Audiobook · read by volunteers
Chronicles of Canada Volume 09 - The Acadian Exiles: A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
Arthur G. Doughty (1860–1936)
Read by J. M. Smallheer, Esther, Sarah Jennings, Graham Redman, Kevin McAsh, Sibella Denton · 10 chapters · 3 h 35
About the book
Long before it became a symbol of exile, Acadia was a corner of New France on the Atlantic coast, claimed in turn by the French and the British. This volume of the Chronicles of Canada follows its story from the first French settlers to the struggle between two empires, and on to the oath of allegiance that Britain demanded. Arthur G. Doughty writes as a historian with an eye for scenes and for the people who lived through them: farmers, soldiers, governors and priests. The book is also a guide to the background of Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, which turned the story of the Acadians into one of the best-known tales of North American history. Ten chapters, read by six LibriVox volunteers, make a clear and readable account of a painful chapter in Canada’s past. The story is told with a clear eye for people and places.
Introduction
Arthur G. Doughty was a Canadian archivist and historian, born in 1860 and died in 1936. He served as the Dominion Archivist and wrote this volume for Chronicles of Canada, a series of short volumes published in the 1910s that aimed to tell the story of Canada in a form accessible to the general reader. The Acadian Exiles, which came out in 1916, is the ninth in that series, and it bears the subtitle A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline.
The title points to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem Evangeline, published in 1847, which made the expulsion of the Acadians known to a wide audience. Doughty’s book goes behind the poem to the historical record. The opening chapter explains that the French gave the name Acadia to the maritime east of New France, as distinct from the St Lawrence valley to the west, which was called Canada, and that they never drew the boundary between the two clearly.
The ten chapters take the reader from the founders of Acadia through the period of British rule and the demand for an oath of allegiance, and on to the events that followed. Readers should be aware that the book is a product of its time, written over a century ago, and later historians have treated the subject differently.
The recording lasts about three and a half hours and is shared among six LibriVox volunteers. It is useful for readers of Longfellow, for anyone interested in Canadian or Acadian history, and for those who want to see how the story was told in the early twentieth century. The book is brief and well organised, and it gives a useful background to a story many know only from poetry.
Public domain
Arthur G. Doughty died in 1936: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text