Of their exiled countrymen, one party overpowered the crew of the vessel that carried them, ran her ashore at the mouth of the St. John, and escaped.[286] The rest were distributed among the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, the master of each transport having been provided with a letter from Lawrence addressed to the Governor of the province to which he was bound, and desiring him to receive the unwelcome strangers.  The provincials were vexed at the burden imposed upon them; and though the Acadians were not in general ill-treated, their lot was a hard one.  Still more so was that of those among them who escaped to Canada.  The chronicle of the Ursulines of Quebec, speaking of these last, says that their misery was indescribable, and attributes it to the poverty of the colony.  But there were other causes.  The exiles found less pity from kindred and fellow Catholics than from the heretics of the English colonies.  Some of them who had made their way to Canada from Boston, whither they had been transported, sent word to a gentleman of that place who had befriended them, that they wished to return.[287] Bougainville, the celebrated navigator, then aide-de-camp to Montcalm, says concerning them:  “They are dying by wholesale.  Their past and present misery, joined to the rapacity of the Canadians, who seek only to squeeze out of them all the money they can, and then refuse them the help so dearly bought, are the cause of this mortality.”  “A citizen of Quebec,” he says farther on, “was in debt to one of the partners of the Great Company [Government officials leagued for plunder].  He had no means of paying.  They gave him a great number of Acadians to board and lodge.  He starved them with hunger and cold, got out of them what money they had, and paid the extortioner. Quel pays!  Quels moeurs!"[288]

[Footnote 286:  Lettre commune de Drucour et Prevost au Ministre, 6 Avril, 1756.  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 1 Juin, 1756.]

[Footnote 287:  Hutchinson, Hist.  Mass., III. 42, note.]

[Footnote 288:  Bougainville, Journal, 1756-1758.  His statements are sustained by Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760.]

Many of the exiles eventually reached Louisiana, where their descendants now form a numerous and distinct population.  Some, 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, notably at Madawaska, on the upper St. John, and at Clare, in Nova Scotia.  Others were sent from Virginia to England; and others again, after the complete conquest of the country, found refuge in France.

In one particular the authors of the deportation were disappointed in its results.  They had hoped to substitute a loyal population for a disaffected one; but they failed for some time to find settlers for the vacated lands.  The Massachusetts soldiers, to whom they were offered, would not stay in the province; and it was not till five years later that families of British stock began to occupy the waste fields of the Acadians.  This goes far to show that a longing to become their heirs had not, as has been alleged, any considerable part in the motives for their removal.