Acadia

Frederic S. Cozzens was a New York wine merchant with a comic reputation, and in the late 1850s he spent a month in Nova Scotia and wrote it up. He lands at Halifax, loiters in its markets and climbs Citadel Hill, then pushes on to Bedford Basin, Cape Breton and the ruins of Louisbourg, sizing up the Mi’kmaq, the settlers the outside world called Blue Noses, and the Acadians still living at Chezzetcook. Longfellow sent him: he went looking for the real Evangeline and found her selling eggs and worsted socks at daybreak.

The joking stops at the deportation of 1755. Cozzens reprints the Grand-Pré order, counts the eighteen thousand sent into exile, and turns hard on what he calls the filibustering fathers of New England. Published in 1859, it holds an unhurried picture of the Maritimes.