Expulsion of the Acadians

1755

British authorities in Nova Scotia rounded up 11,500 French Catholic farmers and shipped them to the thirteen colonies, to France, to Louisiana. Families were split on different boats; many drowned. The 'Grand Derangement' scattered an entire people - and seeded the bayous with the ancestors of the Cajuns. Longfellow's poem Evangeline, published a century later, turned the deportation into one of America's most familiar tragedies.