-!\ »-,k VL MISSION OF S.S. PHILIP AND JAKES EGMONT BAY *********************** In the year 1813 the Lieutenant-Colonel Herry Compton of St. tleanors in offered his French tenantry the privilege of buying the farms which they occupied at the price of one hundred pounds for one hundred acres of cleared land. This the Acadians considered too large a sum to pay, and they accordingly decided to emigrate further west to the free lands of Township Fifteen upon the shores of . In 1799 a certain number of the Acadians had already gone to the extreme western part of the Island to establish colonies which later became the parishes of Tignish and Cascumpec . That this decision was partly owing to their dislike of their newly arrived English neighbors there can be no doubt, and dislike appears to have been mutual, for strange stories live in the memories of the oldest Acadians concerning cruelties practised on them by their wealthier fellow settlers. In the spring of I8I3, accordingly, a long procession of pirogues or Dug-outs, canoes, might have been seen passing along the southern shore of Prince Edward Island . The procession doubled Cape Egmont and landed upon the low land west of that promontory. They at once set to work to clear the land for cultivation and put in a crop of potatoes of which the mice ate every vestige. The ci-devant tenants of Colonel Compton appear to have retained very few of their possessions in their sudden flight to "La Roche" as they called their new village. Many of them left behind them much that constituted the comfort of their home life, and thereby endured privations and hardships. All their journeys were of necessity made by water and in the primitive pirogues; in tais unwieldly craft they would have to repair to Bedeque to get an axe beaten or a bushel of corn ground. An old lady related that when sue and her husband first went to St. Jacques de la Roche, they built a rough log shanty as a temporary shelter and used to put taeir /