may be put to distressing this distressed people." Two of
the prisoners, however, while trying to escape, were shot by a
reconnoitring party.

At the beginning of November Winslow reported that he had sent off
fifteen hundred and ten persons, in nine vessels, and that more than six
hundred still remained in his district.[281] The last of these were not
embarked till late in December. Murray finished his part of the work at
the end of October, having sent from the district of Fort Edward eleven
hundred persons in four frightfully crowded transports.[282] At the
close of that month sixteen hundred and sixty-four had been sent from
the district of Annapolis, where many others escaped to the woods.[283]
A detachment which was ordered to seize the inhabitants of the district
of Cobequid failed entirely, finding the settlements abandoned. In the
country about Fort Cumberland, Monckton, who directed the operation in
person, had very indifferent success, catching in all but little more
than a thousand.[284] Le Guerne, missionary priest in this neighborhood,
gives a characteristic and affecting incident of the embarkation. "Many
unhappy women, carried away by excessive attachment to their husbands,
whom they had been allowed to see too often, and closing their ears to
the voice of religion and their missionary, threw themselves blindly and
despairingly into the English vessels. And now was seen the saddest of
spectacles; for some of these women, solely from a religious motive,
refused to take with them their grown-up sons and daughters."[285] They
would expose their own souls to perdition among heretics, but not those
of their children.

[Footnote 281: _Winslow to Monckton, 3 Nov. 1755_.]

[Footnote 282: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 283: _Captain Adams to Winslow, 29 Nov. 1755_; see also Knox,
I. 85, who exactly confirms Adams's figures.]

[Footnote 284: _Monckton to Winslow, 7 Oct. 1755_.]

[Footnote 285: _Le Guerne a Prevost, 10 Mars, 1756_.]

When all, or nearly all, had been sent off from the various points of
departure, such of the houses and barns as remained standing were
burned, in obedience to the orders of Lawrence, that those who had
escaped might be forced to come in and surrender themselves. The whole
number removed from the province, men, women, and children, was a little
above six thousand. Many remained behind; and while some of these
withdrew to Canada, Isle St. Jean, and other distant retreats, the rest
lurked i