Episode Details

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In the early eighteenth century, the shores of the Bay of Fundy were home to a densely settled society of Acadian farmers who had reclaimed fertile land from the sea using a complex system of earthen dikes and sluice gates. They built a prosperous agricultural world, negotiating alliances with the local Mi'kmaq while attempting to remain neutral as their homeland repeatedly changed hands between the French and British empires. This episode examines how these farming families, who possessed no army and no fortifications, came to be viewed as a critical military threat by British officials in the 1750s.

I kept returning to one central question while working on this episode: how does a civilian population become an existential security problem simply by trying to stay out of a war? The Acadians offered conditional oaths of allegiance to the British Crown, refusing to take up arms against their French neighbors or Mi'kmaq allies. For decades, this pragmatic compromise held. But when the French and Indian War intensified the strategic pressures on Nova Scotia, Governor Charles Lawrence decided that qualified neutrality was no longer acceptable, ordering a mass removal that destroyed communities and scattered families across the Atlantic.

Understanding the deportation requires grasping the unforgiving logic of imperial rivalry rather than attributing the event to simple cruelty. It is a history of how administrative decisions can transform a landscape and a people, leaving a diaspora whose descendants eventually shaped the cultural geography of the Maritimes and Louisiana.