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Reviewed by:
  • Jeremiah Bancroft at Fort Beauséjour and Grand Pré ed. by Jonathan Fowler and Earle Lockerby
  • Edward MacDonald
Jonathan Fowler and Earle Lockerby, eds. Jeremiah Bancroft at Fort Beauséjour and Grand Pré. Diaries of the Acadian Deportations 1. Gaspereau Press. 114. $25.95

The past is much with us, and seldom more so than with the Deportation(s) of the Acadians. Between 1755 and 1762, British forces forcibly deported some 10,000 Acadians from what is now Maritime Canada. Two and a half centuries later, Le Grand Dérangement continues to benchmark the identity of the Acadian diaspora, troubles our conscience, and consumes scholars. The deportation of 1755, the first and largest, garners most of the attention. English-language historians used to term it “the Expulsion,” as if Acadia were some colonial Garden of Eden and the Acadians had somehow sinned. Recent versions generally cast the Acadians as victims and the Deportations as a needless tragedy. Some commentators bandy chilling modern words such as genocide and ethnic cleansing. To seek a better understanding of the Deportations through a return to sources is no idle exercise, then, but a necessary act of recovery.

Such is the tacit mandate of Diaries of the Acadian Deportations, a new series launched by Gaspereau Press with this slender, handsomely printed volume. Volume 1 presents for the first time in book form the diary kept by Jeremiah Bancroft, an amateur soldier from Massachusetts, recruited to wage war against the French empire in North America. What began for Bancroft as an expedition to capture Fort Beauséjour (in presentday New Brunswick) ended with the deportation of the Acadians of Grand-Pré. Bancroft was thus eyewitness to one of Canadian history’s great dramas, and his terse, unvarnished journal is one of only two extant accounts of the Deportations any place other than at Chignecto. [End Page 171]

This edition of Bancroft’s diary is mediated for modern readers by editors Jonathan Fowler, an historical archaeologist at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, and Earle Lockerby, an independent scholar of eighteenth-century Atlantic Canada. They sandwich introductory remarks and post-script analysis around the comprehensively annotated text of the journal itself. Their careful framing of this primary source is dispassionate in tone, resisting the temptation to moralize (or to moralize about the moralizers), but it consciously acknowledges the continued topicality of the Deportations. They offer a convincing case for the document’s importance in piecing together the mechanics of deportation, as well as its physical and emotional geography, and furnish needful historical context (noting, for example, that deportations of “enemy” populations were more normative than we might imagine during this period). They also deconstruct – sometimes tentatively – the diary itself, its preoccupations with religion and punishment, and its evidence of Acadian resistance to deportation. Like many such documents, the diary “offers a laconic record of events rather than an exploration of their meaning,” yet, in their estimation, “in [Bancroft’s] very act of selecting which events to note and which to omit, we gain partial access to his world view and values.”

Their Bancroft is, not surprisingly, anti-French and anti-Catholic, but he is not genocidal. He does not demonize the “neutral French,” though he easily typecasts them. And while he has no qualms about rounding up families, seizing their crops, and burning their farms, he feels a flicker of sympathy for the human tragedy his leaders have set in motion. The moment when the Acadians of Grand-Pré discovered their fate made a deep impression on Bancroft: “the shame and confusion of face together with Anger so altered their countenense that it cant be expressed.”

There is room to quibble that Fowler and Lockerby should make a distinction between the various deportations, that this first wave was undertaken during a period of de facto war but official peace and involved British subjects, not enemy aliens. And perhaps Fowler and Lockerby could explain why Bancroft’s diary has been chosen to begin this series. But these are small matters. The annotated diary succeeds admirably in bringing modern readers closer to the catastrophic events of 1755. And it whets the appetite for future volumes in the...

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