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January 1747 may have had its usual "January Thaw", but if it did, the 27th of that month was not one of its days, for its eve knew the keen and biting cold of a mid-winter, Northwest blizzard. The few Acadians, who lived in their rude, box huts at the mouth of Dewar’s River found it cold, even with their hearths of blazing logs of beech, birch and maple. On the morning of the 27th, the sun rose cheerless in its bleak dawn; its meagre warmth unfelt in the bitter wind, which swept over the miles and miles of ice and the floe of the Gulf and Strait and the sheeted white surface of Tatamagouche Harbour. The Acadians were up early, but they could see only the bleak leafless hardwoods, the dark pines, spruces and firs, and the white of ice and snow. The Harbour and its estuaries were frozen even beyond where the long finger of the Malagash Peninsula jutted Northeast into the Strait. Now and then, they could hear the sharp report as the ice snapped under its weight and its cold or the splash of the floes falling into the open water at the edges of the channel and along the shore. Today in midwinter, two hundred years after, at Blockhouse point, at Ross’s Point, at Gouzar, or elsewhere along the shore line, the scene is the same. Nature and nature’s climate have not changed. As the Acadians arose, unmistakable but perhaps not unexpected sounds came to their ears; they were those of axe man at work in the heavy forests near the base of Malagash Peninsula. And the Acadians rightly judged that they were many. Then, as they waited and watched, the dark, bundled forms of men emerged from the shelter of the woods, and came down the slope to the shore and into the open of the ice and snow of Gouzar. Back |
