All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Expulsion of the Acadians (le Grand Derangement)

1755–1764 · Americas

Displacement

Displaced

10,000

Roughly 10,000 people out of an Acadian population usually put at 14,000-18,000 were deported or driven into flight between 1755 and 1764. Parks Canada puts the first phase, from the Halifax Council's order of 28 July 1755 through 1762, at 6,000-7,000 removed, with about 2,000 more escaping to Canada and Ile Saint-Jean or taking refuge along the Miramichi; the British capture of Ile Royale and Ile Saint-Jean in 1758 produced a second wave. The figures rest on British transport manifests, colonial council minutes and parish registers rather than on any census, and totals differ between accounts.

Share of the population affected

71%

of the Acadian population of Nova Scotia and the surrounding French settlements in 1755, 1755

Killed

1,600–5,000

deaths in transit or in camps

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What happened

After the fall of Fort Beausejour in June 1755 the Nova Scotia Council, judging the Acadians' refusal of an unqualified oath of allegiance a security risk in the approaching war with France, ordered their deportation on 28 July 1755. Troops burned settlements, seized livestock and loaded families onto transports for the British seaboard colonies, England and France; Parks Canada puts the removals of 1755-62 at 6,000-7,000 people, with about 2,000 escaping to Canada, Ile Saint-Jean or the Miramichi. A second phase followed the capture of Ile Royale and Ile Saint-Jean in 1758. Families were separated at embarkation, several transports were lost at sea, and colonies that received deportees frequently refused to settle them. Many later moved again to French Louisiana, where their descendants became the Cajuns; those who returned after 1763 found their diked farmland granted to New England Planters.

Parties

British colonial authorities in Nova Scotia deported the French-speaking Catholic Acadian population and dispersed it among the Thirteen Colonies, Britain and France

Disputed

The total deported and the number who died are both uncertain, and historians differ over whether the deportation is best explained as a wartime security measure or as a deliberate removal of a population whose land was wanted.

The denominator

French and British colonial censuses of the 1750s give an Acadian population of about 14,100 at the start of the deportations; roughly 11,500 were deported and a 1764 census found some 2,600 still in Nova Scotia having evaded capture.

Where the baseline comes from

Expulsion of the Acadiansopen-edited

On the death toll

There is no death register. The best-documented losses are at sea in 1758, when a large share of those shipped from Ile Saint-Jean drowned or died of disease, including the several hundred lost when the transports Duke William and Violet foundered. Wider estimates that between a third and a half of all deportees died of smallpox, typhus, shipwreck and exposure in the receiving colonies rest on colonial correspondence and burial registers rather than counts, and are not agreed.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of PropertyArbitrary Detention

Parks Canada and the University of Maine's Canadian-American Center describe the burning of settlements, the confiscation of land and livestock, and the detention of Acadian men in churches and forts pending embarkation.