For centuries, the residents of Belle- 
lie have made their living from both 
the land and the sea. The Acadians, 
accustomed to an abundance of 
bread and milk, were said to be 
contemptuous of the local diet, 
whose staples were fish and cider. 
Caribbean. The three or four 
hundred Acadian families that had 
reached France by 1763 were living 
in the seaports — the best places for 
gathering information about other 
refugees. In particular, the Acadians 
living in Saint-Malo and Morlaix 
enjoyed the charity of the due de 
Nivernois, who was helpful in 
reuniting families separated over the 
previous eight years. Relinquishing 
such aid and leaving for regions not 
nearly so well placed for obtaining 
news from oceangoing vessels was a 
matter of considerable concern. 
To understand how grave this issue 
was for the Acadians, it should be 
noted that in the New World, the 
Acadians had enjoyed a high birth 
rate and a low death rate, mainly due 
to their plentiful food supply and to 
the absence of most of the major 
epidemic diseases. As the North 
American colony grew, each village 
in it came to be joined to all the 
others by a web of marriages. By 
1755 the descendants of a small 
number of original settlers were 
linked by extensive family 
relationships. The deportation, 
although it rarely separated husbands 
from wives or young children from 
their parents, broke apart these large 
extended families, separating older 
and younger generations and, above 
all, brothers and sisters. Records 
show that throughout their exile the 
Acadians searched relentlessly for 
their kin, gathering weeping on such 
occasions as the death of Rene 
Leblanc in Philadelphia, with only 16 
of his 102 children and grandchildren 
