CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Arrival

The first chapter in the history of the CORMIER family in America begins with an act of seeming irrationality that makes the rest of the story possible. In the spring of 1644, during the first year of the reign of the boy king Louis XIV, a 34-year-old charpentier de navire, his wife, and two sons, one of them still an infant, left their native city of La Rochelle, France, to seek their fortune in the New World. They set sail aboard the Le Petit Saint-Pierre for Fort Saint-Pierre on Cape Breton Island in the colony of Acadia, bound as servants to Louis Tuffet, commander of the fort.01

La Rochelle was a prosperous Atlantic port at the time, its troubles in the terrible Wars of Religion long behind it. Trading vessels from all over the world could be found in its magnificent harbor, as could the smaller ships of the fishermen who crossed the Atlantic every spring to fill their nets in the teeming banks off the coast of North America. Certainly there was plenty of work in La Rochelle for a ship’s carpenter or for anyone associated with the maritime trades. So why did this ship’s carpenter leave the city of his birth and venture with his family to a struggling colony across a wide and dangerous ocean, to a colony which in its 40-year existence had seen more hardship and strife than happiness and prosperity?

This ship’s carpenter left no diary or cache of letters to give us an answer to this question. He was illiterate and thus unable to leave us his story even if he had wanted to. The best we can do to understand his motivation and why the CORMIER family came to America is to review the history of the place into which he cast his fortunes, the place we now call Nova Scotia but which he and his fellow Frenchmen called l’Acadie.

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The usual place to begin the story of the founding of the European New World is with the commercial revolution that swept through Europe in the centuries that followed the great Crusades to the Holy Land. In 1095 Pope Urban II stood before a council of bishops at Clermont in southern France and preached the First Crusade. The pontiff had learned that a new breed of infidels, the Seljuk Turks, had seized the Holy Land and refused to allow Christian pilgrims to visit the Holy Places. He urged the warriors of Christendom to strap on their swords, take up the cross of their crucified Redeemer, and hurry to the Holy Land to drive these Muslim infidels from Jerusalem. The knights of France and other Christian kingdoms took up the papal challenge, and four years later the Holy City fell to them in an orgy of blood and righteousness.

For two centuries the European knights clung to their principalities in the Holy Land, and for two centuries they tasted the luxuries of the Orient, literally. From far to the east came peppers, clove, cinnamon and nutmeg to please the palates of men who had tasted only salt in their food, as well as silks and jewels and every manner of luxury not easily found in Europe. In the 1200s, as the Christians gradually lost their grip on the Holy Land, Italian merchants opened a lucrative trade with the Muslim infidels to provide these Oriental luxuries for the wealthy consumers of Europe. By the 1300s, the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice dominated with their navies the Mediterranean trade routes that had not seen so much use since Roman times.

To other Europeans, this Italian monopoly of the Oriental trade was unacceptable. The tiny kingdom of Portugal, which faced the vast Atlantic to the west, was the first maritime power to try to circumvent Italian dominance in the Mediterranean by finding an all-water trade route to the East. Encouraged by the king’s brother, Prince Henry, Portuguese navigators in the 1400s made their way cautiously down the west coast of Africa in hopes of finding a way around the great continent and on to the Far East. Another, perhaps more compelling motivation, was the exploitation of Africa itself. What the Portuguese found in West Africa proved to be as lucrative as spices and silk—gold, ivory, jewels ... and slaves. In order to secure the flanks of their bases along the African coast, the Portuguese seized Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde Island, thrusting their economic and strategic interests deep into the Atlantic. Finally, in 1488, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Diaz discovered the tip of Africa. Ten years later Vasco da Gama ventured all the way to India via the tip of Africa and returned with ships filled with Oriental luxuries. The Portuguese now possessed their all-water route to unprecedented wealth and power.

It was an obscure Italian with a Great Idea who shook up the world again. Cristoforo Colombo was born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver who lost his boy to the lure of the sea. Young Columbus, as he is known to history, worked in the merchant fleet of his native city then switched his allegiance to Portugal. Sometime in the 1480s, after carefully (mis)calculating the circumference of the earth, he conceived his Great Idea—to sail due westward from Europe and reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic Ocean. He was confident that his skills at navigation and command could overcome all obstacles he would surely encounter in this dangerous voyage and give Portugal a much shorter route to the riches of the East. He presented his idea to his Portuguese masters, but a maritime commission rejected his calculations and refused to entrust a fleet to him. Undaunted, he moved to Spain but met similar rejection there. He refused to give up and eventually sold his idea to Queen Isabella of Castille, who, with her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon, had just conquered the Moors and thus established a certain degree of domestic tranquility in their kingdoms. Christian Spain was ready, Isabella believed, to compete in the Eastern trade. So Columbus became the admiral of a fleet of three ships which set sail from Palos in early August 1492. Two months later, on the sandy beach of San Salvador, in the present-day Bahamas, the history of the world was profoundly changed when Columbus reached "the Indies." Though Columbus himself never acknowledged the existence of the New World he had accidentally discovered, others did. Spanish conquistadors exploited Columbus’s great discovery, and by the early 1500s, gold and silver from America, as the New World came to be called, transformed Spain into the most powerful kingdom in Europe.

Portugal stumbled upon the New World in 1500 when Pedro Alvares Cabral, on his way to India to duplicate Da Gama’s voyage, was blown off course by mid-Atlantic winds and landed on the coast of present-day Brazil. The papal Treaty of Tordesillas six years before had awarded Portugal that part of the Atlantic east of a certain line of longitude down the middle of the ocean. The place where Cabral landed and promptly claimed for Portugal stood east of the treaty line. So even the Portuguese now had claims to exploit in what Europeans soon realized was an entirely New World.

Meanwhile, another Italian navigator, Giovanni Caboto of Venice, known to history as John Cabot, also had seized upon the idea of a cross-Atlantic voyage to the Indies. He moved to Bristol, England, and coaxed King Henry VII into authorizing a voyage to the East. Cabot reached "the Indies," probably at Cape Breton Island, in 1496, and explored the coast extensively. Now the English, too, possessed an early claim to North America. But, unlike Spain, which had settled its domestic difficulties on the eve of Columbus’s first voyage, England was still in turmoil from the recent War of the Roses and was still struggling with its old cross-Channel enemy, France, for possessions on the Continent. England thus failed to exploit its American claims for many decades, leaving Spain and Portugal the early winners in the imperial competition for the New World.

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France was a late comer to the competition for America’s riches, and, as in England, domestic turmoil held it back in its exploitation of the New World. Not until the 1520s did a French monarch, Francois I, authorize a voyage to America. Yet another Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazano, explored the North American coast in 1524, seeking the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient. He claimed for France the entire coast of North America, which he called "Arcadia."02 A decade later, in 1534, the Frenchman Jacques Cartier discovered the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the magnificent river that flowed into it. On subsequent voyages into the early 1540s, he explored the river as far up as present-day Montreal and spent a hard, cold winter at the site of Quebec. Cartier’s discoveries and explorations in the St. Lawrence region gave France its first undisputed claim in North America. But, like England and unlike Spain and Portugal, no imminent settlements came of it.

The Protestant revolt that had erupted in Europe a generation after Columbus’s discovery of the New World consumed France as much as it did Germany and England in a maelstrom of rancor and violence. The French theologian Jean Calvin was as important a figure in the struggle against Catholic authority as was the founder of Protestantism, the German priest Martin Luther. Run out of France in the year of Cartier’s first voyage to North America, Calvin took refuge in Geneva, but his ideas seeped back into this native country. French Protestants, known as Huguenots, challenged the authority of the pope and preached what Catholics insisted were heretical doctrines. As a result of these intractable theological differences, a series of nine Wars of Religion raged through France from 1562 to 1598. "At times," a modern historian has written, "they brought the French monarchy very low; the nobility came near to mastering it. Yet, in the end, aristocratic rivalries benefited a crown which could use one faction against another. Meanwhile, the wretched population of France had to bear the brunt of disorder and devastation. In 1589 a member of a junior branch of the royal family, Henry, ruler of the little Spanish kingdom of Navarre, became (after the murder of his predecessor) Henry IV of France and inaugurated the Bourbon line whose descendants still claim the French throne. He had been a Protestant, but now accepted Catholicism as the condition of succession, recognizing the religion most Frenchmen would stand by. The Protestants were given guarantees which left them a state within a state, the possessors of fortified towns where the king’s writ did not run."03

One of these Protestant strongholds was La Rochelle, the busy port on the Atlantic coast.

Despite domestic upheaval, the Huguenots, at least, tried to establish French colonies in the New World. In 1555, as war still sputtered between Catholics and Protestants in central Europe, Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, a powerful Huguenot leader, sent an expedition to establish a colony of his fellow Protestants on an island in the harbor of present-day Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Coligny ignored the fact that Portugal had long claimed this area. The next year, Coligny sent 300 reinforcements to the colony, "many picked personally by Jean Calvin himself." The colony languished, and in 1560 the Portuguese attacked the settlement and hanged all of its survivors. Two years later, Coligny tried again, this time in an area claimed by Spain. In 1562 he established the settlement of Fort Caroline in northern Florida and in 1564 Charles Fort, near the Savannah River in present-day Georgia. The devoutly Catholic Spanish would have none of this. In 1565 they attacked Fort Caroline and massacred the entire settlement. They did the same thing to Charles Fort the following year then erected Spanish strongholds at St. Augustine and at St. Catherine’s Island to keep Protestants away from their Catholic realm. In 1572, in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France, Catholic militants murdered Coligny along with other prominent Huguenots, "thus bringing to an end the first phase of French transatlantic expansion."04

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Not until well into the reign of Henry IV did the French attempt another lodgment in America. It is then that the history of Acadia begins in earnest.

In 1604 the king granted Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts, a distinguished member of his court, "extensive rights to settlement, trade, and fishery" in the area the French called Acadie. At that time Acadia meant to the French the area which comprised not only the peninsula of present-day Nova Scotia but also northern Maine, all of New Brunswick, St. Edward’s Island (called Ile St.-Jean by the French), Cape Breton Island (Ile Royale), the Magdalen Islands in the Bay of St. Lawrence, and the southern coast of the Gaspe peninsula in present-day Quebec province.05

Like Coligny, De Monts established a settlement in territory claimed by a rival nation. Unlike Coligny, De Monts chose not to remain in France but to go himself to oversee the establishment of his new holdings. He crossed to Acadia in late spring of 1604 with 79 men; no women and certainly no families accompanied this venture. This was to be first and foremost a commercial enterprise bankrolled by an association of merchants, both Catholic and Protestant, back in France. With De Monts were Jean de Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt and Francois Grave du Pont, two of his associates in the venture, and Samuel de Champlain, a noted navigator and geographer and friend of De Monts from their native region south of La Rochelle.06 "A brief survey of the coasts of southwestern Nova Scotia, including the Annapolis Basin, led de Monts to cross the Bay of Fundy [which he called Baie Francoise] and settle on an island at the mouth of the St. Croix River" at the present-day border of Maine and New Brunswick.07

Poutrincourt and Grave du Pont returned to France later that year, leaving De Monts and the others to spend a terrible winter in the new settlement on Dotchet Island. At least 35 of them perished from scurvy. The following June, Grave du Pont returned to the St. Croix with two ships, vital supplies, and reinforcements. De Monts ordered an exploration of the coast south to present-day Cape Cod to find a more suitable place to settle. But he chose to move instead across the Bay of Fundy to the present Annapolis Basin, where, in the summer of 1605, he established Port Royal—the oldest more or less continuously occupied French settlement in the New World and the heart of the French colony of Acadia.08

De Monts erected a small fort with several buildings on the north side of the basin, opposite Goat Island. The following winter, Champlain remained again with the settlers, this time with Grave du Pont. De Monts and Poutrincourt returned to France. De Mont stayed in France and sent Poutrincourt back to Acadia the following July with more supplies and men. To his chagrin, Poutrincourt found Port Royal virtually abandoned when he returned in July of 1606.

Most of the settlers had gone to the other side of peninsula, to Canso, site of a well-known fishermen’s rendezvous, where they were certain to meet ships from the homeland. The fishing trade at Canso and other harbors along the Acadian coast had been flourishing for decades. "First in dozens, then in scores, and finally in hundreds," notes an historian of the period, fishermen from western Europe "came to the coast of Newfoundland and gradually to the offshore banks and the coasts of Greater Acadia in search of codfish" throughout the sixteenth century. "Norman and Breton, West-country English and Basque, Spanish and Portuguese, they gradually added to the technique of packing the cod down in heavy salt on their vessels (the ‘green’ or ‘wet’ fishery) the practice of curing their catch on shore, in the open air soon after catching, with much less salt. This (the ‘dry’ fishery) made a more valuable product and required landing on, and learning the nature of, the rocky Atlantic shoreline. Disembarking only briefly in the summers at first, they began to find the shore phase of their work important enough to require leaving men to winter in the new land in order to protect structures and to prepare for the following season…. We have records of many who virtually lived their lives in such a fishery and whose knowledge of the coasts of today’s Atlantic Canada must often have been profound. Lescarbot described a meeting at Canso, in 1607, with a French fisherman who was on his forty-second annual voyage to the area."09

But Poutrincourt was not in Acadia to establish a fishery settlement. He ordered De Monts’s men back to Port Royal to sow vegetables and grain to feed the new settlement. "A lime kiln was built, a forge set up and charcoal made for it, and paths were cut from the settlement to the fields and the valley. Tradesmen of many kinds spent a brief part of the day at their trades, the rest of it fishing, hunting, and gathering shellfish. They had a good winter, and toward the end of March [1607] started sowing seeds and building a water-powered gristmill to take care of the anticipated harvest."10

Then disaster struck. In the summer of 1607 news arrived in Port Royal that the king had withdrawn De Monts’s concessions in Acadia. Court politics threatened, not for the last time, the existence of the colony. The year before, "merchants and shipbuilders from Dieppe and La Rochelle succeeded in having De Monts’s 10 year trade and commerce rights in Acadia annulled just when the entire venture was beginning to look promising."11 De Monts gave up and stayed in France. Port Royal was no longer necessary. That autumn "the longest and most elaborate post-Viking settlement of Europeans on the North American continent north of Florida was abandoned—in the same year that Jamestown was established" by an English company of merchants 800 miles to the south in Virginia.12

Champlain, however, remained in North America and turned his attention westward, to the interior of the continent. The year after Port Royal was abandoned, he founded a new settlement at Quebec on the site of the old Indian town of Stadacona, where Cartier had wintered on the St. Lawrence River 70 years before. Thus began the French colony of Canada, which would be based on the lucrative fur trade, not on the vagaries of agriculture. The little fort at Port Royal lay abandoned for three years, a victim of the elements, until politics in France fashioned a new monopoly for Acadia and resurrection of the settlement in 1610.

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This time it was Poutrincourt who would risk his fortunes in Acadia. He brought with him one of his sons, Charles de Biencourt, who returned to France in 1611 with a cargo of furs then hurried back to Port Royal with reinforcements and two unwelcome Jesuit priests. Poutrincourt returned to France in 1612 on the annual voyage back to the homeland. Meanwhile, the ministers of Marie de Medici, widow of the recently-assassinated Henry IV and regent for her 10-year-old son, King Louis XIII, granted a concession in Acadia to the son of Grave du Pont, who established himself on the St. John River in present-day New Brunswick. In 1613, the Marquise de Guercheville, a champion of the Jesuits, founded another Acadian settlement at St.-Sauveur on Mount Desert Island, off the present coast of Maine. Conflicting claims as well as politics in the mother country threatened once again the future of the Acadian venture.13

No sooner had these rival Acadian settlements put down roots than a greater menace came sailing up the coast, flying the flag of England. Samuel Argall, a Welsh freebooter and the dangerous right arm of Jamestown’s new marshal, Sir Thomas Dale, sailed from Virginia in 1613 and destroyed the infant settlement on Mount Desert Island. In November he returned and fell up Port Royal, "looted and burned the … settlement, dispersed its people, and destroyed its livestock."14

When Poutrincourt returned from France in 1614, he found only a skeleton of a settlement at Port Royal. A decade of effort had produced little for him and his associates. He had his fill of this Acadian business. He gave up and returned to France. But his son Biencourt and a handful of other settlers, including Claude de Saint-Etienne de La Tour and his son Charles, refused to abandon Acadia. They had seen the rich potential of the trade in furs and were determined to supply the wealthy merchants of La Rochelle with the precious commodity. Poutrincourt soon after was killed in France in a bloody civil war, so Biencourt inherited his father’s title as well as his claims in Acadia.15

The next ten years of Acadian history were dominated by the efforts of Biencourt and the La Tours to profit from the fur trade. Without the local Indians, however, their efforts to maintain a French presence in Acadia would not have been possible. At first the French were no more impressed with the local Algonkian-speaking Indians than by any other natives they encountered. The Mi’kmaq, called the Souriquois by the French at first, "were a small group thinly scattered over a large area when the seventeenth century opened. Contacts throughout the previous century, chiefly through fishermen, had prepared them for trading relationships with the French," but they were little acculturated to French habits and attitudes when De Monts and his associates first encountered them. They numbered then about 3,000 over an area of roughly 30,000 square miles. The French put them to good use for their own purposes, and the Mi’kmaq responded in kind. "The chief services of the Micmac to the French, consistent with the maintenance of their own basic culture patterns, were as guides, paddlers, hunters, and procurers of the furs and feathers for which a market existed in Europe, the St. Lawrence settlements, or the English colonies to the south." This largely amicable relationship with the French was sealed by the efforts of Catholic missionaries. "The slow, but ultimately universal, attachment of the Micmac to the Roman Catholic faith reinforced their ties to the French. These ties were maintained assiduously by missionaries largely based on Quebec," who were not above sending their native charges on the warpath against English settlements.16

With the death of Biencourt at Port Royal in 1623, only the La Tours remained to carry on trade with the Indians. Charles La Tour claimed that Biencourt had bequeathed to him his rights to the colony. But it almost did not matter anymore. The English reappeared in greater force, and this time they came to stay.17

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Virginia, too, had endured its share of troubles after its founding in 1607. From the beginning the English exhibited a remarkable ineptness in dealing with the Algonkian-speaking natives who lived in the vicinity of Jamestown. In the first years of the settlement, mostly as a result of incompetent leadership and Indian depredations, the death toll among the settlers was astonishingly high. The introduction of tobacco cultivation as a profitable venture and the conversion of Princess Pocahontas to Christianity after her kidnapping by the resourceful Argall were lucky strokes for the hard-pressed English during the administration of Thomas Dale. By 1619 they even managed to export the institution of representative assembly to Virginia and allowed a cargo of Africans who had arrived on a Dutch ship at Jamestown to become indentured servants. But the peace that followed the princess’s marriage to the Englishman who had introduced tobacco to the colony was shattered in March of 1622 when the Indians under a formidable new leader massacred hundreds of the colonists in every settlement but Jamestown. The king’s ministers soon took over administration of the colony from a defeated Virginia Company. By then, English Separatists had founded a colony of their own near Cape Cod in 1620—only 300 miles from Port Royal, closer to Acadia than to Virginia! These Pilgrims were more adept at relations with the Indians than the Virginia pioneers had been. And now two English colonies offered a potential threat to the tenuous French hold on Acadia.18

To make matters worse for the French in North America, in 1621 King James I of England (who also was King James VI of Scotland) rewarded one of his Scottish friends with a generous grant—Acadia and Canada! Sir William Alexander was Count of Sterling and a prominent member of the House of Lords. In 1622 and 1623 he ventured to Acadia, which he called "Nova Scotia," explored along its coast and made landfall in Newfoundland but did not settle his grant … just yet. Not until 1628 or 1629 did he establish a Scottish settlement at Port Royal. In the latter year his associates, the Kirke brothers of Scotland, forced Champlain to give up the crown jewel of French North America, the settlement at Quebec. A third British settlement was established in the region, on Cape Breton Island in 1629. The story of French Acadia, and French Canada for that matter, could have ended there and then. But the French, despite years of bad luck and neglect, were unwilling to give up their holdings in North America. The Treaty of St.-Germain-en-Laye in 1632 ended hostilities between the two old antagonists. The treaty also provided that the British return Acadia and Canada to the French.19

In the meantime, life had become dangerously complicated for the hard-pressed La Tours. Claude, the father, seems to have been captured in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by one of the Kirke brothers. Sir William offered him and his son titles of nobility in exchange for the outposts they controlled in Acadia. This probably meant little to Charles, who seldom remained in one place. "After the death of the … Sieur de Biencourt," wrote an enemy of Charles about his exploits during this time, "Charles Latour travelled the woods with 18 or 20 men, mingled with the savages and lived an infamous and libertine life, without any practice of religion, not even bothering to baptize the children they procreated and instead abandoned them to their poor, miserable mothers as the coureurs de bois still do today." These half-breed children, called metis by the French, "became some of the staunchest allies of the first French families of Acadia." Many of them were baptized by French missionaries and clung to the faith of their fathers. They diligently pursued the trade in furs that sealed the relationship between the worlds of their fathers and their mothers.20

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After Canada and Acadia reverted to France, the powerful minister of King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, organized an expedition to reestablish French presence in North America under his cousin, Isaac de Razilly of Touraine. Razilly was named "Lieutenant-General of all of New France (Canada) and Governor of Acadia." The Company of New France, a powerful trading organization founded by Richelieu in 1627 to organize the revenues in cod fishing and the fur trade in French North America, would direct Razilly’s efforts.

Razilly’s expedition contained three ships full of men and supplies and arrived at La Heve, now La Have, near present-day Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic coast, in September 1632. Razilly left the settlers at La Heve then hurried to Port Royal to take possession of the old post from the surviving Scots, most of whom returned to Britain. He seized the fort at Penobscot, Maine, by force soon afterwards. After 18 years of neglect and British interference, French suzerainty in Acadia finally was restored.21

Razilly next had to deal with the troublesome Charles La Tour, who considered himself master of all Acadia and had considerable influence with the Indians. Razilly was forced to compromise with his clever compatriot. He would remain with his settlers at La Heve while La Tour and his men could retain their outposts at Cape Sable at the southern end of the peninsula and at Pentagouet and Machias in present-day Maine, from which they could pursue their lucrative fur trade. Razilly also granted La Tour a large concession centered on the St. John River in present-day New Brunswick. La Tour later built Fort Jemseg up the river to secure his rights to the area. Fur-bearing animals now were more plentiful in the western woods of the mainland than on the over-hunted peninsula. Razilly was determined to establish an agriculture-based settlement at La Heve as well as an entrepot for furs and codfish. La Tour was interested only in the fur trade, and Jemseg was a well-placed, well-protected headquarters from which to pursue his efforts.22

Razilly brought with him two associates who would play prominent roles in Acadian history. Charles de Menou de Charnissay, Sieur d’Aulnay, Razilly’s chief lieutenant, was 36 when he arrived at La Heve. Nicolas Denys was 34. Razilly granted them concessions also. D’Aulnay took charge of the settlers, who now for the first time included women and families, and directed the agricultural efforts of the colony. Denys, "an accomplished businessman and tireless trader," took charge of the Acadian fisheries, the fur trade, and a new lumber trade. His concessions extended along the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Canso all the way up to the Gaspe Peninsula. He established his headquarters at Chedabucto, now Guysborough, Nova Scotia, near Canso, and opened a fishing port at Port Rossignol, now Liverpool, Nova Scotia, just down the coast from La Heve. In the 1640s he built a post at Miscou, at the entrance of the Baie des Chaleurs in present-day northern New Brunswick. His holdings eventually included Cape Breton Island, where he built Fort Saint-Pierre in the early 1640s.23

Under such vigorous leadership, the resurrected Acadian colony held every promise of success. Only a single incident during Razilly’s short time at the helm of the Acadian venture threatened the colony. By 1632, the year Razilly commenced his settlement at La Heve, the English had established yet another colony along the wide swath of the North American coast—Massachusetts Bay, centered on Boston in 1630. The founders of this colony were dour, exceedingly righteous, extraordinarily hardworking mainstream Puritan dissidents whom the new English king, Charles I, was glad to be rid of by granting them a charter to establish their "City upon a Hill." Boston, up the coast from the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, had a flawless harbor and thus every chance of permanence. Other Puritan settlements appeared at Naumkeag and Salem. New England was there to stay. It was only a matter of time before these good Puritans clashed with their papist enemies up the coast. In 1634 a Boston merchant named Allerton sailed to Machias, in present-day Maine, between Pentagouet and the St. Croix River, to rescue three Englishmen whom La Tour was holding there and to assert his claim to the outpost. La Tour and Razilly informed the Bostonians that English rights extended up the coast of present-day Maine only as far as the Kennebec River. This left Pentagouet, Machias, the St. Croix and St. John rivers squarely in French Acadia. There the matter ended … for now.24

Unfortunately, Razilly died suddenly at La Heve in 1635, and, again, Acadia was thrown into confusion. To the chagrin of La Tour and Denys, D’Aulnay instantly took over Razilly’s estate and assumed all of his rights in the colony. La Tour insisted that D’Aulnay guarantee to him, as Razilly had done, rights to the Pentagouet outpost. Denys continued his activities developing the flourishing fisheries and the fur and lumber trades on his concessions. In 1636, D’Aulnay departed La Heve, though the settlement there had done well under his leadership, and moved his headquarters to Port Royal, where he insisted there was more arable land and other advantages over La Heve. Almost all of the settlers at La Heve followed him to Port Royal in the next few years. This put D’Aulnay’s headquarters perilously close to La Tour’s seat at Jemseg across the bay. In 1638 La Tour’s powerful friends in Paris acquired for him the title of Lieutenant-Governor of Acadia which he was to share with D’Aulnay. But the Sieur d’Aulnay would have none of that. He and La Tour quarreled bitterly, and virtual civil war erupted in Acadia.25

La Tour made the first move by seizing a ship D’Aulnay had sent to Pentagouet to assist the settlers there against English threats. In 1640 La Tour took two ships to Port Royal to capture the place, but D’Aulnay arrived from Pentagouet in time to capture La Tour and his men instead. The tables then turned on La Tour back in France. In 1641 the French court, now dominated by Cardinal Mazarin, revoked La Tour’s concessions and summoned him to Paris to answer charges against his conduct, which he refused to do. D’Aulnay was named "Governor and Lieutenant-General of the entire coast of Acadia from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Virginia."26 This left not only La Tour but also Denys at the mercy of D’Aulnay, who soon declared that Deny’s holdings along the Gulf of St. Lawrence now were his. In 1642, with La Tour’s refusal to appear before the royal court, D’Aulnay was authorized to seize La Tour and force him to return to France. La Tour holed up in his fort at Jemseg and sought assistance from his former associates, the English. He did this through his Huguenot merchant friends in La Rochelle. The Boston merchants understandably did not trust the daring Frenchman, so at first they refused to help him in his struggle with D’Aulnay. However, the Puritans and Pilgrims did continue to trade with La Tour, and in August 1643 they joined him in an assault on Port Royal with four ships and two armed frigates. D’Aulnay and the settlers could not resist such a formidable assault. The raiders "’wounded several men, killed three others and took one captive. They killed a quantity of livestock and took a ship loaded with furs, powder and food.’"27 D’Aulnay, who managed to escape the raid, hurried to France to inform the authorities of La Tour’s treachery. On March 6, 1644, the French court declared Charles La Tour an outlaw and a pirate.28

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It was into this maelstrom of violence and intrigue that Robert CORMIER appeared with his family on Cape Breton Island in the spring of 1644.

That the island on which he settled was named after the ancient French region of Brittany was entirely appropriate for a CORMIER. The family name our ship’s carpenter took with him to North America appears to be an ancient one in Brittany. The word "cormier" in French refers to the sorb apple tree, "a tree of very hard wood," one source avers.29 Writes another researcher of the family’s history: "In a search of the records … with the President of the Saint Malo (France) Historical Society, the Very Reverend Canon Descottes, has shed new light on our CORMIER ancestors, indicating that our forefathers hailed from the province of Brittany, and more specifically from the Department of Ile et Velaine, France, and most probably from the town of Saint Aubin du CORMIER, according to the conclusion of the Very Reverend Canon. The record states that the town was founded in the early Middle Ages by a Sieur Saint Malo Becheral les Aubin du CORMIER. Evidently, the name with time, was shortened to du CORMIER and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to just plain CORMIER. Thus, as the good Canon pointed out, we are descendants of French nobility, our ancestors having been granted that large tract of land known today as Saint Aubin-du-CORMIER in 1225 by Louis IX, better known as St. Louis."30

"The first CORMIERs were lords of Courneuve (Brittany) and la Vieuville (Brittany)" and may have been knighted as early as 1225, the same source goes on. "It can be concluded from the records that some of the CORMIER clan lived in Saint Malo in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, namely one Richard CORMIER, Sieur de Perron, who was captain of a vessel; one Francois, Sieur de Bellevant, an outstanding Malouin who was commander of of [sic] the illustrious frigate "Saint Malo" and a certain Thomas Olivier CORMIER, a well known citizen of Saint Malo. The name CORMIER is still quite prominent in the Department of ile et Vilaine, also in the Department of the Loire particularly in the towns of Saint Servan sur Mer and Saint Aubin du CORMIER."31

Another source claims that Nicolas CORMIER served as a district attorney in Rennes, the ancient capital of Brittany, and attained the status of a nobleman in the late 1300s.32 "A certain Yves CORMIER was secretary of King Louis in 1584. He was succeeded in the same position by his son Pierre," says another source.33

Like most medieval families whose members claimed nobility, the CORMIERs boasted a family coat of arms: a wide gold chevron surrounded by three silver crescents surmounting a shield of red.34

The ancestors of the CORMIERs probably were Cymric Celts of the ancient region known as Armorica. They fought and were defeated by Julius Caesar and his Roman legions in the first century B.C.E. They stubbornly refused to be Romanized, however, and maintained their ancient traditions. In the fifth and sixth centuries, after the fall of Rome, Britons (Celtic natives of Great Britain) took refuge in the northwestern part of Armorica, fleeing from the Germanic invaders of their island. These Britons were Christians and gradually converted the Armorican Celts to their faith. Armorica came to be called Bretagne, or Brittany, after these British refugees. Although most of the Bretons became devout western Christians, they refused to be conquered by earthly kingdoms. Charlemagne and his army of Franks defeated them in the late eighth century, but they eventually won their independence from Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald. Brittany became a dukedom in the tenth century and remained virtually independent of France throughout the Middle Ages. Aubin du CORMIER was the site of a battle fought in 1488 between the Bretons and the French.35 Not until 1532 did this stronghold of Celtic culture become a formal part of the Kingdom of France.36

Sometime probably in the late Middle Ages, for reasons lost to history, one or more CORMIERs left their ancient homeland and ventured south into the region of Aunis. Though their ancestors may have been noblemen, the fact of their migration gives a clue that these CORMIERs probably were of a lower social status. Some of them drifted inevitably to the port of La Rochelle. At least one of them took up the trade of carpenter.37

Robert CORMIER was born in La Rochelle in 1610, the son of Abraham CORMIER, who was born in Dieppe, Normandy, in 1585, and Catherine LeMayne of LaRochelle.38   Robert may have taken up the trade of his father. At the age of 24, in 1634, he married Marie Piraude in La Rochelle. Their son Thomas was born there two years later. In 1643 they had another son, Jean.

Later in that year or early in the next year, Robert and Marie made the fateful decision that wrote a new chapter in the history of the CORMIER family. A careful reading of the document that Robert "signed" in a notary’s office in La Rochelle in early January 1644 may give us a clue as to why they left their homeland and ventured to Acadia.

Personally established Noble man M. Andre Tuffet, Parliamentary Lawyer occupying the Presidential seat of this city, Honorables Auger, Ducaharin and Dominique de Chevery, merchants living in this city (La Rochelle, France) on one part and Robert CORMIER, carpenter and Marie Paraude, his wife, and Thomas CORMIER, their son, living in this city forming the other or second part. The said parties of their own free will have made and passed between them the following: It is to be understood that the said CORMIER, Piraude, his said wife, and their said son shall be bound as they have promised to embark the first request of Sirs Tuffet, Descharin and de Chevery upon the boat known as the Little St. Pierre (Peter) of whom Pierre Poiliau is Master, to said Cape Breton Island in the Country of New France and to work for the said Sirs Tuffet, Ducharin and de Chevery in his trade as carpenter and the other chores they shall be commanded to perform by Sir Louis Tuffet of Ft. St. Pierre on the said Island towards those ends shall be obliged to obey and follow entirely those orders during a lapse of the next three consecutive years, which shall begin the day they embark and shall terminate the day they embark for their return, the said three years having ended and this for the sake of the sum of one hundred and twenty three pounds for each year, for the first of the said years the said Sir Tuffet, Ducharin and de Chevery have presently paid in advance the sum of (?) the balance shall be paid to them or to their order one month after the return of the said ship, deductions shall me made of what ever received on the said Island and it is accorded and expressly convened that the cases be that the said CORMIER and his said wife disobey or have rebelled against Sir Tuffet’s clerk or other governing bodies, they shall be deprived of theire wages and liable for all fixed expenses, damages and interest between the said parties, for the carrying out of the present agreement the parties of the second part have obligated to one another their present and future belongings and likewise the said CORMIER his person to serve-prison for royal coins and have ? (etc.) judged and condemned (etc.) Signed and sealed in the undersigned notary’s study in La Rochelle before noon the eighth day of January, one thousand six hundred and fourty four before Francois Moreau, practioner and Martin de Hanagillaque, clerk, living in this city. The said CORMIER and his said wife declare not able to write.39

Two and a half months later, perhaps on the eve of their departure for Acadia, the CORMIERs signed a codicil to their indenture that revealed another detail of the make up of their family.

On the twenty-sixth day of March, one thousand six hundred and fourty four, it has been convened between the said parties Robert CORMIER and his said wife shall be allowed to bring with them to the Island of Cape Breton their twenty-month old son, who shall be nourished and cared for on the said island without he be entitled to claim any salary. The said CORMIER declared not able to sign. X.40

But, again, we must ask the nagging question: Why did this humble carpenter and his wife agree to sign an indenture with the hard-pressed associates of Nicolas Denys and venture to a colony noted mostly for its failures and now plagued by civil conflict? Was he ignorant of the almost decade-long struggle between his new seigneurs and the Sieur d’Aulnay? Did he do it for the money—123 French pounds per year—because he was frightfully in debt? Had he committed a crime and sought to escape a prison sentence by signing an indenture and serving his nation’s interests in Acadia?41 Perhaps Robert’s skill as a master carpenter caught the attention of Denys’s associates and they recruited our ancestor to help construct Fort Saint-Pierre and to build new ships for the Denys enterprises there.42

No matter, there he was, boarding the Petite Saint-Pierre with his wife and two young sons. Soon he was pursuing his craft at Fort Saint-Pierre, where he no doubt found plenty of work in the frontier post. Luckily for him that place was on the periphery of the internecine struggle raging in Acadia.

When his contract expired, Robert CORMIER was free to return to La Rochelle. But this apparently he did not do. In 1650, he and Marie and son Thomas, now 14, and perhaps Jean, who would have been 7, settled near Port Royal, where they probably took up farming in the growing community of colonists there. For reasons we can only guess, these first CORMIERs in America chose to remain in this brave New World and pursue their destiny as Acadians.43

~

At Port Royal, Robert CORMIER would have been a closer witness to the long, bitter struggle between D’Aulnay, La Tour, and Denys. In April of 1645, the year after Robert’s arrival in Acadia, D’Aulnay, with reinforcements from France, had assaulted La Tour’s stronghold at Jemseg on the St. John River. La Tour was in Boston at the time, intriguing with his old friends. Madame La Tour and 50 of her husband’s men valiantly resisted the attack. After three days of fighting, D’Aulnay rushed the fort, losing 33 men in the struggle. D’Aulnay hanged many of La Tour’s men "as an example and as a lesson to posterity of such an obstinate rebellion," and forced Madame La Tour to witness the atrocity. She died three months later. La Tour "roved the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a privateer, before taking refuge in Quebec with Governor Montmagny."44

Having vanquished La Tour, D’Aulnay turned on his other former associate, Nicolas Denys. He seized Miscou on Chaleurs Bay and threatened Denys’s holdings on Cape Breton Island.45 By then, Robert CORMIER had left Fort Saint-Pierre and moved to Port Royal, essentially moving from Denys’s sphere of influence into the heart of D’Aulnay’s Acadian fiefdom. Then fate caught up to the Sieur d’Aulnay and threw the colony into chaos again.

By 1650 D’Aulnay’s control of Acadia stood unchallenged. In 1647 he had been declared Governor General and Siegneur of Acadia by decree of the new king, Louis XIV (for whom his mother, Anne of Austria, served as regent since the king was only 9 years old at the time). The only glitch for D’Aulnay in this decree was that Denys retained his rights to what was left of his holdings. Nevertheless, the assumption by D’Aulnay of La Tour’s lucrative empire brought him great wealth and undisputed power. He turned his attention to his original purpose in Acadia, improving the agriculture settlements around Port Royal.

One successful innovation that D’Aulnay encouraged amongst the settlers was the dyking of the extensive salt marshes in the upper Port Royal River basin to transform them into hay fields and eventually into fields of grain, an innovation that eventually transformed the Acadian colony into an agricultural paradise. One day in 1650 D’Aulnay paddled alone upriver from Port Royal to visit one of the dyking operations. Somehow his canoe foundered over a wide, deep mudflat and he died trying to extricate himself from the mire. Indians found his body and brought it to the fort. He left a widow and eight children, including four sons who would perish on French battlefields in the decades to come.46

Suddenly the Acadians had lost their most important leader. To be sure, his ambition, greed and aggressiveness had caused chaos in the colony when he attacked first La Tour and then Denys. But it was D’Aulnay more than anyone who had insured the survival of the struggling colony. He had encouraged families to put down roots at La Heve then at Port Royal to create an agricultural foundation on which to build a colonial enterprise that could endure. His sudden death left the colony in great confusion. His leadership was gone. His creditors were many. It was anyone’s guess who would replace him.

~

One wonders if Robert CORMIER now questioned the wisdom of remaining in this ill-fated colony.

~

The death of D’Aulnay resurrected his old antagonist, Charles La Tour. When La Tour heard that D’Aulnay had died, he left his refuge in Quebec, where he had been "lodged at the Chateau Saint-Louis … by Governor Montmagny," and hurried to France. He secured not only a pardon for his misdeeds but also the governorship of Acadia in February 1651. He chose as his lieutenant Philippe Mius d’Entremont of Cherbourg and hurried back to Acadia. At Port Royal he found that the representatives of D’Aulnay’s powerful creditors already had visited the fort there. Emmanuel LeBorgne, a wealthy La Rochelle merchant, insisted that the D’Aulnay estate owed him 260,000 pounds! The Capuchin fathers at Port Royal tried to protect the interests of Madame D’Aulnay, but LeBorgne’s men pillaged the settlement anyway. La Tour compounded the widow’s problems by demanding the return of his old fort on the St. John River. She was powerless to stop him, so in September 1651 La Tour returned to Jemseg. He ordered D’Entremont to rebuild the trading post at Cape Sable, leaving only Port Royal and its immediate environs to the widow D’Aulnay.

Dissatisfied even with this arrangement, in February 1653 the 60-year-old La Tour solved a personal problem of his own and attempted to solve the widow’s financial problems as well by marrying the good woman. He brought her to Jemseg, farther from the reach of her dead husband’s creditors, and there she added to the number of La Tours who called Acadia home. "His marriage to the widow of the man who had ruined him and banished him from the colony as a pirate made Latour sole master of all Acadia, with the exception of the fief controlled by Nicolas Denys," one historian observes. But financial matters are seldom solved so easily.47

LeBorgne and other creditors of the deceased D’Aulnay were determined to recoup what the estate still owed them, so they grabbed what they could of the colony. In 1652 they seized Chedabouctou, which actually belonged to Denys, burned La Heve, and swooped down on Fort Saint-Pierre, which Robert CORMIER had left only two years before. Denys was at the fort. LeBorgne arrested the poor fellow, slapped him in irons, then, taking Denys with him, sailed to Port Royal and seized the fort there, too.48

But all of this effort by LeBorgne came to naught. In 1654 the English appeared and seized Acadia again.

~

Much had transpired on the isle of Great Britain since the English last had held Acadia in 1632. In 1642 a terrible civil war had erupted in England, pitting King Charles I against his recalcitrant Parliament whose forces eventually were led by the Puritan soldier, Oliver Cromwell. By 1646, after much bloody fighting, Cromwell’s New Model Army had decisively defeated the forces of the king. Charles, however, was a stubborn Scotsman and refused to follow the reforms that Parliament had exacted from him. He was arrested, imprisoned, tried and convicted as an enemy of the state! On January 30, 1649, he became the only monarch in England’s history to be executed by his own people. England became a Commonwealth; by 1653 Cromwell was its Lord Protector. Meanwhile, war had broken out between the English and the Dutch, which Cromwell ended successfully in 1654.

In that struggle, an English seaborne expedition under Robert Sedgwick of Boston was ordered to attack the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam, south of New England. But before he could attack the Dutchmen, Sedgwick learned that the war had ended. He sailed north, instead, to Acadia, where he seized Jemseg from La Tour, and La Heve and Port Royal from LeBorgne. Sedgwick released Nicolas Denys from imprisonment and left Port Royal in charge of a council of inhabitants headed by Guillaume Trahan. La Tour and Denys made deals with their new English overlords and continued their operations unmolested. La Tour moved his headquarters to Cape Sable, where he died in 1666 at age 73. Denys operated from Fort Saint-Pierre and from Nipisiquit on the Baie des Chaleurs and remained in possession of his lucrative concessions until 1669, when, again, Fort Saint-Pierre was destroyed by fire. He settled at Nipisiquit, his remaining post, where he died in 1688 at age 90, almost penniless.49

The inhabitants of Port Royal continued to live as they had done since the first of them had arrived in the basin with D’Aulnay in 1636. As their numbers grew by natural increase, they moved farther up the basin, plowing fresh ground they wrested from the forest and reclaiming new farm land from the marshes along the river as D’Aulnay had showed them. Back in France, Jean Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister of King Louis XIV, ordered the inhabitants at Port Royal not to abandon their settlements in the face of English occupation; he was confident the colony soon would be restored to France. The English occupation halted immigration, and some families defied Colbert’s order and managed to return to France or to move on to French-held Canada. But many of the settlers refused to abandon their farms along the Port Royal basin. This was their home now. They had begun the unconscious process of becoming Acadians, not just Frenchmen. Their sons and daughters grew up and found suitable mates among their neighbors. Married sons moved upriver and wrested from nature new plots of ground on which to raise families of their own. The older folks looked forward to the birth of grandchildren and the blessings of an extended family. A spirit of independence and self-sufficiency had taken hold of these sturdy farmers. France, in spite of herself, had laid powerful roots in the troubled soil of Acadia.50

~

Thomas CORMIER was among the young Acadians who came of age during these years of English hegemony. He turned 21 in 1657, seven years after his arrival at Port Royal. He may have been his parents’ only surviving child. Perhaps because he was an only surviving son and was thus indispensable around the farmstead, he took his time to find a wife amongst the young women who lived up and down the basin. Then again, in these times of frozen immigration and quiet desertion by some of the families, perhaps there were just not enough marriageable women from which he could choose a wife. When he turned 30 in 1666, he was still a bachelor. If his parents were still living in the colony, he likely stayed with them on their little farm beside the slow-moving river. One reference to him indicates that he took up the trade of his father and became a carpenter.51 But the historical record reveals nothing else of Thomas CORMIER during these years of his early manhood.

Nor, sadly, does it reveal anything more about his parents, Robert and Marie. After nearly two dozen years in Acadia, since their arrival from La Rochelle in 1644, the CORMIERs had failed to establish an extended family as other Acadian families were doing.52   If Thomas had remained a bachelor, the story of the CORMIERs in America would have to end here. But soon came personal as well as political change that opened a new chapter in the history of this family.

[to CHAPTER TWO]

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NOTES

01. Arsenault, Genealogie, 494, note 30, indicates that Robert CORMIER was a charpentier de navire, or ship’s carpenter. His indenture, however, says only that he was a carpenter. This same document also reveals that he and his wife were illiterate.

02. For a discussion of the origin of the name, see Clark, 71-72, especially note 1. Interestingly, one of Clark’s sources in this discussion is P. C. CORMIER’s L’Origine et l’histoire du nom Acadie, avec un discours su d’autres noms de lieu Acadiens, published in 1966. Arsenault (English language history), 11, insists that Verrazano “was so overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the primeval forest reaching down to the sea that it reminded him of descriptions of Arcadia in ancient Greece.”

03. Roberts, Europe, 230-31. It was, of course, the Edict of Nantes that gave the Huguenots these guarantees.

04. Johnson, American People, 10.

05. Clark, Acadia, 72.

06. Clark, Acadia, 72, says 79 men. Arsenault, History, 10, says more than 120. De Monts and Champlain were from the region of Saintonge.

07. Clark, Acadia, 78.

08. Arsenault, History, 12.

09. Clark, Acadia, 75.

10. Clark, Acadia, 79.

11. Arsenault, History, 13.

12. Clark, Acadia, 79.

13. Clark, Acadia, 79-81.

14. Clark, Acadia, 81.

15. Clark, 82.

16. Clark, Acadia, 58ff. Quotes from pp. 67, 58, 67-68, 69.

17. Arsenault, History, 18, which says that Biencourt died in 1624 and was buried at La Pree Ronde (Round Hill), near Port Royal. Clark, Acadia, 82-83, usually a more careful historian, says that Biencourt died in 1623 and that the headquarters of the Acadian venture were moved from Port Royal to the Cape Sable area.

18. The history of early Virginia and the founding of Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts, like the discussion of Columbus and other early explorers of the New World, are too well known to document here. Consult any good encyclopedia for details of these important historical events.

19. Clark, Acadia, 83-84; Arsenault, History, 19.

20. Quoted in Arsenault, History, 20.

21. Clark, Acadia, 91; Arsenault, History, 21.

22. Clark, Acadia, 91-92; Arsenault, History, 21-22.

23. Clark, Acadia, 93-95; Arsenault, History, 22. Clark says Denys did not build the post at “St. Peters” until 1650. Is this the same place as Denys’s Fort Saint-Pierre? If so, then how could Robert CORMIER have gone in 1644 to a place that did not exist until 1650, the year he left it?

24. Arsenault, History, 22.

25. Arsenault, History, 22-23, 25, which says that Razilly was buried at La Heve but that his remains were removed to Louisbourg in 1749 when the French constructed their fortress there; Clark, Acadia, 94-95.

26. Arsenault, History, 25.

27. Arsenault, History, 26.

28. Arsenault, History., 27.

29. AGE, Apr 1987, 37-38, which quotes a letter from Rene Gangilhon, chief archivist of Ille et Vilaine, France, written in Apr 1939.

30. J. A. Cormier, “Cormier Family in France.”

31. Ibid.

32. AGE, Apr 1987, 37-38.

33. J. A. Cormier, “Cormier Family in France.”

34. AGE, Apr 1987, 37-38; J. A. Cormier, “Cormier Family in France.”

35. AGE, Apr 1987, 37-38.

36. For a history of Brittany, consult any good encyclopedia. Funk and Wagnall's New Encyclopedia was used here.

37. This writer has not researched Robert’s lineage back to his earliest known ancestors. This paragraph is purely speculation based on the scanty historical record he has found.

38. Arsenault, Genealogie, 494, says Robert was born in La Rochelle, from which he came to New France in 1644. However, Kevin CORMIER of Friendswood, TX, a family researcher, spent a week in La Rochelle in 1997 & found no evidence whatever in the archives there & among the city’s genealogists of Robert’s birth in La Rochelle. He may have been born in a town of the Aunis region, which is where La Rochelle is located. The information on Abraham CORMIER comes from http://claudeprudhomme.50megs.com/famille.htm, the website for the Familles Castonguy & Prud'homme of Quebec.

39. AGE, Apr/Jul 1995, 73. This document, according to T. Hebert, website, was found in the archives of the notary Teuleron. Louis Tuffet and the others were associates of Nicolas Denys.

40. AGE, Apr/Jul 1995, 73. This infant son is assumed to be Jean.

41. As every student of the English colonies in North America knows, many indentured servants who left England for the colonies did so to escape prison sentences in the mother country. There is no evidence that this was Robert CORMIER’s motivation, or at least this writer sees no such thing in his contract with Tuffet et al.

42. Such is the speculation of family genealogists Ronald C. CORMIER of Lebanon, CT, and Patrick CORMIER of New Orleans, LA.

43. Arsenault, Genealogie, 494, gives no documentation for his assertion that Robert CORMIER settled at Port Royal in 1650.

44. Arsenault, History, 27.

45. Clark, Acadia, 93-94.

46. Arsenault, History, 28-29, 31. Arsenault says he died of exhaustion and exposure. Moody, Acadians, 17, indicates that he may have been pushed from the canoe and thus murdered.

47. Arsenault, History, 31, 32.

48. Arsenault, History, 32, 33; Clark, Acadia, 94.

49. Arsenault, History, 32-34; Clark, Acadia, 94. Nipisiquit, or Nepisquit, is present-day Bathurst, New Brunswick.

50. Arsenault, History, 35, 36; Clark, Acadia, 108.

51. Arsenault, Genealogie, 909, note 19, which calls him a charpentier. This information no doubt came from the first Acadian census of 1671. See T. Hebert, website.

52. See the next chapter for a discussion on the fate of Robert and Marie CORMIER.

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[Chapter Two]