After weary weeks of delay, which tried Winslow’s patience to the utmost, the transports at last arrived at the mouth of the Gaspereau, and the work of embarkation began. Up to the very last the Acadians could not believe that the order of deportation was serious, and when they finally realised their fate and knew that they must bid farewell for ever to their homes--the homes of their fathers, the land that they loved so well--their grief was indescribable. "Began to embark the inhabitants," says Winslow in his Diary, "who went off very solentarily and unwillingly, the women in great distress, carrying off their children in their arms; others carrying their decrepit parents in their carts, with all their goods; moving in great confusion, and appeared a scene of woe and distress." It was late in December before the last transport left the mouth of the Gaspereau. Altogether more than twenty-one hundred Acadians were exiled from Grand Pré and the country round about. They were distributed along the Atlantic coast, from Massachusetts to Georgia. Some made their way to Louisiana; some escaped and reached Canada. "Some," says Parkman, "after incredible hardship, made their way back to Acadia, where, after the peace, they remained unmolested, and, with those who had escaped seizure, became the progenitors of the present Acadians, now settled in various parts of the British maritime provinces." Few of them, however, returned at any time to Grand Pré, and that once thriving settlement remained desolate for several years, until at last British families straggled in and took up the waste lands of the unfortunate Acadians.
The story of the Richelieu River is a story of war and conflict. It opens just three hundred years ago, when Champlain set out from Quebec to join a war-party of Algonquins and Hurons, who had determined to seek the Iroquois in their own country, and had begged him to aid in the expedition. In consenting to do so, Champlain no doubt felt that he had good and sufficient reasons, but if he could have foreseen the consequences of his act he would surely have left the Algonquins and Iroquois to settle their difficulties in their own way, for from this first act of aggression dates the implacable hatred of the Iroquois for the French, and a century and more of ferocious raids into every corner of the struggling colony.