top of page
![“Saw Mount Surratt [and] Saint Kitts Is.”: Navigation and Notation in an Acadian Merchant Captain’s Voyages from Nova Scotia to the West Indies](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/0d0423_68165a84649c44169f60608f34f3fa7c~mv2.jpeg/v1/fill/w_1331,h_1000,fp_0.50_0.50,q_30,blur_30,enc_avif,quality_auto/0d0423_68165a84649c44169f60608f34f3fa7c~mv2.jpeg)
![“Saw Mount Surratt [and] Saint Kitts Is.”: Navigation and Notation in an Acadian Merchant Captain’s Voyages from Nova Scotia to the West Indies](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/0d0423_68165a84649c44169f60608f34f3fa7c~mv2.jpeg/v1/fill/w_1816,h_1364,fp_0.50_0.50,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/0d0423_68165a84649c44169f60608f34f3fa7c~mv2.jpeg)
“Saw Mount Surratt [and] Saint Kitts Is.”: Navigation and Notation in an Acadian Merchant Captain’s Voyages from Nova Scotia to the West Indies
Documents authored by eighteenth-century Acadians are rare. The French settlers known as the Acadians had been deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, and Roman Catholic education in the province was soon thereafter reduced to non-existence. The generation of eighteenth-century Acadians born and raised in exile seldom had access to formal education.[1] There were exceptions, however, and some Acadians born in the tumult of the 1750s rose to prominence through lucrat
Colby Gaudet
Aug 13, 202410 min read
Primary Source: Sarah Bancroft, Antinomian Prophetess of the Annapolis Valley, 1791
In the early 1790s, in the lower Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, there lived a woman known locally as “The Prophetess.” Her name was Sarah Bancroft, and she was an antinomian preacher in the radical New Light tradition of Protestant evangelism. As a prophet, Bancroft preached publicly about the urgency of recognizing and confessing one’s sins in the hopes of experiencing a spiritual conversion (or New Birth) through God’s grace. The New Light message of spiritual rebirth had
Colby Gaudet
Sisters of Charity Burials, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Halifax
In my recent research pursuit of Sister Mary Bernard (1852–1937), who I discussed in my last post, I discovered that she was buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery, here in Halifax.
Colby Gaudet
Primary Source: Letters from an Acadian Nun to Her Parents, 1884–1893
Last fall, I was looking through the items in the Fonds James Valentine Stuart at the Centre Acadien, Université Sainte-Anne. Born in Halifax in 1806, Stuart married an Acadian – Marguerite-Sophie Melanson – in 1839, and lived the remainder of his life in the port village of Church Point in the township of Clare, Nova Scotia. In the 1860s and 1870s he was a justice of the peace and the customs collector at Belliveau’s Cove, a key port at the time on St. Mary’s Bay.[1] His pap
Colby Gaudet
bottom of page