War broke out between the British and French Empires in the 1740s and again in the 1750s. At some point the Boudrot family moved to Cherbourg, France. Basile’s father was a mariner, and the young man worked as a fisherman “now and then.”
In 1764 Basile married Magdelene d’Entremont in Cherbourg. She, too, had roots on Nova Scotia, in Pubnico on the southeastern shore.
Four years later, the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, Michael Francklin, signed a charter creating the settlement of Clare in the easternmost corner of the peninsula. That area was set aside for French-speaking Acadians.
Three important things happened to Basile Boudrot in 1772. First, the Musée des Acadiens des Pubnicos tells this story:
It was in April when he left [France] with a letter from his sister[-in-law] Marguerite Landry for her brother-in-law in Pubnico, asking him to send her the money which had been hidden at the “Cabanaux.”Benoni d’Entremont (1745–1841) had spent his adolescence in Marblehead, Medfield, and finally Walpole, Massachusetts, having been expelled from Acadia with his family after the capture of Louisbourg. His father died in 1759 and was reportedly buried in Roxbury. After years as “French neutrals,” the rest of the family returned to Nova Scotia.
On his way to Acadia, Basile opened the letter and went right straight to the spot indicated where the money had been hidden and unearthed “1004 pieces of money.”
Then he went to Pubnico and told the d’Entremont bothers that their relatives in France were well provided for, having received money from “the town-hall and a quarter out of two vessels.” Thus, he was going to keep the money. It is obvious that he did not give them Marguerite’s letter.
He left Pubnico on May 7 and disappeared forever. In a letter, we read that some captains from Cherbourg had seen him several times “in America” without saying exactly where.
A few days after Basile had left, Benoni d’Entremont wrote to his sister-in-law Marguerite Landry and told her about the visit that he and his brothers had received from Basile Boudrot. Marguerite answered April 20, 1773, telling of the letter she had entrusted him with and of the lies he had told of her being well provided for, and these the whole story of Basile’s “prevarication” came to light.
Back to Basile Boudrot. According to Isaiah W. Wilson’s A Geography and History of the County of Digby, Nova Scotia (1900), in May 1772 the government of Nova Scotia granted him 300 acres on St. Mary’s Bay within the Clare settlement. Today the village of Comeauville claims him as a founder.
I have questions about how those events fit together, assuming all the details are correct. Did Boudrot use the money he unearthed to buy that land? The timing would be tight if he left France in April and completed the real estate deal by the end of May. Or did he return to Nova Scotia to settle on a land grant and as a bonus stumble onto buried treasure?
Pubnico and Comeauville are more than fifty miles apart, but there weren’t a whole lot of people living on eastern Nova Scotia at that time. Did the D’Entremonts really never hear about Boudrot living in the same province?
As for the third event in 1772, that’s coming up later this week.
TOMORROW: Parson Parsons’s sons.
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