“Un Petit Dérangement: The Eviction of French Fishermen from Newfoundland in 1755”

Summary

One of the more traumatic events in Canadian history – the deportation of the Acadian people from their homes in Nova Scotia – began in the late summer and early autumn of 1755. Something like six or seven thousand Acadian men, women and children were rounded up by Anglo-American and British military and naval personnel, herded onto transports and shipped off to various destinations throughout the North Atlantic while their homes were put to the torch and their livestock slaughtered. It was a remarkable event, described in a recent study of the Seven Years’ War in North America as “perhaps the first time in modern history [that] a civilian population was forcibly removed as a security risk.” The event certainly remains controversial to this day; although the Acadians had been under British control since 1710 and had resisted pressure to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown, no one anticipated so drastic a reaction to their stubbornness a full generation later. Moreover, England and France were nominally still at peace in 1755; true, hostilities had already commenced in some parts of North America, but war would not formally be declared until 1756. Historians therefore still search for reasons and meaning to “le grand dérangement,” while for the modern-day Acadian descendants, it remains both a formative event in the evolution of their culture and proof of English perfidy.

Yet this mid-eighteenth-century act of “ethnic cleansing” was not as unprecedented as one might think. In 1744, as England and France had been about to formalize hostilities in the last war, an attempt had been made to expel French inhabitants from Isle Saint Jean (today's Prince Edward Island). And as this paper will show, in August 1755, just a few weeks before the Acadian deportation began in Nova Scotia, a “petit dérangement” took place when French fishermen working and living on the coast of southwestern Newfoundland were forcibly removed by English warships. We shall see that one man links all three events, although only additional research will enable us to determine the extent to which his involvement was more than just an historical coincidence. This essay will concentrate on the Newfoundland incident, giving particular attention to how and by whom that expulsion was carried out.