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Old Forts of Acadia
The tourist will find many memorials of the days of
the French regime throughout the Provinces which were once comprised
within the ill-defined and extensive limits of Acadia, and are now
known as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These memorials must be
sought among a few com-munities speaking a language sadly
degenerated from the Norman and Breton French of their ancestors, in
a few grass-covered mounds, or in the names of many of the bays,
rivers, and headlands of the Acadian country. Port La Tour, on the
western coast of Nova Scotia, recalls the time when the
high-spirited, courageous Frenchman, the rival of the treacherous
D'Aulnay, was laboring to establish himself on the peninsula. The
Gaspereau was the name given to a rapid stream, which winds its way
through the very garden of Nova Scotia, by the ancestors of that
hapless people whom a relentless des-tiny, and the mandate of an
inexorable Government, snatched from their old homes in "the sweet
Acadian land." The island of Cape Breton, which once bore the proud
name of "Ile Royale," still wears the more homely and also more
ancient name which was given to its most prominent Cape by some of
those hardy Breton sailors who, from the very earliest times,
ventured into the waters of the northern Continent. Louisbourg still
reminds us of the existence of a powerful fortified town, intended
to overawe the English in America and guard the approaches to the
Laurentian Gulf and River. The Boularderie Island is a memento of a
French Marquis, of whom we would never have heard were it not for
the fact that his name still clings to this pretty green island
which he once claimed as his seigneurie. The Bras d'Or yet attests
the propriety of its title of "the Golden Arm," as we pass through
its lovely inlets and its expansive lakes, surrounded by wooded
heights and smiling farms.
The French had at best but a very
precarious foothold in Acadia. At a few isolated points they raised
some rudely constructed forts, around which, in the course of time,
a number of settlers built huts and cultivated small farms. The
rivalry between England and France commenced on the continent as
soon as the British Colonies had made some progress, and prevented
the French ever establishing' flourishing settlements all over
Acadia. At no time was the French Government particularly enamored
of a country which seemed to promi.se but a scanty harvest of profit
to its proprietors; tor the history of Acadia shows that the Kings
of France and their Ministers left its destinies for years in the
hands of mere adventurers and traders. In the course of time they
began to have some conception of the import.mce of Acadia as a base
of operations against the aggressive New Englanders, and were forced
at last, in self-defense, to build Louisbourg on the eastern coast
of lie Royale. But then it was too late to retrieve the ground they
had lost by their indifference during the early history of the
country. Had the statesmen of France been gifted with practical
foresight, they would have seen the possession of Acadia was an
absolute necessity to a power which hoped to retain its dominion by
the St. Lawrence and the great Lakes.
The Old Forts of Acadia, By J. G. Bourinot, The
Canadian Monthly, and National Review, Vol. 5, May 1874
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