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88 thoughts on “Acadia”

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  Stephen Liss November 11, 2022 at 20:42

  I think Cajun is a contraction of Acadien, not Canadian.

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    craig Post author November 11, 2022 at 20:53

    Very likely Stephen. Acadien or Canadien are both possible of course.

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      Dodds November 13, 2022 at 15:46

      Craig it is in their songs, the lament of lost “Acadie” that they call themselves Cajun. It is not short for French Canadien and definitely not short for Canadian.
      And that gives the name to their music routed in the old folk music…and tales of loss.

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    Lysias November 11, 2022 at 21:00

    That (that Cajun is a contraction of Acadien) is what I have always read.

    Craig’s piece has inspired me to order Longfellow’s Evangeline, which I understand is about the expulsion of the Acadiens, for my Kindle. I have another reason: Evangeline is I believe the only major poem in English written in the dactylic hexameter well known from Homer and Virgil.

    I read on Wikipedia that New England played a major role in the expulsion and that Longfellow totally ignores that role.

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    Ebenezer Scroggie November 12, 2022 at 08:27

    I lived and worked in Louisiana for a couple of years.

    They all say and believe that Cajun is a contraction of Acadien. I’ve never heard the Canadian theory before and I doubt that (m)any Cajuns have either.

    The etymology of Coonass is much less clear. Most of ’em I asked about that one said that it was a corruption of the French word Connasse which means something like filthy hooker. A few of them told me it was something to do with racoons.

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    David G November 12, 2022 at 13:37

    I mean, obviously. Weird he’s going with “both are possible,” rather than admit the error.

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  Peter VE November 11, 2022 at 20:51

  Someday soon the denizens of London are going to wake up and realize that their American friends have just completed the deindustrialization of Europe, and their services are no longer in demand. Couldn’t happen to a better lot of inbred incompetents.

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  Nick Lord November 11, 2022 at 21:23

  Thanks, Craig, for a most interesting article. The Cajuns and their history have always interested me. Back in the 60s I was a member of the first band in England to play Cajun music, Les Vieux Soulards. We learnt the songs phonetically from records and had very little idea of what we were singing, but we had great fun and it went down well in the folk clubs at the time.

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  Steven Newbury November 11, 2022 at 23:05

  Not sure I’d entirely agree with the idea England being exempt from such atrocities. The Black Act of 1723 was certainly a mechanism to remove certain “trouble makers” with the introduction of over 200 capital offenses. This is all part of a long terrible history of social, cultural and religious cleansing going back all the way to the “Harrowing of the North” which certainly qualifies as a depopulation. Please don’t imagine the English lower classes have ever had a pass when it comes to being victim to the elite of this land.

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    craig Post author November 11, 2022 at 23:38

    I can assure you that as a devoted reader of E P Thompson and his school I don’t ignore that history at all, Steven.

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    Fazal Majid November 12, 2022 at 01:57

    Or the Frame Act that made it a capital crime for an unemployed weaver to smash the automated looms that put them out of work. The UK had more soldiers quelling Ludd’s rebellion that fighting Napoleon.

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  Cliff Moore November 11, 2022 at 23:13

  Close to the best thing I have read that you have written. I read many years ago the John? Prebble book about the highland clearances and it rather shocked me that it happened. More than that actually!

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    DonDon November 11, 2022 at 23:34

    I am looking forward to your biography of Lord George Murray. Probably the most interesting character involved in the 45.
    I have walked much of the route between Mar and Atholl. Hardly saw a soul between White Bridge and the lodge in Glen Tilt.

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      craig Post author November 11, 2022 at 23:41

      Indeed. And yet Glen Tilt is at the same elevation as my house here in Swanston, Edinburgh! There is nothing uninhabitable about the terrain on the route.

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        Ebenezer Scroggie November 12, 2022 at 08:44

        Glencoe, prior to the unpleasantness, grew copious crops of barley and oats. Nowadays that looks impossible.

        Once tilled land falls into disuse it rapidly become unrecognisable and unusable as arable ground. Those abandoned dwellings which appear nowadays to have been far from tilled fields were mostly surrounded by productive arable land. Once that land falls into disuse for a decade or more it becomes too acidic to grow farmable crops.

        When the people were driven off the land by the Germans there was nobody to lime and tend the land so it became useless for anything but deer and sheep and grouse.

        The modern landscape of much of the Highlands is a highly artificial consequence of the triple monocultures of sheep and deer and grouse. The (mostly) Scottish major landowners are the cause of that ecocatastrophe.

        The former Forestry Commission of Scotland is responsible for the equally catastrophic mass production of alien monocultures of Sitka and Norway spruce which form a barren desert for most of Scotland’s flora and fauna.

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          Lapsed Agnostic November 12, 2022 at 17:51

          The soil in Glencoe is unlikely to have become too acidic to grow crops after not being tilled for more than ten years, Ebenezer – otherwise how would its first settlers back in the mists of time have managed to do it when the soil had never been tilled at all? Even if it has, people can just add lime – and bear in mind that plenty of crops (potatoes, apples, raspberries etc) like it acid, and some (blueberries, cranberries) like it very acid.

          In fact, you don’t need to till the soil at all – you just need to put lots of well-rotted organic matter on top of it and let the micro-organisms etc do the work for you. You actually get better yields that way, likely because there’s less disruption to fungal mycelia, which help plants to take up nutrients. Obviously, the makers of several types of agricultural machinery don’t want farmers to know this. For more info, see Charles Dowding’s ‘no-dig’ gardening site:

          https://charlesdowding.co.uk/

          R. Jagger Esq. (formerly of this parish) is a fairly regular contributor to the comments section of their blog, if anyone’s missing his wit and wisdom – at least in relation to his Norf London allotment.

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          Dodds November 13, 2022 at 15:55

          Plus absence of cattle and new trees and drainage where needed.
          Rather than add to greenhouse gas, coos are part of the regeneration of land , but everything has been extracted to mono culture and the barreness of the landscape. Where there was once an abundance of native plants in the grasses.
          If the deciduous woodland that the isles were covered in hadn’t been removed and then prevented from re-establishing we would have a far richer bio diverse landscape that would support the flora and fauna we have lost to basically the same clearance practices as cleared the people.

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  Ian November 12, 2022 at 00:13

  Music fans will make the connection with The Band, whose song Acadian Driftwood is considered one of the finest of Robbie Robertson’s output. A kind of Northern companion piece to The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down, it portrays what is apparently referred to as The Great Expulsion.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadian_Driftwood

  According to Wiki, the numbers expelled were in all, of the 14,100 Acadians in the region, approximately 11,500 deported, of whom at least 5,000 Acadians died of disease, starvation or shipwrecks. This is over a longer period than the incident Craig refers to. Shocking, just another day in the Empire.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians

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  SleepingDog November 12, 2022 at 00:47

  From Abigail L Swingen’s Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (p15):

  Sending orphans and children of convicted felons also became Virginia Company policy, and in 1620 the City of London bound one hundred such children to be sent to Virginia.

  Children were apparently also kidnapped by ‘spiriters’ and sent abroad.

  On a slightly different tack, I read in Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization by Robert A Williams Jr, chapter 12, that only the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (all settled by the British) voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, with 143 states in favour. Article 28 apparently contradicts the Doctrine of Discovery and supports redress. The four states later recanted, but what does that initial vote tell us about imperialism and colonialism today?

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  Helen Devries November 12, 2022 at 01:25

  When I lived in France, many descendents of Acadians used to visit nearby Loudon, seen by many as the origin of their families.
  If the drainage system resembled that of western France, then there must have been people from the Marais Poitevin in the exodus.
  Their French astounded local people….

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  Clark November 12, 2022 at 01:37

  Craig:

  – “What was in my childhood an occasion for reflection, grief and thanksgiving for peace has been turned into an orgy of militarism. […] The victims of Empire deserve remembrance too.”

  Wear the white poppy, with pride:

  https://www.ppu.org.uk/

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    Brian Keane November 13, 2022 at 15:49

    Well said Clark x

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  Fazal Majid November 12, 2022 at 01:54

  Remember the extermination camp was invented during the Boer War to force the wily Boer warriors to surrender because their wives and children were taken to concentration camps deliberately chosen for their insalubrious conditions. And of course the Irish have suffered mightily at the hands of the English (and sad to say, of the Scots as well).

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    Laguerre November 12, 2022 at 09:27

    Not the extermination camp, the concentration camp.

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      Pears Morgaine November 12, 2022 at 09:33

      Big difference. Also first used by the Spanish on Cuba in 1896.

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    Greg Park November 14, 2022 at 10:41

    The British government continued to build Nazi-style camps even after the Holocaust to repress rebels in the colonies. During the 1950s 90,000 Kenyans were executed or tortured in British camps that had a strategy of beatings, starvation, forced hard labor, rape, and castration, all designed to break the resistance of the native people.

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/the-british-empire-was-much-worse-than-you-realize-caroline-elkinss-legacy-of-violence

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  RT Happe November 12, 2022 at 02:41

  “They constructed a palisade thought which” leaves me thinking: is that possibly a thwart ‒ or a typo? Dictionaries fail me.

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  zoot November 12, 2022 at 03:30

  “The victims of Empire deserve remembrance too”

  they definitely would be remembered if brits were as decent and respectful as they always pretend this time of year.
  of that there is no doubt.

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  JohnA November 12, 2022 at 04:57

  Another example of how blood never dried in the British empire. Excellent piece of research.
  By ‘They constructed a palisade thought which enclosed both the church and cemetery.’ Should that read palisade fort?

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    craig Post author November 12, 2022 at 08:34

    thanks – right hand temporarily out of action so using a speech recognition app!

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  Ebenezer Scroggie November 12, 2022 at 08:16

  Let’s not forget the fact that Nova Scotia means New Scotland.

  Remember too that Scotsmen were the most ardent proponents of the British Empire, both militarily and commercially.

  The United Kingdom was created by Scotsmen, not Englishmen. The English merely acquiesced in Scotland’s creation of the UK and paid for it. They’re still paying for it through the labyrinthine Barnett Formula whose mechanism wasn’t fully understood even by its eponymous creator.

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    Lysias November 12, 2022 at 22:40

    According to Wikipedia, the people settled on the land taken from expelled Arcadians were largely from Scotland and New England, both very anti-Catholic at the time.
    One of the causes of the American Revolution was the Quebec Act, whereby the British government granted toleration to the Catholics of Quebec. The colonists in America, especially those in New England, very much disliked this (for a time, until their alliance with France).

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      Lysias November 13, 2022 at 14:21

      Acadians, not Arcadians. I suspect that mistake was imposed on me by Autocorrect.

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    Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh November 12, 2022 at 22:40

    An “ardent Scots” quote from Tom Devine’s book ‘The Scottish Nation 1700-2000’:

    “Of the 157 battalions which comprised the British Expeditionary Force, 22 were Scottish regiments […] The human losses were enormous and unprecedented. Of the 557,000 Scots who enlisted in all services, 26.4 percent lost their lives. This compares with an average death rate of 11.8 per cent for the rest of the British army between 1914 and 1918. Of all the combatant nations, only the Serbs and the Turks had higher per capita mortality rates, but this was primarily because of disease in the trenches rather than a direct result of losses in battle. The main reason for the higher-than-average casualties among the Scottish soldiers was that they were regarded as excellent, aggressive shock troops who could be depended upon to lead the line in the first hours of battle.”

    (‘THE SCOTTISH NATION 1700-2000’, by T.M. Devine. Published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1999. Page 309)

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      Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh November 12, 2022 at 23:47

      The (mainly) Gaelic YouTube linked below, Donald MacCormick focusses on the Battle of Loos with its catastrophic loss of Gaelic-speakers from strategic localities. His pan-Scottish figures echo those of Tom Devine given in the comment above. The following is a transcription with informal translation:

      “The worst disaster to ever hit the Gaels was the Battle of Loos 25 Sept 1915. Three Scottish Divisions. 15th Scottish Division, 9th Scottish Division, and 51st Highland Division. Worst blow 9th Scottish Division, 26th Brigade: ‘The 5th Camerons: On the right were the men of North Uist, Strathspey, and Lochaber. On the left were the men of South Uist, Benbecula, and Skye, under Major Arkshaw, who fell at the head of his men. The first two lines went forward and were absolutely wiped out. Line after line was mown down. Of the 760 men who went over the top, only 70 came back. And of the 700 who were killed, you could probably say that 90% of them were Gaelic-speakers. And I don’t think Gaeldom ever got over it. And Scotland as a whole. It was a black day for Scotland. The three Divisions had 14,000 casualties at Loos. Percentage-wise, more Scots were killed in First World War than any other country. The English lost 11%. The Germans lost 12%. The French lost, I think, 14 or 15%. The Scots lost 27%. One in every hundred was a Scot. I couldn’t get over the figures. And after the disaster of Loos, and the wiping out of the Camerons, Lochiel put out an appeal — I have a copy of it here — saying ‘Another thousand Highlanders wanted for Lochiel’s Brigade of the Cameron Highlanders.’ That notice went up throughout the country, after 700 of them lying dead. [Head shake] That was pretty tough. You know. Pretty tough.”

      https://youtu.be/TCXxIcI7NuM

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      Laguerre November 13, 2022 at 08:50

      Somewhat special pleading there. The Bretons in the French army were in much the same situation, and for similar reasons. Five Breton brothers from my partner’s family were all killed in the first three months in 1914, pushing it to the hilt.

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  Bayard November 12, 2022 at 08:18

  “It is also worth pointing out the very basic fact that there was never the kind of expulsion and depopulation anywhere in England that occurred in both Scotland and Ireland.”

  Not the scale of depopulation of the Highland Clearances, no, but certainly the type. As late as the 1930s large areas of England like Salisbury Plain were depopulated to make army training ranges, in some cases the inhabitants were told they could leave their possessions behind as they would be returning soon. They still haven’t.

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    Pears Morgaine November 12, 2022 at 09:30

    There are reckoned to be 2,000 to 3,000 abandoned settlements in England, many were abandoned after the black death but tens if not hundreds of thousands of people were forced off their land under the Enclosures Acts or just because the landowners thought they spoiled the view. From the late 18th Century onwards thousands were forced into cramped housing in towns and cities to slave in the new factories.

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    Stevie Boy November 12, 2022 at 14:34

    Tyneham in Dorset. Inhabitants forced to move out so that the military could train for WW2. Promised to be returned after the war – never has been.

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  Sam November 12, 2022 at 08:27

  I’ve read the diaries and letters of the Puritans (who actually called themselves “Saints”) who settled in Plymouth Rock, and guess what? They, too, were very poor, lived in squalid conditions, and tended to inbreed.

  In fact, except for the poverty part, I’d say just about everyone in the English world was similarly afflicted in that era.

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  Sam November 12, 2022 at 08:33

  Also, I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t remark that les haricots sons pas sale! 🙂

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  Ebenezer Scroggie November 12, 2022 at 08:52

  “The Acadians arrived as individuals or families with no hierarchy. They acknowledged no nobility and crucially they did not acknowledge any Crown. Occasionally they were obliged temporarily to pay lip service to the French or British crown when military forces passed through, but until their deportation they were never successfully subjected to any central authority.”

  As Catholics they had the Pope for that sort of thing.

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  gyges November 12, 2022 at 10:33

  No mention of Evangeline?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangeline

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  gyges November 12, 2022 at 10:41

  Another thought … less specific to Aracadia but still relevant: the Scottish people played a disproportionate (wrt relative population sizes) part in Britain’s colonial rule. An obvious example being Alexander Burnes; not only him but many others. Others who lacked opportunity at home so either through the army or trade (read slavery/plantations) did rather well out of the British Empire.

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    Stevie Boy November 12, 2022 at 14:44

    Many young men joined the military in the 19th and early 20th century to escape working on the land for the local gentry. In many cases the work conditions at home were similar to slavery, and if you didn’t ‘behave’ then deportation to the colonies was always an option. Even today, for many underprivileged youngsters the military still serves as a potential escape route from poverty at home. Says a lot about our society ?

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  James Galt November 12, 2022 at 11:04

  We are constantly told about our wonderful Scottish “wilderness” and how it must be preserved.

  Whilst our Highland and Island landscapes are starkly beautiful, they are also strangely depressing.

  Part of the propaganda is of course that these communities were “unsustainable” and that the people lived horrible lives of grinding poverty, the implication being that being turfed off their lands and essentially deported under terrible conditions was the best thing that ever happened to them.

  There are plenty of good people living miserable lives of poverty and neglect in the “useless eater reservations” in the schemes and demoralised de-industrialised communities of central Scotland that would make good “settlers” of their own lands given half a chance.

  That would be a task worthy of a genuinely independent Scotland.

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  Mark Golding November 12, 2022 at 11:08

  I see the children lost, hungry, scared and dying. I see my best friend ‘Eggy’ killed on HMS Sheffield, a defenceless decoy in the Falklands war. PBUT

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  frankywiggles November 12, 2022 at 11:48

  That 18th-century brutality remained characteristic throughout 20th-century decolonisation and is still manifest today in Britain’s constant violence and provocations on the world stage (and in the annual orgy of militarism each November.)

  It is not going away. This is who they very recently voted the greatest Briton of all time..
  (1 minute video)
  https://mobile.twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528

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    Dodds November 13, 2022 at 16:16

    Even today soldiers who “survived” WW1 i.e. returned home their circumstances, medical state, is still under a blanket cover up.
    The medical records of men who were completely traumatised and gassed and didn’t live long; their symptoms are all en masse passed off as something else. To this day there is no openess about their exposure to gas and the trauma of being in the front line, in some cases multiple times for years, even after being invalided out in the early weeks of the war. And whole families of brothers were not supposed to be permitted to enlist, to be wiped out; but if course they would all try to enlist.

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  David G November 12, 2022 at 13:52

  Craig, if you were struck by the passage about the “landscape littered with bleached bones of livestock and burned ruins of houses,” how about crediting the author?

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    craig Post author November 12, 2022 at 15:06

    It is in one of the linked articles David.

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  Rosemary MacKenzie November 12, 2022 at 14:44

  Thanks Craig, that is a very good account of the expulsion of the Acadians. I went through the Nova Scotian school system in the 1950s and this was part of the history curriculum and described as something we were and are not proud of – a very dark part of the history of the province. I had not seen a list of the names of the deported. These names are very common surnames in Nova Scotia today. Acadia in those days comprised of modern day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec up to the St Lawrence River. French and English are the official languages of New Brunswick today. Also, there are many French speaking communities around Nova Scotia in Yarmouth and the Acadian Shore, western Cape Breton Island to name a few. Many Acadians would have escaped, and hopefully returned from exile. The other horrific thing about the expulsion that indicates how political it was and not economic was the slaughter of all the animals belonging to the Acadians.

  Lunenburg County, where I live, was settled by many of the “foreign protestants”, mainly from southwest Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and parts of France. These people were enticed by the promise of land etc, but were politically supposed to counteract the Catholic influences. Geopolitics of the eighteenth century – as cruel, unjust and unnecessary as today.

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    pretzelattack November 12, 2022 at 14:54

    some of them are current surnames in Louisiana, too.

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    Theophilus November 12, 2022 at 15:07

    Yes it has echoes of the NATO backed treatment of ethnic Russians in south eastern Ukraine.

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  Rosemary MacKenzie November 12, 2022 at 14:51

  PS Many of the Highlanders deported from Scotland during the clearances came to Nova Scotia settling in Cape Breton Island, and Pictou among other places. Very strong Scottish traditions exist today in the form of Gaelic speaking, and cultural traditions. Scotland was hiring its Gaelic teachers from Nova Scotia a few years back. I remember a news item of a teacher offered a job in Scotland to teach Gaelic but the English Home Office denied her residence.

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  Theophilus November 12, 2022 at 15:02

  An old story that is very familiar, living in France but having relatives in N.S of Scottish descent. Genocide does not seem quite the word, more ethnic cleansing. Nova Scotia was vital for naval security. Some of them made it back to France where they were helped by Louis XV. Speaking from memory, there are some distinctive surviving farm buildings that the former colonists built in France.
  This is an interesting text for francophones – Les Canadiens en France et aux colonies – https://www.persee.fr/doc/outre_1631-0438_2004_num_91_342_4091 – although it is more about the former officers, minor aristocrats and merchants. They seem to have been treated quite fairly, considering the times.
  Of course the delicious blowback was that once the British government had removed much of the French military threat to the colonies, especially the great Fortress of Louisberg, the ungrateful rascals successfully demanded their independance… with help of the French. 21st century Imperialists take note. Things do not always turn out the way you expect but often in the end you get what you deserve.

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  Ian Hickinbottom November 12, 2022 at 15:35

  Another interesting article. I’ll just pick up on a few points if I can.

  I agree that remembrance day is now an excuse for promoting the glory of war. However as always in war its the innocent that mainly perish. This includes the cannon fodder of the British armed forces. They swear allegiance to the monarchy and have the ability to question orders drilled or beaten out of them. The perpetrators of war are those laying the wreaths at the cenotaph.

  I heard a Scottish historian on an In Our Time podcast a couple years ago, saying how the majority of the clearances were by Scottish Lairds and Clan leaders. Came as a bit of a shock. Not sure how much truth in it, but he was very knowledgeable.

  The British empire and other colonialist regimes have committed many atrocities over the centuries, murdering many millions. Something our ‘leaders’ conveniently forget.

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    Ebenezer Scroggie November 12, 2022 at 20:02

    ” the majority of the clearances were by Scottish Lairds and Clan leaders. Came as a bit of a shock. ”

    Sadly, true.

    More Scottish soldiers fought on the German side at Culloden than on the Jacobite side.

    That’s not why they won, but it is socially significant, even today.

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  john November 12, 2022 at 15:43

  Well said Craig.
  Regarding the Jacobean apocalypse – I am a lowlander, but lived in the early ’00s on Kintyre, where I was surprised to find that the betrayal perpetrated by the Campbell clan during that dark period was still remembered bitterly there.
  Their home, Inveraray Castle, occupies a beautiful sheltered location on the River Aray.
  As Wikipedia blandly asserts “The foundation stone of the new castle was laid in October 1746. In the 1770s, the village of Inveraray was demolished and rebuilt a short distance away, to give the castle a more secluded setting.”
  Anyone who has visited Inveraray out of season knows what a bad deal the villagers got, exposed to all weathers on the shore of Loch Fyne.

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  terence callachan November 12, 2022 at 16:19

  I agree wholeheartedly
  What happened to these people is criminal , Ireland and Scotland as well as so many others across this planet suffered at the hands of the English , im sick of their denial.