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The ensuing winter proved most trying to the destitute Acadians. The harvest had been extremely poor. In some cases the old inhabitants had nothing to live upon but the grain needed for seeding in the spring time. The conditions at Miramichi were probably not more wretched than on the River St. John. Of the former the Marquis de Vaudreuil writes in the following plaintive terms:
Thus the acquaintance, broken off, in that cold, restrained morning adieu, on the banks of the Miramichi, was renewed under the sunny, joyous sky of Italy. Their communion with one another was now no longer marred by youthful waywardness and caprice.
It happened that he arrived at the wharf just as the sloop had got beyond the possibility of reaching her, and he turned away bitterly disappointed. The night that followed was one of darkness and horror; the sloop caught fire and all on board perished. He had now received an impression that it was his duty to go, as an ambassador of Christ, to Miramichi.
There were timber-ships, huge and square-sided, unmistakeably from Quebec or Miramichi green high-sterned Dutch galliots American ships with long black hulls and tall raking masts and those far-famed "Black Ball" clippers, the Marco Polo and the Champion of the Seas, in short, the ships of all nations, with their marked and distinguishing peculiarities.
He had orders to proceed to Gaspé, Miramichi, and other settlements on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, destroy them, and disperse their inhabitants; a measure of needless and unpardonable rigor, which, while detesting it, he executed with characteristic thoroughness. "Sir Charles Hardy and I," he wrote to his father, "are preparing to rob the fishermen of their nets and burn their huts.
His claithes look pretty nice. As a gen'al thing them people fra' the States hae plenty o' plack in their pockets. What do you think, sir?" "He is undoubtedly a gentleman from New England", said Mr. Norton. Mrs. McNab was a native of Dumfries, Scotland, and had made her advent in the Miramichi country about five years previous to the occurrences just mentioned.
He was one of the few persons who had the good fortune of escaping the great conflagration in Miramichi, which broke out in the October after my arrival, and excited so much general sympathy. Fifteen of his comrades perished in the flames.
The consummation of terror, madness, and dismay, depicted in its most awful form, would fail to do justice to this sickening calamity the Miramichi fire. The forests, for hundreds of miles in every direction, were one solid mass of living fire, roaring louder than thunder; in its fury shaking the bowels of the earth and leaping up to the heavens which seemed, also, to be enveloped in flames.
Mon. de Boishebert will in like manner be engaged rallying the savages and forming of them a body equally important, and by corresponding with M. Manach, the missionary at Miramichi, will be able, in case of necessity, to unite the savages of that mission to his own in opposing the advance of the enemy.
This convocation, occurring in the leisure spell between the end of planting and the commencement of haying, is consequently no hindrance to the agricultural part of the community; and old and young "off they come" from Miramichi, from Acadia, and the Oromocto, in shay and waggon, steam-boat and catamaran, on horseback or on foot, as best they can.
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