From St. John River across the Bay of Fundy to Digby Gut in Nova
Scotia is forty-five miles. For one hundred and thirty miles, the
North Mountain Ridge, elevated six hundred feet, stretches along the
bay upon the Nova Scotia shore, sharply notched down at Digby Gut, the
entrance to Annapolis Basin. This strait, barely a half-mile wide, is
cut two miles through the mountain ridge, having a tidal current of
six miles an hour, and within is a magnificent salt-water lake,
surrounded by forests sloping up the hillsides, and one of the
pleasantest sheets of water in the world. It is no wonder that De
Monts, when his colonists abandoned the dreary island in St. Croix
River, sought refuge here, and that his companion, Baron de
Poutrincourt, obtained a grant for the region. It is one of the most
attractive parts of Acadia, and as the old song has it:
"This is Acadia--this the land
That weary souls have sighed for;
This is Acadia--this the land
Heroic hearts have died for."
Digby is within the Gut, fronted by a long and tall wooden wharf that
has to deal with fifty feet of tide, its end being an enormous square
timber crib, built up like a four-story house. The town is noted for
luscious cherries and for "Digby Chickens," the most prized brand of
herrings cured by the "Blue-noses," and it has also developed into
quite an attractive watering-place. To the southwestward a railway
runs to Yarmouth, at the western extremity of Nova Scotia, a small but
very busy port, having steamer lines in various directions. To the
northeastward Annapolis Basin stretches sixteen miles between the
enclosing hills, gradually narrowing towards the extremity. Here, on
the lowlands adjoining Annapolis River, is the quaint little town of
Annapolis Royal and the extensive ramparts of the ancient fort that
guarded it, covering some thirty acres. This was the original French
capital of Acadia, and the first permanent settlement made by
Europeans in America north of St. Augustine, De Monts founding the
colony in 1605. He named it Port Royal, but the English Puritans a
century later changed this, in honor of their "good Queen Anne," to
Annapolis Royal. Almost from the first settlement to the final capture
by the Puritan expedition from Boston in 1710, its history was a tale
of battles, sieges and captures by many chieftains of the rival
nations. As the Marquis of Lorne in his Canadian book describes it:
"This is the story which is repeated with varying incidents through
all the long-drawn coasts of the old Acadia. We see, first, the forest
village of the Red Indians, with its stockades and patches of maize
around it; then the landing from the ships, under the white flag sown
with golden lilies, of armored arquebussiers and spearsmen; the
skirmishing and the successful French settlement; to be followed by
the coming of other ships, with the red cross floating over the
high-built sterns, and then the final conflict and the victory of the
British arms." Now everything is peaceful, and the people raise
immense crops of the most attractive apples for shipment to Europe.
East of Annapolis is the "Garden of Nova Scotia." The long ridge of
the North Mountain on the coast screens it from the cold winds and
fogs, while the parallel ridge of the South Mountain stretches for
eighty miles, and between these noble ranges, which are described as
"most gracefully moulded," is a broad and rich intervale extending to
the Basin of Minas and the land of Evangeline, which Longfellow has
made so sadly poetical. Good crops of hay grow on the fertile red
soils, which the farmers gather with their slowly-plodding ox-teams;
and of this region the poet sang mournfully:
"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms,
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate, answers the wail of the forest."
To-day, however, "the murmuring pines and the hemlocks" are not there,
excepting in stunted growth in occasional thickets, the land being
meadow and grain fields, with many orchards. Upon a low-lying
peninsula, washed by the placid waters of the Basin of Minas, is the
"Great Meadow," the Grand Pré of the unfortunate Acadians, where in
that early time they had reclaimed from the enormous tides some three
square miles of land, while south of the meadow, on somewhat higher
ground, was their little village. Beyond it the dark North Mountain
ridge stretches to the promontory of Cape Blomidon, dropping off
abruptly six hundred feet into the Basin of Minas. The contented
French lived secluded lives here, avoiding much of the ravages of the
wars raging elsewhere around the Bay of Fundy, and when France ceded
Nova Scotia to England in 1713 they numbered about two thousand. They
took the oaths of loyalty to the British crown, but in the subsequent
French and Indian wars there was much disaffection, and it was
determined in 1755 to remove all the French who lived around the Bay
of Fundy, numbering some eight thousand, so that a loyal British
population might replace them. In September the embarkation began from
Grand Pré, one hundred and sixty young men being ordered aboard ship.
They slowly marched from the church to the shore between ranks of the
women and children, who, kneeling, prayed for blessings upon them,
they also praying and weeping and singing hymns. The old men were sent
next, but the wives and children were kept till other ships arrived.
These wretched people were herded together near the sea, without
proper food, raiment or shelter for weeks, until the transports came,
and it was December before the last of them had embarked. In one
locality a hundred men fled to the woods, and soldiers were sent to
hunt them, often shooting them down. Many in various places managed to
escape, some getting to St. John River, while not a few went to
Quebec, and others found refuge in Indian wigwams in the forests.
There were seven thousand, however, carried on shipboard from the Bay
of Fundy to the various British colonies from New Hampshire to
Georgia, being landed without resources and having generally to
subsist on charity. To prevent their returning, all the French
villages around the Bay of Fundy were laid waste and their homes
ruined. In the Minas district two hundred and fifty houses and a
larger number of barns were burnt. Edmund Burke in the British
Parliament cried out against this treatment, saying: "We did, in my
opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretences that, in the eye of an
honest man, are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent,
deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern or to reconcile
gave us no sort of right to extirpate." The sad story of Grand Pré and
of Evangeline was historic before Longfellow's day, but he made it
immortal.