Again like Champlain, Razilly made a particular effort to recruit families. For both men, this was the hardest part of their task and the most vital to the peopling of a colony. French families showed great reluctance to emigrate, unlike those from Britain, Germany, and other European countries. The anomaly of French attitudes toward emigration has never been explained. With great effort, Razilly found twelve or fifteen French families for his first voyage in 1632—not many, but enough to start a population growing.15
In one respect Champlain and Razilly did things differently. The settlers of Quebec came from French provinces north of the Loire, especially from Normandy. They sailed in three ships from the Norman port of Dieppe, with others following from Honfleur and Le Havre. Razilly’s colonists for Acadia came from provinces south of the Loire in the west-center of France. They sailed from the ports of Auray and La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay.
Razilly’s fleet was the first to sail, late in the season of 1632. On September 8, 1632, they reached their destination and his colonists came ashore on the Atlantic coast of what is now Nova Scotia, in the beautiful harbor of La Hève. It was, and is, a very attractive place. At the mouth of the harbor was an island that the colonists called the Isle aux Framboises, “its top being nothing but raspberry bushes.” The island was said to be “completely covered with pigeons.” Thousands of them fattened on the raspberries, and the settlers fed on the pigeons.16
On one side of the harbor was a spectacular headland of yellow clay a hundred feet high. At first light of day it gleamed like gold, and they called it Cap Doré. Inside the entrance was a beautiful basin, big enough to hold many ships. A handsome river flowed into it through large groves of oaks and elms. There were open meadows, marshes, and “fine and good lands” with soil of deep fertility.17
To the settlers, Acadia seemed a place of unimaginable abundance. On both banks of the river they found “an infinity of scallops like those of Mont St. Michel and Saint Jacques.” In the waters off the coast they discovered “lobsters as big as little children,” with fore-claws that could hold a pint of good French wine. Salmon and shad swarmed in the river. There were large numbers of deer and moose, birds beyond imagining, wild blueberries and strawberries.18
Even in this earthly paradise, Razilly’s first concern (like that of Champlain for Quebec) was military security against European rivals. At La Hève he built a strong battery on what is still called Fort Point. At the same time he constructed a chapel for the Capuchin fathers and encouraged them to open the first boarding school in New France. Children of both French colonists and Mi’kmaq families were invited to study together. Again like Champlain, Razilly made a sustained effort to establish good relations with the Indians, encouraged them to settle close by, opened the colony to them, and treated them with humanity.19
The French had been slow getting started and arrived very late in the season. They suffered through a hard winter, but Razilly took precautions against scurvy that he may have learned from Champlain’s experience of Indian remedies. All the colonists survived. Some returned to France, but it was a healthy settlement. Its population began to grow by natural increase, slowly at first, but with gathering momentum.
Once begun, the flow of colonists continued the next year, mostly in ships sailing from La Rochelle and other ports in west-central France. On January 24, 1633, d’Aulnay returned to France, recruited more colonists, and sailed back again on March 12 in “a vessel filled with men, provisions, munitions, and other supplies that the company sent to Commander de Razilly.”20 In 1634, Isaac de Razilly’s brother Claude de Launay-Razilly combined with Jean Ordonnier, a bourgeois of Paris, to found another group sponsored by the Hundred Associates, which they called a “Society for the Peopling of Acadia.” Through their cousin Cardinal Richelieu they petitioned the king for five of His Majesty’s ships to be used for trade and fishing. On their outward-bound voyage from France, they carried supplies and settlers to Acadia. Richelieu himself took an active role in recruiting investors for the society of Razilly and Cordonnier, “to support the enterprise that they have made to populate the settlements of Port-Royal and La Hève on the coast of Acadia.”21
After the French colony at La Hève was well on its way, Razilly turned to another task. A few Scottish Freebooters were still living at Port-Royal on the other side of Acadia, and some of them were acting as if they meant to stay. Their leader, Andrew Forrester, was a violent, cruel, and angry man who had defied orders from his king to abandon the colony. He led a party of Scots in a surprise attack on the French trading post at Fort Sainte-Marie, across the Bay of Fundy on the Saint John River. Forrester entered the French fort with professions of peace, made prisoners of the habitants, clapped them in irons, tortured one of them to find things of value, stole their furs, food, and trade goods, pulled down a Catholic cross, removed the royal arms of Louis XIII, and returned to Port-Royal. He put his French captives aboard a passing New England pinnace and ordered the captain to maroon them on a barren island in Penobscot Bay—a sentence to death by starvation. The New England captain released them instead near the Saint John River, and they found their way back to Cape Sable on the southeast coast with a report of their cruel treatment.22
Forrester had crossed the line between freebooting and piracy, and the French went after him. Razilly mustered his men and led them ashore at Port-Royal. Forrester was overmatched, and asked for terms that he had denied to others. Razilly acted with wisdom and restraint. After a parley, he offered the Scots transportation to Britain and payment for their possessions, if they surrendered the fort intact. They were very quick to agree.23
Razilly occupied Port-Royal, and ordered some of his colonists to take possession of the old French settlement under the command of René Le Coq de la Saussaye, an old hand on the Acadian coast. They restored relations with the Mi’kmaq and a fur trade began to revive in 1633. A few of the Scots chose to remain with the French and were made welcome. They began to mix with French families in Port-Royal to form a hybrid culture that still exists in Nova Scotia, even as its proportions have changed. Here again Razilly was much like Champlain in his tolerance of diversity, as long as he had unity of command.24
In 1634, Razilly sent a long letter to Marc Lescarbot, describing in detail the success of his small colony at Port-Royal. He had spent his own wealth lavishly to supply the settlers with food from France and had brought over “cattle, pigs, goats and poultry,” which were doing well. He planted vegetables and kitchen gardens. Razilly told Lescarbot that the tools and building supplies had cost many thousands of livres, but that “a miserly man could never found a successful settlement.” His hope was to “give his wealth to such a cause if he could establish a place for the poor people of France in the abundance of the new world.25
Razilly also devoted himself to the economic development of his colony, with mixed results. He encouraged Nicolas Denys to organize a timber operation near La Hève, with workers cutting oak, squaring it into timbers and preparing it for export to France when the immigrant ships sailed home. Denys also founded a fishing settlement near La Hève at Port-Rossignol.26
At Canso, in northeastern Acadia, Razilly built another fortified trading post called Fort Saint-Francis. Its purpose was to organize the fur trade. Here he faced a challenge to his leadership. While Razilly’s men were building the fort, they were attacked by a French fishing captain named Jean Thomas, who traded wine for furs from the Mi’kmaq Indians—a lucrative business, but illegal. Thomas had a license from Cardinal Richelieu to operate on the Grand Bank but he was expressly forbidden to trade in furs or to sell wine to the Indians. He led a party of Mi’kmaq warriors in an assault on Fort Saint-Francis. The French commander was wounded and the post was looted. Razilly responded much as Champlain had done when faced with a rebellion in Quebec. He gathered his strength, moved quickly with all the strength at his command, arrested Tomas, and sent him in irons to La Rochelle.27
In three years, Razilly had succeeded in the
same way that Champlain had done at Quebec. He had reclaimed the heartland of Acadia for France, removed British freebooters, established settlements at La Hève on the east coast and Port-Royal on the west, with a trading post at Canso, and he started a population growing. More French families arrived each year. The economy was developing, and good relations were established with the Mi’kmaq Indians.
Just as everything was going so well, Razilly died very suddenly in November 1635, at the age of forty-eight and the peak of his powers. It was a heavy loss for New France. He was mourned by those who knew him for his strength, integrity, and humanity. In Acadia his death was an especially heavy blow—heavier than anyone could have known at the time. But Razilly had laid a firm foundation.
Razilly’s cousin d’Aulnay became commander of the colony. He encouraged many settlers to move from La Hève to Port-Royal. That larger site became the center of the colony. By 1644, according to a memorandum from d’Aulnay, the habitants of Port-Royal numbered two hundred men, including soldiers, laborers and other artisans, plus Capuchins, women, and children who were not enumerated. D’Aulnay reported that more than twenty French households had migrated intact and many more begun to form in Acadia. He also noted that his count also did not include “enfants sauvages” who were taken into the French settlement. More than a few Frenchmen in that settlement made unions with Indian women. The Razillys in Acadia, again like Champlain in Quebec, encouraged métissage.28
Nicolas Denys visited Port-Royal in 1653, and reported, “All the inhabitants there are the ones that M. le Commandeur de Razilly had brought from France to La Hève” in 1632. They had continued to move from La Hève to Port-Royal after Razilly’s death in 1635. Denys observed, “Since that time they have multiplied much at Port-Royal, where they have a great number of cattle and swine.”29 In 1671 a census found 227 children in sixty-three households at Port-Royal alone. These families founded many settlements along the coast. A study of Acadian parishes in the early eighteenth century found that migrants to La Hève accounted for two-thirds of the entire Acadian population. The same evidence also showed an astonishing concentration of French family names. In the census of 1671, Acadians had a total of only fifty-three French names. That concentration persisted for many generations. In the mid-twentieth century, yet another census found that 86 percent of 34,000 French Acadians, had only seventy-six family names as late as the year 1938. Scholars have compared those two lists and they have found that fully two-thirds of twentieth-century Acadian names appeared in the census of 1671. Geneviève Massignon observes that “the cradle of the Acadian population was Port-Royal,” which in turn derived from the migration that began at La Hève in 1632.30
Where did Acadia’s founding families come from? Many studies have found a pattern, based on choices that Razilly and Champlain had made about the recruitment of colonists and the charter of their ships from 1632 to 1635. As we have seen, most immigrants to the St. Lawrence Valley came from Normandy, Perche, the Île de France, and other western provinces north of the Loire River. These provinces together supplied more than 51 percent of the colonists in Quebec, and less than 25 percent in Acadia. A different pattern appeared in Acadia. Colonists from Touraine, Poitou, Saintonge, Aunis, and other provinces in the center-west of France accounted for more than 51 percent of the Acadian population, but less than 25 percent in Quebec. Brittany was a small but important element in both populations, about 4 percent each. Very few immigrants came to either place from the north, the east, the southeast, or far southwest of France. English, Scots, Irish, Portuguese, and Basques, all mixed, added at least 7 percent of Acadian population.31
A distinctive French dialect took root in Acadia, and it was a clue to the importance of founding events in the era of Razilly and Champlain. Acadian speech derived in part from the patois of Poitou, Saintonge, Aunis, Anjou, and Touraine. To speakers of metropolitan French today, Acadian dialect sounds quaint and old-fashioned—and so it is in some ways. But it was another instance of that American paradox—stubbornly archaic in some ways, strongly inventive in others. Acadian pronunciation is so distinct that speakers of standard French sometimes have difficulty understanding what is said.
One defining feature is familiar to us all. Acadians were apt to drop an initial vowel, and add a j-sound before a second vowel. Thus Acadien became Cadjin or Cadjen in Canada, and later Cajun or parler le cajun in Louisiana. In the same way, bon dieu (Good God) became bon djeu, and braguette (trousers) is brajette. The letter r has a way of disappearing in the last syllable: libre is libe, and arbre is arbe. In many words an initial c or q or t is sounded like a sneeze: queue becomes tcheue, the imperative tiens! (hold on! or stop!) is tchin!; cuillère is tchuillère and quelque chose becomes tchecu’chouse.32
Some Acadien pronunciations derived directly from regional origins of the founding families in the 1630s. Linguist Yves Cormier estimates that 55 percent of Acadianisms of French origin are regional words, and 45 percent are archaic words peculiar to their period of origin in the seventeenth century. Among Acadian words of regional origin, more than half are from the centerwest of France, about 15 or 20 percent from Normandy and the northwest, fewer than 15 percent from other parts of France.33
The vocabulary of Acadia also had many nautical terms, as in amarrer (to moor) for “tie,” or piquer (to get a fish) for “open.” This was an industrious culture that valued honest toil. The praise word vaillant meant “brave, busy, and industrious.” It was a raw and muscular language. A metropolitan French baby will pleurer (cry); an Acadian baby will horler (howl). To disturb somebody in France is to déranger; in Acadia it is to boloxer. To have a difficulty is not, as in French, avoir de la difficulté but avoir de la misère. Acadian vêtements (clothing) are hardes; aussi is itou; et is pis (from et puis); se dépêcher (to hurry) is se haler, literally to haul oneself.34
Acadian speechways were also very inventive in the creation of new expressions for unfamiliar objects in a new world. The slender bright green glasswort that grows on northern beaches was called tétine-de-souris, literally, a mouse tit. Later, the Académie française did not approve and made it salicorne d’Europe. A cranberry is a canneberge in France; in Acadia it is a pomme de pré (literally a saltmarsh apple); in Quebec it is the Indian atoca. The hearty Acadian diet required new words for its cuisine: fricot for a wonderfully thick stew of meat, potatoes, onions, carrots, and lumps of dough; poutine râpée for a heavy ball of chopped potatoes with a piece of pork at the core. Some words appear in both Quebec and Acadian dialects, but these two distinct speech-ways came from different parts of France in the same period, 1632–35.35
The French-speaking families of Acadia rapidly outstripped the land available at Port-Royal, and began to found other settlements along the coast at Grand-Pré (today an Acadian shrine), at Pigiguit (today’s Windsor), and at Cobeguit (Truro). Other Acadian settlements were planted at Beaubassin, Petitcousdiac, and Memramcook at the head of the Bay of Fundy. Some of the most enduring were to the south at Sainte-Anne’s on St. Mary’s Bay, Pobompoup (Pubnico), and other sites along the south-western coast of Nova Scotia which are still strongly francophone today. On the opposite side of the Bay of Fundy, settlements were planted near the present city of Saint John in New Brunswick. Other Acadian descendants later moved to settlements in Maine at Madawaska, Caribou, Presqu’isle, Saint-Francis, Saint-Luce, and Saint-Joseph.
From an early date, Acadians in many of these places worked their land in a very distinctive way. They created grain fields by building dykes around marshes on tidal rivers and freshwater streams. The dyking of fertile marshlands in Acadia developed in the 1630s and was well advanced by 1650.36 An early reference to this practice was at Port-La-Tour, near Cape Sable. There the Récollet fathers had a mission, and one of them kept a garden of about half an acre, “on excellent fertile land … formerly a marsh or meadow, still called French meadow.” This marsh soil was extraordinarily productive. The younger La Tour did the same thing, and planted a garden wher
e “the land is very flat near the bottom of the bay,” with similar success. The date was approximately 1630.37
The draining of marshlands multiplied along both coasts of Acadia in the mid-1630s. It was so important that Isaac de Razilly’s brother Claude de Launay-Razilly recruited five saulniers, or marshworkers, for service in Acadia. These men signed a contract in March, 1636, at the Three Kings Tavern in La Rochelle.38 In France they had been specialists in ditching and dyking tidal marshes for the salt industry. In 1632 Razilly had already recruited some of these skilled workers to make salt in Acadia for the fishing industry. Once there, they discovered the fertility of deep topsoil in the tidal marshes, and began to make salt marshes into arable fields. He also brought saulniers from Touraine, where they were well practiced in the dyking of freshwater marshes.39
The marshlands of Acadia were used in two ways: sometimes for the evaporation of salt from seawater, as in the area around Brouage in France, but mostly for the draining of cropland. The work of draining the land was heavy, but so also was the labor of clearing the forest for fields. Within a generation of settlement, these dykes had become very extensive. Denis commented on “the great extent of meadows which the sea used to cover and which sieur Aulnay had drained.”40 Visitors remarked on the size of “rich but hard-won grain fields behind the dykes.41 The French families of Acadia won this land from the sea by their unceasing labor, and they became strongly attached to it. They developed a different attitude from other colonists in North America, who favored extensive agriculture, mining the soil, and moving on to new land when it wore out. The Acadians gained a reputation for clinging stubbornly to the land when others tried to remove them.
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