Exiles
An Acadian Saga
by
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1 Chapeter 1 June, 1760 Six ships from Connecticut lie at anchor at the mouth of the Gaspereau. At the turn of the tide, just before dawn, the women and children are to be put in the boats and taken ashore. Most, in terror of the black water and ill from twenty-one severe days at sea, balk at stepping into the darkness from the security of the ship’s deck. The ship’s Captain, firm that no time be lost in the disembarkation, orders his seamen to seize any falterers and carry them bodily down the ladders and into the boats. Screaming children are slung in after the women while their men look on, unable to interfere. The children are quiet in the boats, clinging to any woman near them and whimpering softly. The women, shawls pulled tight around their shoulders, stare transfixed at the fog-haloed lantern at the bow, grimly marking the rhythmic clatter of oarlocks in the gun whales, and the forward surge at each stroke of the oars. As the boats find bottom, negro slaves sent ahead for the purpose appear by the gun whales and haul the boats further in. Not a word is exchanged as the women and children are helped into the icy, shin deep water and led ashore to a sheltering grove of trees a short distance up the shore. The women, abandoned in the mist, can see neither the land upon which they are to spend the rest of their lives nor the ships that brought them. They hear the shouts of the men in the distance and the panicked bellowing of the livestock as it is hoisted over the ships’ sides and lowered into the sea. “Stay amidst the trees,” they have been told. “Lest you be trampled.” They wait, staring into the gloom. The children huddle in their mothers’ skirts. Then, as desperate hooves find land, there is an uproar, terrifyingly close. The earth shudders and the children wail as the beasts stampede past the grove on either side, hulking phantoms leaping momentarily into view as they pass. Then, as quickly as it came, the danger passes. The women begin talking and disperse in pairs to gather driftwood for a cooking fire. Already, some of the men are ashore, landing the first of the provisions. The children relax and chase each other in and out of the mist.
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About the Book
Lured by the prospect of free land, a group of New Englanders emigrate to Nova Scotia in the spring of 1760 to claim land seized from the Acadians by the British. Weary of poverty and religious oppression, Connecticut farmer Zadoc Bennet hopes to build a peaceful new life there for his family.
But there is no sanctuary from war and revolution, and private tragedy stalks the family. On their first day ashore, one of their sons vanishes. Another son later succumbs to religious fanaticism and pays for his obsession with his life. Mercy, their mother, holds a secret fear close to her heart. Is she somehow at fault?
Life in Nova Scotia was to be a new beginning for the family, but the past cannot be undone. Their fates are inextricably entwined with that of Catherine Dupuis, an exiled Acadian woman with her own dark grief. She has suffered hatred, brutality and degradation, but she is determined to redeem what she has lost. Separated from her brother in the expulsion of the Acadians, she will stop at nothing to find him.
In a story set against the backdrop of pre-revolutionary North America, these humble people struggle to survive and prosper in a harsh new land.
About the Author
Don Bennett spent a career teaching in British Columbia before retiring with his wife to Haileybury, Ontario in 2009 He was a finalist in the 2006 CBC Literary Competition and THIS magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. He placed second in the 2012 Canada-wide Dr. William Henry Drummond Poetry Competition. Exiles is his second novel.