At the beginning of November Winslow reported that he had sent off fifteen hundred and ten persons, in nine vessels, and that more than six hundred still remained in his district.[281] The last of these were not embarked till late in December.  Murray finished his part of the work at the end of October, having sent from the district of Fort Edward eleven hundred persons in four frightfully crowded transports.[282] At the close of that month sixteen hundred and sixty-four had been sent from the district of Annapolis, where many others escaped to the woods.[283] A detachment which was ordered to seize the inhabitants of the district of Cobequid failed entirely, finding the settlements abandoned.  In the country about Fort Cumberland, Monckton, who directed the operation in person, had very indifferent success, catching in all but little more than a thousand.[284] Le Guerne, missionary priest in this neighborhood, gives a characteristic and affecting incident of the embarkation.  “Many unhappy women, carried away by excessive attachment to their husbands, whom they had been allowed to see too often, and closing their ears to the voice of religion and their missionary, threw themselves blindly and despairingly into the English vessels.  And now was seen the saddest of spectacles; for some of these women, solely from a religious motive, refused to take with them their grown-up sons and daughters."[285] They would expose their own souls to perdition among heretics, but not those of their children.

[Footnote 281:  Winslow to Monckton, 3 Nov. 1755.]

[Footnote 282:  Ibid.]

[Footnote 283:  Captain Adams to Winslow, 29 Nov. 1755; see also Knox, I. 85, who exactly confirms Adams’s figures.]

[Footnote 284:  Monckton to Winslow, 7 Oct. 1755.]

[Footnote 285:  Le Guerne a Prevost, 10 Mars, 1756.]

When all, or nearly all, had been sent off from the various points of departure, such of the houses and barns as remained standing were burned, in obedience to the orders of Lawrence, that those who had escaped might be forced to come in and surrender themselves.  The whole number removed from the province, men, women, and children, was a little above six thousand.  Many remained behind; and while some of these withdrew to Canada, Isle St. Jean, and other distant retreats, the rest lurked in the woods or returned to their old haunts, whence they waged, for several years a guerilla warfare against the English.  Yet their strength was broken, and they were no longer a danger to the province.