APPENDICES

Acadian Immigrants to Louisiana from the Caribbean Basin, 1765-1812

Relatively few Acadians came to Louisiana directly from the Caribbean Basin, including French St.-Domingue, today's Haiti, during and after Le Grand Dérangement.  Professor Carl A. Brasseaux, the best informed scholar on the Acadians in Louisiana, says that "Numerous published sources, based entirely on speculation, had suggested that many of the Saint-Domingue Acadians left the colony for Louisiana in the mid-to-late 1760s.  The documentary record in Louisiana, however, makes it clear that few, if any, Saint-Domingue Acadians migrated to the Mississippi Valley."  See Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 45 (italics added); Appendix.  This study agrees with Professor Brasseaux's assertion ... to an extent.  Of the nearly 2,900 Acadians who emigrated to Louisiana from 1764 to the early 1800s, only a few dozen came directly from Haiti.  Most of them arrived in 1765 probably with the refugees from Halifax who transshipped at Cap-Français as early as December 1764, and some perhaps with the refugee expeditions from Maryland, some of which also transshipped at Cap-Français on their way to New Orleans in the late 1760s.  Even fewer Acadian exiles came to the colony from other French islands in the Caribbean Basin--at least three from Champflore, Martinique, in 1766-68.  See also Paul Delaney's chronology of Le Grand Dérangement at <acadian-home.org>.

Below are the Acadians in Louisiana whose presence in the Caribbean Basin can be supported by primary sources, solid inference, just plain guesswork.  This list does not include the hundreds of Acadians from Halifax who came through Cap-Français, St.-Domingue, in late 1764 and 1765 on their way to New Orleans, or the hundreds more from Maryland who came through Cap-Français in the late 1760s.  It includes only the ones who would have gone directly from the Caribbean Basin to Louisiana, including refugees from the Haitian revolt of the 1790s and early 1800s who fled to Cuba and Jamaica in 1803 and who moved on to Louisiana after Jefferson's Purchase. 

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