their families, hostages for the
peaceable conduct of the men. Inside were the brothers and husbands,
hostages for the good conduct of the families outside. Only in a few
places was there any rioting, and this was probably caused by the
brutality of the officers. Murray and Monckton and Lawrence refer to
their prisoners as "Popish recusants," "poor wretches," "rascals who
have been bad subjects." While the Acadians were to be deported so
they could never reunite as a colony, it was intended to keep the
families together and allow them to take on board what money and
household goods they possessed; but there were interminable delays for
transports and supplies. From September to December the deportation
dragged on, and when the Acadians, patient as sheep at the shambles,
became restless, some of the ships were sent off {236} with the men,
while the families were still on land. In places the men were allowed
ashore to harvest their crops and care for their stock; but harvest and
stock fell to the victors as burning hayricks and barns nightly lighted
to flame the wooded background and placid seas of the fair Acadian
land. Before winter set in, the Acadians had been scattered from New
England to Louisiana. A few people in the Chignecto region had escaped
to the woods of New Brunswick, and one shipload overpowered its
officers and fled to St. John River; but in all, six thousand six
hundred people were deported.

It is the blackest crime that ever took place under the British flag,
and the expulsion was only the beginning of the sufferers' woes. Some
people found their way to Quebec, but Quebec was destitute and in the
throes of war. The wanderers came to actual starvation. The others
wandered homeless in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in
Louisiana. After the peace of 1763 some eight hundred gathered
together in Boston and began the long march overland through the
forests of Maine and New Brunswick, to return to Acadia. Singing
hymns, dragging their baggage on sleighs, pausing to hunt by the way,
these sad pilgrims toiled more than one thousand miles through forest
and swamp, and at the end of two years found themselves back in Acadia.
But they were like ghosts of the dead revisiting scenes of childhood!
Their lands were occupied by new owners. Of their herds naught
remained but the bleaching bone heaps where the lowing cattle had
huddled in winter storms. New faces filled their old houses. Strange
ch