully, and escaped.

Huguette would have had no way to know any of that at the time.

At the end of Church’s reign of terror, or maybe raining terror in the northern settlements, he returned to Port Royal.

Much to the surprise of the Acadians and French at Port Royal, Church did not attack – not because of any altruistic reason, but because Port Royal was the capital, and he thought better of actually attacking the capital without permission from England. He had no qualms, though, about destroying the smaller settlements as retribution for the French attack at Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Church had a minor skirmish at Port Royal, killing one and injuring another, then left, much to everyone’s amazement.

We don’t know how the Port Royal Acadians discovered what had happened at Petitcodiac and elsewhere. It’s not unlikely that the rumor mill was already turning, and that either the beginning of a stream of refugees from those settlements, or their Mi’kmaq allies, made their way to Port Royal.

We’ll never know for sure, but given that Guillaume Blanchard owned a boat, and his family members were at Petitcodiac, I’d wager that he immediately set out to check on things – a trip that turned into a rescue mission.

There was nothing left at Petitcodiac. Both sons and any other family members who might have been living there returned to Port Royal.

Huguette must have been terrified when she heard the news, then incredibly relieved. I can only imagine the tearful reunion when she saw her children climb out of a boat onto shore once again.

Maybe all except one. Maybe Jean never came home.

The Final Decree

In 1705, the final decree from Paris arrived, confirming what the 1703 decree had declared about property ownership at Petitcodiac. Any dream of renewing and rebuilding Village des Blanchard was dead.

This was probably a last hurrah for Guillaume, as they were aging. Huguette had reached the half-century mark, and Guillaume was about five years older.

If Guillaume was disappointed, Huguette’s two sons, Antoine and René, must have been devastated. Petitcodiac represented the future and opportunity. Now, instead of being the sons of a seigneur, positioned to become seigneurs themselves one day, they had to readjust to life at Belle Isle as farmers.

But they were young men, with full lives ahead of them.

Antoine’s eyes must have brightened when he saw Elisabeth Theriot. Maybe he developed a sudden interest in helping her father on the farm. Two and a half years later, they married and started a family.

Antoine Blanchard and Elisabeth Theriot

Antoine Blanchard married Elisabeth Theriot on January 31, 1707. I’m sure they would have married at St. Laurent at Belle Isle, because by this time, the congregation was meeting in the building purchased from Villieu – the man who, combined with Benjamin Church, had caused his family’s dreams to be crushed.

Antoine died on October 5, 1750, in Port Royal. They had 10 children between 1708 and 1728.

• Three of those children did not live to adulthood, so they would probably have been buried at St. Laurent, near where Antoine and Elisabeth lived.
• One of his children died in Port Royal, Martinique, after having been exiled to New York during the 1755 Expulsion.
• Another died someplace in Martinique.
• One died in Quebec.
• One probably died as a prisoner in Halifax after being held at Camp d’Esperance and Fort Edward.
• One probably died near Port Royal after 1763 when he returned from Quebec.
• One died in Martinique after being sent to New York.
• One died in Louisiana after arriving via Santo Domingo, after probably being held at Fort Beauséjour.

Huguette would have known five of Antoine’s children. One child who did not survive to adulthood was born in 1710, so Huguette might have been present for her funeral as well.

The 1707 Census

In 1707, at Port Royal, Huguette Gougeon, aged 52, lived with her husband, Guillaume Blanchard, aged 57. They had two boys aged 14 or older, two younger boys, and two girls aged 12 or older. The family owned 6 guns and lived on 25 arpents of cultivable land with 32 cattle, 38 sheep, and 14 hogs.

The children living at home would have been:

• René, age 30
• Elisabeth, age 18
• Guillaume, age 17
• Madeleine, age 15
• Pierre, age 12
• Charles, age 10

Jean Blanchard, who was listed in the 1701 census and accounted for in 1703, had died by 1707 when he would have been about 20.

Port Royal Burns, Twice

Aside from the bright spot of Antoine’s wedding, 1707 was a terrible year.

The Acadians lived with intense, unrelenting stress. The situation with the English was constantly on the threshold of becoming a flashpoint, and cumulative raids and threats of raids took their toll.

Everyone was on edge, and with good reason. Captured English told of massive preparations to attack Acadia – and the Acadians weren’t about to forget what the English COULD have done to Port Royal in 1704, and didn’t. They probably had no idea why they had been spared.

On June 6, 1707, Colonel John March sailed up the river, heavily armed and with about 1600 total soldiers and sailors. Governor Subercase sounded the alarm. With all of the available Acadian men, plus the 100 French soldiers at the fort and about that many Abenaki warriors who were visiting, they were massively outnumbered.

This was it, and everyone knew it. The best they could hope for was the most generous surrender terms possible, and mercy.

Fortunately, the English were extremely incompetent and inexperienced with siege warfare. Despite their numbers, the English committed multiple rookie errors and actually failed to take the fort. However, in their humiliation, before climbing aboard their ships and sailing away, they burned the town.

And because once wasn’t enough, they did the exact same thing two months later, in August – with the exact same results.

Unfortunately, they burned nearly every building and farm in and near Port Royal.

Once again, the upriver Acadians, mostly women and children because the men would have been fighting the English, watched as the plume of smoke rose from Port Royal. Not once, but twice.

The first line of defense at the farms was retreating into the woods and mountains with the children for safety. That said, I’d wager that if you cornered an Acadian woman, woe be unto you. The Acadian bravery and perseverance is legendary yet today.

British Governor Samuel Vetch’s correspondence described the upriver Acadians as “intractable.” His soldiers would arrive at farms only to find the houses completely empty, their assets hidden in the forest, and local guerrilla fighters waiting in the tree line to ambush them.

I’m Angry with France

Point of personal privilege here.

Yes, I know this happened more than 300 years ago, and yes, I know it was far away – but I’ve written so many Acadian ancestors’ stories that I sit here right with them as they suffer.

And you know what – that particular suffering was entirely unnecessary.

France established this colony and then neglected them repeatedly from the beginning. No regular supply ships. No regular reinforcements. No maintenance, and often, no pay for the soldiers.

How in the devil did they expect a few hundred men, at MOST, to defend the colony? The majority weren’t soldiers and didn’t even have guns, yet they faced HUNDREDS of English men WITH guns backed by a flotilla of warships with cannons.

The fort at Port Royal was constantly falling apart, then fell apart. It was so bad that most of the time NONE of their cannons were mounted, and could not be.

The Acadian Governor was forever trying to make do and finally partnered with French pirates just to feed his soldiers.

Yes, even though my Acadian roots spring from France, I’m still VERY angry with historical France in the 1600s and 1700s for abandoning their colony to whatever fate the English subjected them to.

And that fate was repeatedly awful, horrible, torturous, and eventually, in 1755, genocidal.

Acadia was slipping away from France by the early 1700s, and they were too daft or shortsighted to do anything about it.

By then, most Acadians no longer considered themselves “French.” They had never seen France and had formed a unique society, fully Acadian, with their own spirit and culture. Not to mention that France had betrayed them repeatedly, abandoned them, and left them to suffer. Over and over.

Rant over. I guess a little bit of my Acadian slipped out there for a minute.

Let’s return to 1708 and attend René Blanchard’s wedding, which was unquestionably held at Belle Isle, because the “church” at Port Royal, such as it was, had been burned in 1707, never to be rebuilt.

René Blanchard and Marie Savoie

On January 18, 1708, René Blanchard, about 31, Huguette’s oldest son who lived to adulthood, married Marie Savoie, whose parents lived in the heart of the Belle Isle community.

René died in 1754 in Port Royal at 78 years of age, but his family was exiled to Massachusetts. His impoverished widow, Marie, recorded at age 77, is listed in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1757, where she was living with her daughter, Marguerite, age 34. They are noted as “very poor and unable to work to support themselves.” I’ve always wondered if Marguerite was disabled in some way. Marie is also shown in 1763 with one female child, and is presumed to have died in Massachusetts.

René and Marie had 13 children, five of whom were born before Huguette’s death.

• Son Jean was deported to South Carolina but made it back to Camp d’Esperance, where he boarded a ship bound for Quebec City. Unfortunately, a smallpox epidemic was raging there, and his wife and 4 children died within weeks of his arrival. Jean died in September of 1759, possibly in the decisive Battle of Quebec on the Plains of Abraham that led to the end of French rule in Canada. The English took the lives of so many Acadians.
• One of René’s children died in Repentigny, Quebec.
• One disappeared about the time of the 1755 Expulsion after being found in Memramcook near Village des Blanchard in 1755.
• One probably died being held prisoner at Fort Beauséjour.
• No record of René’s namesake son beyond his 1716 baptism appears, and we know an epidemic devastated the Port Royal region about this time. He died before 1724, when a second son by that name was born.
• One died in Martinique after being sent to New York, where they were listed on Long Island in 1763.
• One died in Quebec after being exiled to Georgia, then probably sought refuge on Isle St. Jean before making their way to Quebec.
• Marguerite is never found in any records again after her mother’s death in Massachusetts, so she probably died there too.
• René’s son by the same name, born in 1724, left Miramichi aboard a ship bound for Quebec City, but smallpox claimed their family after arriving. He died along with his wife and two children within weeks of each other, leaving behind two young orphans.
• One was shipped to Massachusetts, where they asked in 1763 for passage to France before dying in Quebec 23 years later.
• Twins died at 2 and 7 days of age in July of 1728 at Port Royal. They would have been buried at St. Laurent at Belle Isle.
• The youngest daughter married just months before the 1755 Expulsion, apparently losing her first couple of children during that horrific ordeal, before dying in 1767 in Yamachiche, Quebec.

Élisabeth Blanchard and Claude Girouard

On February 5, 1709, Élisabeth Blanchard married Claude Girouard, who lived across the river. He would have rowed over in his canoe to court Élisabeth, and they would have seen each other at the St. Laurent church. Rivers were the highways in Acadia.

Élisabeth’s story is a bit unusual, because she only had four children whose baptisms were recorded, but neither she nor Claude died during her child-bearing years. Her children were born in 1710, 1714, 1717, and 1720, but none after that. Typically, if a woman has children at all, they continue to have children for the duration of their fertile years, which would have been until about 1732, or so.

Looking at the baptismal records for the four children whose records we do have, a pattern becomes clear. All four of those children were baptized by a neighbor or someone other than a priest, although the baptism was eventually recorded in the parish register.

Therein lies our clue. Élisabeth and Claude must have lived remotely, distant from a church, and her babies needed to be baptized immediately. Élisabeth probably gave birth to at least eight other babies, and that’s presuming that each of those children lived long enough to be weaned before she became pregnant with the next child. If that wasn’t the case, then she could have had even more children that perished.

So much grief.

Since all of her children born after 1720 appeared to have died, I can’t help but wonder about a hidden genetic issue, like Rh incompatibility.

Élisabeth didn’t die until sometime after 1760, when she is listed in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at age 72, living with Joseph Doucet, her first cousin’s wife’s brother.

• One daughter died in Port Royal in 1735, not quite two months after she had married.
• Another is never found in records again after his 1720 baptism.
• One child died in Saint-Domingue (now Haïti) sometime after 1763.
• The only child who positively outlived Elisabeth died in Saint-Ours, Richelieu, Quebec, of smallpox in 1776 after having been exiled to Marblehead, Massachusetts, during the Expulsion.

Elisabeth’s three oldest children were born in Huguette’s lifetime, the last one in July before Huguette passed in October 1717.

Olivier Daigre Dies

Life is tenuous and unpredictable. On September 22, 1709, Huguette’s son-in-law, Olivier Daigre, her daughter Jeanne’s husband, suddenly died. It was so unexpected that he received all three last rites “one after the other” from a visiting priest, not Father Durand. Whatever happened to Olivier, it was very quick and unexpected.

Huguette’s daughter, who lived across the river and upriver a few miles, was left with five children between 18 months and eight years old, plus she was four months pregnant with her sixth child. Jeanne’s son would be born to his widowed mother on the five-month anniversary of Olivier’s death.

Additionally, when Olivier died, they were in the midst of harvest season. He might have been involved in some kind of accident. Regardless, they still had to bring in the rest of the harvest, thresh the grain, preserve the garden food, and hold the fall slaughter.

Jeanne desperately needed help, and Huguette would obviously have stepped up.

A year and two days after Olivier’s death, and when Jeanne’s baby was just seven months old, the English returned to Port Royal. This time, they wouldn’t fail in their mission.

The 1710 Fall of Port Royal

Huguette wouldn’t have worried less as she aged and her children married; she would have worried more, because she had more people to love as sons-in-law and grandchildren were added to the family. Plus, her daughter, Jeanne, was now a widow with six children to provide for.

No one was surprised when the English sailed back into the river basin in late September of 1710, this time loaded for bear with 35 ships and more than 3,400 men.

And like always, the French soldiers at the fort were hungry, neglected, and ill-equipped. The Acadian men came to their aid, of course, along with maybe 20 men from Quebec and as many Mi’kmaq who had the misfortune to be visiting.

Together, they were outnumbered more than 10 to 1. This wasn’t going to end well.

There was no reason for the ships to fire on the fort. The English didn’t actually want to destroy anything, because they wanted as many spoils as possible.

They wanted to capture Acadia and get rid of those pesky French.

And so, they did. The fort fell, but there was no burning and looting. The English simply took control.

This time, everyone acted like gentlemen. The Acadians and French soldiers were allowed to march out with their dignity, flags flying and drums beating.

The French commander gave the English commander the key, quipped that he might pay him a visit in the spring, and the English marched in.

Acadia would never again be in French hands.

The English required an oath of allegiance to the English crown. The Acadians refused, and for the next two decades, the English and Acadians engaged in an economic and political tug-of-war for control.

Initially, the English told the Acadians living within a 3-mile radius that they had to sign the oath, and then gave them two years to move to a “French territory,” meaning outside Acadia.

What happened if they refused to sign the oath? The implication was that they didn’t get two years to move.

What about those Acadians who lived beyond the 3-mile radius, at Belle Isle and upriver? Who knew?

Did they have to leave before that?

Did they have to leave at all?

Everything was in an utter state of confusion.

The Acadians were absolutely determined NOT to leave, at least initially.

To make things worse, the harvest failed that fall. Late spring frosts combined with unusually heavy rainfall and a shortened growing season caused crops to rot in the fields.

And to make things even worse yet, an epidemic of some sort drove the privateers, the very people Acadians had come to rely on for supplies, away. Acadians died, food was in short supply, and Huguette must have wondered if they would survive.

It was small consolation that the English soldiers in the fort at Port Royal were literally starving.

Huguette was 55 years old by now, and she had to be chronically exhausted. And while the actual physical “battle” for political control of Port Royal and Acadia was over – the battle for local control was not. There’s more than one way to fight.

1711 – A Year of Rebellion

Desperate, in January of 1711, Samuel Vetch, the English commander at Port Royal, sent Peter Capon to negotiate a purchase of grain from Pierre LeBlanc, the Acadian militia leader. While the two men were talking in LeBlanc’s house, a group of armed Acadians burst in “with their firelocks cocked,” seized Capon, and dragged him out into the night. Not wanting the entire English garrison to descend upon Belle Isle, LeBlanc quickly went after them and arranged for Capon’s release, paying a ransom of 20 pistoles.

Furious, Vetch sent an officer and fifty armed men to St. Laurent chapel, a half mile upriver from the LeBlanc Village, the following Sunday morning to arrest Father Durand, whom he considered seditious. Huguette and the other Acadians would have been attending services. Vetch also arrested leading inhabitants at the church, including Pierre LeBlanc. So much for his good deed.

They were imprisoned in the “Black Hole,” a torture chamber in the fort. Some were released, and some died.

Could the Acadians hate the English any more?

While the fort was clearly under English control, the upriver Acadians clearly were not. There was no food at the fort.

Food in Acadia came from the farms, most of which were upriver at Belle Isle – and remember, the harvest had failed.

Over the winter of 1710-1711, Vetch had to go to Boston and beg for food for his soldiers. He claimed the Acadians were hostile and uncooperative. Indeed, they were.

When he left, he took the priest, Father Durand, with him as a hostage.

When Vetch returned to Port Royal, his 450 soldiers had shrunk to about 200 through death and desertion, and those 200 didn’t want to be there either.

The upriver Acadians might have been hungry, but at least they knew how to fish and hunt in the environment they had called home for about seven decades.

Full of himself, in June, Vetch decided to send about 70 English soldiers upriver to strongarm the Acadians into providing lumber to repair the fort, and food. This was meant to be a show of force.

He clearly did not know the Acadians yet.

The situation at Port Royal was even more complex than that, because the Native people did not want the Acadians assisting the English, and the Catholic church threatened excommunication if they did. So the Acadians were being threatened by all sides simultaneously, and were caught square in the middle of a no-win situation.

The Acadians would have watched the English on their whaleboat and two flatboats, rowing upriver that summer day, and the human grapevine probably traveled faster than the boat, especially if they had the bad judgment to row against the current.

The Blanchard family lived near the Mass House and beside the LeBlanc Village, shown here on a 1753 rendition of a 1733 hand-drawn map that includes Bloody Creek.

The very out-of-place English would have rowed past all of the homes and villages, including Huguette’s. Their red coats would have been strikingly evident and attracted the attention of literally everyone. Perhaps that was the intention, but what happened next clearly was not.

The English soldiers rowed another six miles or so up the curving river, beyond the houses at Belle Isle, into an even more remote area, near the creek that would soon be named Bloody Creek.

Bloody Creek is narrow just a quarter mile or so upstream, but opens into a plain.

The Creek curves as it snakes its way through the forest, then fields and marsh.

The foliage and vegetation along the creek could easily obscure people from those unfamiliar with the terrain.

The official story says that, in an incredible coincidence, between 50 and 150 Wabanaki warriors, depending on which side’s report you believe, under the leadership of Bernard-Anselme d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin, just happened to be hunting together on that very day, in that very place. Isn’t that just amazing!

Bloody Creek empties into the river at a steep bend, and it was there that the “Abenaki” attacked, killing 16 soldiers, injuring 9, and capturing the rest. Frankly, I’m amazed that they didn’t kill them all.

Father Antoine Gaulin said that the British had planned to attack both the Mi’kmaq and Acadian families and burn the settlements on the upper river, a hotbed of resistance.

Huguette, her four children still at home, and, of course, her children who lived nearby were all witnesses to this event. They would all have seen the soldiers pass by, perhaps with a sense of foreboding. Her widowed daughter, Jeanne, lived perilously close to Bloody Creek. Close enough that she probably heard the battle.

Once again, the official story was that no Acadians were involved, but they were assuredly involved in what came next.

Encouraged, the Acadians and even more Native allies banded together to attempt to retake the fort. Numbering 600 altogether, they were determined and nearly succeeded, but lacked siege equipment and artillery large enough to breach the fort’s walls. It must have felt like breaking into your own house after it had been stolen from you.

Vetch was worried enough that he went begging for reinforcements.

While Vetch was gone, Father Gaulin personally sailed to Newfoundland to obtain the needed artillery and siege equipment, but had the bad fortune to run smack dab into the English fleet on his way back.

Vetch wasn’t about to let this end peacefully. He sent his soldiers to plunder the upriver Acadians, burn their farms and crops, and kill their livestock. He wanted to starve the Acadians and kill the resistance, along with their ability to feed their Mi’kmaq and Abenaki allies.

This time, Huguette’s home would have burned, and assuredly the church at Belle Isle as well. Catholic churches, breeding grounds of rebellion, were symbols the English despised.

As always, the Acadians rebuilt because they were unflinchingly firm in their resolve that they were NOT leaving.

Madeleine Blanchard and Charles Gautrot

Eleven months later, on May 18, 1712, Madeleine Blanchard married Charles Gautrot, probably at a new church at Belle Isle, or at a home where the Acadians were worshiping.

Madeleine and Charles settled at River Gaspareaux at Les Mines by 1715, and later at Grand-Pré. They had eight children.

• Four children did not survive to adulthood.
• Four children died in France after the expulsion.

Madeleine, her husband, and all four of her adult children, with their families, were rounded up during the Expulsion and deported to France in 1758, where Madeleine was on the list of passengers who arrived in Boulogne the day after Christmas. I’d wager she fell to her knees and kissed the earth. She died less than a year later at age 67 and was buried on October 30, 1759, at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Two of Madeleine’s children were born before Huguette died, but given that they were living at Les Mines and Grand-Pré, she would not have known those grandchildren.

It must have been very difficult to say goodbye to your children when they moved to the next frontier for what you knew in your heart was forever.

Guillaume Blanchard and Jeanne Dupuis

Guillaume Blanchard married Jeanne Dupuis on January 16, 1714. His death is recorded in the Port Royal parish on February 20, 1752. They had nine children.

• Guillaume’s firstborn child died in October 1717 in Port Royal, just four days before Huguette, in the same epidemic.
• One child probably died in South Carolina.
• One possibly while held at Camp d’Esperance.
• Six children died in Quebec:
  • One in 1760 after being held at Camp d’Esperance
  • One at Sorel.
  • One at Saint-Ours.
  • Three within a month during the November/December 1757 smallpox epidemic. Guillaume’s youngest daughter, Madeleine, at 21, had never married and she succumbed, along with her two siblings, Anne Helene and Francoise, and their family members. Francoise’s only child died 24 days before she did. Anne Helene’s daughter died on the same day she did, and her husband died 10 days earlier.

Those who died in Quebec in 1757 likely died within days or weeks after arrival. Smallpox was ravaging Quebec City, and the Acadians had already suffered months of malnourishment and other deprivations following the Expulsion. How incredibly sad to survive nearly two years of extreme hardship in exile and, after finally reaching what should have been safety, to succumb to a virulent disease.

Two of Guillaume’s children were born during Huguette’s lifetime. Their firstborn child, also named Guillaume, died just four days before Huguette in 1717. She probably helped care for him in his sickness.

The 1714 Census

In 1714, Guillaume Blanchard is recorded with his wife and 2 sons. Guillaume would have been about 64, and Huguette, 59.

The boys were Pierre, 19, and Charles, 17.

They were living beside their son Guillaume, who had recently married and had no children yet, and their son Rene, who had 3 sons. They were just a few doors from Antoine, who had 1 son and two daughters.

Not the Blanchard Village they had dreamed of, but a Blanchard Village nonetheless.

The Next Oath Demand

Since the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, things had been relatively peaceful in Acadia. However, that was coming to a halt. The treaty unraveled when King George I came to the throne, and the English at Port Royal had become increasingly concerned about another uprising, or that the Acadians would decide to leave en masse to Île Royale, which was still under French control. In just a few short years, the English had gone from insisting that the Acadians MUST leave, and the sooner the better, to forbidding them from leaving.

Meanwhile, the Acadians had gone from refusing to leave to wanting to leave. They were fed up with the incessant demands. Done.

Once again, they were at a stalemate.

On January 22, 1715, the English demanded an unconditional oath of allegiance to King George. And once again, the Acadians refused, proposing a conditional oath that guaranteed their religious freedom and stated that they would not have to bear arms against either France or the Mi’kmaq.

That made things worse, and the English, whose stubbornness could rival that of the Acadians, decided to impose a trade embargo, of sorts, by closing the fort gates and prohibiting trade with either the fort, meaning the English at Port Royal, or the Mi’kmaq.

This sounds a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Enter Father Durand, who had been returned in a prisoner exchange in December of 1711. He had spent the intervening time operating out of the church at St. Laurent and ministering to his flock up and down the river.

Father Durand, undaunted, told his parishioners that taking the oath would jeopardize their ability to worship as Catholics. He was a legend, a folk hero, in his own lifetime.

The English soldiers at the fort began to starve because they weren’t getting any food products from the Acadians. That’s what happens when you lock them out.

The English in Boston, however, weren’t nearly so picky, and they were glad to help the Acadians set up a smuggling ring, run blockades, and navigate the black market.

It’s no wonder that there are many omissions in the parish registers during this time.

Fortunately, Jeanne’s second marriage was recorded.

Jeanne Blanchard and Jean Le Prince

Jeanne Blanchard married for the second time to Jean Le Prince on January 30, 1715.

Huguette must have been INCREDIBLY relieved that her daughter didn’t have to face life alone. Jeanne’s father and brother signed as witnesses, so the union, even if Jean was 11 or 12 years younger than Jeanne, which was quite unusual, seems to have been blessed.

They lived across the river, upstream near Bridgetown, which was also close to Olivier’s land. We don’t know exactly when Jeanne died, but we know she was alive in Acadia in 1752, and deceased by 1762 when she is noted as such in her son’s marriage record in Quebec. She may have died during some portion of a 1755 escape over the mountains, instead of boarding those doomed ships at the fort in Port Royal.

Jeanne had five children with Jean LePrince, two of whom were born before Huguette’s death.

• One died either in Connecticut or Quebec in the 1780s.
• Two died in Bécancour after surviving the smallpox epidemic in Quebec City.
• One died in Quebec City during the smallpox epidemic in 1756 along with two of his children and a nephew.
• One died in Quebec City later.

Unlike Jeanne’s Daigre children who settled at Beaubassin and Grand-Pré, her Le Prince children stayed and put down roots near Bridgetown until the Acadians were forcibly removed in 1755.

Unrest and Upheaval

1715, 1716, and into 1717 were filled with unrest and upheaval at Port Royal, and by extension upriver as well.

By 1715, Huguette was 60 years old, and Guillaume was five years older.

Guillaume died during this time of upheaval, with food scarcity, black markets, and clandestine alliances with the English out of Boston.

All this happened while the British soldiers at the fort were starving, and the English were inflicting punishment upon the Acadians – retribution for refusing to provide them with timber and food.

Everything was a huge mess.

One of the omissions in the parish register is the death and burial record of Guillaume Blanchard.

We know he was alive when Jeanne married in January 1715, and he appears to be alive on November 3, 1715, when “Guillaume Blanchard, the son” witnessed a baptism, which implies that Guillaume, the father, was still alive.

By the time Huguette was buried on October 18, 1717, Guillaume was already deceased.

Huguette had become a widow sometime in the two years before her death, which just happens to be when the smuggling efforts, which probably meant plying the river at night, under cover of darkness, were at their height.

Maybe Guillaume just simply died, an older man who had a stroke or a heart attack. Or maybe he succumbed to the epidemic that wreaked havoc upon the population up and down the river. Or, maybe he met with an accident, navigating his boat at night, or maybe he met with an “accident,” and drowned.

We’ll never know. What we do know is that when Guillaume died, Huguette still had two sons at home. Thankfully, they were young men and could certainly handle the farm chores. They were only a few months away from inheriting the rights to farm that land.

Huguette’s Death

Huguette Goujon, widow of Guillaume Blanchard (in the margin).

This eighteenth day of October of the year one thousand seven hundred and seventeen, I, the undersigned performing the pastoral duties at Port Royal in Acadia, solemnly buried with all the ecclesiastical ceremonies Huguette Goujon, widow of Guillaume Blanchard, aged about seventy years, who passed away the preceding day after having received the Holy Viaticum preceded by the Sacrament of Penance, [I] not having been able to give her the Holy Oils because of the shortness of time. In faith of which I have signed the day and year as above.

Friar Justinien Durand, Recollet, Missionary

Huguette was actually about 62, but her life had been difficult, and the priest was quite harried.

This entry tells us that Huguette died rapidly and unexpectedly. In fact, the priest, “because of the shortness of time,” only had time to hear her confession (Penance) and give her final Communion (Viaticum). She passed away before he could complete the third and final step of Last Rites, anointing her with the Holy Oils (Extreme Unction).

The priest may have arrived late in her illness, or because of how sick she was, there may not have been enough time to complete her Last Rites, which consist of three separate rituals.

We know that Huguette was at least partially conscious, because the first two rituals were completed.

1. The first rite is the Sacrament of Penance, also known as the last Confession. This might normally take 5 or 10 minutes. The dying person must verbally confess their sins to the priest, express genuine remorse, and receive absolution. If Huguette was drifting in and out of consciousness or struggling to speak, this step could have taken up almost all of the precious minutes Father Durand had left with her.
2. The second rite is the Holy Viaticum, the Final Communion where the priest recites a short scripture verse and prayers, then administers a small piece of the consecrated host (the Eucharist) as “food for the journey” to the next life. This should only take a minute or two. Perhaps Huguette couldn’t swallow or was struggling terribly to breathe by this time, because she died, and Father Durand was not able to perform the third rite.
3. The third rite, and the one that Huguette missed, is the Extreme Unction, or Anointing with Holy Oils. The priest uncaps his container of holy oil (Oleum Infirmorum) and physically dips his thumb to anoint the dying person’s senses one by one: their eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, and hands. With each touch, he must recite a specific, formal Latin prayer asking God to forgive the sins committed by that specific sense.

As I think about this final act, I also think about the priest touching the very parts of his parishioners’ bodies that would have been highly contagious.

Because Huguette was able to complete her Confession, in the eyes of the Catholic church, her soul was perfectly safe because Confession wipes away all mortal sin. She died reconciled with God, but missed the comfort and grace of the Extreme Unction which was meant to grant spiritual strength to fight off the last-minute terrors of death, when it was believed that the Devil was most likely to launch one last stand. It would also provide physical comfort and erase the lingering “temporal punishment,” lifting the spiritual weight of venial sins, which shortens the soul’s time in Purgatory.

Because Huguette missed this “final erasure” of venial sins, such as a quick temper, minor lie, or selfishness, by anointing the lips (things wrongly said), eyes (things wrongly seen), and so forth, her family would have felt the need to help her through Purgatory. In the following weeks and months, they would have said extra rosaries, offered private prayers, and possibly paid Father Durand to say special Requiem Masses specifically dedicated to Huguette.

It’s obvious that Huguette died very quickly. Had she already been gravely ill, the priest could have heard her Confession four days earlier when her grandson died.

Normally, the body would have been washed and prepared for burial by female friends and family members, and an overnight vigil held. However, these were not normal times. The valley was in the grip of an epidemic. Most people were buried on the same day during this time, or different dates are unspecified. According to the parish register, Huguette was buried the following day.

The final portion of Father Durand’s entry, where he wrote “ay inhumé,” which translates to “I have buried,” tells us that he was in fact at her burial. He would have said her final mass, led the funeral procession outside of the church into the cemetery, blessed her body with holy water, and committed her remains into consecrated land. She was probably buried not far from her husband, Guillaume, and perhaps beside her grandson of the same name who had just died.

Huguette’s family would have marked her grave with a simple wooden cross, perhaps at the same time they marked her grandson’s.

Father Durand wouldn’t have tarried any longer than necessary at any home, although he may well have spent the night if he knew he was delivering mass at a funeral the next day in that same location. He would have eaten meals at the homes he visited, of course, and comforted the families as best he could.

Father Durand was being pulled in every direction at once, and he told us that in his own words.

Epidemic Epicenter

Translating the entries on the same page both before and after Huguette’s entry, and on adjacent pages, it’s evident that some severe sickness was rampaging through the community. Huguette’s grandson, who lived in the household next door, died four days earlier.

Multiple children died and in another case, two adult daughters in one family, ages 20 and 25, died a day apart, and the son of a third daughter just 10 days later. One entry says they died in a “severe fit of sickness” and the priest was not able to get there in time.

A total of 12 people died in just over a month, but the final death may not have been associated with the others.

Several mention the extremely rapid onset of illness and death.

However, there’s a smoking gun that provides insight. In the death record for Anne Roy, who died the day before Huguette, we find:

This sixteenth day of October of the year one thousand seven hundred and seventeen, I, the undersigned performing the pastoral duties at Port Royal in Acadia, solemnly buried with all the ecclesiastical ceremonies Anne Roy, wife of Jean Clémenceau, aged about thirty-five years, who passed away without being able to receive her Sacraments because of the mortality which prevents me from assisting everyone who is in danger, because there are too many of them, and I must tend to the others, and I am alone. In faith of which I have signed the day and year as above.

The translated pages in both directions show a distinct cluster of deaths. One can clearly see when this epidemic both starts and ends, according to the existing entries in the register. Furthermore, these are mostly upriver families, with the exception of Anne Roy, whose mother was Native, and the Le Borgne child whose death I suspect had nothing to do with the epidemic.

The entry prior to the October 13^th death was in May of the same year. It was written on the same page, but a gap of five months with no deaths in a community of roughly 900 people is highly suspect.

The priest would not have been carrying a leather-bound book in his boat with him. He would have been making notes and later copying them into the parish register. Obviously, some notes never made it.

Given what the priest’s burial notes reveal, I suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Known Chronological Breakdown of the Crisis

There are no surviving entries between May 13 and October 13.

• October 13, 1717 – Guillaume Blanchard, age 3, was Huguette’s grandson and the son of Guillaume Blanchard (Jr.) and Jeanne Dupuis. His death marks the earliest recorded victim of the epidemic.
• October 13, 1717 – Cécile Comeau, age 20, was the daughter of Pierre Comeau dit de l’Esturgeon and Jeanne Bourg. Cécile received last rites on the same day that Guillaume died, which meant that the priest had to row several miles between locations.

Father Durand reports that he attended the burial for both Guillaume and Cécile, which makes it impossible that traditional vigils prior to funerals were taking place during this time. There is no record that these deaths and burials occurred on different days.

• October 14, 1717 – Paul Vincent, 6 months old, was born to Clément Vincent and Madeleine Levron in April. They lived on the south side of the river, slightly upriver from Port Royal, near the Comeau family.
• October 14, 1717 – Catherine Comeau, age 25, was the sister of Cécile Comeau, who died the day before. Father Durand recorded that she “died of a severe fit of sickness (morte de fort de maladie) before I was able to administer the Sacraments to her.”

This entry, in combination with her sister’s death the day before, documents the incredible speed of this fatal pathogen. Given that her sister had just died of whatever was going on, had Catherine been ill the day before, Father Durand would have attended to her then, at least to hear her Confession, just in case.

• October 14, 1717 – Anne Petitpas, age 35, was the wife of Jacques Giroüer (Girouard). This is the third death on the same day that Father Durand would somehow have had to minister to.

These three families lived in different communities along the river, but he made it in time for Anne’s last rites. The Vincent family lived downstream from the Comeau family who lived near Moschelle. The Girouard family lived at Tupperville, across the River from the Blanchards and upriver a few miles from the Comeau family.

To put this in perspective, one would only row WITH the tidal river’s flow, not against the tide. It was 3 or 4 miles rowing from Port Royal to Moschelle, maybe 8 or 9 miles from Port Royal to Tupperville, and 11 or 12 to the St. Laurent church area above Belle Isle.

If we are to assume the recording order is the same as the death order, Father Durand had to row to the Vincent home, then from the Vincent home to Moschelle, which would have taken 45 minutes to an hour each, assuming he was in top physical condition and both the weather and tides were cooperating. From Moschelle to Tupperville would be about the same. The total distance from Belle Isle to Port Royal under ideal conditions would be a couple of hours. Rowing against the tide would be impossible, as the opposing current of the river’s tidal flow would neutralize forward momentum. And death didn’t operate on a schedule.

Frantic messengers would have been sent up and down the river to summon Father Durand. The tide changed roughly every six hours, so both messengers and the good priest had to time their travel accordingly.

• October 16, 1717 – Anne Roy, age 35, was the wife of Jean Clémenceau. Her death record is the “smoking gun” where Father Durand laments that the immense mortality (la mortalité) has left him working entirely alone and unable to reach everyone who needs him.

Although Father Durand had attended six bedsides that resulted in death since October 13^th, that would not have warranted his verbiage of “because of the mortality [epidemic] which prevents me from assisting everyone who is in danger, because there are too many of them, and I must tend to the others…” Six does not constitute “too many others.” His words suggest that the crisis extended substantially beyond the deaths recorded here. I can hear the pain and agony in his voice 309 years later.

• October 17, 1717 – Huguette Goujon (Gougeon), who Father Durand said was about 70, but was actually closer to 62. Huguette fell ill and died so quickly that Father Durand only had time for Penance and Viaticum, omitting the Holy Oils due to “shortness of time.” She was buried the following day and is the only record in this group that shows a burial on a different day than her death. Perhaps she died later in the day or during the night, and he stayed to bury her the following morning. He was probably exhausted, as was her family. Many more were probably sick and did not die.
• October 24, 1717 – Jean Pitre, age 15, the son of Claude Pitre and the late Marie Comeau. Jean was the grandson of Pierre Comeau dit de l’Esturgeon, the father of both Cécile and Catherine, who died on the 13^th and 14^th, marking the third child or grandchild that Pierre lost in a matter of 11 days.
• October 28, 1717 – Huguette Vincent, age 50, wife of Jean Bastarche. She is also the aunt of Paul Vincent who died two weeks earlier, on the 14^th. Just like Huguette, her fatal illness moved so rapidly that she received the first two rites but missed the final Extreme Unction. Whatever this pathogen was, it was WICKED!

The Bastarche family lived further upstream, just beyond Bridgetown today, but they interacted with the other Belle Isle families. Huguette Gougeon’s daughter, Jeanne, was the Bastarches’ neighbor.

• November 5, 1717 – Pierre LeBlanc, age 53, son of Acadian founders Daniel LeBlanc and Francoise Gaudet. Pierre’s swift illness (maladie preste) and death prevented him from receiving any sacrament other than Extreme Unction, which probably means he was not conscious. He is believed to have lived at Pre Ronde, 9 miles above the fort, between the Comeau and the Girouard families. His brother was Daniel LeBlanc, the neighbor of Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Gougeon.
• November 9, 1717 – François Brossard (Broussard), age 22, son of Francois Broussard and Catherine Richard, received all three Last Rites. The Broussard family were neighbors of the Blanchards and lived on the opposite side of St. Laurent church from them.
• November 20, 1717 – Joseph Le Borgne, age four months, was the son of Alexandre Le Borgne and Madeleine Doucet, who lived in the town of Port Royal. Given the distance between November 9 and 20, this child’s death may not be related to the epidemic.

Other than Joseph, there was one other known epidemic death associated with the town of Port Royal, Anne Roy. The homes in Port Royal were built close together, essentially side by side, and the soldiers in the garrison lived together in the bunkhouses. One would think that if the pathogen got a foothold there, we would have seen mass deaths. However, we have no view into what happened with the English administrators or soldiers, because the priest was only tending Catholic families.

Joseph Le Borgne was the final recorded burial entry for 1717, and then there are no recorded deaths during the winter. That’s extremely unlikely, so these records are probably lost too. My guess would be that winter weather moved in and water travel became impossible.

The next parish entry is for a 5-year-old child who died on April 14, 1718. Ironically, four days later, the next entry is for Jeanne Aucoin, “aged more than 90 years.” She was one of the original Acadian founders who managed to survive everything else, AND whatever pestilence descended upon the valley in the fall of 1717, to die of what was probably old age six months later. Jeanne was married to Francois Girouard, and we know her grandson’s wife died of the pestilence.

Searching for a Pattern

Is there a pattern to these deaths?

Let’s look at a map.

Click to enlarge

I’ve added the Blanchard surname to the 1733 map where it goes based on the census, earlier maps and other information. The Mass House, which is the St. Laurent Church, is shown at Belle Isle. The various family groups mentioned in the death records are shown with red arrows, and I’ve placed a red star for the various death locations.

Vincent, Pitre and Comeau live at or near Moschelle, close to town on the south side of the river. Girouard is at Tupperville, across from Belle Isle, also on the south side of the river.

Huguette Vincent is married to Bastarche, who lives on the south side of the river across from the Broussards, but several miles further east. However, she is the aunt of Paul Vincent, the baby who died on the 14^th and lived just west of the Comeau group.

Anne Roy lived in Port Royal. Her mother was Native and outlived her, so she would have had connections beyond Port Royal. Anne may also have not been at home when she was struck down.

As we see on the map, this epidemic occurred in distinct locations, assuming all deaths during this measurable interval from mid-October to the end of November were recorded in the parish register. These locations are interconnected and formed two primary clusters.

• The Roy and Le Borgne deaths at Port Royal, if the Le Borgne death was a result of the epidemic – 2 deaths.
• The Vincent child and Comeau family at and near Moschelle – 4 deaths.
• The nearby Girouard family, across the river from the LeBlanc, Blanchard and Broussard group – 1 death.
• The LeBlanc, Blanchard and Broussard grouping surrounding the St. Laurent Church – 4 deaths.
• The Bastarche family who lived across the river but is connected with the cross-river St. Laurent group and the Vincent family – 1 death.

The common factor among these families, with the possible exceptions of Anne Roy and the Le Borgne family, is the St. Laurent church. In 1717 the Catholic church at Port Royal was not functional, the English trade embargo was in place, and Catholic families would have been attending church together at St. Laurent.

In the fall, they also would have helped each other harvest salt marsh hay into stacks to dry.

The church sits dead center between the LeBlanc, Broussard, and Blanchard families. The Bastarche and Girouard families would have rowed over. Since the Comeaus could no longer attend church in Port Royal, they would have attended St. Laurent too.

The first deaths recorded, Guillaume Blanchard and Cecile Comeau, were probably exposed at about the same time since they died on the same day. Huguette Blanchard would have stepped in to help nurse her desperately ill grandson, receiving a full exposure of whatever he had. She died four days later.

It’s rather amazing that Father Durand didn’t succumb to whatever it was, himself. Although that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been an infection vector. He went from a critically ill, dying person to the bedside of the next critically ill, dying person. He could have unknowingly spread disease as he went.

Father Durand was born in France and may have had some residual immunity from his childhood or previous exposures. He could, however, have been an unwitting superspreader, as could the family members who frantically traveled along the river to find him when their family member was desperately ill. A loop of frantic desperation that was all tied together in a knot at their beloved church. Services, Last Rites administered, followed by funerals and the cemetery where they buried their loved ones.

I can close my eyes and see the haunting image of Father Durand, a solitary priest rowing alone, trying desperately to get to everyone in time – exhausted and paddling silently through the autumn evening river fog, perhaps even at night, maybe unknowingly carrying death from dock to dock and door to door, along with comfort and religious sacraments.

Then came the funerals where even more people would have been exposed. Perhaps they knew just enough about disease to realize they needed to minimize contact with those who had perished from “the plague.”

Because records are incomplete, we don’t really know when the epidemic ended, but it would have helped immensely when families began to shelter for the winter. The river froze, no one rowed back and forth, and snow isolated families. People probably didn’t attend church very often either. This served as an accidental but fortuitous quarantine.

As virulent as this scourge was, soon everyone would have either died or recovered and obtained some level of immunity. Once herd immunity was achieved, combined with winter’s isolation, the epidemic disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

What Was It?

Don’t I wish I knew.

There are clues, however.

First, not everyone got sick enough to die, and the majority of the community did not perish. This could have been due to previous exposures to the pathogen. We don’t know if people who didn’t die weren’t getting sick, or they got sick, but recovered. We know pretty much everyone was exposed, certainly within the families whose family members succumbed.

For those who died, the onset was extremely swift, and the outcome deadly – within less than 24 hours from fine to dead.

Incubation could have been 24-48 hours until the first symptoms appeared, with exposure to death being about four days, based on Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Gougeon.

Based on the symptoms, patterns of deaths and other clues, there are two primary candidates:

Fulminant (Hemorrhagic) Smallpox (Variola major)

While ordinary Smallpox takes weeks to run its course, this horrific and terrifying hemorrhagic variant acts as a hyper-toxic viral storm that destroys the vascular system internally, often causing death within 24 to 48 hours. This generally occurs before the classic, signature “pox” appears.

This could well explain why Catherine Comeau was fine on one day, when her sister died, then suddenly violently ill and dead the next day.

One problem with this option is that not everyone developed the hemorrhagic version of Smallpox, so many other people would have had the normal variant of Smallpox which was also lethal – just not AS lethal. We would have expected to see far more infant deaths since babies had never been exposed and had no prior immunity.

Father Durand mentioned the sickness, but he never says “pox.” People living then assuredly knew what Smallpox was, and they were terrified of it.

Those born in Europe would have had full lifelong immunity after initial exposure and survival there, and anyone exposed as a result of decades of trade with European vessels was protected too. Smallpox surfaced widely enough to be recorded in New England and colonial histories every decade or so.

One piece of evidence that argues against Smallpox is that Huguette’s son, Charles, who lived at home and was very clearly exposed when she died, also died of smallpox in 1757 in Quebec.

So, if the epidemic probably wasn’t Hemorrhagic Smallpox, what else could it have been?

Meningococcemia (Meningococcal Septicemia)

Meningococcemia is a potentially fatal infection that attacks the bloodstream and the brain lining with terrifying speed. It’s caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis, which can also cause meningitis.

A patient can be perfectly fine in the morning and face multi-organ failure and death by evening. It’s excruciatingly painful – as in beg-for-death painful.

Transmitted by respiratory droplets, it thrives in cold, damp autumn weather, which fits this scenario perfectly. The high-velocity, house-to-house spread matches a community interacting closely at church, interconnected families, fall harvesting, and consecutive funerals.

How did Father Durand and others survive?

In any meningococcal outbreak, the vast majority of exposed adults carry the bacteria in their nose and throat without developing symptoms or becoming ill. Father Durand could have carried the bacteria safely in his throat while single-handedly acting as a mobile shuttle service between the upriver docks.

This scenario also explains why some families experienced multiple deaths, but entire families were not wiped out.

Nothing other than these two diseases meets all the criteria that we’ve sifted from the burial records that we have. Based on the lack of infant deaths and later evidence, it seems that we can likely rule out Hemorrhagic Smallpox. Flu and pneumonia don’t kill people immediately, so they can be ruled out too. Meningococcal Septicemia seems to be the best fit.

Huguette’s youngest sons, Charles and Pierre, both lived in the same house with her, and next door to 3-year-old Guillaume, yet neither of them died.

The close-knit, interrelated community would have grieved deeply with the deaths we know about, and probably many whose burials never made it into the parish register. However, life went on, and both of Huguette’s youngest sons married a few months later.

Charles Blanchard and Madeleine Girouard

Huguette’s youngest child, Charles Blanchard, married on June 11, 1718, to Madeleine Girouard, the sister of Claude Girouard, who married Charles’s sister, Elisabeth, in 1709. Charles and Madeleine had 10 children. They assuredly married at St. Laurent, and I wonder if Charles took a walk through the cemetery to speak with his mother, whose grave was still fresh, on that joyful day. She accompanied him in spirit.

In 1756 and 1757, Charles and Madeleine are found on the list of families of Camp d’Esperance. Many families who survived that experience wound up in Quebec in 1756 or 1757. Charles died and was buried on December 22, 1757, in Quebec City during the smallpox epidemic there, but Madeleine never appears in any records again, so we have no idea when or where she was laid to rest.

• One of his children died as an infant in Port Royal, and two died as adults there.
• A daughter died during the smallpox outbreak in Quebec just a month before Charles did, and her husband died just three months earlier.
• One child died either in Connecticut or Louisiana.
• Two in New York.
• One probably died in Saint-Domingue (now Haïti) after being held at Camp d’Esperance, then Caraquet with refugees who refused to surrender, then Fort Edward before Halifax where he refused to sign an oath of allegiance.
• Two simply disappear in the records.

Charles’ son, Pierre Blanchard, somehow found his way to New Hampshire, then to New York, where he fought in the American Revolution against the British and later collected a pension. He carried a letter about 10 miles from François Chandonet in the town of Chazy, NY to Pliny Moore in Champlain, which was situated on Lake Champlain about 2 miles from the Canadian border. Pliny Moore played an outsized role in the family of Marie Josèphe LePrince, the daughter of Jeanne Blanchard, Pierre’s aunt, making Marie Josèphe his first cousin whose family settled in St. Jean sur Richelieu, Quebec, about 30 miles away.

Pierre Blanchard and Anne Robichaux

On November 7, 1718, Pierre Blanchard married Anne Robichaux and had nine children. In 1755, the family was deported to South Carolina, although some children were separated. Pierre died sometime between their deportation and August 12, 1763, when the Acadian census was taken there. Anne died sometime later, and may have made it to Louisiana, but that is uncertain.

• Three children did not survive to adulthood and died at Belle Isle.
• One child was at Memramcook in 1754 and 1755, but appears to have died in South Carolina.
• One either died in Port Royal, during the expulsion, or in South Carolina where his widow is found in 1763.
• One was at Memramcook in 1752 and 1755, then, at age 27, was separated from her husband who arrived in Georgia alone. She and two daughters later died in Canada. He managed to make his way to Quebec at some point, but apparently not in time to have additional children with Marie, so they may have been apart for at least 15 years, maybe longer.
• Three died in Louisiana.

Even though the Blanchard family members were widely dispersed during and after the 1755 Expulsion, and many died, at least some of the remnants managed to find their way back to each other.

Huguette’s Family at a Glance

When I began Huguette’s article, I didn’t realize she had given birth to the generation who would suffer the injustices and devastation of the Expulsion. As her story unfolded, so did the journeys of her children and grandchildren, including how they survived, or didn’t. I created this handy reference to keep track of her children who survived to adulthood as I wrote the article, and thought you might find it helpful too.

Huguette’s Complex Life

We have very few records for Huguette herself. Most of her life’s story is told through the records of others around her and the history of Acadia, Port Royal and Belle Isle.

She was a silent, or maybe not-so-silent partner in her husband’s seigneury aspirations at Petitcodiac.

At least three of her children had planned to make their homes at his newly established Village des Blanchard, and maybe Huguette and Guillaume did too.

We don’t know exactly how many children Huguette had, although we know of at least 12.

We know she buried at least one nameless child who is found on the 1678 census as three years old, but not in the 1686 census. He was between 3 and 11 when he was buried in the cemetery beside the church, probably at Belle Isle.

Her son Jean died after 1703 and before 1707, when he would have been between 17 and 20. He died about the time that their Petitcodiac dream went up in flames, and I fervently hope those two events weren’t connected.

Ten of Huguette’s children married and had children, although three of her daughters settled in Beaubassin or Grand-Pré, so she would never have seen those daughters again, or known those grandchildren as they grew up.

Two of her sons married after Huguette died, so she didn’t know those grandchildren either, although they would certainly have heard stories about her

Huguette’s other five children blessed her life with 23 grandchildren born before she herself perished. One, Guillaume, named for both her son and husband, may well have died in her arms just four days before her own death, both casualties in the same epidemic.

Of Huguette’s 94 grandchildren, I’m surprised that none were named after her. Neither did she serve as a godmother for any of the grandchildren who were born in Port Royal after 1702, when parish records remain. Perhaps Huguette’s children were more interested in younger people who could raise their children should something happen to them.

Huguette had three great-grandchildren when she died, but they were in Beaubassin. She wouldn’t have known those babies either, but she would have heard the joyful news through the Acadian grapevine as boats came and went from both locations, probably with strict instructions to deliver messages to specific people.

Huguette’s husband, Guillaume Blanchard, died sometime after January of 1715, probably after November of 1715, and before her own death. For all we know, he could have been one of the early casualties of the same epidemic whose burial record is lost forever in those five months between May and October 1717.

While Huguette’s death was tragic, I take some comfort in knowing she went quickly and any suffering she experienced was of very short duration.

Huguette couldn’t have known it, of course, but she had given birth to the generation that would suffer horrifically and act incredibly bravely during the 1755 Expulsion when the English rounded up every Acadian they could find during the late fall and winter of 1755 and either forced them onto ships, bound for random destinations, or imprisoned them. The ships that carried those imprisoned people away arrived later, but they sailed into a bleak future, just the same.

Huguette lived under that constant threat of English destruction and retribution for simply being Acadian, meaning French, and Catholic, but her children and grandchildren suffered the unimaginable, horrific reality of that fait accompli.

Of Huguette’s children who reached adulthood:

• Antoine, Rene and Guillaume died in Port Royal.
• Marie died in Beaubassin.

The rest were caught up in the Expulsion.

• Jeanne may or may not have survived to the Expulsion. If so, she would have attempted the crossing of the North Mountain range, on foot, in the winter, only to camp on the frozen beach at Morden until spring. Many died there and in the months to come as they attempted to make their way to Quebec through the woods. Some made it to Quebec to die in the smallpox epidemic there. Others, like Jeanne, simply disappear from the records.
• Anne was last found in the Chignecto region but disappears from records there. She may have been one of the rebels who set out in the woods on foot, never to be heard from again.
• Elisabeth is last recorded in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1760 living with Joseph Doucet
• Madeleine eventually wound up back in France.
• Charles died of Smallpox in Quebec City after somehow surviving the actual deportation event in the northern part of Nova Scotia.
• Pierre died someplace in South Carolina.

Huguette’s grandchildren ranged in age from 13 to 62 when the English exiled the entire Acadian population.

Her grandchildren were scattered to the winds, even those within the same family.

The numbers who died in various known or probable locations were:

• Port Royal area including Belle Isle – 19
• Beaubassin – 3
• Quebec after being deported elsewhere first – 23
• France – 6
• Tintamarre – 1
• South Carolina – 4
• Drowned when the ship Duke William sank (with their entire family) – 1
• Saint-Domingue – 4
• Saint-Pierre et Miquelon Islands – 2
• Cornwall – 3
• Liverpool – 1
• Connecticut – 3
• Miramichi – 3
• Haiti – 2
• Halifax, Nova Scotia – 2
• Louisiana – 5
• Martinique – 4
• Village des Blanchard (Petitcodiac) – 1
• Fort Beausejour – 1
• Massachusetts – 1
• Camp d’Esperance – 1
• New York – 2
• Known to be alive in 1755, but completely disappeared from the records, along with their families, during/after the Expulsion – 2

It’s no wonder that Acadians have seeded the earth.

Huguette and her family were plagued with epidemics, both along the river above Port Royal in 1717, and in Quebec after the Expulsion.

The ships transporting starving Acadian refugees to Quebec were known to have been infested with Smallpox, so the prison camps probably had been too.

Including spouses and family members, more than 23 died of smallpox in Quebec, mostly in 1756 and 1757, although one died of the same disease in a subsequent epidemic wave a few years later.

Parish death records that we do have generally don’t provide causes of death, although occasionally, some do. Historical records of specific regions sometimes record terrifying epidemics. Many more of Huguette’s descendants probably died of smallpox and whatever ravaged the community in 1717 than we’ll ever know.

If the English weren’t trying to kill them, some pathogen was.

Guillaume Blanchard was born about 1650 in Port Royal to Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert.

In 1650, the first settlers hadn’t yet been granted land upriver at Belle Isle, so Guillaume would have been born here, in Port Royal, where his parents had been settled for at least a decade. But not settled peaceably.

Acadia was in the midst of its own Civil War where two Frenchmen, Charles La Tour, a Protestant, and Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, a Catholic, fought over who was going to be the administrator of Acadia.

After a 1645 battle, it seemed that question was settled. La Tour was defeated, his wife, who led the defense of La Tour’s fort in his absence, was murdered, and d’Aulnay was in charge of Acadia, with Port Royal as its capital.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered. Right?

D’Aulnay began dyking and draining the 1500 acres of salt marsh at Belle Isle, upriver of Port Royal. Note that Belle Isle is spelled Belleisle today.

However, in 1650 d’Aulnay drowned in an accident, and La Tour returned.

The Acadian men at Port Royal had all been involved in the destruction of La Tour’s fort across the Bay at St. John in 1645, the execution of all of his soldiers, and the death of his wife, so La Tour’s return from exile must have made everyone’s blood run cold.

What would he do? Would La Tour seek retribution?

And of course, Guillaume Blanchard was born in the midst of this upheaval.

Following the death of Governor d’Aulnay in 1650, Emmanuel Le Borgne (Senior), d’Aulnay’s principal creditor, claimed seigneurial rights due to the large debt owed. Le Borgne initially sent representatives to collect, including his son by the same name, but arrived himself in 1653 with a force of armed men to seize d’Aulnay’s estate to satisfy the debt.

Between 1651 and 1654, Le Borgne (Junior) began distributing land allocations upriver at Belle Isle to Acadians. This prime real estate was highly sought after because the salt marshes had already been dyked by d’Aulnay, offering substantially larger fields and a much safer agricultural alternative to the exposed waterfront at Port-Royal.

We don’t know exactly when Le Borgne granted what to whom, in part, because he was known to tipple a bit too much and when inebriated, he granted the same land to multiple people. He was later accused of withdrawing documents that would have incriminated him.

Guillaume was too young to remember any of this, or what came next, but he would have heard the stories as he grew up.

Including this unbelievable tale!

The Most Unlikely Marriage EVER

Are you ready for this?

Sit down.

On February 24, 1653, La Tour returned to Port Royal and married d’Aulnay’s widow, Jeanne Motin. So, yes, La Tour married the widow of the man who executed all of his soldiers, contravening the surrender terms negotiated with his wife before she then “died” after being forced to stand on the scaffold and watch the men hang.

La Tour and Motin sought to unify Acadia, both militarily, politically, and financially.

How well the financial part worked is certainly disputable. La Tour inherited d’Aulnay’s debts, and in August 1653, Le Borgne (Senior) arrived from France with his own brigade of 100 armed men, fully intending to seize d’Aulnay’s lands by force. His own personal brute-force militia terrorized and seized other Acadian forts not associated with d’Aulnay, imprisoning their commanders. Then in August 1653, he forced Jeanne Motin, under duress, to sign a document stating that 206,286 livres were still owed to him.

One benefit to Motin of the marriage was that La Tour became a partner in the fight for d’Aulnay’s lands, complicating the situation for Le Borgne. Jeanne was a “defenseless widow” with eight children, while La Tour was the newly-restored Governor of Acadia. To protect them, Jeanne moved her children to La Tour’s fort across the river, the same fort d’Aulnay had destroyed in 1645. No irony there, but it gets better.

In the greatest of all ironies, Jeanne’s first child with La Tour, Marie, born the following year went on to marry Alexandre Le Borgne about 1675, the chaotic wine-loving son of Le Borgne (Senior).

All of that aside, it’s a good thing that La Tour and Motin healed old wounds and rifts that still haunted the community, because in July of 1654, the English attacked, and Acadia needed to be unified.

We know that the Blanchard family was somehow a beneficiary of the land grants at Belle Isle. However, in 1654, when the English arrived, it’s unclear whether Jean Blanchard and family were still living along the waterfront in Port Royal, beside the fort, or if they had received land at Belle Isle, built a home and already moved upriver.

Things were about to get messy. Very, very messy.

1654

La Tour, Jeanne Motin and her children were living at his fort across the Bay at St. John.

On July 4, 1654, English Colonel, Robert Sedgwick, out of Boston, sailed into the Bay. Before approaching Port Royal, he first stopped at Saint John and captured the unsuspecting La Tour.

Sedgwick then sailed across the Bay, into the river basin, and on to Port Royal where Emmanuel Le Borgne Senior, then governor, was quite friendly with the English. Too friendly. Friendly to the point of being accused of treason.

Sedgwick, with a total of about 733 soldiers laid siege to Port Royal, whose 133 soldiers attempted unsuccessfully to defend both the fort and the town.

On August 8^th, the siege ended. Le Borgne surrendered with terms that were “very” generous to the English, and to himself. By this time, 113 Acadians were being held captive by the English, along with 23 cannons, 500 weapons, 50 barrels of gunpowder, and Le Borgne’s own ship, the Chateaufort, which was loaded to capacity with alcohol.

In the surrender conditions that Le Borgne himself had negotiated, he was allowed to keep his ship, plus the alcohol, which was quite valuable, and return to France. His sons were allowed to remain at Port Royal “as hostages” to watch over his property in Port Royal and elsewhere in Acadia, which he was also allowed to retain.

Acadians accused Le Borgne of treason and blamed him for the capture of Port Royal and the ensuing savagery that befell them at the hands of the English. Was this attack truly unexpected, as portrayed, or was it coordinated by Le Borgne?

After the surrender, and contrary to the terms, Sedgwick’s men were unleashed and tore through Port Royal, plundering for spoils, defacing the church, smashing its windows, floors, and paneling before burning it, and then killing the settlers’ livestock just because they could.

Guillaume would have been about four years old at that time. If his family was still living in Port Royal, he would have assuredly remembered the rampaging soldiers and fires. In fact, it could well have been his first memory – one that he carried for life.

If their home burned in Port Royal, they would have moved to Belle Isle immediately, having little other choice.

Based on a reconstruction of the original Port Royal landowners due to a 1705 expropriation of their original lands when the fort was expanded, we know where Jean Blanchard’s land was located in Port Royal.

The original fort is labeled as 1 in Nicole Barrieau’s 1994 thesis, and subsequent forts expand on the original boundaries.

Here, Jean Blanchard’s land is drawn on a current aerial of the present-day fort, with the location of the church and cemetery marked as well. Guillaume’s family lived just 500 feet or so away from the church that went up in flames, just a two-minute walk.

How terrifying for a child. Let’s hope they had already transitioned upriver.

Sedgwick and Le Borgne’s handiwork would not be undone for another 16 years, in 1670, after Acadia was returned to French control through the Treaty of Breda. One of the first things the French did was to order a census. Thank goodness for Acadian descendants that they did!

Life at Belle Isle

In the 1671 Port Royal census, Guillaume is living with his parents and, at 21, is the eldest child living at home. They are enumerated in the Belle Isle community, 15 miles or so east of Port Royal, between Belle Isle and Bridgetown.

Guillaume married Huguette Gougeon around 1672, when he was about 22, which was somewhat young for an Acadian groom.

In the 1678 census, Guillaume and Huguette are living with his parents in a blended household, along with their 3 children – two boys and one girl. The family lives on 6 arpents of land, with 17 cattle and one gun.

By 1686, Guillaume is recorded as 35, Huguette is 27, and they have five children, two boys and three girls.

• Marie – 12 (so born 1673)
• René – 8 (so born 1678)
• Antoine – 6.5 (so born 1679 or 1680)
• Jeanne – 5 (so born 1681)
• Anne – 2 (so born 1684)

It looks like they have lost at least two children

The family is living on 5 arpents of land with 16 cattle and 20 sheep in the LeBlanc community at Belle Isle. They live next door to Guillaume’s parents who are elderly. His father, Jean, is 75, and his mother, Radegonde, is 65. Clearly, while they are residing in different houses, they are living on the same farm, and Guillaume is working the land.

MapAnnapolis has mapped the Acadian homestead locations along the river based on censuses, early maps, and other information.

Taking a drive along Highway 1, also known as Evangeline Trail today, where it intersects with Marshland Road, the old homesteads are long gone, burned by the English in 1755, but the land remains substantially the same.

It was right about here that Guillaume Blanchard grew up, sharing a home first with his parents, then with his wife and children.

This landscape is timeless. The Blanchard’s stream still flows, running from the mountains north of the river, beneath Evangeline Trail, visible in the distance, and towards Marshland Road.

This freshwater stream sustained the families of Guillaume Blanchard and his brother Antoine, along with their parents before them. I can feel their souls here.

Standing on Marshland Road, and turning around to face south, we can catch glimpses of the Annapolis River today. It was the Rivière du Dauphin then.

The tranquil beauty belies the upheaval that occurred here three centuries ago.

When Guillaume lived here, the dykes d’Aulnay built and his father maintained held back the river’s salty water. Looking across the wheat fields between his home and the river, Guillaume could see the mountains behind the Girouard land on the south side of the Annapolis River. One of his daughters would marry into that family one day.

Guillaume lived most of his life here at Belle Isle, in the Annapolis River Valley, and probably died here as well.

1690 – Terror at Port Royal

Tensions in Acadia and the colonies in general began to ramp up again when the Nine Years’ War began in 1688 in Europe. The following year and early in 1690, the French capitalized on this turmoil to launch raids with their Native American allies along borders with New England and New York.

After the fall of Fort William Henry at Pemaquid in August of 1689, the English not only sought to retaliate, they also wanted to capture Acadia. Additional 1690 raids spurred a public outcry in New England, and the Massachusetts government authorized a raid against Acadia.

Boston merchant John Nelson had extensive trade dealings with the Acadians, but now he was one of the major proponents of an attack. He offered to lead the expedition but was rejected because of his previous trade relationships.

Ironically, he apparently had been scheming against the Acadians all along. It was John Nelson whom Acadian Jacques Bourgeois had entrusted with all of the Acadian land titles granted by d’Aulnay. Nelson took them to Boston, ostensibly to have them bound, but he never returned them and tried to claim Acadia for himself in 1692. Apparently, the English didn’t trust Nelson, and the Acadians shouldn’t have.

The expedition’s command was finally awarded to Sir William Phips, who, ironically, also had extensive trade dealings with Acadians – Jacques Bourgeois, in particular.

Phips was a Maine native who had no military experience, but who did have motivation. He had survived the French and Wabanaki raids that destroyed his hometown near Portland, Maine during the First Abenaki War in 1676.

In March 1690, Phips was commissioned, and on April 28th, he sailed out of Boston Harbor, bound for Acadia. His flagship, the Six Friends, was mounted with 42 cannons. A total of five ships carried 446 troops plus another 288 sailors and local men.

Eleven days later, Phips entered the basin of the Rivière du Dauphin, stopping at the home of the French Huguenot, Pierre Melanson, who was bilingual and known to be friendly with the English. Phips inquired of Melanson as to the condition of Port Royal, and the fort.

At some point, a sentry, possibly at present-day Digby, alerted Governor Meneval at Port Royal that the English fleet had entered the river.

The fleet spent the night anchored in the river at Melanson’s before pulling up anchor the next morning and proceeding to Port Royal, a few miles upriver, and anchoring there.

After his visit with Melanson, Phips clearly knew of the deplorable conditions at and of the fort, and he must have been thrilled.

Phips could clearly see from his position anchored in the river, in front of the fort, that there were no cannons mounted. This map, drawn in 1686, shows the fort in such poor condition that you can’t even tell it’s a fort.

Phips may or may not have known that there were only 90 soldiers stationed at the fort, which meant the English outnumbered them ten to one. Worse yet, if it could be any worse, only 70 soldiers were there, and the garrison’s soldiers only had 19 guns among them. They were doomed.

If you added every able-bodied Acadian man and their 71 guns to that total, the English soldiers still badly outnumbered and outgunned the Acadians.

Not to mention that the fort had been allowed to deteriorate to the point where it was essentially indefensible.

Phips didn’t even bother firing. He simply demanded that the fort, and Port Royal, meaning Acadia writ large, surrender.

Governor Meneval sent the Catholic priest to negotiate for the best terms possible – essentially to spare the lives and property of the soldiers and residents.

Phips agreed verbally, but the following day when Meneval boarded the Six Friends to sign the agreement, Phips refused.

One way or another, the fate of Acadia, and the Acadians now rested with Phips, and Meneval had no choice but to trust him at his word.

As it turned out, Phips’ word was worthless, and the resulting attack was brutal.

Contrary to his promises, he unleashed his soldiers on the town the following day, where they rampaged through town, plundering as they went. They stole what they could and burned the rest.

What the English did not do was travel upriver beyond Port Royal. That would have required them to leave the safety of their nearby ships in the harbor and fan out into unknown terrain. That was much more risky.

Safety at Belle Isle

In 1690, Guillaume was 39 or 40 years old and had nine or 10 children. Thank goodness his father had moved upriver and settled at Belle Isle in the 1650s when Guillaume was a child. Their location was the only thing that prevented their farms from being burned.

The upriver Acadians were warned about the imminent danger when Governor Meneval discharged the cannon to call the Acadian men to his aid at the fort. Meneval clearly knew he was in trouble.

Unfortunately, 42 Acadians were absent, and Meneval reported that only three Acadian men came to the fort to assist, which sounds absolutely bizarre. Perhaps they were preparing to defend their own farms and families.

Perhaps they wondered if they were walking into a trap by the English.

Maybe they knew the fort, which was in the process of being torn down to be rebuilt, could not be defended, and they weren’t interested in being slaughtered there.

We will never know, but Meneval’s hands were tied. He must have been furious with France, who had allowed her fort and defenses to decay, in spite of his repeated requests, and furious with the Acadian men for essentially abandoning him. Maybe the Acadians felt that France had abandoned them and they weren’t willing to intentionally risk their lives. I wish we knew more, specifically which Acadian men went to the fort, prepared to fight regardless.

Fortunately, Belle Isle was somewhat sheltered by being several miles upriver, beyond Port Royal and the bend in the river beyond which large ships could no longer navigate.

At Belle Isle, the Acadians lived behind the marshes, and in front of the mountains that separated the Annapolis River from the Bay of Fundy.

The mountains north of Guillaume’s lowlands provided safety and a refuge in time of need. A place where the English would not have known how to navigate, or where to find them.

The Oath

At some point, Phips and his soldiers either summoned or rounded up the Acadian men. They were probably held in the church or the fort where they were forced to sign a loyalty oath to the English crown. This document made its way to Boston, of course, where I found it in the Massachusetts Archives in 2008. The 1695 date threw me for a minute, but later correlation with the 1686 census, the oath signatures, the 1693 census, and known deaths confirm that, indeed, this is the 1690 document.

The only men missing were the very elderly, who the English wouldn’t have been terribly worried about causing a ruckus.

On the 1690 oath document, Guillaume Blanchard made his mark that looked something like a “P,” which tells us that he could not write. It says, “Marque de “P” Guillaume Blanchard”, where P is his mark made by his own hand.

Guillaume’s parents, Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, were living on the same land at Belle Isle with him in the 1686 census, and both were absent in the 1693 census. Jean Blanchard’s signature is missing from the 1690 document. If living, he would have been about 80 years old.

At least Guillaume didn’t have to load his very elderly father into a cart or a canoe and transport him to Port Royal to sign that cussed oath.

It was bad enough that Guillaume and his brother, Martin, had to sign.

The English left, but only a few weeks later, as the Acadians were trying to recover, English pirates attacked, killing the rest of the livestock and taking what little Phips’ men had missed the first time around.

1693

In the 1693 census, Guillaume, 42, is living with his wife whose name is spelled Agate Goujon, 37, and their nine children. Their oldest daughter, Marie, 19, is married to Charles Bourgeois, and they live with Guillaume and Agate. Both couples have a 1-year-old baby. They live on 30 arpents of land and own 30 cattle, 40 sheep, 15 hogs, and 3 guns.

We don’t know when Guillaume’s parents passed away, but they are gone by 1693 and were probably buried in the nearby churchyard of the St. Laurent Church.

Interestingly enough, Guillaume’s daughter, Marie, and her husband Charles Bourgeois were also listed in the Beaubassin census with their daughter, Marie, 4 months. Beaubassin, the next frontier, only had 20 families living there, with a total of 119 people. This tells us exactly when they relocated.

1698

Five years later, in the 1698 census, Guillaume is shown as 48, and Huguette is shown as 47. She was actually closer to 42.

Their 10 children still living at home range in age from son René at 22 to Charles who is listed as ½. They are living on 34 arpents of land with 26 cattle, 24 sheep, and 12 hogs. Guillaume owns 3 guns, and they have 12 fruit trees.

Their neighbor is Laurent Doucet.

By now, two of their daughters have married and removed to Beaubassin, and the rest of the family was considering pulling up stakes too.

1698 and 1699 were watershed years, filled with hope.

The Next Frontier

In July of 1698, Guillaume Blanchard and fellow Acadian Pierre Thibodeau, the miller who lived across the river at Pre Ronde, set out on Blanchard’s boat for what would one day become Chipoudy. Pierre had visited once before and may have already begun dyking marshes there.

The fact that Guillaume had his own boat tells us that he was among the more well-to-do. Not everyone had a boat.

Two of Guillaume’s sons accompanied them as they explored along the Petitcodiac River before returning to Port Royal a few months later. The two sons must have been Guillaume’s eldest, René, who would have been 20 or 21, and Antoine, the next-born child. Neither were married and both lived at home.

Given that both the Petitcodiac River, which empties into Shepody Bay, and the Minas Basin, marked with red stars above, are tidal estuaries, they likely explored both areas looking for the best, as-yet-undeveloped candidate location for a new settlement. Both estuaries suffer from extreme twice-daily bore tide surges. The tide at Les Mines rises suddenly from 46-53 feet, the highest in the world, and at Petitcodiac from 36-46 feet.

Several locations in the Minas Basin (Les Mines) had already been settled, beginning in the early 1680s.

Upon their return, the men would have been full of good news and encouraged their fellow Acadians to consider establishing themselves on the next frontier where land was plentiful and there were no English overlords to harass them.

Village des Blanchard

Guillaume Blanchard returned in late 1699 and founded “Village des Blanchard,” along the Petitcodiac River at or near Hillsborough, NB.

The Petitcodiac River, known colloquially as the Chocolate River, is heavily tidal, with marshes very similar to what the Acadian families had been dyking and farming at Belle Isle. Belle Isle had a tidal rise and fall as much as 25 feet, but minus the dangerous bore tides.

It takes three years after dyking the marshes with aboiteau for the salt to leach out of the soil and the land to become farmable.

Therefore, the Acadians would have needed to select land and invest the labor and time to dyke the land, then wait for three years to build homes and move their households.

In the meantime, they could have maintained some livestock there and traded with the Native people, but not farmed. It wasn’t yet hospitable to families, but sons in their early 20s would be the perfect people to begin transforming marshes into farmland, and molding homesteads from wilderness.

Hopewell is at Shepody Bay, just south of Hillsborough, and this entire area along the river is conducive to salt marsh farming. The fields are evident by the color change.

In 1755, the Battle of Petitcodiac was fought at Village des Blanchard, today’s Hillsborough, NB, where salt marshes line both sides of the river.

This 1755 map shows the location of Village des Blanchard and the Thibodeau village at Chipoudy.

1699

In 1699, after the fall harvest was in, a group of men from Port Royal set forth to establish the next Acadian village.

On November 1, 1699, an extract from a letter from Mathieu de Goutin concerning the founding of Chipoudy says, “Guillaume Blanchard and other settlers from Port-Royal came here two days ago to take up grants …”

Obviously, the men were on a scouting mission, evaluating locations to establish a community similar to Belle Isle.

Not quite two months later, on December 27^th, another extract discussed the chartering of a ship by Guillaume Blanchard to his associates Jean Labat and Christophe Cahouet, at a rate of thirty livres per month.

Labat and Cahouet were business mariners focused on trade, such as transporting furs, timber, and provisions. Blanchard was laying the foundation for a profitable future for his new settlement.

Guillaume established a small village at Petitcodiac, reportedly eventually settling two sons and a daughter with her husband there. Guillaume and Pierre returned to Port Royal, but Guillaume returned to Village des Blanchard in both 1700 and 1701 when his sons, daughter, and son-in-law spent the winter.

It’s easy to surmise that the two sons left by Guillaume to overwinter were René and Antoine, his eldest.

Identifying the daughter and son-in-law is more challenging and less evident.

• Guillaume’s oldest daughter, Marie, born about 1674 had been married to Charles Bourgeois since about 1692, and they were already established in Beaubassin. Did they uproot and move to Petitcodiac? It’s unlikely, but we don’t know for sure.
• Guillaume’s second-oldest daughter, Jeanne, married Olivier Daigre on August 8, 1700, and their first child was born about 1701. Did they strike out and settle on the frontier with no midwife when they were either expecting a baby or with a newborn? I’d judge that to be unlikely.

They are shown in the 1701 census in Port Royal, but we don’t know when that census was actually taken. Their next child was baptized in August 1703 at Port Royal.

That said, it’s certainly possible that Olivier went with Jeanne’s brothers, and Jeanne stayed with her mother at Belle Isle to deliver her child.

• Guillaume’s third daughter, Anne Blanchard, married Claude Bourgeois around 1701, when they are shown at Beaubassin in the census alongside her sister, Marie, and her husband, who was Claude’s brother. In other words, Blanchard sisters married Bourgeois brothers. Did they go to Petitcodiac? Their first known child was born about 1704, so we can infer that their first child died.

Both Marie and Anne are shown in the 1703 census in Beaubassin, and Jeanne is living in Port Royal, so which daughter was established at Petitcodiac, even for one winter, cannot be determined.

By 1702, some of the land was arable, and the colony became permanent as settlers began to stay over the winter there instead of returning to Port Royal.

The dykes still restrain the brackish water and the bore tides today. A small dirt road runs between the dyke and the fields, while the houses are located far from the river. This dyke on the left could well have had its genesis in one of the original dykes built by Guillaume, his sons, and son-in-law.

They invested back-breaking labor and believed they were building a rosy future here.

The Early 1700s Censuses

In 1700, Guillaume Blanchard, 49, and Huguette, called Agathe, 45, are living at Port Royal with their eight children.

• René – 23
• Antoine – 21
• Jeanne – 18
• Anne – 16
• Elizabeth – 11
• Jean – 13
• Guillaume – 10
• Madelaine – 8

Their two youngest children are not listed, but based on later records, had not died.

Their daughter, Marie, with husband Charles Bourgeois, is living in Beaubassin.

The 1701 census is somewhat confusing. Guillaume, 52, and Huguette, 46, are living at Port Royal with their children on 20 arpents of land. They have 25 cattle, 25 sheep, 17 hogs, and five guns. One man by the name of René Blanchard, has married and is living at Riviere St. Antoine (Les Mines). However, René Richard, age 23, is living with Guillaume and Huguette in Port Royal, as is their son, Antoine, so those boys aren’t settled at Petitcodiac yet. The René Blanchard married and living in Les Mines is not their son.

The 1703 census is much less detailed than the earlier censuses and only gives the name of the head of household, with family members counted by sex. Guillaume is listed in Port Royal with his wife, six boys, two girls, and five arms bearers. If this is accurate, there’s an unknown boy living with them.

The same René Blanchard that was listed at St. Antoine in 1701 is listed in 1703 at Les Mines. Petitcodiac does not appear to be included, or if it is, it’s listed in a broad category. Or, maybe something else is happening.

The new colony at Petitcodiac may not have been included in the census, but the settlers had been noticed, and trouble was looming on the horizon.

Land Challenges

Maybe, just maybe, Guillaume Blanchard spoke too highly of Petitcodiac when he returned to Port Royal. Their settlement came to the attention of the Seigneur of Beaubassin, who claimed all the land was his and threatened legal action for trespass.

Claude-Sébastien de Villieu threatened to file suit on behalf of his wife’s father, Michel Leneuf de La Vallière, who lived at Beaubassin. La Vallière claimed Chipoudy, settled by Thibodeau, and the Petitcodiac settlement founded by Blanchard, as part of his seigneury.

Apparently, Blanchard and Thibodeau initially tried to negotiate, but Villieu refused, so Thibodeau and Blanchard applied to Paris for their own seigneury. Despite the dispute, building and land preparation continued. One report said that a mill had been built with materials out of Boston, probably by Thibodeau since he was a miller at Port Royal.

On October 2, 1702, a report by Mathieu de Goutin, Thibodeau’s son-in-law, concerning the founding of Les Mines, requested that Guillaume Blanchard be granted a half league on either side of the Petitcodic River:

“The said Blanchard has a sailing vessel, and grown sons, sons-in-law, and nephews, who will put the Petitcoudiac land along the Petitcoudiac River to use and will settle there many people, and in three years the colony will draw support from them.”

This request was for a massive amount of land. A French league equates to about 2.42 miles, and a half league is about 1.21 miles. This means that Goutin was requesting half a league on both sides of the river, with no specification for a restriction on distance. The agricultural buffer zone would straddle the river, ensuring that the Village des Blanchard controlled the rich, dykable tidal marshes on both shores.

Guillaume Blanchard had chosen well. On this map of the Petitcodiac River, the white areas along the riverbanks are salt marsh fields. The area near Hillsborough has deep marshes on both sides of the river. The marshes extend even further north to Moncton, while Chipoudy, where Thibodeau’s village and mill would have been located, was on the Cape to the south. Both are outside the picture.

By 1702, there were 7 families with 33 people at Shepody, and 5 families with 13 people at Petitcodiac. Villieu realized the settlers were dug in and had every intention of staying. Now, Villieu was ready to negotiate, but Blanchard and Thibodeau were not, because they were requesting their own seigneury.

Finally, on March 20, 1703, a royal decree was issued from the Conseil d’État in Paris that tried to balance both sides. It stated that the Acadian settlers could retain possession of the land and improvements, a “censitaire du seigneur,” essentially tenant farmers with the right to pass the tenancy of the land to their descendants. But it also established that La Vallière was to have seigneurial rights over the land.

This meant that neither Thibodeau nor Blanchard could grant rights to land to new settlers, could not collect rents, and had to obey the legal jurisdiction of La Vallière’s estate.

A 1705 decree restated the same. Pierre Thibodeau died in 1704, before the final decree. Guillaume Blanchard was about 55 by this time.

This was not at all what Guillaume and Pierre had in mind, and La Vallière’s successful claim destroyed their hope of obtaining seigneurial rights for themselves and their descendants.

Guillaume’s dream was crushed. Those rich farmlands would never be his.

The Blanchard family refused and returned to Belle Isle. Eventually, future generations, including some Blanchard descendants, would settle the Village des Blanchard where Guillaume first sank roots.

Even without the Blanchard family, Petitcodiac had been born and eventually thrived. By 1734, there were 65 families distributed on the Shepody, Petitcodiac, and Memramcook Rivers, and by 1750 the population had more than doubled.

In 1752, two Blanchard families are listed at Petitcodiac, three at Chipoudy, and six at nearby Memeramkook.

However, in the early 1700s, conflicts with the English that escalated into attacks slowed settlement even further.

We don’t know exactly when the Blanchards returned from Petitcodiac, but based on what we do know, I suspect it was either before or shortly after July of 1704 when Benjamin Church attacked.

I doubt that Guillaume ever returned.

Queen Anne’s War

With the outbreak of Queen Anne’s War between England and France, the small French colonial settlements like Port Royal, and the even smaller settlements like Beaubassin and Petitcodiac became English targets.

In 1704, the English set out to punish the Acadians for their attack, along with their Native American allies, on Deerfield, Massachusetts, killing dozens and taking more than 100 captives.

Furious, the Governor of Massachusetts recruited the notorious pirate, Colonel Benjamin Church, who had at his disposal a massive fleet of ships ranging from warships to fishing boats.

If they could not destroy the Acadians, they would starve them out.

It began on July 2^nd, before dawn, when two English warships and seven smaller transport vessels slipped into the Port Royal Basin from the Bay. They captured the sentries on guard at or across from Goat Island and proceeded on to Port Royal, undetected.

Church captured the family of bilingual Charles Melanson (the younger) on the north shore of the river and sent his wife, Marie-Jeanne Bourg, as an emissary into the rebuilt stone-and-earth fort to relay his surrender demand to Governor Jacques-François de Monbeton de Brouillan.

The Acadians had no way of knowing that Church had instructions not to attack the fort, since London had not authorized the retaliatory expedition.

Brouillan flat refused to surrender, so the next 17 days were spent in a standoff. The French soldiers waited inside the fort for an attack that never came. Instead, Church simply waited, his warships on full display, anchored threateningly in the river.

For Church’s actual purposes, a blockade was perhaps even more effective, because it pinned down the French soldiers and many Acadians, while the rest of his flotilla moved on to even more-vulnerable targets.

Church rained destruction and fire on the secondary Acadian settlements: Grand-Pré, Pisiguit, Beaubassin, Chignecto, Petitcodiac and Chipoudy.

The Destruction of Petitcodiac and Chipoudy

In his 1716 memoirs, Benjamin Church described what he saw at Chipoudy and what happened there and at Petitcodiac.

Realizing he faced extreme tides, Church split his forces into smaller whaleboats to better navigate the rivers.

Church wrote that as they approached Chipoudy, they spotted a few Frenchmen and an Indian guide on the shoreline and immediately pursued them into the woods.

He recalled that the settlers had built their homes and outbuildings with distinct frontier craftsmanship. Following his orders to “leave no habitation standing,” his New England privateers systematically went house-to-house, torching them all.

Church specifically boasted about burning the newly constructed homes and barns at Chipoudy and that the inhabitants fled into the woods or marshes rather than barricading themselves in their homes.

He then detailed moving on upriver where the Blanchard Petitcodiac settlement would have been. He recounts killing their cattle and sheep, destroying their homes, and tearing down the dykes, allowing the salt tides to wash back over the land. He bragged that it gave him great satisfaction to break the “substance” of “the French” inhabitants, systematically destroying everything, hoping to also neutralize the assets of their allied “Indian Rebels.”

Quite a lovely man he was.

All I can say is that I’m glad the Acadians ran for the woods, because if Jeanne Blanchard was Guillaume’s daughter who was living there and she had chosen to barricade in her home, I wouldn’t be here today.

If three of Guillaume’s children had died on the new frontier, he would never have forgiven himself.

Back at Port Royal

After Church’s dastardly deeds leveling the Acadian outlier communities, he returned to Port Royal, where he withdrew after a minor skirmish. The Port Royal Acadians would have heaved a huge sigh of relief, but their families in the remote settlements were devastated. Their fields and dykes were ruined, and their homes burned. Many flooded back to Port Royal for safety and survival, and to somehow start over – again.

As soon as Church departed, I’m sure Guillaume Blanchard immediately headed for Petitcodiac to rescue his family and the other settlers. What he found probably made him sick. The years of investment, now all gone – but at least his children were alive. He hugged them and headed home, back to the safety of Belle Isle. I can’t help but wonder if everyone lived. Could this be a clue about what happened to Anne Blanchard’s first child?

Church’s scorched-earth tactics created a humanitarian and agricultural crisis in Acadia, followed by the death of iron-willed Governor Brouillan the following year.

By the time Governor Subercase arrived in 1706, he found a desperate colony. The French had ignored both the colony and its defenses, or lack thereof, for years. The former governors had pleaded for funds, the soldiers hadn’t been paid in years, and morale was in the toilet.

Subercase realized that the English would return to finish what they had started. It was nothing short of a miracle that they hadn’t already, and it was only a matter of when.

Subercase knew that the existing fort wasn’t enough to protect either the fort itself, the soldiers, or the town.

He ordered the construction of a new subterranean powder magazine to keep their powder dry and engaged with privateers to secure provisions. What else was he to do?

Those privateers brought captured English soldiers from the ships who revealed that Boston was raising a massive army specifically designed to capture Acadia.

But the intelligence gathering wasn’t one-sided. Disgruntled, unpaid, and hungry French soldiers defected, running away to the English colonies where they helped the English lay out their attack strategy.

Amidst this building anxiety, life in Acadia, along the river and in the marshes at Belle Isle continued somewhat normally.

1707

On January 31, 1707, Guillaume’s son, Antoine Blanchard, married Elizabeth Teriau.

Guillaume is listed as Antoine’s father, and the “P” shaped mark appears to be his signature, as it was in 1690. “Falaise,” beside Guillaume’s mark, is the signature of Louis de Gannes, Sieur de Falais, a French military officer who was appointed Major of Port-Royal in 1704, meaning he was second in command of the entire colony under Governor Subercase.

In 1707, Port-Royal was under immense stress, facing frequent English naval blockades and attacks. Because the colonial government and military elite were close to the local Acadians, high-ranking officers frequently stepped into the nearby Saint-Jean-Baptiste church to act as formal witnesses for notable weddings.

The English Are Coming

The conflict with the English that the Acadians had been warned about, and were dreading, was on the horizon.

The English in Boston had been preparing, but recruitment was difficult and they had to draft men. Eventually, 1,150 soldiers and 450 sailors on 24 ships sailed out of Boston Harbor and headed for Port Royal. One ship carried 50 cannons, and another carried 24.

This time, led by Colonel John March, the English sailed into the river at Port Royal on June 6, 1707.

As soon as Governor Subercase realized what was happening, he sounded the alarm by firing a cannon, summoning the Acadian men to the fort. His 100 French soldiers had recently been reinforced by another 60, and, as luck would have it, 100 Abenaki warriors were visiting too.

Subercase’s call to the local militia mustered about 60 men out of 102 families, bringing the total available men to about 320.

Was Guillaume among them? We don’t know. His sons assuredly were. Guillaume might have been considered too old.

Regardless, the French were vastly outnumbered. The English had more men than the Acadians had sheep! The total population at Port Royal was about 550, including children, and the entirety of all the Acadian settlements was about 1400 – still less than the number of English soldiers.

Imagine the terror of everyone in Port Royal who could see the size of the offensive. There was absolutely NO WAY they could overcome this – and they wouldn’t have if the English commanders had been even remotely competent. They lacked experience in siege warfare.

On the following day, March landed 700 men north of the fort and another 300 to the south – except they were too far away and spent most of the day marching back towards the fort.

The 1710 English siege map shows the 1707 landing locations as well.

This miscalculation allowed Subercase time to mount a defense – not to mention that Subercase’s soldiers were shooting down at the arriving English, making the unfortunate English, looking up into their guns, sitting ducks.

The English camped about a mile and a half from the fort, and of course, Subercase was commanding a group of soldiers who were familiar with the terrain.

A few men in the dark forest can sound like an army, and rumors began to spread among the English that men from the more distant villages were arriving to reinforce the Port Royal Acadians.

The English commanders began to argue among themselves about how they should, or should not, approach taking the fort. Their chief engineer didn’t think they could mount their cannons, and they couldn’t take the fort without them. They tried, on June 16^th, and failed spectacularly, although at some point Subercase’s horse was shot out from under him, forcing a temporary retreat.

Governor Subercase’s report sent to Paris that fall tells us that the civilian habitations within the “banlieue,” about a mile surrounding the fort, had been “ravaged by fire” in June.

On June 17^th, the English returned to their ships and sailed away – thoroughly humiliated that they had been unable to take the fort, even when they massively outnumbered the enemy. Unfortunately, they self-soothed by burning the surrounding town and nearby farms before leaving.

They stopped at Casco Bay on the way home where the commanders sent letters ahead to Boston blaming each other.

Not only was this a massively embarrassing disaster for the English, the Bostonians agreed, and crowds of women and children met the returning men with jeers. How humiliating.

In Port Royal, the Acadians were devastated about the loses, but also deeply relieved that the primary English goal had been thwarted.

But they had also been reminded once again of the powerful might of the English, and they knew they had to be better prepared. And quickly.

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Attacking Port Royal Might Not Be for You

The English men were ordered to stay put on the ships in Boston while the English commanders tried to figure out what to do next. They decided to try capturing Acadia again. However, roughly half of their men had deserted, so this time they sailed for Port Royal in late August with Commander Wainwright at the helm, but only about 850 men.

The Acadians had been forewarned, and Subercase had taken the opportunity after the June attack to quickly add defensive earthworks. Lady Luck was with him, and a French frigate arrived whose crew was added to their defenses. Not only that, but the captured English prize ships provided much-needed provisions.

The English fleet arrived on August 21^st. Brilliantly, they landed their forces in nearly the same locations, which just happened to be where Subercase had reinforced.

Two days later, Wainwright ordered 300 troops to clear a path for their heavy cannons. Men clearing brush and dragging a cannon are easy marks. The French shot from the top of the fort’s ramparts and employed guerrilla tactics, forcing an English retreat.

Another brush-cutting party was attacked, and nine men were killed. They were fortunate the entire group wasn’t wiped out. Perhaps a tactical error.

Confused by the combined military and guerrilla attacks, the English not only retreated to their camp; they eventually moved the camp because they couldn’t defend it.

On the 31^st, the English attempted another landing.

Subercase himself led 120 men out of the fort, engaging about 70 English soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. Reportedly, 20 of the Native American and Acadian defensive forces were wounded, and five were killed. Subercase reported that more than 200 English were killed, but British sources reported 16 wounded and 16 dead.

Again frustrated by their inability to take the fort, and with it, Acadia, they set about on an arson spree again.

French colonial records tell us that vast majority of Port Royal’s early land deeds and court registry files were completely lost to “an enemy fire on a single night in August 1707” at the home of Port Royal’s main notary, Jean-Chrysostome Loppinot. His home is later listed on the Labat map as location “O”, which was marked as broullée, burned. The only documents that survived from his office were a small handful of papers that happened to be in the physical possession of Judge Mathieu de Goutin on the night of the inferno.

On the other side, Thomas Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts records that the English officers proudly detailed the destruction they had wrought, stating that during their retreat on June 7, 1707, their soldiers systematically set fire to the outlying Acadian houses, barns, and storehouses along the riverbank, and slaughtered hundreds of cattle to spoil the French food supply.

Yet, their repeated incompetence combined with Subercase’s experience and smart military tactics prevented the fall of Acadia.

Houses burned, and the Acadians were certainly damaged, but Acadia stood firm.

Click to enlarge

In 1708, Pierre-Paul de Labat documented the devastation on a map, and he appeared to update the map through 1709. In 1710, when the French administrators were expelled from Port Royal, he took his map with him to France.

His invaluable legend details the list of burned properties by resident.

There’s another interesting gem buried here too. The circle drawn on the map that says “Limite de la banlieue” was an important demarcation. By royal decree, the banlieue of Fort Royal extended outward in a perfect geographic arc from the fort’s bastions, measuring exactly one league (roughly 3 miles or 4.8 kilometers) in radius. That circle marks the edge of the banlieue.

Everyone living within the banlieue circle was legally bound to the fort’s defense. That means that if warships appeared in the river, they were required to leave their homes and enter the fort for protection. The men were expected to bring their guns and fight.

Furthermore, if necessary, the garrison had the right to do whatever necessary to those properties to prevent their enemies from taking cover there. What that meant, or could have meant, goes without saying.

The English camped right near the edge of that circle, and when they couldn’t capture the fort, they burned everything they could. Almost all of Port Royal went up in flames, destroying the administrative and economic hub of Acadia.

And for everyone else living beyond that circle – while their property wasn’t burned, this time, they would certainly have seen the smoke rising in the distance. The message was clear – sooner or later, this WILL be you.

I can only imagine Guillaume gathering his family close and planning their strategy for when the English brought destruction to them once again.

While Subercase, the French soldiers, the Acadians, and their Native allies were all extremely relieved that the fort held, the Acadians continued to live in an emotionally exhausting high-stakes drama where no one could ever really relax.

They knew this was not the end of the English incursions, even if they were gone for a little while.

The next assault might be just around the corner, around the bend in the river, the next sail spotted in the distance – and France was doing nothing to protect her colony. Port Royal and the rest of Acadia were caught between two massive powers in a brutal game of ping-pong.

And they had to rebuild, alone.

The 1707 Census

The census was typically gathered over time, in the late spring and early summer months, compiled and bound together, then sent back to France in the fall. The 1707 census was dispatched to the Ministry of Marine in Paris in November, after the August siege.

While one would think this represents Acadia, particularly Port Royal, AFTER the English twice burned Port Royal, it isn’t. Comparing the census entries with the homes listed as burned on Labat’s map makes this contradiction evident. For example Claude Landry (location “I” on the map) could not have amassed 21 cattle, 15 sheep and 20 hogs before November after his home and barns had burned, and his livestock slaughtered in June and August. Nor could his brother, Pierre Landry (location “K” on the map) have amassed 19 cattle, 20 sheep and 13 hogs.

This makes the 1707 census a snapshot of Port Royal right BEFORE the dual English sieges, and shows us just how much those families who were burned out lost.

Guillaume had probably never been so thankful that he lived upriver.

In the 1707 census, Guillaume’s age is not listed, but he and Huguette are aging. He would be about 57 years old. They have 2 boys who are 14 or older, 2 boys who are younger, and two girls who are 12 or older. They are doing well and own 32 cattle, 38 sheep and 14 hogs. They live on 25 arpents of land and have 6 guns.

They have now become the older generation. Their son Antoine is living next door with his wife, but no children have arrived yet. He has a gun, 2 cattle, 3 sheep and 4 hogs, but no land, so they are living on Guillaume’s land and working it as a family.

Weddings

More of Guillaume’s children are marrying.

On January 18, 1708, son René Blanchard married Marie Savoye, one of the local neighbor girls at Belle Isle.

Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon are listed as his parents, and Guillaume signs with the now familiar “P” that looks something like a flag.

On February 5, 1709, daughter Isabelle Blanchard (also called Elizabeth in the margin and elsewhere) married Claude Girouard, whose family lived across the river.

1710

One would think that by 1710, the Acadians could be breathing a little easier, but that certainly wasn’t the case.

By now, Guillaume was about 60 years old.

First, the harvest failed. Late spring frosts combined with unusually heavy rainfall and a shortened growing season caused crops to rot in the fields.

Furthermore, an epidemic of some sort, probably either smallpox, typhus, or yellow fever, drove the privateers away. Not only were people dying, but their source of provisions dried up when they needed them most. Life was looking quite bleak.

To make matters even worse, the English returned. They might have taken a bit of a respite, but they had not given up on capturing Acadia and were probably aware of the weakened state of the Acadians. The 1707 sieges had failed, but this one would not.

While France was still neglecting Acadia, England was supporting her colony. Thirty-five English ships with more than 3,400 troops reached Port Royal on September 24, 1710.

They faced 300 hungry, neglected, and ill-equipped Acadian men and French soldiers, 20 unfortunate Quebecois who happened to be visiting, and a few Mi’kmaq warriors. The French soldiers hadn’t been paid in years, nor had the soldiers or Acadians been supplied.

Even if you add every Acadian man and boy above 15 to the mix, you’ve only added 100 to the defensive force. There were many times more English soldiers than the entire Acadian population, including women and children, which only totaled about 570 people.

The Acadians didn’t stand a chance, but miraculously, they held out until October 2^nd.

After doing their best to defend the fort and town for eight days, facing impossible odds, the best the Acadians could hope for was to obtain reasonable surrender terms and save themselves from being slaughtered.

Guillaume was never one to shy away from conflict, so he was probably among the men in the fort. This was a do or die trying moment.

All things considered, the surrender terms were quite reasonable, at least compared to the alternative.

In addition to being allowed to march out of the fort through the gate, flags flying and drums beating, before handing the keys to the English, the soldiers and Acadians were not to be harmed.

The French soldiers and administration were sent back to France, but things were so bad that General Francis Nicholson, the English commander, had to provide rations for them on their journey.

The Acadians retained the right to worship as Catholics, their personal property, and those who lived within cannon-shot of the fort – about 3 miles – could stay for 2 years IF they signed an unconditional oath of allegiance. They had two years to remove their moveable items to another French-held location.

The 3-mile delineation covered about 481 Acadians, including women and children. Three months later, by mid-January, 57 heads of household had begrudgingly signed.

This little-known 1710 Acadian military census was ordered by Nicholson after Port Royal fell. He needed to know how many households and people fell within his jurisdiction, and within that 3-mile radius.

That partial census consists of 90 households, five of which were headed by widows. That tells us that 85 men were eligible to sign and only 57 had, so that means that 28, or 33% were holding out. That’s pretty remarkable when you think about David staring up into the face of Goliath and refusing.

Those terms left the Acadians beyond 3 miles, which included Guillaume Blanchard, who lived about 10 miles distant from Port Royal, on the far side of Belle Isle, in limbo.

Did that mean those Acadians didn’t have to take the oath, and didn’t have to remove? What did it mean, exactly?

Was Guillaume considering trying Petitcodiac once again, even though everything had been ruined there? If he was going to go that far to start over, he might as well go just a bit further and be outside “Acadia” altogether, but still in French territory.

We know for sure that some people were still living at Chipoudy, because the following year Francois Broussard of Chipoudy was arrested at Port Royal.

Of course, knowing the Acadians, they did everything possible to skirt the requirement to move from the land they had developed and nurtured for decades. Where would they go? How would they get there, and how would they support their families once they arrived?

Did Guillaume still have his boat, or had that been lost in the earlier depredations at Petitcodiac?

Yet, many Acadians weren’t about to take that despised oath, potentially having to fight against their own countrymen, their allies, and family members in the Native community.

And to add insult to injury, their priest, Father Justinian Durand was captured and held hostage in Boston.

By this time, Acadians had to be both physically and emotionally exhausted.

But it wasn’t over.

January of 1711 – Resistance

The Acadians were fighting back.

We can be nearly 100 percent certain that Guillaume Blanchard was involved in this next incident based on Samuel Vetch’s own records. He kept meticulous notes in his book of letters.

In January 1711, Vetch sent the garrison’s commissary, Peter Capon, to negotiate a purchase of grain from Guillaume Blanchard’s neighbor, Pierre LeBlanc. While the two men sat talking in LeBlanc’s house, a group of armed Acadians burst in “with their firelocks cocked”, seized Capon, and dragged him out into the night. LeBlanc quickly went after them and arranged for Capon’s release, paying a ransom of 20 pistoles.

Furious, Vetch sent an officer and fifty armed men to St. Laurent chapel (one half mile upriver from the LeBlanc homestead) the following Sunday morning to arrest Father Justinien Durand, whom he considered seditious. Vetch also arrested leading inhabitants at the church and elsewhere, including Louis Allain and Germain Bourgeois, along with their eldest sons, as well as Jean Comeau, Francois Broussard, and Captain Pierre LeBlanc himself. The men were taken to the fort where they remained in a dungeon for several weeks.

Some of these men were tortured, and at least one never left that completely dark dungeon alive.

• Germain Bourgeois of Beaubassin was “passing through” Port Royal and was arrested for capturing an English soldier, which would have been Capon. He perished after being held torturously for months in the subterranean “black hole” at Fort Anne after refusing to take the oath of allegiance.

Rest that brave man’s soul.

• Guillaume Bourgeois of Port Royal, son of Germain Bourgeois, was arrested and eventually released. Imagine having to watch your father be tortured and die slowly.
• Jean Comeau of Port Royal was arrested and eventually released.
• Pierre LeBlanc of Port Royal, Guillaume Blanchard’s neighbor, was arrested and eventually released.
• Francois Broussard, who went back and forth between Chipoudy and Port Royal, was arrested. The Broussard families were neighbors of the Blanchards and lived just upriver. Francois survived his torture in the Black Hole, but barely, dying two years later.

Keep in mind, these are only the men we know about, and there were probably more.

It’s no surprise, given the abuse and torture of the Acadian men held in the Black Hole that two of Francois Broussard’s sons, Alexandre Broussard dit Beausoleil, born about 1699, and more particularly, Joseph Broussard, dit Beausoleil, born about 1702 became legendary freedom fighters and Acadian folk heroes during the 1755 Expulsion.

Both men tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the Expulsion of the Acadians from their beloved Acadia in 1755. Fighting to the bitter end, Colonel William Foster wrote of Joseph, one of the last Acadians still resisting, “These people are Spirited up in their obstinacy by one BeauSoleil . . .”

Belle Isle was producing a generation of, if not generations of, resistors.

The first uprising was only a few months away.

Uprising – The Battle at Bloody Creek

1711 wasn’t kind to the Acadians, but it wasn’t kind to the English either.

Winter descended on Port Royal shortly after the English took possession. Food shortages developed quickly for the English soldiers at the fort, and assuredly, the Acadians were in no mood to feed them. Several were being held in the Black Hole.

Unsurprisingly, the Acadians were openly hostile.

Geez, I wonder why.

Between death, disease, and desertion, there were only about 450 English soldiers left at the garrison, and none of them wanted to be there.

By January 1711, Samuel Vetch, the British commander, had been reduced to sailing to Boston to beg for food for his soldiers. When he returned, he only had 200 soldiers left.

Vetch considered the Acadians intractable, because they were, and wore it like a badge of honor. Vetch was an evil man, and I’m sure they hated him with every ounce of their being.

It’s against this backdrop that the Battle of Bloody Creek occurred on June 21, 1711. Between 50 and 150 “Wabanaki warriors” ambushed about 70 English soldiers who had been foolhardy enough to travel upriver to attempt to force the Acadians to provide them with lumber and food.

What a bad idea.

You already know this isn’t going to end well.

The Blanchards lived near the Mass House shown on this 1733 map, and the LeBlanc Village. The Battle of Bloody Creek took place slightly upriver.

The site of the Bloody Creek Battle was about four miles as the crow flies from the Blanchard home. The distance as the boat rowed was about 6 miles. The English would have rowed past numerous Acadian homes, including those at Belle Isle, who probably quietly sent messengers upstream, warning of their impending arrival.

The Battle at Bloody Creek was initially described as an ambush of between 50 and 150 Wabanaki warriors against about 70 English soldiers, killing 16, injuring 9, and capturing the rest.

Did I also mention that some of the captured English reportedly had to pay their own ransoms to be released? Pardon my chuckle.

I’ve always been very suspicious of the claim that the Wabanaki conducted the raid – or at least that it was only the Wabanaki.

Following this successful ambush, the Acadians and their Native allies were emboldened. Buoyed by their victory, a large joint force of approximately 600 Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, and Acadian men assembled under the leadership of Father Antoine Gaulin, who was anything but your quiet parish priest, and Bernard-Anselme d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin.

A total of about 600 men attempted to retake the fort at Port Royal. Unfortunately, they had no heavy weapons or artillery and could not launch an effective attack, but they hemmed the sickly English soldiers in for weeks. Gaulin went to Newfoundland and asked the Governor for supplies and reinforcements, which he received. The Acadians needed the heavy ammunition, siege equipment and other supplies being carried on the French ship dispatched by the Governor, but unfortunately, it encountered the British fleet and was captured, effectively ending their hope of dislodging the English at Port Royal.

Still, the English at Port Royal were worried, and Governor Vetch sent for reinforcements. The Acadian effort was abandoned when he returned with 200 English soldiers.

The English were not about to let this uprising go unpunished, and they cracked down HARD.

• Vetch arrested inner-circle hostages who lived within the 3-mile radius, like Pierre Melanson and Louis Allain. Thrown into the black hole on a rotating basis, they were held under threat of execution if they didn’t force the surrounding communities into submission.
• The English plundered the upriver Acadians who had openly participated in the ambush at Bloody Creek and subsequent blockade. They burned crops, barns, and killed livestock with the goal of ensuring that the resistance movement couldn’t feed itself, or any “visitors” who might arrive to help. Ummm, wouldn’t that have been every Acadian?
• Not only that, but Vetch also required an immediate payment of 100 pistoles, gold coins, per month, along with a mandatory levy of timber and logs to repair the fort.
• Vetch threatened that if any village failed to deliver on any of his demands, it would be burned to the ground.

Vetch and his soldiers wouldn’t have been selective about whose farms he burned, so this time, Guillaume very likely lost his home and farm to fire. Like always, the Acadians rebuilt, because they had no other choice.

Another Wedding

On May 18, 1712, Guillaume witnesses the marriage of his daughter, Magdelaine Blanchard to Charles Gautrot.

Both Guillaume the elder and his son by the same name signed as witnesses.

This wedding would have been held in the local St. Laurent Chapel, because the Belle Isle Acadians were no longer going into the church at Port Royal that had been repurposed as an English barracks.

1714

On January 16, 1714, Guillaume’s namesake son, Guillaume Blanchard, married Jeanne DuPuis, another neighbor.

It’s interesting that while Guillaume the father cannot read and write, as indicated by his signature “P” mark, his son can.

The 1714 census was taken four years after the English takeover. On it, we find two Guillaume Blanchards. One, the father, is shown with a wife and two sons. The second, newlywed Guillaume, is listed with his wife. They are living beside his parents, with his brother, René Blanchard, on the other side with his wife and three sons.

The Blanchard Village, just not at Petitcodiac.

Unfortunately, the 1714 census doesn’t show the amount of livestock or arpents of land being worked, so we can’t compare it to the 1707 census to gain some idea of how much was lost in the upriver community when Vetch went on his retaliatory burning campaign in 1711.

Guillaume’s Death

We don’t know exactly when Guillaume Blanchard died, but we can bracket the date within a couple of years. We know it was sometime after January 30, 1715, and before Huguette died on 18 October 1717, when she is noted as a widow.

On January 30, 1715, Guillaume’s widowed daughter, Jeanne, married for the second time to Jean LePrince. Her parents are shown as Guillaume Blanchard and Huguette Goujon, and neither are noted as deceased.

Guillaume Blanchard signed with his easily recognizable mark, and Jeanne’s brother Guillaume signed with his signature below the elder Guillaume.

On November 3, 1715, Guillaume Blanchard witnessed a baptism where he is noted as Guillaume the son, implying that Guillaume, the father, is still alive at this time.

Assuming the baptism information is accurate and Guillaume is still alive, he died between November 3, 1715 and October 18, 1717. Guillaume would have been between 65 and 67 years of age. Only history knows why his death and burial weren’t recorded in the parish registers, or didn’t survive.

But history also gives us a hint.

By September 1715, the temporary peace following the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht had collapsed into severe local tension. Queen Anne had died, King George I took the British throne, and the British authorities at the fort grew justifiably paranoid about an Acadian uprising or mass emigration to French-controlled Cape Breton (Île Royale). After all, just a few years earlier, they told the Acadians that they HAD to move. Be careful what you ask for.

On January 22, 1715, just a week before Guillaume’s daughter, Jeanne, remarried, the English required an unconditional oath of allegiance to King George. The Acadians refused, saying they would swear a conditional oath that guaranteed their religious freedom and exempted them from ever having to bear arms against their French or Mi’kmaq neighbors.

While initially requiring the Acadians to move, now the English forbade it, because they had come to realize that they needed the Acadians to feed them. Conversely, the Acadians now wanted to leave.

Terrified that the Acadians would move to French-controlled Cape Breton (Île Royale), and also furious at their refusal to take the oath, the English locked the fort gates and prohibited all trade – with them or with the Native people. The Acadians couldn’t even build boats, not even for fishing, nor sell their cattle or livestock outside the river valley.

Father Durand functioned as one of the leaders of the Acadian resistance, so he was targeted and heavily watched as he slipped from farm to farm, ministering to his flock as best he could. He preached that taking the oath would jeopardize their ability to worship as Catholics, and encouraged the upriver Acadians to hold out against the British demands.

The Acadians continued their resistance, and the English became increasingly desperate. While the fort’s soldiers starved, the Acadians developed a smuggling network with New England merchants, bypassing the English at Port Royal and their fort entirely, which made the fort commanders even angrier. Desperate for the Acadian cattle and grain, the Boston merchants were more than willing to bypass the garrison – and they paid with actual silver coins, sugar, molasses and textiles. This made the upriver Acadians like Guillaume Blanchard even more fiercely independent and contravened the effects of the fort’s embargo.

Unable to control the smuggling, the starving English at the fort began upriver expeditions to steal livestock and grain from the Acadians living there, because the Acadians would not willingly relinquish them.

One can rest assured that Guillaume and his neighbors were all hiding their assets from the local English while running a successful smuggling business and navigating the black market.

By 1716 and 1717, the lockdown had eased a bit through administrative paralysis. The British garrison realized their enforcement was an utter failure. The fort was completely out of money, the soldiers were mutinous and malnourished, and Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Caulfeild grew severely ill and died. The garrison simply lacked the manpower, energy, and resources to patrol the entire valley or stop the massive Boston black market. The two sides were effectively stalemated.

The parish records during 1715, 1716 and 1717 are disorganized and sparse. Father Durand was attempting to serve a fragmented population, with services and rites being held in individual homes up and down the river. He was sometimes assisted by other, traveling priests. Everyone avoided the three mile radius around the fort.

It was during this time that a second Catholic church was built at Granville Ferry since the Acadians had lost access to the one at Port Royal. This meant that Father Durand was now serving two churches, plus his other clandestine activities.

Clearly, many events, like Guillaume’s burial, never made it into the registers. Perhaps the officiating priest, if there was one, recorded them on slips of paper that never made it into the official parish register. People had to be buried when they died, and couldn’t wait on a priest, so often the local population leadership simply did what needed to be done.

This also causes me to wonder if Guillaume’s death had something to do with the smuggling operation that operated at night, under cover of darkness. Did he encounter English soldiers and have an “accident” at their hands, or perhaps drown in the river or bay? Did he die defending his property? Is that why his burial is never recorded? Was he part of the active, daily resistance network?

Assuming Guillaume died at or near Belle Isle where he lived, he was probably buried in the graveyard beside the neighborhood Catholic church, St. Laurent, shown on various maps as the “Mass House.”

The Mass House did not survive the fires and destruction following the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia, and neither did the cemetery.

However, using maps and other information, we’ve been able to approximate its location.

Guillaume Blanchard doesn’t rest someplace at Village des Blanchard on the Petitcodiac River where he established his short-lived community.

He probably rests in a lost grave beside the lost St. Laurent church, here, at Belle Isle, near his home in the original Blanchard Village.

_____________________________________________________________

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Say Their Names

• Jacques Mius (c1688 in Nova Scotia – November 2, 1726 in Boston)
• Philippe Mius (the third) (c1703 in Nova Scotia – November 2, 1726 in Boston)
• Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr. (c1684 in Nova Scotia – November 2, 1726 in Boston)
• Jean-Baptiste Guidry Jr. (1712 in Nova Scotia – November 2, 1726 in Boston)
• John Missel (unknown birth – November 2, 1726 in Boston)

Merligueche

The devastating events that snuffed out the lives of these four men and one boy began on July 28, 1723, here, in Merligueche Harbor, now Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr. and Philippe Mius (the second) (c1660-after August 25, 1726) lived and were raising their families. Philippe had a trading post nearby.

Both Philippe and Jean-Baptiste were French Acadians. Philippe Mius married two Mi’kmaq women and had lived among the Native people for decades. Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr. married Madeleine (Madelaine) Mius around 1720, the half-Mi’kmaq daughter of Philippe Mius and his second wife, Marie. They too lived in the Mi’kmaq village at Merligueche.

Jacques Mius and Philippe Mius (the third), sons of Philippe Mius (the second), were half Mi’kmaq, and were called “Indians” by the English, while Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr. and his half-Mi’kmaq son by the same name were both referred to as “French.”

John Missel was an Indian man, according to the English records. His name is probably substantially misspelled, given that both Mius and Guidry are, and Jacques Mius is called James in the English records.

July 28, 1723

In 1723, New England was engaged in Dummer’s War with the Wabanaki Confederacy, which included the Mi’kmaq, particularly those living in New England as opposed to Nova Scotia. The Massachusetts government, along with the fishermen, were afraid of losing access to their lucrative Nova Scotia fishing waters, so naval galley ships were sent to patrol the Nova Scotia coastal waters.

On July 28, 1723, English Commander Joseph Marjory was patrolling the Nova Scotia coastline when he captured a group of seven people, according to the ship’s log, after anchoring in Merligueche Harbor. This family band, far removed from New England, had not been involved in warfare.

Commander Marjory labeled the three adult men and four children broadly as “Indians,” conveniently ignoring their European or mixed-European heritage. The children were aged 16, 10-12, and two younger children around 7 or 8. Yes, children were taken as hostages for leverage.

Among those kidnapped were François Mius, about 23, the son of Philippe Mius, the second, and Paul Guidry, about 22, the son of two French parents, Claude Guidry and Marguerite Petitpas. Paul Guidry was the brother of Jean-Baptiste Guidry who was married to Madeleine Mius, the daughter of Philippe Mius. The others were probably family members as well, but historical records have not confirmed their names.

François Mius, born about 1700, was one-half Mi’kmaq, and Paul Guidry, born about 1701, was entirely French, although he was born at Merligueche, as confirmed by his Catholic baptism record. He grew up among the Native people and the Mius family.

On October 3, 1723, the Boston News-Letter reported that a provincial sloop had sailed into Boston Harbor carrying “seven of the Cape Sable Indians on board, who were all sent to prison.”

But 1723 wasn’t the first time that both the Guidry and Mius family members had been kidnapped.

Dummer’s War Was Declared

There was another group of Guidry brothers, reportedly Augustin, Paul, Claude and Philippe, and their families who were kidnapped in 1722, shortly after Dummer’s War was declared on July 25th.

Paul Guidry and his wife Anne Marie Mius had their daughter Judith while being held in confinement in Boston, and Augustin Guidry and Jeanne Hebert had twins Hélène and Marie-Josèphe Guidry while confined in Boston in January of 1723.

The Guidry patriarch, Claude, then 75 years old, was also captured and performed an emergency or conditional baptism, called an ondoiement, done when no priest was available. His wife, Margaret Petitpas, about 62, and also French, probably delivered her granddaughters. At least some of these family members were returned to Nova Scotia, one way or another, in 1723, sometime before September 26^th when the twins’ baptisms were recorded in the Grand Pre parish records.

If you’re heaving a collective sigh of relief – don’t.

Not everyone was released, and by the time that this powder keg exploded in August of 1726, the families had waited for more than three years.

The Interminable Wait

For three agonizing years, 1,124 days, their families sought their freedom, expecting them to be released anytime, like the Guidry family had been in 1723 after being held for a year. That’s what “normally” happened, but not this time.

Finally, on December 15, 1725, a peace treaty was signed in Maine, and hostilities related to the Dummer War ceased, but that treaty did not include all parties.

When word of the treaty arrived in Merligueche, they were hopeful. Surely their family members would be arriving home soon since hostages were no longer “needed.”

Yet no ship arrived on the horizon.

No hostages appeared.

The days dragged on.

An additional treaty was signed in Nova Scotia in June of 1726, but word spread slowly, and full peace was not reached until the summer of 1727.

The Acadians and Mi’kmaq had lost faith in the promises of the English – their long-time, sometimes clandestine, trading partners.

Still, no one returned, and no word came either.

Day by day, every single day, they waited and prayed to the Catholic God, and the Great Spirit.

Were the hostages even still alive?

Sane?

What had happened?

Were they ever coming home?

Letter to Philippe

My dearest ancestor, Philippe,

I did not understand why you sent the winds to summon me to Merligueche two summers ago.

I learned, as we sailed along the coastline, that this is where your village stood more than 300 summers before. Where you lived, and loved, and grieved endlessly.

Where I walked the very land you refused to leave during the hunting moons because the English ships might return your family – and you wanted to be there, waiting, to greet them and rejoice.

Where you called me to wait for their spirits with you.

Nothing was more important.

I did not know, when I laid my hand, wearing the ring that belonged to your granddaughter, my mother, on Paul’s stone in the cemetery, with 1754 neatly carved beneath the cross, who he was – and what he had endured and survived.

I did not know that Paul Guidry married your daughter Anne Marie Mius.

Paul was known as LaVerdure, which the English heard as “Labrador,” so later in his life they called him “Old Labrador,” before he was buried here on the sacred land at Merligueche.

I did not understand the aching in your soul, the desperation for François. How could you have known that he would one day become a Chief, a leader of his people, and that during his time in Boston he was iron being forged into steel by the fire? All you knew was that he was your son, being held hostage, in the worst of conditions, in a faraway world that he didn’t know and could not escape from.

Now I know why you called me.

I answered then.

I’ve answered now.

Life has come full circle.

Your blood is in my veins.

Two years later, your invisible hand pushed me across the waters to Boston.

To do what you could not.

Kidnappings and Hostages

In August 1726, Captain Joseph Decoy from Cape Breton had been trading in Boston when his son was taken and detained for some reason. Distraught, Capt. Decoy stopped at Merligueche, probably at the trading post. He told the people there what had happened and that he thought the only thing that would secure the release of his son was seizing a Boston vessel and trading it in exchange for his son’s freedom.

That’s the way life worked in the French and English colonies, both of which had been established on Indian lands.

Apparently, the people living in the village at Merligueche, after 1,124 days of fruitless waiting for their relatives to be released, were at their wits’ end too, and Capt. Decoy either planted or perhaps watered a seed.

On August 25, 1726, the English fishing vessel, Tryal, captained by Samuel Daly (recorded as Doty in the trial record), sailed into the harbor at Merligueche, where he invited several villagers, including the Mius and Guidry men, aboard to drink.

Philippe Mius (the elder) did not drink, nor did he stay on board after greeting Daly with a friendly handshake, unlike the others, who remained to imbibe with the crew. Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr.’s mother also begged the Merligueche men not to stay on board and share the English sailors’ rum, but her warning, too, went unheeded.

One thing led to another, as described in my article, Philippe Mius (c1660 – after August 1726), Disaster, Piracy and the Dead Man’s Jig, and under the influence, it seemed like a good idea to do exactly what Capt. Decoy had suggested.

Who can blame them after more than three years of fruitless waiting for François Mius, Paul Guidry, and perhaps others to be released? By this time, any hope garnered by the 1725 peace treaty in Maine had quickly faded. Days turned into months, and months had dragged into years.

However, things didn’t go exactly as the Merligueche men had anticipated in their alcohol-fueled bravery. The English crew regained control of the ship before even leaving the harbor, tied Jacques Mius, Philippe Mius (the third), Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr., Jean-Baptiste Guidry Jr., and John Missel below deck in ropes, and headed straight for Boston with their drunken trophy “pirates” that were, in fact, political prisoners. This type of back-and-forth capture, trade, and release of prisoners had been going on for decades. Except that, unlike others, François Mius and Paul Guidry had been held and languishing as prisoners at Castle William for an exceptionally long time and not released.

The English were not playing by the unspoken rules.

In addition to the men being transported to Boston, three other “Indian” men jumped overboard when the English regained control of their fishing sloop. Being about four miles from shore, they may have drowned, although one report states that they survived. Unable to escape, the wife of one of those men described as a “squaw” and two “papooses” remained on board and were taken to Boston with the male captives. If she ever saw her husband again, I’m guessing she had a few choice words.

We don’t know the identities of the woman and children, or what happened to them after the trial a few weeks later.

Philippe was now left staring at the endless horizon, which, in addition to having already swallowed François, Paul, and five others three years earlier, had now consumed two more sons, his son-in-law, grandson, another man, woman, and two additional children.

His heart must have sunk in his chest, heavy with grief and foreboding.

Family Members

Various Mius and Guidry family members were taken hostage in multiple kidnappings. I can’t help but hear the phrase, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

Keeping track of the players is confusing, so I’ve assembled a color-coded chart.

The children of Philippe Mius and his Mi’kmaq wife, Marie, who were known to be kidnapping victims in these episodes or were married to hostages, are shown at left.

Claude Guidry and Marguerite Petitpas’s children are shown in a column at right. Both couples had children who were not known to have been involved in the hostage episodes, and those children are not shown.

Two Mius daughters married two Guidry sons. Madelaine (Madeleine) Mius married Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr. dit Gravois and Anne Marie Mius married Paul Guidry.

The peach background color identifies known captives of the first kidnapping in 1722, where several Guidry family members and their families were taken. At least some were released in 1723, but perhaps not all.

The blue background color indicates known captives taken in July of 1723 who were still being held in 1726. There were more people kidnapped who were assuredly family members, but we don’t know their identities, nor do we know when François and Paul were eventually released. The records are silent until at least 1730 for Paul, and longer for François.

Paul Guidry was either kidnapped twice or never returned from the 1722 kidnapping. We know he was still held in the fall of 1726.

The names in bold red were captured in August of 1726 in Merligueche and hanged in Boston that November.

Boston

Prisoners who had allegedly committed crimes were held in jail while awaiting trial, but hostages, like the men taken in 1722 and 1723, were shipped to fortified Castle William on an island in Boston Harbor, where escape was not only improbable, but nearly impossible. That said, records from 1724 contain details about an incident in which a group of “Indian Hostages” successfully staged an escape from Castle William. Given the currents in the bay, I wonder if they survived, especially considering the physical conditions of the men held there and the island’s isolated location in the harbor. Could any of these brave escapees have been our Merligueche men?

François Mius, Paul Guidry and the other captives were held under deplorable conditions. Paul may have remained from the 1722 captures or could have been recaptured just a month or so after his 1723 return. In other words, by 1726, he had been confined there either three or four years.

Castle William was a stone military fortress, and the hostages were valuable pawns, diplomatic chess pieces, not men awaiting trial. There was no intention of releasing them, and only enough care was taken of them to keep them alive. Dead hostages aren’t useful.

Budgets reflected their fare of bread, salted meat and peas, along with colonial clothing such that they would not freeze to death.

They were fed, but experienced total isolation from everyone and everything they knew.

For three long years, and maybe more.

How did they not go mad?

In 1723, the men on board Marjory’s warship would have watched as they sailed directly into the harbor, dropping anchor at Castle William where their family members had been held after the 1722 kidnappings. Some may still have been languishing there.

Knowing what to expect, fear must have gripped the captives’ throats with its icy hands, but at least they had each other.

They, or their family members, had been here before and had tales to tell.

Their climb up this incline from the sea, with muskets or knives at their backs, was probably the last time they were outside these walls for more than three years – although we don’t know how much more than three years. For all we know, it could have been many more years of unjustified captivity.

Paul Guidry, if he had not been released earlier in 1723, would have been both thrilled and horrified to see his family members being ushered through those doors at knife- or bayonet-point, their hands bound.

How many of the people who entered this door walked out again? How many were carried in a wooden box or whose remains were simply tossed into the sea?

What horrors did they endure?

What about the women and children who were held here?

I shudder to think.

It’s worth mentioning that our last record of patriarch Claude Guidry is the twins’ official baptism entry in Grand-Pré that September where the parish record notes that he had given them ondoyée baptisms after their births here in January 1723.

Hostages were typically not held in dungeons at Castle William unless they were deemed uncooperative or unruly, but they were closely guarded within the barracks and parade grounds.

They probably looked up into the salt air, when they could, and wished themselves to be a seagull, lifting over the tops of the walls and following the waters of the Atlantic back to Merligueche.

Merligueche must have seemed like another time and place. Long ago. A land of their dreams.

Both François and Paul were in their early 20s, and while their more than three years spent here were undeserved and certainly unpleasant, to say the least, they were both honing survival skills that would serve them well for the rest of their lives – not the least of which was learning English.

François and Paul ultimately survived, but we have only silence about the rest.

Photo courtesy of Katherine Borges

How ironic that the flight path for planes arriving at Boston Logan Airport tracks right over the castle, named Fort Independence today. Escape – so close and so far into the future.

Is the reason we never learned the identity of the rest of the hostages because they died here?

I scattered flower petals that I had brought with me on the water, with a white feather that was gifted from above, for the souls who suffered and died at Castle William, perhaps attempting to escape – and for the soul of Philippe, the tortured father, who was suffering on the shores of Merligueche.

Boston

During the first week of September 1726, following the episode in Merligueche that resulted in the eight Acadian and Mi’kmaq captives, the ship Tryal sailed straight into Boston Harbor from the Atlantic, directly past Castle William.

The captives on board the Tryal would have watched as they passed Castle William, if they were allowed above deck. They would have known that their family members that they had been trying to free were suffering there.

Those men, beloved family members, whom they risked their lives to save, were within mere feet, yet they could not see them. In fact, they would never see them again.

The ship passed both Governors Island and Bird Island on their right, both within sight of Castle William and part of Boston’s Logan Airport today.

These two historical 1700s maps of Boston and the harbor are overlaid on a current map showing greyed-out ghostly images of future development, including the airport beneath most of Bird Island. Boston was significantly smaller then. Much of Boston and all of East Boston adjacent to the airport is built on fill.

Bird Island had mostly washed away before the airport development began in the 1930s and 1940s and had evolved into Bird Island Flats. The northwesternmost tip is marked today by an orange buoy in the harbor. The pointed Skyline Memorial is visible behind the buoy, at far left, with the airport runway and shipping terminals behind the tree and to the right.

These are the remnants, beneath the fill, of Bird Island.

Of course, the Boston skyline as seen from Bird Island today looks nothing like it did in 1726, but Long Wharf remains across the harbor, nearly indistinguishable in the picture, just slightly to the left of the buoy.

Click to enlarge any image.

The purpose of Skyline Monument is to orient visitors to what they are seeing across the water.

The ship Tryal with our unwilling passengers anchored along Long Wharf, which is found in the monument section below the white flowers on the railing at right if you zoom in.

The water near the Boston shoreline was too shallow for ocean-going vessels. It was mostly mud flats at low tide, hence the need for Long Wharf to be so, well, long, extending some 2,000 feet into the water, reaching well beyond the low tide mark.

Boston was the center of commerce in colonial New England. Merchants and traders maintained their businesses along the wharf, which transitioned directly into King Street, leading to the Old State House, and past that, the jail, then spelled gaol.

Most of the time, the ship’s captain would go directly to the customs house, unless he was smuggling, of course – but not on that day.

Nope, that day, Captain Daly had something much more valuable than fish to declare. He had pirates, five of them, plus an accidental “squaw” and two “papooses,” but they could be useful barter too.

Indeed, it was his lucky day. He was probably so excited that he “accidentally” forgot to declare his cargo!

The hostages would have been bound with ropes and marched through the street, like trophies, shepherded by proud-as-punch Capt. Daly, straight up King Street to either the State House or the gaol, as shown on this 1722 map.

Minus today’s modern innovations, the harbor as seen from the end of Long Wharf looks much the same. The tall building directly across the harbor to the left of center is the Hyatt, which stands on what was once Bird Island, beside the Skyline Memorial.

A walk down Long Wharf is a stroll through time, past the old Chart House, now a historic restaurant.

Jacques and Philippe Mius, both Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr. and Jr., father and son, John Missel, and an unnamed Native woman with her two children walked this exact same path.

They were probably justifiably terrified.

Perhaps at night, past the bustling waterfront taverns, in a darkened street, enveloped by fear.

The children cried. The men wanted to.

Perhaps the State House in 1726 held a lantern in the cupola.

Just beyond the State House lay their final destination for the next few weeks anyway: the jail, drawn on the map as the prison.

Where were the woman and her two children taken? Did anyone have mercy, or were they “just Indians,” dispensable and disposable?

Did Jacques and Philippe Mius, Jean-Baptiste Sr. and Jr., and John Missel know that they were going to be tried as pirates? I’d wager that they did, and everyone knew what happened to pirates. Maybe they thought their trial would be different, because they weren’t actually pirates.

The Boston jail was a horrific place, described as a forbidding, dark stone building with “outer walls three feet thick, unglazed windows barred with iron, the cells partitioned off with planks, and the cell doors covered in heavy iron spikes. The passageways like the dark valley of the shadow of death.”

And that was not written by a prisoner. Imagine the experience of someone confined there and what they would have to say.

Daniel Fowle, a Boston printer, in his Total Eclipse of Liberty, said of the gaol, “If there is any such thing as a hell upon earth, I think this place is the nearest resemblance of any I can conceive of.”

I’m sure that Jacques, Philippe, both Jean-Baptistes, and John can attest to Hell on Earth. That, combined with the overwhelming dread of what they had to realize was coming.

The word of either a Frenchman or an Indian would never be believed against the triumphant deliverance of “pirates” to Boston by an English captain for a showy trial.

Today, Queen Street is Court Street, and the entire area from the street to the rear of the present-day 26 Court Street is occupied by the Old City Hall Annex, at far right. You can see the Old State House just a block away, now dwarfed by surrounding skyscrapers, where the Mius, Guidry and Missel men would be taken to be tried.

I use the word “tried” very loosely, because wouldn’t you know it, their case would be heard by William Dummer himself, of Dummer’s War, in the Vice Admiralty Court, which was structured in a way that essentially presumed one’s guilt unless you could prove yourself innocent. Oh, and by the way, jury trials were prohibited.

This is not going to go well.

I realize this is “only a sunbeam,” but I like to think that maybe their spirits were not snuffed out and that they remained to protect others from injustice.

The Eclipse

It was around noon on September 14^th, 1726, and people were partaking of their midday dinner when the sun began to grow dim, casting an unnatural gray pallor over the Boston streets. Today, we know it was an eclipse, and nothing to be afraid of, but they didn’t know that then.

People looked up, reacting in fear as the sun was still present in the sky, yet was being swallowed by an evil darkness. The five men in the jail cells would probably not have been able to see the sky, but they would have heard their frightened jailors.

An ominous omen.

However, François Mius and Paul Guidry at Castle William would have seen the eclipse and probably understood its meaning all too well. To them, it foretold death.

In Puritan New England, an eclipse was widely interpreted as a direct warning from God. It was, indeed, just that, an omen that they were about to bloodstain their own hands.

The “Trial”

Witnesses, meaning the crew, were publicly called by the cryer to testify about “acts of Piracy, Felony and Robbery committed on board the Sloop Tryal, by John Baptist Jedre, alias Laverdure, John Baptist Junior, James Mews, Philip Mews and John Missel.”

Not only that, but to further inflame the situation, and justify the results, the devil was brought into the mix.

For that the said John Baptist Jedre, alias Laverdure, and John Baptist Junior, Not having the Fear of GOD before their Eyes, but being Instigated by the Devil, on the Twenty Fifth Day of August last, about the Hour of Two in the Afternoon of the said Day, together with James Mews, Philip Mews, John Missel, Indians, and others, in or near Mallegash Harbour…

Puritans viewed New England as holy ground carved out for them to build a godly society. Crimes like piracy, murder, and witchcraft were viewed as literal covenants with the Devil that polluted the community.

The men assuredly knew the charges were woven around details that may or may not have been entirely accurate. And introducing “the Devil” just inflamed everything.

“I move for dismissal, Your Honor, on grounds of prejudice. The “Devil” has poisoned this trial,” but there was no one to say that, and the Puritans certainly wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Not to mention that no one cared about a fair trial. This took place just over 30 years after the last of the Boston and Salem witch trials.

On the morning of October 4^th, the two Guidry men, father and son by the same name, heard the key turn in the lock of their spike-studded jail cell door. They were probably chained as they were marched to the Old State House.

They may not have seen each other in the month since they had been placed in the prison’s dungeon.

The light would have blinded them as they emerged from the darkness.

The Old State House was badly damaged by fire in 1747, with only the brick exterior remaining, so we don’t know exactly what it looked like in 1726, although this 1791 sketch is probably close.

It was here that their fate would be sealed by men speaking a language they did not understand.

Records tell us that they would have been marched inside the building, and up the stairs. They were tried on the second floor where they would have heard the muffled voices of traders and merchants conducting business beneath them, on the building’s ground floor.

By Bestbudbrian – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51534885

Dummer would have been seated at the head of the table, along with the rest of the wealthy merchants and politicians hearing their case.

Did the accused men even get a seat at the table?

Photo courtesy of Katherine Borges

Were they banished to the side of the room, looking out the window at the freedom they would never know?

Photo courtesy of Katherine Borges

Perhaps staring at the church across the street, wishing it were Catholic, and that they could seek shelter and solace there. Did they pray as they heard the voices that would condemn them drone on in the background in a foreign tongue they did not understand?

Indeed, many people entering the State House, where lives were changed in an instant, needed to pray, either entering or exiting, or perhaps both. Of course, Catholics would not have been welcome in the Puritan church.

Perhaps God, by whatever name, heard them anyway.

The old brick church, long gone, stood diagonally across from the Old State House, where the tall building with the arched windows stands today.

The lintel above the door indicates that this was the site of the first meeting house in Boston, where its replacement, a brick church built in 1712, stood in 1726.

During the trial, we learn that Jean-Baptiste Guidry Jr. was only 13, turning 14 that fall, and that the Guidrys did not understand English and requested a French interpreter. A local Huguenot was summoned.

The court decided that since young Jean-Baptiste was not a “madman,” he was old enough to be responsible for his actions.

The sentence, a foregone conclusion, was then pronounced:

You…are to go from hence to the place from whence you came, and thence to the place of Execution, there to be hanged up by the Neck until you are Dead, and the Lord have Mercy upon your Soul.

After Sentence was given against the Prisoners, the Marshal of the Admiralty was Ordered to remand and keep them in safe Custody within His Majesty’s Goal in Boston.

As the father and son left the State House with the guards, life outside continued as it had that morning. Horses and carts and people making their way along the streets, attending to their business.

Everyday, mundane life.

But they probably sounded different, because the father and son knew they would not hear those sounds for long. They would never hear the precious voices of their family, or the sounds of their beloved woods, again, either.

Someone assuredly informed Jacques and Philippe Mius, and John Missel back in the jail what had happened at court. The guards may have taken glee in the men’s misery.

The next morning at 10 o’clock, their cell doors clanged open, and it was their turn to walk the long block to stand before the tribunal.

Photo courtesy of Katherine Borges

The charges were read, in English, of course:

For that the said Philip Mews, James Mews, and John Missel, not having the Fear of GOD before their Eyes, but being Instigated by the Devil, on the Twenty Fifth Day of August, last, about the Hour of Two in the Afternoon of the said Day, together with John Baptist Jedre, alias Laverdure, John Baptist Junior, and others, in or near Malegash Harbour…

Ironically, the Mius men had an Indian interpreter, not a French one. Their court-provided advocate asked for time to prepare a proper defense, and he was so generously given until 3 that afternoon.

By the end of the same day, two hours later, they too had been found guilty, with absolutely no regard for the fact that at least eight of their family members had been held for a year in 1722-1723, and seven more had been kidnapped in 1723, of which at least two were still being held at Castle William.

If the two Jean-Baptiste Guidrys, Philippe and Jacques Mius, and John Missel were supposed to abide by the December 1725 treaty, which is what qualified their behavior as “piracy,” then why weren’t the Bostonians?

Why hadn’t François Mius and Paul Guidry been released from Castle William and returned to Nova Scotia?

Why wasn’t any of that considered?

Apparently, the “rules” applied only to one side, and not the other.

Why were the accusers allowed to testify, but the accused men’s explanations were discounted and dismissed, along with the circumstances surrounding the hostages?

Was justice ever the goal? Or was this always meant to be an elaborate vengeful performative political spectacle dressed up as justice?

The identical verdict awaited Jacques and Philippe Mius, and John Missel, word for exact word.

This begs the question of how much François Mius and Paul Guidry, confined helplessly at Castle William, knew about what was going on. Humans love to gossip, so I find it difficult to believe they were unaware.

François and Paul were probably equally thrilled that their families hadn’t forgotten them, or given up on obtaining their freedom, and at the same time utterly horrified. Devastated that they had essentially sacrificed their lives for nothing.

This dreadful soap opera wasn’t over yet.

In the words of Marcus Rediker, Boston and other cities “staged spectacular executions” of pirates. Five pirates, all to be hanged on the same day, would be a sight to behold. Top-flight entertainment for everyone to look forward to. A public holiday.

Sickening.

Utterly sickening.

Between the Gavel and the Gallows

The walk from the Old State House back to the prison seemed like it was into another dimension for the four men and one boy whose lives would be ended. Not justice, but injustice, revenge, had been meted out that day. They were dead men walking.

The clock was ticking, day by day, hour by hour, until their lives would be snuffed out.

They probably didn’t know which day they would die. Would it be sooner, or later? Who would decide?

Gallows had to be constructed for five executions. We don’t know whether one executioner’s platform or five separate ones were built while Boston Town watched in anticipation of the blood-sport being prepared for their mass consumption.

Just three months earlier, William Fly only had to wait eight days after his verdict before he drew his final breath.

There were no such things as appeals. Often the length of time between the sentence being passed and execution carried out was dependent on how successfully the Puritan ministers were in their spiritual counseling delivered inside the jail cells of the condemned. But these people weren’t Puritans. They were Native Americans and Catholics. The Catholics had spent the past century trying to convert the Native people. We know the Guidrys were Catholic, but the mixed family members may have practiced some combination of Catholicism and Native American traditions.

Were they afforded any religious comfort, such as Last Rites, or were they treated as less than human?

Was the promise of the Puritan version of life after death powerful enough for them to recant their beliefs?

Ironically, Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who is entombed in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground near the Old North Church, within sight of where they were hanged, was fascinated by pirates and visited them often in the gaol, attempting to extract confessions and convert them. He ultimately published several treatises about piracy and conversion, so it’s unclear how much of his zeal was concern for their souls, fodder for his pulpit and books, or fascination with the spectacle of hanging itself.

Then on the morning of November 2nd, 28 long days later, the cell doors creaked open for the final time.

Did they know in advance that this would be the day?

Their appointed date with the Grim Reaper had arrived.

Were the men hopeful of a final miracle, or were they resigned to their fate?

The Execution

I’ve learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about executions since writing Philippe Mius’s original article, and I’ve since traced their footsteps on that fateful, final day.

Because Philippe Mius (the third), Jacques Mius, Jean-Baptiste Guidry Jr. and Sr., and John Missel were convicted of piracy in the Vice Admiralty Court, tradition required that they be hanged over the water. The Diary of Jeremiah Bumstead tells us that executions occurred on the mudflats near the Charlestown Ferry between the high and low tide marks.

Execution day was a much-anticipated social event – for the attendees – not for those unfortunate men at the center of this carnival-like spectacle.

Nearby towns were emptied of residents as they flocked to Boston. Businesses closed, except for taverns, of course, and vendors sold food, drinks, and printed copies of execution ballads to the gathered crowds.

Preachers often appeared, using the convicted as examples to convert the flocks.

Everyone lusted for morbid last dying speeches, waiting breathlessly to see what would happen.

Would the men break?

What would they say?

Peasants and laborers watched from the crowded shore or the mudflats, but the wealthy secured prime seating or even watched from their boats in the river for a premium view.

Enslaved people and indentured servants were encouraged, permitted, or perhaps forced to attend in order to internalize the lesson of complete, unquestioning obedience.

Based on historical records of Boston’s pirate executions and admiralty customs, we can glean what their last day would have been like.

On the morning of their executions, the men would have been taken from the Boston gaol and placed into open wooden carts, sometimes alongside their own coffins, then paraded through the packed streets, lined with jeering residents and visitors.

The town drum corps marched ahead of them, beating a slow, ominous rhythm to alert the neighborhoods that the condemned men were approaching so the residents could hurry to watch.

The procession started at the gaol and moved slowly past the Old State House so the authorities could watch, then threaded through the North End’s narrow streets that were most heavily populated.

The condemned men were paraded around the city so everyone could take their turn seeing the spectacle. Hostility and violence were actively encouraged by the Puritan authorities, who wanted the public to vocalize their hatred for “sin” and rebellion – qualities it was believed that these four men (and one boy) represented in the flesh.

What a macabre parade.

People crowded the doorsteps, leaned out of second-story windows, and packed the cobblestones. They aggressively shouted insults, cursed the men, and openly spat on them as the carts rolled slowly past, bumping along the cobblestones, giving everyone ample opportunity to desecrate their bodies.

The lower-class spectators typically pelted the prisoners in the carts with mud, rotting produce, dead animals, and stones scraped from the street’s gutters. The “guards” did nothing to stop this, as it was viewed as part of the public penance.

I shudder to think of the example this set for children. Whatever happened to messages that would be preached from the pulpits on Sunday, like “love thy neighbor,” and being kind?

The merchants viewed pirates as an economic threat, but these men weren’t pirates in the traditional sense. Their “crime” was about something different altogether, and the fact that François Mius and Paul Guidry were still sitting at Castle William was evidence that the English had committed the exact same crime – and that crime was still in progress. Yet, there was no justice, and no accountability for them. Someone needed to hold a mirror!

The regular townspeople saw the prisoners as lawless, bloodthirsty outlaws who had broken both the laws of the King and the laws of God. The crowd felt a righteous, religious duty to mock them and break their spirits before they reached the gallows. Cruelty seemed to be the point, the purpose, and the name of the game.

The men were probably actually relieved to be finished with that unholy gauntlet by reaching the mudflats where their execution would soon occur. And poor Jean-Baptiste Jr. That poor child.

One of the reasons that hangings occurred in the intertidal zone, between high and low tide, was that in Boston, the high tide mark was where the streets and buildings began, but where the mouth of the Charles River entered the harbor was shallow. The low tide mark extended some 1,650 feet offshore in places, nearly one-third of a mile, providing a great deal of real estate for people to gather to witness the gruesome spectacle, along with the day’s entertainment.

The shoreline has changed substantially, but the historical map overlaid on the shadowed contemporary map beneath shows the 1700s shoreline, with the buildings in red, and the subsequent development on filled land on the current map.

The procession would have passed by various cemeteries, then called burying grounds. The prisoners knew they would not be buried there.

Pirates were not wanted in Puritan cemeteries, and neither were French Catholic or Native American men. Nor were they welcome in the Old North Church, either.

As the spectacle passed by the tombstones of Copp’s Hill, descending the steep hillside as they neared the water, the men could see the harbor, river, and the mudflats where their fate awaited.

Their heartbeats must have quickened.

As they approached the streets that ran along the waterfront, they would have been able to see the gallows scaffold, towering above the water, in the distance.

Everyone could find their way to Charlestown Ferry, where the mud flats extended nearly halfway across the river to a narrow channel.

Today, part of the area shown as water along the shoreline on the early map has been filled and is part of Langone and Puopolo Parks, located directly across Commercial Street from the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground lower terraces. The elevation and historic shoreline don’t much matter, though, because the gallows would have been constructed well offshore so that everyone had a good view of the barbaric spectacle that they had come to enjoy.

Oh, the incredible irony of the marker that greets visitors to Langone Park, today.

Thousands of spectators lined the North End docks, and the river was choked with boats, all gathered to watch the horrible gallows performance.

Around noon, typically between 11 AM and 1 PM, the show got underway, with the ministers acting as showmen.

The convicted men, with only minutes left to live, were either forced up on a ladder or sometimes stood in the back of the cart.

With four men and one boy to be hanged at the same time, I’d bet that they were all five forced to climb onto the scaffold or scaffolds and up ladders so that the crowd could see better.

The executioner would place the nooses around their necks.

Then, everyone was “treated to” an execution sermon. Yes indeed, what could possibly have been lovelier or more inspiring? I wonder what God thought.

Next, they were forced to listen to fiery sermons by high-profile rival Puritan ministers like Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman, often lasting well over an hour, frightening and capturing the imaginations of the attendees.

They exhorted the voyeurs by using the condemned men as “living examples” of what happens if one strays from God’s law.

Finally, the ministers pressured the desperate men standing with nooses around their necks, willing to do almost anything to delay the inevitable, to recant and repent, reading a script pre-written by the minister. This coerced final act of admitting their sins would supposedly “save their souls.”

Of course, the condemned men could have been incredibly brave, stood their ground and refused to participate in the charade, as actual legendary career pirate William Fly, who raided shipping fleets, had done just a few weeks earlier. Fly shocked the crowd with his belligerence, disdain, and refusal to comply – rather spoiling their day.

Fly’s body would still have been “hanging in chains” in a gruesome gibbet cage on Nixes Mate, an island in Boston Harbor, as a warning to others when our men were hanged.

We’ll never know what Jacques Mius, Philippe Mius, John Missel, Jean-Baptiste Guidry Sr., and his 13-year-old son, Jean-Baptiste Guidry Jr., did, or didn’t do – but I’d hazard a guess. At least, I hope they refused. They literally had nothing to lose at that point, except their very last shred of dignity.

I can’t help but wonder if François Mius and Paul Guidry were transported from Castle William to witness this horrific spectacle, perhaps being provided with up-front, close seats as a form of torture for them and the convicted men as well. One last well-planned indignity.

The hanged men’s final minutes of life, sometimes stretching into hours before death overtook them, were scenes of pure torture.

Years later, hangings occurred using the “long drop” method where the floor of the scaffold was dropped from beneath the feet of the condemned, and their necks snapped, providing a blessedly quick death.

Not so in 1726. Death came slowly.

Either the cart was pulled from beneath each man, or the ladder was removed, or the men were “turned off” of it, leaving them swinging by their necks. The weight of their own bodies caused the noose to tighten, depriving them of oxygen.

Death by slow strangulation was neither swift nor kind, but that was anticipated by the voyeurs as part of the spectacle. The men died slowly, struggling for air, while horrible involuntary utterances and agonizing moans escaped their bodies as the transfixed crowd watched in this torture theater.

Sometimes their faces were covered, and sometimes not.

In the Footsteps of the Executed

In August of 2026, 300 years later, I found those mudflats and walked in their footprints.

After passing that horribly ironic marker reading, “By their deeds, measure yours,” I stepped onto the boardwalk of Langone Park.

The bustling city around me faded into oblivion. I could feel the cold iron of the chains, the motion of the carts lurching through the streets, what they endured as their bodies were bruised and abused, and the fibers of the nooses on their skin. The absolute terror of the thirteen-year-old child who died here, the horror of relatives held on an island, so close, but so far away, and the crushing grief of a father hundreds of miles removed.

My body was in the present, but my heart was with them, almost exactly three centuries earlier.

The pain was overwhelming, but I knew I couldn’t look away. I had to stay. I had to finish what was started.

That is why I had been called here.

Summoned.

I walked to the water.

Looking to the left, the beautiful bridge crossing the Charles River to Charlestown belies what happened here.

The bridge and water were lovely in late August 2026, but not when they breathed their last here, on November 2, 1726.

Looking directly across the water, I could see both the Bunker Hill Monument and the USS Constitution, a tall ship similar to what our family members might have seen as they were carted onto the mud flats that fateful day.

Looking to the right was the vast shallow plain of mudflats that stretched out to the heavily trafficked shipping lanes, the gallows scene completely inescapable to any ships passing by.

My eyes were drawn to the shallow water, below.

I knew that it was here.

Here that they had hanged from their necks until they died, choking, deprived of air.

Swinging helplessly.

Deprived of life as thousands reveled in their misery.

These ancient timbers bearing witness.

And these.

I looked up and saw the flats, heard the roaring crowds, cheering for their murders – as they gasped, groaned and perhaps begged for mercy that would never come.

Especially the father for his son.

I found the old seawall, marking the high tide and bearing the footprints of time.

When their last breaths had forever escaped their earthly bodies, the rest of Boston went off to celebrate.

Practices of English admiralty law required the men be left to hang for a full day, as a spectacle, until three high tides had fully washed over them, submerging or battering the swinging corpses.

This ritual symbolized the Crown’s authority over the prisoners, allowing the sea to claim them three different times – because once just wasn’t enough.

The gallows did not just claim their breath; their customs demanded one final, grotesque act in this morbid theater.

The third tide would have receded around noon the following day, exposing their waterlogged bodies. The colonial marshals either rowed out to the scaffolds, or took the carts and cut the men down, hauling their soggy bodies into the bottom of boats.

Denied burial in a burial ground, Philippe, Jacques, Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Baptiste, and John were instead rowed across the harbor to Bird Island. They were buried like so much waste, anonymously, in the wet, marshy soil where no one could honor them, but where their family members, François and Paul, still held at Castle William, could suffer the agony of watching them be buried – fully comprehending the horror they were witnessing.

Not only had they failed to save them, but by trying, they sacrificed their own lives.

Back in Nova Scotia, Philippe awaited the official word, but he probably already knew.

Philippe was never heard from again.

Bird Island

I am here to stand witness and tell you that neither the state, the gallows, nor the mud won.

The pain of standing on this ground was excruciating and tore at the very fabric of my soul. But I did not come to relitigate their staged kangaroo trial that could not be won, grant them quarter for their heinous deeds, or give them yet another win.

I came to answer three centuries’ worth of silence.

Against all odds, I found Castle William, the gaol, the path they traveled, the execution site, and finally, the remains of Bird Island.

I walked there, along the Harborwalk.

I brought flowers to free their souls. The Universe added a feather. I heard the message loud and clear. So did they.

I came for Philippe, to deliver what he had been denied. As a father, father-in-law, and grandfather, he had been robbed of the right to tend his family in death, to observe the sacred rituals of walking on into the next realm, and to lay them to rest in this one.

I walked to the very end of what had once been Bird Island, before the sea whittled it down to Bird Island Flats. The Skyline Monument stands here today.

One bouquet for the graves of Philippe, Jacques, Jean-Baptiste Sr. and Jr., and John, with the buoy marking the end of Bird Island Flats in the water, at right.

One bouquet for François Mius, Paul Guidry, and unnamed others who were held hostage at Castle William, and those who died there.

A third bouquet over the mud and flats. To release their souls.

Philippe, my ancestor, I stand here for you.

We have done a holy thing.

Resurrecting their memories from the mud.

Beyond all doubt, I know the Universe heard.

And answered.

With unbounded beauty.

You were denied the mercy of their funerals and the sacred rituals of burial. You could not touch your boys, your daughter’s husband, or your grandson. You could not comfort them, stroke their faces, and wash away the cruelty they had endured.

You were left alone on the shores of faraway Nova Scotia to mourn an empty horizon for all the rest of your days.

In your stead, I did what you could not.

I brought the ritual to them and returned them to the sacred water that spirited them away.

The judges are all forgotten now, themselves turned to dust, having already answered to God.

The scaffolds, too, are gone, but the water remembers. It’s alive. That which can divide us also unites us.

Together, we brought them out of the shadows and lifted them up to the Creator.

We set them free.

We have spoken their names and honored them.

You are all free now.

Your work is done.

Your time here is finished.

Your tasks complete.

Soar with the Eagles

And touch the face of God.

The gallows did not win.

Madeleine, Madelaine, and sometimes called Magdelaine or Magdeleine Hélie, the wife of Philippe Mius d’Entremont, was born about 1633 in France, probably in Normandy. For consistency, I’ll refer to her as Madeleine. To confuse things further, she also had a daughter by the same name AND a daughter named Marguerite. Of course she did! To throw fuel on that fire, census takers were anything but accurate, omitting the exact information we need today.

Madeleine arrived in Acadia in 1651 with her husband and their first child, Marie Marguerite Mius, who was born about 1650, according to several later census records.

Based on the age of her daughter, Madeleine Hélie married Philippe Mius no later than 1649 or maybe in the first few months of 1650.

No record of their marriage, or either of their births, has been found in France, but two contemporaneous records state that they were from Normandy. One official record sent by Sieur Mathieu de Goutin, the King’s Secretary, in 1707 stated that Philippe Mius, from Normandy, had died in 1700. Another 1762 record created by their descendants who had been exiled and wound up in Cherbourg, Normandy, in 1760, stated the same, but unfortunately, neither record says where in Normandy.

I considered the possibility that they married earlier and lost a child or children before Marie Marguerite’s birth, but a 1678 census record indicating that Madeleine Hélie’s last child was born in 1677 tends to contraindicate that possibility. By 1677, she had been bearing children for 27 years. Assuming she was 44 or 45 in 1677, that suggests her birth around 1632 or 1633.

Given Philippe’s age in 1650, which, based on various documents, would have been between 41 and 50, so born between 1600 and 1609, it’s also possible, and I’d say probable, that Madeleine Hélie was not Philippe Mius’s first wife.

You can read more about Philippe Mius in the following articles:

• Philippe Mius d’Entremont (c1609-c1700): Baron de Pobomcoup & King’s Attorney
• Philippe Mius d’Entremont (c1609-1700): Returning Home to Pubnico
• Maritime Scavenger Hunt: Where Did Philippe Mius d’Entremont Build His Manor House?
• Descendants of Philippe Mius d’Entremont Petition to Return from France
• Philippe Mius d’Entremont: Y-DNA Provides Amazing Information

Arriving in Acadia

Philippe Mius was brought to Acadia as the second-in-command to Acadian Governor Charles St. Etienne de LaTour, who was a Huguenot.

Philippe, Madeleine and their baby probably left from La Rochelle, which was the departure port for ships bound for Acadia.

As they sailed out of this harbour, shown here in a 1762 painting, Madeleine, about 18 with a small baby, probably shed a few tears. She knew she would never return and would never see her family again.

Or, perhaps she was too young to fully grasp the magnitude of what she was leaving behind and viewed it as a grand adventure.

The trip from La Rochelle to Acadia would have lasted approximately 6 weeks, give or take a few days or weeks, based on the weather the ship encountered.

Arrival in Acadia

We don’t know exactly where they first landed, but given that they had to pass right by La Heve, the original seat of Acadia, where a fort and a few families remained, it’s likely that they stopped there for a few days. At least for fresh water and food. Imagine how good fresh-baked bread or a hot, buttered biscuit would have tasted after all those weeks at sea.

This was probably where Madeleine first set foot in Acadia. Looking down the beach from where the fort stood, the habitations, or village, where Acadian families lived before the seat of Acadia was moved to Port Royal between 1636 and 1640, was located on the point in the distance.

They would have checked on the fort, perhaps delivered supplies, taken on clean water and food, and given the passengers the opportunity to stretch their legs for a few days before boarding again to continue sailing along the Nova Scotia coastline.

Fort LaTour

Charles St. Etienne de LaTour established Fort LaTour on Cape Sable, which was “on the way” to Port Royal, so they presumably would have stopped here too, especially if LaTour was on board. Nothing remains today, except this marker.

In 1651, the fort was the domain of Charles LaTour, but it’s unclear whether he actually lived here at the time, or simply maintained a trading post where he traded with both the Mi’kmaq and English traders out of New England. Regardless, this outpost was quite remote, and the seat of Acadia was in Port Royal where they were headed next.

The ship would have rounded the land on Cape Sable that Philippe and Madeleine would one day own. Pobomcoup was labeled only as “Micmacs, Indene du Cap de Sable,” although the word “Indene” is very difficult to make out. No Europeans had yet settled there.

As they rounded the point in 1651, Philippe and Madeleine would have had no idea that this inlet, today’s Pubnico Harbour, the peninsula, and surrounding land would define much of their lives.

Madeleine’s son, Philippe, would one day marry into the Indian people, not once, but twice, although he would not be born for another nine years.

Did they stop to trade in the sheltered bay on the way before continuing on to Port Royal, the seat of Acadian government?

Had Philippe and Charles been discussing Philippe’s eventual compensation package, and did it include land of his choosing?

Did Charles suggest that Pubnico would be a good choice? Could they have stopped not only to trade, but to meet the local Native people, who were clearly very friendly, with the idea that this would be an excellent trading post?

We don’t know where Madeleine and Philippe lived for their first couple of years in Acadia, although we do know that LaTour was gone on business and trading, and Philippe Mius governed in his absence. That was exactly why Philippe was brought to Acadia.

My wager would be that Philippe needed to be in Port Royal during LaTour’s absence, and that Madeleine had their second child there about 1652.

That child did not survive to 1671, so would have been buried in the graveyard at the fort in Port Royal, overlooking the Riviere Dauphin, if it perished as a baby.

Land Barons, Literally

Philippe apparently served well in LaTour’s absence, because on July 17, 1653, Charles St. Etienne de LaTour awarded a large land grant referred to as the “Baronnie de Pombcoup”, which is today’s Pubnico Harbour and surrounding land, to Philippe Mius and Madelaine Hélie, jointly.

They probably didn’t settle there right away, because it would have taken some time to build a proper mansion house – or a house of any kind. Their second child to survive to adulthood, Jacques, could have been born in Port Royal or Pobomcoup sometime around 1654.

A 1762 document found in the French archives details the land history and says, in part:

Concessions granted at Port Royal on July 17, 1653, by the high and powerful lord Messire Charles de Saint-Étienne, Seigneur de La Tour, Knight of the Order of the King, Governor and Lieutenant General, to nobleman Philippe Mius, esquire, Sieur d’Entremont, and to Demoiselle Madelaine Hélie, his wife…

The grant itself is missing, but the Nova Scotia Archives provides excerpts from the now-missing grant:

There was present and personally certified the high and powerful seigneur Charles de La Tour, Lieutenant General in all of Acadia. He voluntarily acknowledged the receipt and avowed that he had, by these presents, given and relinquished in perpetuity the title of baron and noble fief having the administration of justice, high, mean and low as paramount fief to the nobleman Philippe Mius, Esquire, sieur d’Entremont and Madame Magdeleine Hélie, his wife, who were present and accepted it for themselves and their heirs. In consideration of the particular merit of said Sieur d’Entremont and of the good and faithful services which he has personally rendered to us, we have given and granted and do give and grant by these presents to the said sieur d’Entremont the extent of one league in width and four in depth in the place called Pobomcoup to be enjoyed by the said grantees and successors with the title of baron, in consideration of an on condition of homage and a quichipoly (an Indian word meaning “a small bag” or “purse” made out of an animal skin) of beaver with two bouquets on the days and feasts of St. John Baptist for each year, and on condition that he occupies and establishes the said places. The said seigneur LaTour has today granted and placed in possession of the said seigneur d’Entremont the said land, fief and barony of Pobomcoup, promising and binding himself accordingly. — These renunciations were made and passed at the fort of Port Royal on July 17, 1653.

As a result of this substantial land grant, Philippe’s status was elevated to Baron, a Noble title, just above the gentry class who were high-status landowners – “gentle folk” who did not perform manual labor. This meant that Madeleine shared that status. Her official title would have been either Madame, La Baronne, or Madame la Baronne, which technically means “My Lady.”

However, in Pobomcoup, for a very long time, there was no one other than her family, the Mi’kmaq, and traders to address her as anything. Given what we know about early life in Pobomcoup, I’d wager they lived primarily from the bounty of the sea and established a trading center for Native people and English traders out of Boston.

Capture!

You might think that high drama in Port Royal had nothing to do with Madeleine in Pobomcoup, but it assuredly did. Some events occurred before Madeleine arrived, but the balance formed the chapters of Madeleine Hélie’s life in Acadia.

It’s also worth remembering that Madeleine wasn’t living in Port Royal during most of this time, so she would have anxiously awaited word of what was happening there, which was anything but dull. I wonder whether a woman there would have written her letters, assuming any of the women could write, or if she had to depend on sailors for news.

Philippe’s position as lieutenant governor didn’t last long, because the following year, on July 31, 1654, the English attacked and took Acadia, including Port Royal, Pubnico, and Cape Sable.

On their way to seize Port Royal, the English captured Fort Pentagouët in present-day Castine, Maine, and Fort St. Jean, on the Saint John River, across the Bay from Port Royal.

While the “taking” of Pobomcoup would have been largely symbolic, because there was only one European home there to “take,” all of Acadia fell under English rule. At one point, the English had supported LaTour in Acadia, in part, because they were both Protestant.

It’s unclear whether Philippe and Madeleine were Catholic or Protestant, but they were close to the LaTour family, and eventually, the two families would intermarry.

I strongly suspect that when the English arrived that July, Philippe Mius and Madeleine Hélie were already in Pobomcoup, and if not, they assuredly would have high-tailed it right home, where it was much safer than in Port Royal. There is no report of the English in either Pobomcoup, Fort LaTour, or La Heve.

Part of the reason I don’t think they were in Port Royal at that time is because they weren’t captured.

Charles LaTour was captured in Port Royal and taken to England as a high-profile hostage, but was treated more like royalty. He wasn’t thrown in prison but was placed under house arrest while the English tried to figure out what to do with him, and Acadia. In 1656, he talked his way out of his predicament and was returned to Acadia as the English-appointed Governor, having sworn allegiance to the English crown and agreed to sell his assets to Thomas Temple to pay his debts.

LaTour returned to Acadia in 1656, but soon realized he really wanted no part of governing the now-English colony of angry Acadians. He “retired” and returned to Fort LaTour at Cape Sable.

A lot is uncertain about this time in Acadia, but prior to the 1654 English attack, LaTour had already had his Governorship challenged by Emmanuel Le Borgne, a Catholic, who had a claim to LaTour’s holdings based on his marriage to Charles d’Aulnay’s widow in 1653.

The Backstory

Charles d’Aulnay governed Acadia until his death in 1650 and was LaTour’s vehemently despised arch-rival. They waged war for a decade, both claiming the governorship of Acadia. In truth, their valid claims overlapped, thanks to the French government.

In 1645, d’Aulnay’s men from Port Royal captured LaTour’s fort across the bay at Saint Johns while LaTour was in Boston seeking additional English support.

LaTour’s wife, Françoise-Marie Jacquelin, only 23, commanded the defensive battle to defend the fort, but eventually lost and surrendered. D’Aulnay then executed all of LaTour’s men after agreeing not to harm them in the surrender agreement. D’Aulnay held Françoise-Marie captive, and three weeks later, she suspiciously died in his custody.

The brutality of this event widely divided the Acadians’ loyalty.

D’Aulnay drowned in 1650, leaving his wife, Jeanne Motin to manage the colony he commanded, their eight children, and d’Aulnay’s massive debt.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “What a mess!”, you’d be exactly right.

Philippe and Madeleine Arrive

Philippe Mius and Madeleine Hélie arrived in Port Royal in 1651, just in time for the next chapters. Did they know any of this before accepting this assignment? We’ll never know.

In 1653, Charles LaTour returned to Acadia from his self-imposed exile in Quebec following his wife’s untimely death at d’Aulnay’s hands, and d’Aulnay’s widow married him in Port Royal. There could not have been a less-likely couple.

They hoped their marriage would heal the bitter feud between families, along with the resulting decade-old rift among Acadians. The added benefit (and maybe the overarching reason) was that they had competing legal claims. Regardless, the marriage did serve to heal the colony, at least somewhat, smoothing the way forward, although it wouldn’t last long.

After the English took Acadia in 1654, they ruled it as a colony, with Emmanuel Le Borgne being appointed as absentee Governor by the French in 1657. He “governed” from France and retained the title until 1667, when Acadia was officially returned to France by treaty.

However, it took three years of conflict on the ground in Acadia for the physical turnover to actually occur, with the English King finally commanding Thomas Temple to surrender the territory. However, instead of returning the governorship to Le Borgne, the French assigned a new governor.

Ironically, Le Borgne’s son, Alexandre Le Borgne de Belle-Isle had remained in Acadia the entire time and about 1675, married Marie Saint-Etienne de LaTour, Jean Motin’s daughter with LaTour.

Alexander reportedly had a significant drinking problem and was heavily addicted to wine. He would regularly become quite intoxicated and create havoc by granting the same tract of land to multiple settlers.

By this time, LaTour had died, in 1666, at Cape Sable – and there’s still no mention of Philippe Mius and Madeleine Hélie in any records – so we presume they are quietly going about their lives in Pobomcoup. Out of both harm’s way and the limelight. Sometimes, the best plan of action is to keep your head down.

In 1670, Acadia was actually returned to French control.

One of the first official French acts, aside from ordering a census, was to appoint Philippe Mius as the King’s Attorney.

Madeleine had been living in Acadia for almost two decades now, mostly in Pobomcoup. I wonder if she ever questioned her decision to leave France. Life had certainly not turned out how she would have expected.

The First Census

The 1671 and later censuses provide us with information about the ages of Madeleine’s children.

In 1671, the family was living in Pobomcoup and the ages of family members are listed as follows:

• Philippe Mieux, squire, Sieur de Landremont – 62, so born about 1609
• Madeleine Hélie, no age listed
• Daughter Marguerite Marie is noted as married to Pierre Melanson, no age listed
• Son (Jacques, listed by age but not by name) – 17, so born about 1654
• Abraham – 13, so born about 1658
• Philippe – 11, so born about 1660
• Madeleine – 2, so born about 1669

We don’t know if Father Laurent Molins, the Franciscan Priest who signed the census and listed Philippe and Madeleine in Pobomcoup actually visited, but it’s unlikely since her age was missing, and their oldest son’s name was missing. I can just hear the conversation between Father Molins, who had probably never met any of the family, and someone else in Port Royal. “What was that oldest boy’s name, anyway? I can’t remember.” “I don’t know, but I think he’s about 17. He’s just younger than Marguerite.”

Census takers, priests or not, haven’t changed a lot. Father Molins could have asked Philippe and Madeleine’s daughter, Marguerite, who lived in Port Royal with her husband, Pierre Melanson or Melancon, but it seems they were, um, one would say, “uncooperative.”

Father Molins recorded that, “Pierre Melanson, tailor, would not give his age nor the number of animals, but his wife’s answers concerning their possessions were just as crazy.” This alone should tell us that in 1671, they were not a Catholic family.

One of the reasons I’ve wondered if Philippe Mius and Madeleine Hélie were Huguenots is because LaTour was, and one would think that he would select someone as his second-in-command whom he trusted completely. At that time, Catholics and Protestants were literally at war in France.

The second reason I wondered is because Madeleine’s oldest child, Marguerite, married Pierre Melanson, who was also a Protestant.

Pierre Melanson’s father, also named Pierre, was French, but Pierre (the younger) was baptized in London in 1632, and was well-educated and fluent in both French and English. The Melanson family arrived with the English, via Boston, in the company of Sir Thomas Temple in 1657. They supposedly converted to Catholicism in Acadia, based partly on the fact that their son, Pierre, married Acadian Marguerite Mius, who was presumed to be Catholic. However, based on that 1671 census reply, I’m not convinced.

Madeleine’s daughter Marguerite is shown in the 1686 census as 36 years old, which would have placed her birth about 1650, so she would have been about 21 in 1671 when the French census-taker, who just happened to be the local priest, arrived asking “nosey” questions. It appears that the Melanson family might not have been terribly happy about the French regaining control of Acadia.

The 1678 Census

In the 1671 census, Madeleine Hélie is accounted for, but her age is not given.

The 1678 census throws us a curveball. The family is enumerated in Port Royal instead of in Pobomcoup, which means that Philippe’s position as the King’s Attorney has required his presence in Port Royal. I don’t know how he could possibly have fulfilled his duties living remotely in Pobomcoup, so they probably moved to Port Royal not long after the 1671 census, which was signed and returned on November 8^th that year.

Philippe and Madeleine would have lived on the main street of town, among the other administrators and officials of the colony.

In 1678, Philippe owned 12 cattle and had 9 arpents of land under cultivation.

Overlooking what’s left of the Queen’s Wharf today, before the fort expansion of 1705, where I am standing to take this photo, would have been 5 or 6 houses east of the Governor’s house. In other words, in the center of town, between Michael Boudrot and BelleIsle.

This is the area where they lived. In fact, I might be standing “in their house,” and if no, assuredly within sight. The main street of town was only a block long.

The 1678 census only listed children’s ages, not their names, but the Myus family was a rather strange mix of both named and unnamed children. The census showed the following, in order:

• Philippe Myus
• One girl age 10 (Madeleine, but not listed by name)
• Jacques Myus, Abraham Myus and Anne (no ages listed and no surname for Anne who is presumed to be Madeleine (the daughter) born in 1669)
• Marguerite (no age or surname – daughter Marguerite would be the wife of Pierre Melanson who had married about 1665)
• 1 girl (age) 1 (which means she was born in 1677)

The 1678 census was transcribed by Tim Hebert, here, and Lucy LeBlanc Consentino, here. On their documents, Father Clarence d’Entremont had reconciled the children with their names and birth years based on other censuses and documents.

Who was this baby girl born in 1677? We have no idea.

But there’s something else.

Madeleine Hélie is Missing

Madeleine Hélie is missing.

This strongly suggests that the baby girl, who is age 1, was Madeleine’s last child, and Madeleine died between 1677, when the little girl was born, and 1678, when the census was taken.

Of course, I wonder if Madeleine died in, or as a result of, childbirth.

I can only imagine how Madeleine felt, knowing that she was dying, and leaving a baby behind.

Madeleine’s daughter born in 1677 would have been 9 in 1686 if she were living, but she is not listed, so she too had perished by then.

Calculating Madeleine’s Birth Year

We don’t know exactly when Madeleine Hélie died, but her last child (that we know of) was born about 1677 and Madeleine is gone by late 1678. If Madeleine was 44 at the time her last child was born, she would have been born about 1633 and married when she was about 16.

Between fourteen and seventeen would be a normal age for a French bride of that era.

Therefore, Madeleine was probably between 43 and 45 when she died between 1677 and 1678.

Babies Born, Babies Lost

There are a lot of blank spaces between Madeleine’s children where we know babies would have been born. Assuming a child was born every 24 months, and not closer, Madeleine buried more children than she raised. If a child died at or near birth, the next child generally followed a year later, if that long. So, if anything, this list is incomplete.

I’ve shown Madeleine’s children’s births on a timeline adjusted to accommodate her children who were born and died prior to the first census in 1671:

1. Marguerite Marie or Marie Marguerite, born about 1650, probably in France
2. Unknown child born about 1652, probably in Port Royal, died before 1671, probably in Pobomcoup
3. Jacques – 17 in 1671, but not named in the census, born about 1654, probably in Port Royal. The 1686 census in Pobomcoup shows his birth year as 1659, but I doubt that was correct because he married about 1678 and, as the eldest son, inherited his father’s Barony. He is also shown visually as the firstborn son on the pedigree chart provided by Mius/d’Entremont/LaTour descendants in France in 1762.
4. Unknown child born about 1656, died before 1671, probably in Pobomcoup
5. Abraham – 13 in 1671, so born about 1658
6. Philippe – 11 in 1671, so born about 1660
7. Unknown child born about 1662, died before 1671 in Pobomcoup
8. Unknown child born about 1664, died before 1671 in Pobomcoup
9. Unknown child born about 1666, died before 1671 in Pobomcoup
10. Unknown child born about 1668, died before 1671 in Pobomcoup
11. Madeleine – 2 in 1671, so born about 1669, probably in Pobomcoup. Also listed as Magdelaine (in 1686, age 16), and died before 1693, probably in Port Royal.
12. Unknown child born about 1671, died before 1678 in Port Royal
13. Unknown child born about 1673, died before 1678 in Port Royal
14. Unknown child born about 1675, died before 1678 in Port Royal
15. Unnamed daughter born about 1677, age 1 in 1678, no name given, and died before 1686, probably in Port Royal

1686

In 1686, Philippe, listed as the “Royal Prosecutor,” is still living among the Acadian elite in Port Royal, listed between Michel Boudrot, the Lt. General of Port Royal, and Claude Petitpas, the Clerk of Court.

We know that Madeleine had already passed by 1678, and only two children are listed with Philippe Mius Sr.

• Philippe Mius (the son), 24, who is himself a widower
• Magdelaine, who was 2 in 1671 and is 16 in 1686.

This 1686 map shows the Governor’s House, #7, and Le Bourg’s House, #8, so Philippe Mius would have lived in one of the homes near his colleagues of similar social stature.

Magdelaine, the daughter born in 1669 is listed in this census at 16 years old. She would be expected to marry about this time, but she is never found in any records again, so she apparently died between the 1686 and 1693 censuses.

Madeleine Hélie’s children are being picked off one by one.

By 1686, Philippe Mius d’Entremont Sr. owned 40 arpents of land in Port Royal, which is twice as much as the next two most wealthy landowners, his neighbor Michel Boudrot and Jacob Bourgeois, each with 20 arpents.

Jacob Bourgeois, whose 20 arpent section of land was just at the end of the street on Hogg Island, would sell some of his land to Etienne Pellerin a few years later.

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530899866/f1.item

It’s really quite remarkable to realize that we are looking at a drawing of the home where Philippe and Madeleine lived 350 years ago. It has to be one of these larger homes – and there are only 17 shown in total, with three identified.

Given the amount of land that Philippe is credited with, he may have lived in one of the homes with the most garden space, or perhaps that “extra” lot was his, too. Or, maybe the field behind the fence on the right.

Given the sheer size of his holding, Philippe almost had to have been awarded land up the road leading away from town, or across the river.

In 1708, the Labatt map shows the Pleinmarais land, his son Abraham Mius’s dit name, above, at right. It’s nearly double the size of Port Royal, at left, which makes sense when you compare it to the 20 arpents of land on Hogg Island at the end of Port Royal extending down into the river.

It’s probably unlikely that Philippe lived in anything less than a “mansion house” when he moved to Port Royal as a Nobleman and as the King’s Attorney, sometime after the 1671 census.

Furthermore, it would have been very unlikely that he moved in Port Royal after arriving and becoming established. There wasn’t much land available there, on the waterfront where the administrators lived, so few houses to choose from. Therefore, if he had 9 arpents of land in 1678, and 40 in 1686, he had to have been awarded land elsewhere in addition to the 9 he had under cultivation in 1678.

It’s possible that the only land shown adjacent to the homes of the colony’s Administrators were their gardens, and the rest of their land was tended by others elsewhere.

No matter how much wealth and worldly goods Philippe and Madeleine Hélie accumulated, nothing could save Madeleine or her children from early graves.

The graveyard where her children rested was only a few steps away. The good news, if there was any, was that Madeleine could visit them often. The bad news was the same, and she would join them much too soon in unmarked graves.

Did Philippe and Madeleine Return to Pobomcoup?

Did Philippe and Madeleine ever move back to Pobomcoup? I don’t think so.

We know that Philippe was the King’s Attorney until about 1688. Given that he’s still living in Port Royal in 1686, and has, by 1686 standards, a massive amount of land, it’s unlikely that he ever returned to Pobomcoup.

By 1686, Philippe, then in his 80s, had conferred the Barony upon his son, Jacques, who was one of only five families living at Cap Sable, which is the name under which Pobomcoup was enumerated in 1686.

Philippe probably conveyed the Barony because one typically must live upon a Barony to retain it. In the rough archives translation of the now-lost 1653 deed, we find “on condition that he occupies and establishes the said places,” although the documents found in the French archives specifically state that continuous inhabitation was not a condition of land retention. Perhaps this was a bone of contention.

Regardless, both Jacques and his brother, Abraham, married daughters of Charles LaTour, and they would both have been quite comfortable with their families at Cape Sable. Trade there was probably very lucrative as well, with no competition.

Madeleine’s Known Children

Marguerite Marie Mius, Madeleine’s oldest daughter, married about 1665, when she was about 15, to Pierre Melanson, a Huguenot who lived in Port Royal. Even though the English were holding Port Royal at that time, the Mius family clearly visited Port Royal, or Charles Melanson visited Pobomcoup, because otherwise Marguerite would not have had the opportunity to meet Charles’s son, Pierre.

Marguerite and Pierre settled across the river from Port Royal, present-day Annapolis Royal, in the Melanson Village, near Pierre’s parents. Two years later, in 1667, they left for Boston, but Pierre and his brother remained in Acadia.

This map shows the Melanson Settlement with a red star on the 1686 map, across the river from Port Royal (red arrow).

In 1682, Pierre Melanson led one of the pioneering expeditions to Les Mines, where he and Marguerite settled sometime before 1686 and lived the rest of their lives.

After Pierre and Marguerite had relocated to Les Mines, the Melanson settlement itself continued to grow, fueled by Pierre’s brother, Charles. All three of the Melanson boys maintained close ties with Boston throughout their lives. After Pierre’s parents and brother, John moved to Boston in 1667, when Acadia was returned to France, both Pierre and his brother, Charles, remained in Acadia on their father’s land.

The Melanson family was an interesting bunch. Charles, the son, while living in Acadia, requested and received a militia captain commission in Massachusetts. He was also a pirate.

Perhaps the Melanson allegiance to England and connection with Boston lends more perspective to Pierre and Marguerite’s reaction to the 1671 census taker, especially given that Acadia had just been returned to the French.

There’s more too.

While Pierre Melanson and Marguerite Mius left for Les Mines and settled in Grand Pre, Pierre apparently went back and forth. They may not have sold their land in Port Royal.

In 1690, when the English sailed into the River on their way to attack Port Royal, they stopped at Pierre Melanson’s to check on the condition of the fort and of Port Royal. Pierre’s was the first homestead encountered after entering the mouth of the river.

This 1708 map shows the location of the Melanson settlement land, homes and fields. They were the most distant settlement, towards the sea, across the river from Port Royal.

I don’t think there’s any question that the Melanson family was loyal to the British, and retained their Protestant faith as well. At some point, they may have hidden their leanings, but that hadn’t happened by 1690.

This situation must have been awkward for Philippe Mius and by extension, Madeleine. I wonder how she navigated those waters, or perhaps she was Protestant herself. There’s so much we don’t know.

The Melanson settlement constituted a small village as it expanded over the years.

This drawing shows typical Acadian life in the Melanson Village, based on archaeological excavations there and elsewhere. The layout is strikingly similar to the 1686 map of Port Royal, with enclosed gardens.

The apple orchards were planted behind the homes and gardens, and the salt marsh fields were between the homes, protective dykes, and the river.

Excavations have unearthed several structures and the remnants of village life.

The bustling village of yesteryear, where Madeleine would have visited Marguerite and her family, lies abandoned today, having returned to nature – with no hint of the turmoil that was once found here.

Marguerite had five children that lived before her mother died between 1677 and 1678, and probably two or three who died, based on birth spacing. Tiny coffins would have been constructed for the children who perished, the pounding of the hammer ringing in the ears of Marguerite and Madeleine with each blow. Madeleine would assuredly have been with her daughter at this most devastating of times.

Mother and daughter would have washed their tiny bodies one last time, wrapped them lovingly, and placed them in their caskets for their final sleep.

What happened next is debatable.

If Catholic, they would then have been carried to the canoes or small boats and rowed across the river to the church.

Services were held in the church where a funeral Mass was celebrated before they were buried in the graveyard beside the church, either the same day or the next.

If they were not buried as Catholics, they would either have been buried in the same cemetery, without benefit of a mass, of course, or buried in a cemetery near where they lived.

We know that the Stoney Beach Cemetery, very close to the Melanson Settlement is the site of burials in the late 1700s, and it may well have been used before that by the residents on the far side of the river, especially Protestants.

Eventually, the family did convert, because they are found in the Grand Pre Catholic Church records, but we don’t know who converted, when, where, or why. They may have simply acquiesced to the traditions of their neighbors.

Marguerite’s five children who lived are probably the only grandchildren Madeleine Hélie was able to welcome and enjoy, even if only for a short time. We know that Madeleine died sometime between her last child’s birth in 1677 and the 1678 census, and that at least five grandchildren were born before 1678: in 1666, 1668, 1670, 1673, and 1676.

For several of those years, Madeleine and Marguerite were having children at the same time, likely helping each other through the process. It looks like two of Marguerite’s children died during that time, and five of Madeleine’s. Mother and daughter would have drawn strength from each other in their darkest hours.

Even though we know that they died before the next census where they should have been found, they may not have been stillborn.

Catholic babies were baptized as soon as possible after birth, and in emergencies, sometimes even in the birth canal by the midwife. Sometimes provisional baptisms occurred if a priest wasn’t readily available, the baby was in distress, or inclement weather prevented the trip to church.

Baptisms were events to be celebrated.

The family, including the mother if she was able, made their way to the church with the baby later that day or the following day, depending on when the baby was born. They gathered beside the baptismal font in the Catholic church in Port Royal as their babies were baptized. Perhaps Marguerite stood as godmother for her younger siblings, knowing that of the two women, she was more likely to outlive her mother.

In 1682, when Marguerite, then 32 or so, and her family said goodbye to Port Royal and sailed north, her mother had been gone for between four years and a decade.

Madeleine and Philippe’s children apparently didn’t all live in Port Royal, at least not full time during this period, because their son, Philippe (Jr), born about 1660 married a Mi’kmaq woman about 1678. He may well have been living with his older brothers, Jacques or Abraham, in Pobomcoup. They all married between 1676 and 1678.

Jacques Mius d’Entremont, born about 1654, Madeleine’s oldest son, married Anne Saint-Etienne de LaTour about 1678, and they lived in Pobomcoup. That’s probably when Philippe Mius (Sr.) conveyed the Barony to him. It’s possible that the Anne, with no other name, in the 1678 census with Philippe Mius Sr. is Jacque’s wife, Anne.

Although Jacques lived in Pobomcoup, he must have traveled back and forth to Port Royal, because he made a deposition in 1685 that James Taylor of Boston has stolen from him and others in Port Royal. Jacques is connected to fishermen, specifically Jean Le Roy dit Laliberte who is a shoremaster for both Jacques and Charles St. Etienne de LaTour at a location with a Mi’kmaq name. This makes sense, since in the 1696 census, La Liberte Le Neigre is living by himself at Cap Sable, but by 1698 was back at Port Royal, living in the Melanson settlement.

Jacques had nine children, most of whom used the surname d’Entremont and remained in the Pobomcoup, now Pubnico, area.

He inherited the Barony and maintained it until his death in 1735 or 1736. The manor house location continues to be widely debated, given that it was destroyed when the English expelled all of the Acadians beginning in 1755. I documented possible locations in this article.

Regardless of where the manor house stood, a mill wheel was found in Hipson’s Brook, indicating that this location was of primary importance, grinding grain for the Pobomcoup families.

Pubnico Harbour, where the Philippe and Madeleine established their Barony and where Jacques spent his life is stunningly beautiful.

I wrote about my experience returning home to Pubnico, complete with pictures, here.

The English began the expulsion of the Pubnico Acadians in 1756 and finished their dirty work by burning everything. Some of Jacques’ descendants were sent to the English colonies and a few made their way back to Pubnico a decade later. Others were tracked through the woods, eventually caught, and imprisoned at Halifax in 1659, then were subsequently sent back to France. I wrote about that, here, including their petitions to return. It’s heartbreaking.

Abraham Mius or Mius de Pleinmarais, his dit name, Madeleine’s second-oldest son, was born about 1658 and married about 1680 to Marguerite Saint-Etienne de LaTour. In 1686 and 1693, they are living in Pobomcoup aka Cap Sable.

By 1703, Abraham is living in Port Royal where he spent the rest of his life. Unfortunately, that census does not show the amount of land in each household. However, given that he is listed second in the census, called “Mr. Plemarais, and they are living beside his wife’s sister, Marie Saint-Etienne de LaTour, the widow of Alexander Le Bourg de Belisle, this makes sense. Owning land, especially for the wealthy did not equate to actually living on and farming the land. This also causes me to wonder if Abraham’s parents, Madeleine Hélie and Philip Mius, were living beside the Le Bourg home back in the 1670s.

If so, that may narrow the location to the homes beside #8 on the 1686 map.

If that’s the case, then that restricts the candidates to a few that I can correlate to contemporary locations.

My cousins and I just happened to have dinner along the boardwalk, behind what is today a wine bar, in this same location or at least nearby, looking out over the beautiful river.

Obviously the Acadian buildings are gone, burned in 1755, but the waterfront is every bit as beautiful now as then.

It makes sense that Abraham would have wanted to reclaim his father’s home in Port Royal, since Jacques had the manor house in Pobomcoup, and Philippe Jr. was living with the Native people.

We don’t know if that’s what happened, and the O’Dell House map shows that Abraham’s widow was living south of Port Royal along the road headed out of town, at location #9 in 1710. I tend to doubt that, in part because she is enumerated beside her sister in the 1707 census, assuming it was in procession order, and we know where her sister who was married to Le Bourge lived. Those outlots are also far from the elite part of town. Abraham’s widow was, after all, a LaTour, and the widow of a Mius, both Noble families.

Regardless, we are moving far from Abraham Mius and his widow – and with the passage of time and each subsequent step, it’s more difficult to discern what actually occurred.

Abraham Mius Pleinmarais died towards the end of 1707, after his daughter’s August wedding and before the census where his wife is listed as Madeleine Plemarais, with her five children.

At this time, she is living on only one arpent of land, which is confusing, especially given that Abraham’s holding shown on the 1708 map is extensive. She may well have moved back to town, and that’s assuming they weren’t already living in Port Royal proper.

Abraham’s land was not far from the Melanson settlement, and I suspect this is the land originally owned by Abraham’s parents. It’s even more likely given that Abraham was clearly the “second son” in Pobomcoup, but opted instead for this large parcel of land in Port Royal. His father died in 1700, leaving him a Sieur in his own right, according to the 1762 French depositions.

This 1708 Labatt map, which was drawn the year after Abraham died, still shows his land, and also states that Bernard Bourg is living at the place called Plemarais, although that word is difficult to see.

The 1707 census for Bernard shows him cultivating 8 arpents of land. In 1686, he has 3 arpents, in 1693, 30 arpents, in 1698, 35 arpents with 45 fruit trees, in 1700, he was cultivating 30 arpents. This is suspiciously close to the 40 arpents claimed by Philippe Mius Sr. in 1686, especially since he had 9 arpents in 1678. At 80 years of age, and a man of letters, Philippe was clearly not farming this land himself.

If Abraham moved back from Pobomcoup after his father died, Bernard may have released the majority back to Abraham. Born in 1648, Bernard was over 50 years old and probably no longer up to maintaining more land than any other landholder in Acadia. Abraham Mius Pleinmarais was a decade younger.

Philippe Mius Jr., born about 1660, spent most of his formative years learning to hunt and fish among their neighbors in Pobomcoup, the Mi’kmaq, so marrying a Native woman wouldn’t have been anything unexpected.

Philippe Jr. and his first wife, whose name is unknown, had about four children before she died sometime after 1684, when daughter Francoise Mius was born, and before the 1686 census when he is found in Port Royal with his father. By about 1688, son Philippe the younger had returned to his beloved forests, married again to a second Native woman named Marie, indicating that she had been baptized as Catholic, and lived the rest of his life among the Native people.

Madeleine would never have met any of those grandchildren, given that Philippe married about the time she died, and they lived far away, at Pobomcoup or maybe even further, at Merligueche, near present-day Lunenburg.

Philippe’s descendants generally used the surname Mius, and are found among the Mi’kmaq. Philippe’s son, Francoise Mius, born about 1700 and who died after August 1763, was appointed Chief of the Mi’kmaq and resided at La Heve.

Conclusions

What conclusions can we draw here?

This evidence, taken together, means that Madeleine Hélie most likely lived in Port Royal beginning after the 1671 census, and died there between 1677 and 1678, given that they appear to have never returned to Pobomcoup. It also means that the children born in 1671, 1673, 1675, and 1677, along with daughter Madelaine, born about 1670, are all likely buried with her in Port Royal, while Madeleine Hélie’s half dozen children who died before 1671 are buried in a lost cemetery somewhere near where they lived in Pobomcoup.

By accounting for her known children, we can tell that Madeleine was born about 1633. She married about 1649 to a much older husband.

Depending on which records we have more confidence in, Philippe was between 40 and 49 in 1649, when Madeleine was between 14 and 16. Despite a quarter-century age difference, he went on to outlive her by a substantial margin. Life was especially treacherous for women. Every childbirth was a tug-of-war between life and death for both mother and child – a battle Madeleine may have lost.

Madeleine buried at least six children between 1652 and 1671, and three more by 1678.

That’s a minimum of nine children buried during her lifetime, and likely more.

Her namesake daughter, Marguerite, as she was listed in the 1678 census, and called Madeleine in the 1686 census, outlived her mother by a few years. She is never found in any records beyond 1686, so likely died between 1686 and 1693, joining her mother in the Port Royal Cemetery.

And the one-year-old baby in 1678? She joined her mother and siblings before 1686.

That means that of the 15 children that Madeleine brought into the world, and possibly more, only four survived to adulthood, and none of the nine born after 1660.

How absolutely crushing.

Madeleine’s four surviving children could not have been more different.

1. Daughter Marguerite married a Huguenot, acted “crazy,” and refused to answer the Priest’s questions in 1671, and was one of the founders at Les Mines.
2. Son Jacques became the second Baron de Pobomcoup, continuing his father’s legacy, and established the Mius d’Entremont family of Pubnico.
3. Son Abraham settled in Pobomcoup, but then returned to Port Royal where he lived for the rest of his life. He had a substantial piece of land, probably his father’s 40 arpents, across the river from Port Royal.
4. Madeleine’s youngest son, Philippe, married into the Mi’kmaq Tribe, twice, and lived his life among the Native people. His son became their Chief, but Philippe’s descendants would suffer immense heartache.

Madeleine’s Journey

I can’t help but think about Madeleine Hélie as a carefree young girl in France, running and playing in the sun-drenched golden fields.

Acadia hadn’t yet been settled, so even if she had known that Acadia existed, she would never have dreamed of going there. Travel then, such as it was, was pretty much a one-way, no-return ticket.

Yet, she did sail to Acadia and became a Noblewoman there, elevated to the status of Madame of the Barony of Pobomcoup.

But she would not breathe her last in her barony.

If Madeleine’s life story were a book, one would swear it has to be fiction.

She traveled to La Rochelle as a young bride. Having not yet seen her 20th birthday, she climbed aboard a rocking ship with her husband and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime.

She arrived at La Heve with a babe in arms and perhaps pregnant for her second child who would perish in a foreign land. How did she feel, burying that baby, with no family surrounding her as those clods of dirt thudded on the tiny coffin?

Surveying her new world, maybe she wondered where the rest of the people were, because the land was densely forested and barren of European women, at least in La Heve and Fort LaTour. From a bustling community, established for millennia, someplace in Normandy, to unbroken forest dappled with Native villages that moved with the seasons – the contrast must have seemed surreal, and unreal.

She assuredly cried for her family, but there was no going back.

When they finally arrived in Port Royal, she probably expected a city, but what she found were dirt cart paths, a beleaguered earthen fort, and 38 or 39 families consisting of about 270 people, scattered up and down the river. That would have meant only 38 or 39 adult women in the entire colony.

Did she think, “Good Lord, what have I done?”

Two years later, her status was elevated when they were awarded a massive land grant in Pobomcoup, where she would live even more remotely, with NO European women for company. She didn’t speak the Mi’kmaq language and would have been terribly isolated.

After 18 or 19 years in Pobomcoup, they moved back to Port Royal. By then, it had grown substantially, doubling in size, and probably seemed quite busy by comparison.

Madeleine died there a few years later, before she was even 50. She buried 9 or 10 children, and left behind her last child – an infant daughter less than a year old who desperately needed her mother.

On the other hand, Madeleine’s life was astounding, especially for a woman in the mid-1600s. She saw unheard of places and prayed in the cathedral of the forest. Her life of adventure probably seemed like a dream to many, and evolved into something she could never have imagined. She was unique among women of her time.

Madeleine inhabited the most remote yet starkly beautiful stretches of the Atlantic coastline, with few, if any, other European women nearby, and later lived among the elite of Port Royal.

Her blood runs in the veins of the Mi’kmaq people, the Cajuns of Louisiana, the American colonies, many people who settled in Quebec, exiles in Cherbourg, Normandy and the people who returned to Pubnico in the 1660s.

The price was dear, though – having to leave her family behind in France forever.

In Acadia, she survived untold drama, including the 1654 capture by the English, and Acadia’s rocky return to the French sixteen years later. She became a Noblewoman and lived in a manor house on the shores of the Atlantic.

Regardless, Madeleine’s life was still cut short. She wept at the graves of far too many children and probably would have traded everything to be able to raise the children she could not.

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