Some History related to Acadian Shorelines

Hello. Patrick à Ti Benoit à Joe-Botte à Butler à Squire à Bénoni à Jacques II à Jacques I à Sieur Philippe here.

Sieur? That’s right—Sir! The first of my ancestors to land in Nova Scotia was Philippe Mius of France who had been made Sieur d’Entremont by Louis XIV. Apparently this original d’Entremont was related to the royal house of Bourbons, of which said Louis Quatorze was a member.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Sieur Philippe came to Acadia in 1651, and in 1653 he was granted the Baronnie de Pobomcoup, which stretched from Cap Fourchu, near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to Cap Nègre, in Shelburne County. Pobomcoup was a Mi’kmaq word meaning “land cleared for cultivation.” It was later Francized to Poumbcoup, then Anglicized to Pubnico. While people and events in this novel are fictitious, the setting is not, and I strive to portray the time and the place as faithfully as possible.

“Well, if you were kicked out, why are you still here?” Tommy’s English-speaking friend Jeffrey asked.

“We came back,” explained Billy, and I feel I need to add a bit of context to Billy’s answer.

This is where Bénoni d’Entremont comes in. Before the Expulsion of 1755-1763, Bénoni, great grandson of Sieur Philippe, lived in what is now Barrington, which was then part of the Baronnie de Pobomcoup. He, his father and siblings and many other families were expelled in April, 1756, in the first of three raids in southwest Nova Scotia (the other two being in 1758 and 1759). These families were shipped off to Massachusetts where, after some struggle, the governor allowed them to settle in the areas surrounding Boston. One story has it that Bénoni’s father, Jacques II, met a mariner in Boston whose life he had saved some 35 years earlier, and it was this sailor who had pleaded their case to the governor.

In August 1766, after ten years in exile and three years since the Treaty of Paris that had ended hostilities between France and England, some of these Acadians sailed back to Nova Scotia. They were originally going to keep on going to Québec, but met up with an officer in Halifax who interceded on their behalf and convinced them to return to their homeland. When they got there, however, they found their land had been taken over by English settlers, and they spent the winter of 1766-1767 in the Sand Hills area, near Barrington.

The following spring, many villages that now dot the Acadian Shores of Yarmouth County were settled, including Buttes des Amiraults, Wedgeport, Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau, and East and West Pubnico. My ancestors settled in West Pubnico. These included siblings Joseph, Paul, Bénoni and Marguerite d’Entremont, as well as Joseph’s wife, mother, and two children. Their father, Jacques II, had died in exile in Massachusetts.

And that Bénoni d’Entremont was my great-great-great-grandfather. Except for some strange twists of fate, I could have been born in Barrington, in Massachusetts, or in Québec. But I was born in West Pubnico, which forms the basis for Glen River, the setting for this novel.