seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
gave the name “Acadie or Nova 
Scotia” to the disputed territory lying 
between New England and New 
France. Most of the Europeans who 
came to settle there were French, but 
there were also a number with 
English, Scottish, or Irish heritage. 
Between 1604 and 1713, the colony 
changed hands fourteen times, being 
claimed now by France, now by 
England, and once by the 
Netherlands. The people who lived in 
Acadia developed their own 
distinctive form of French, but 
English was known, and the colony 
had close enough trade relations with 
Massachusetts to consider Boston to 
be “our friend, the enemy.” 
During the eighteenth century, the 
Acadian lands were seen as 
increasingly important by both the 
English and the French. In 1713 the 
Treaty of Utrecht made the majority 
of the Acadians the French-speaking, 
Catholic subjects of the Protestant 
English crown. The next forty years 
of strife saw the Acadians attempt to 
pursue a policy of neutrality, but to 
no avail: the French believed the 
Acadians ought to have a 
fundamental loyalty to France, and 
the English suspected that they 
might. Although by the mid- 
eighteenth century the Acadians 
were an independent-minded group 
that scorned the schemes of empires, 
in 1755 the English decided to 
evacuate them as a security measure. 
The governor of the territory 
attempted to deport the entire 
population, sending more than 10,000 
persons to other English colonies in 
the New World. Only a few thousand 
Acadians, including those who were 
still in French-controlled territory, 
escaped this deportation, an event the 
Acadians still call le grand 
derangement. 
For some of the Acadians, the 
deportation led back to the Old 
World, and by the conclusion of 
hostilities in 1763, some three to four 
thousand were established in the 
Atlantic ports of France as 
dependent refugees. These included 
approximately nine hundred persons 
who had had the misfortune of being 
dispatched to Virginia. The governor 
of that colony had refused to accept 
them, choosing instead to export 
them to England, where they had 
languished in detention camps as 
charges of the “Sick and Hurt 
Board” of the Admiralty. It was not 
until 1763, as part of the treaties 
ending the Seven Years’ War, that 
these families, among others, were 
shipped to France to join the 
refugees already there. 
Also under the treaties of 1763, 
the inhabitants and lands of Belle-Ile- 
en-Mer reverted to France, after 
having been in English hands for 
three years. The French quickly saw 
Belle-Ile as a place where some of 
the Acadian refugees might be 
resettled and returned to a 
productive, normal life. But the 
leaders of the Acadian exiles were 
bluntly unenthusiastic about this 
proposal. To a group that had 
suffered one deportation because 
their lands had become a 
battleground, the outstanding feature 
of Belle-Ile was its exposed position. 
that of Brittany. Although they knew 
how to fish, they were accustomed to 
consuming bread and milk and had 
contempt for a diet whose staples 
were fish and cider. They were 
accustomed to wood, not stone; 
forests, not quarries. The Acadians 
themselves wrote to the French 
officials to point out that given their 
almost total lack of experience with 
stone, they would need instruction 
and help from master stonemasons. 
In addition, the Acadians feared 
that resettlement on Belle-Ile would 
do further damage to their already 
disrupted family ties. The 
deportation of 1755 had split apart a 
closely knit community of more than 
10,000 people, and the majority of 
the exiles remained outside Europe, 
either in North America or the 
In a letter to the due d’Aiguillon, one 
of the French officials concerned 
with their resettlement, the Acadians 
complained that “Belle-Ile is 
evidently more exposed to enemy 
attack than any other place in the 
realm, and in all probability we 
would find ourselves [there] in a 
similar situation to the one that has 
placed us today in such painful 
straits.” 
The vulnerability of Belle-Ile was 
by no means the sole reason for the 
Acadians’ hesitation over the project. 
Very much North Americans, they 
saw little to sustain them on the 
wind-swept, nearly treeless island. As 
one French lawyer observed, the 
Acadians had lived in a country of 
abundance, with plentiful land and 
soil of infinitely better quality than 
Today, tourists are lured by the 
rustic charms of Belle-Ile, but the 
Acadians, deported from their 
homeland because of international 
conflicts, were reluctant to settle 
there. They felt that the island was 
vulnerable to attack, isolated from 
overseas communication, and 
deficient in resources. 
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