[ganong] INDIAN PLACE-NOMENCLATURE 44S 



times; in this country are many native place-names ending in -acadie; 

 therefore the two are (probably) one and the same. Dawson alone 

 feels the need for explaining the method by which the Micmac termin- 

 ation of local place-names could become transmuted into a general 

 name for the country, and his hypothetical explanation of the way the 

 early settlers would notice the termination -acadie and later use it as 

 Acadie has already been cited earlier, on page 440. Quite fatal, 

 however, to this explanation, is the fact that the name Acadie goes 

 back to a period anterior to the advent of settlers, — goes back at least 

 to the charter of de Monts, of 1603, a document which antedates by 

 one or two years any settlement of the country whatever. Thus the 

 word could not have come into use in the way that Dawson supposes. 

 Furthermore, there is a piece of direct evidence that the earlier settlers 

 did not know the name at all; for in 1616 Father Biard, who lived at 

 Port Royal, where all the settlers of Acadia were then collected, wrote 

 in his Relation that of the name Acadie "there no longer remains 

 any remembrance in the country" (Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, III, 

 41). Thus it seems clear that Acadie was used simply as an official 

 and map name, but was not in use among the first colonists, who 

 considered the country as a part of New France. Indeed, I cannot 

 find any trace of the use of Acadie by the residents until considerably 

 later. And if we substitute for the "settlers" in Dawson's explanation 

 the word "explorers," or "fishermen" the case is not helped, as the 

 evidence to follow will show. 



Let us now trace the name backward through the historical 

 records. It appears in numberless documents, treaties and maps 

 in an unbroken chain backwards, sometimes as Acadie (also Accadie, 

 Acadye), and sometimes as Acadia, the former representing the 

 French and the latter the English usage. The form Acadia I find 

 first in an English document of 1668 {these Transactions, VII, 1901, 

 ii, 185), where it clearly represents a legal form of the French 

 Acadie, presumably based upon the latinization of the latter in some 

 official document written in Latin. Back of that date we can trace 

 Acadie from document to document, without a break, to 1603, where, 

 as so often pointed out, it occurs as La Cadie in the commission of the 

 Sieur de Monts (copy in Grant and Biggar's translation of Lescarbot's 

 Histoire, Champlain Society, II, 211). Cotemporaneously, however, 

 it appears in the works of Champlain, who, in his well-known Voyages, 

 of 1613, has sometimes Acadie and sometimes Arcadie. In his earlier 

 Des Sauvages, however, published in 1604 but describing events of 1603, 

 he uses invariably Arcadie excepting in one case, where he has r Arcadie 

 {Laverdiere s edition, SI, 64, 115, 122, 123, 127), applying the name to 

 that very country which later bore the name Acadie. Thus in the 



