Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2012
272 pp., illus., $37.95 hardcover
American historian Christopher Hodson’s exploration of what happened to the Acadians after the British deported them by the thousands from the present-day Maritime provinces is bracketed by the deaths, half a world apart, of two men.
It begins with the 1838 suicide in New Zealand of Achille Gotrot, the captain of a whaling ship whose exiled father had survived a botched French attempt to use the Acadians to colonize the tropical outpost of Cayenne. It ends with the story of Charles White, who was shipped to Philadelphia with his family at age seven, changed his name from Leblanc to fit in, and amassed a small fortune by the time of his death in 1816.
Their journeys capture the theme of the book — “the role of Acadians in building empires, and the role of empires in transforming Acadians.” Hodson zeroes in on the first half century of exile, after the British scattered them to far-flung points on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is a remarkable story of endurance and survival. In 1755, the first wave of exiles was sent, unannounced, to the American colonies, where they received a hostile reception as war loomed with France. A second wholesale deportation in 1758, from what is now Prince Edward Island, dumped thousands more in France.
Hodson, a professor of history at Brigham Young University in Utah, devotes much of his attention to how the exiles were deployed to shore up the remnants of France’s empire after the Seven Years War. Displaced Acadians were recruited or pressured to settle in the Caribbean, South America, and even the remote Falkland Islands.
A decade of research has netted fresh archival material and important insights into the ordeal of Acadians transplanted to the southern American colonies, the French coastal island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, and other locales. But moulding these personal stories and anecdotes into a coherent narrative proved a difficult task. To trace the Acadians in exile “is to be wrenched through disjointed snapshots of confusion, anguish, and weary resolve,” Hodson notes at one point. His frequent tangents and fuzzy focus threaten to leave readers feeling as bewildered as the exiles.
The Acadians disappear for page after page as Hodson wades into French intellectual history, the myth of a great southern continent, and other digressions. The Falklands episode rates an entire chapter, even though only a handful of Acadians spent barely three years there. And he almost ignores the exiles’ massive migration to Spanish-held Louisiana and their return to the Maritimes, the centres of Acadian and Cajun culture today.
As well, his scattergun account of Acadian history before the grand dérangement downplays the bonds of family and com-munity that sustained a sense of nationhood during the long nightmare of exile. As for the expulsion itself, Acadians who lost ancestors to shipwrecks, disease, mistreatment, and neglect will be startled to see the brutal roundup of 1755 described as “as one of the smoothest, most successful applications of power in the history of the British Empire.”
Hodson’s conclusions are less startling: The places and conditions thrust upon the Acadians changed them in myriad ways, he argues, and the exiles pushed back against their imperial oppressors, English and French alike, to make the best of a bad bargain. The fact that Hodson and other historians continue to explore how the Acadians defied the odds and survived as a distinct people is a measure of the Acadians’ resolve and success.
This review appeared in the February-March 2013 issue of Canada's History magazine.
— Dean Jobb (Read bio)
Dean Jobb is author of Empire of Deception (HarperCollins Canada), the untold story of 1920s Chicago swindler Leo Koretz and his escape to a life of luxury in Nova Scotia.