In 1755, Jeremiah Bancroft enlisted to fight against the French Empire in North America. Embarking from Boston that April
with 2,000 of his countrymen, his attention was focused on the objective of capturing Fort Beauséjour at Chignecto, located
on the present-day border between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Bancroft could not have predicted the fort’s rapid
surrender, nor his New England force’s redeployment against the civilian population of Acadia. His journal preserves an
eyewitness account of the deportation of the Acadians in the Grand-Pré area, offering readers a day-by-day account of one
of the most dramatic events in Canadian history. Edited, introduced and annotated by Jonathan Fowler and Earle Lockerby,
and supported with maps and illustrations, this publication marks the first appearance of Bancroft’s diary in book form. It
also launches “Diaries of the Acadian Deportations,” a new series of history books aimed at attentive readers of Canadian
history.

Jonathan Fowler is a historical archaeologist who teaches at Saint Mary’s University. He holds degrees from Saint Mary’s, Acadia University, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Oxford and has wide-ranging interests in the fields of archaeology, anthropology and history. For the past decade, Jonathan has directed archaeological excavations at Grand-Pré National Historic Site. He is the co-author, with Paul Erickson, of two popular books on regional archeology, Underground Nova Scotia and Underground New Brunswick.

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Earle Lockerby studied chemistry, engineering and management at Mount Allison University, Nova Scotia Technical College and the Imperial College in London before embarking on a thirty-year career in the nuclear power industry. Since his retirement in 1996, he has turned his attention to his other passion, eighteenth-century Maritime history, publishing papers in such peer-reviewed scholarly journals as Acadiensis, Canadian Journal of Native Studies and Native Studies Review. Author of Deportation of the Prince Edward Island Acadians, Lockerby splits his time between his residence in Sandford, Ontario, and his summer cottage at Darnley, PEI.

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