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116 Acadians of the Minas district. In the haste and turmoil attendant oftentimes upon final departure, families were dispersed, some of them never to be reunited. Six thousand Acadians escaped banishment by fleeing to the woods or to distant French settlements. Of the twelve thousand transported to New England and the Southern colonies, many hundreds perished in the holds of ships, and in prisons, or died of exposure and exhausting fevers in unfriendly lands. A few of the exiles reached the West Indies, the Miquelon Islands and France.

The Bostonians, whose soldiers had been sent against the Neutrals, bitterly resisted their being quartered in Massachusetts. They hated them "for love of God because they were Catholics, and for love of England because they were French." In 1756—7 a number of Acadians were held in jail on Staten Island and Governor's Island, New York. Others were distributed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Carolina and Louisiana.

There followed a prolonged period of misery during which the outcasts became "too wretched to be feared, too poor to be despoiled." When peace was made between the Crowns in 1763, groups of Acadians struggled back, hopeful of finding their meadows still untenanted. Houses and bams had been fired immediately after their departure; the smoke of the burning villages had misted their eyes as they sailed past Blomidon and out to the Bay of Fundy. Now they decried new cottages, and