Famous Quotes | It is not generally remembered,...

It is not generally remembered, if known, by the descendants of the Pilgrims, that when their forefathers were spending their first memorable winter in the New World, they had for neighbors a colony of French no further off than Port Royal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia) ... where, in spite of many vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen years.... Though these founders of Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about the same proportion of them ... died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-1605, sixteen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever celebrated their enterprise ... while the trials which their successors and descendants endured at the hands of the English have furnished a theme for both the historian and poet. - Henry David Thoreau
Attribution: Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 231, Houghton Mifflin (1906). Thoreau adds a footnote at the end of this quotation: “See Bancroft’s History and Longfellow’s Evangeline.” The “orator” mentioned in connection with the Pilgrims is probably Daniel Webster.

Categories: Acadians, Author, Canadians, French, Naturalist, Philosopher, Pilgrims, New England

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