How the homeless Acadians from Beaubassin lived through the winter is not very clear.  They probably found shelter at Chipody and its neighborhood, where there were thriving settlements of their countrymen.  Le Loutre, fearing that they would return to their lands and submit to the English, sent some of them to Isle St. Jean.  “They refused to go,” says a French writer; “but he compelled them at last, by threatening to make the Indians pillage them, carry off their wives and children, and even kill them before their eyes.  Nevertheless he kept about him such as were most submissive to his will."[115] In the spring after the English occupied Beaubassin, La Jonquiere issued a strange proclamation.  It commanded all Acadians to take forthwith an oath of fidelity to the King of France, and to enroll themselves in the French militia, on pain of being treated as rebels.[116] Three years after, Lawrence, who then governed the province, proclaimed in his turn that all Acadians who had at any time sworn fidelity to the King of England, and who should be found in arms against him, would be treated as criminals.[117] Thus were these unfortunates ground between the upper and nether millstones.  Le Loutre replied to this proclamation of Lawrence by a letter in which he outdid himself.  He declared that any of the inhabitants who had crossed to the French side of the line, and who should presume to return to the English, would be treated as enemies by his Micmacs; and in the name of these, his Indian adherents, he demanded that the entire eastern half of the Acadian peninsula, including the ground on which Fort Lawrence stood, should be at once made over to their sole use and sovereign ownership,[118]—­“which being read and considered,” says the record of the Halifax Council, “the contents appeared too insolent and absurd to be answered.”

[Footnote 115:  Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760.]

[Footnote 116:  Ordonnance du 12 Avril, 1751.]

[Footnote 117:  Ecrit donne aux Habitants refugies a Beausejour, 10 Aout, 1754.]

[Footnote 118:  Copie de la Lettre de M. l’Abbe Le Loutre, Pretre Missionnaire des Sauvages de l’Accadie, a M. Lawrence a Halifax, 26 Aout, 1754.  There is a translation in Public Documents of Nova Scotia.]

The number of Acadians who had crossed the line and were collected about Beausejour was now large.  Their countrymen of Chipody began to find them a burden, and they lived chiefly on Government rations.  Le Loutre had obtained fifty thousand livres from the Court in order to dike in, for their use, the fertile marshes of Memeramcook; but the relief was distant, and the misery pressing.  They complained that they had been lured over the line by false assurances, and they applied secretly to the English authorities to learn if they would be allowed to return to their homes.  The answer was that they might do so with full enjoyment of religion and property, if they would