Malpeque Bay

Malpeque Bay on Prince Edward Island takes its name from Mi’kmaq Makpaak, interpreted locally as “large bay” or “big water.” Its eighteenth-century shore settlements formed part of the contested French and British Atlantic world, while Indigenous presence long preceded both. Acadian families farmed around the bay and built a church in 1753. After the British capture of Louisbourg and the takeover of Île Saint-Jean in 1758, deportation disrupted these communities, although some families at Malpeque escaped removal. British colonial planning then designated nearby Princetown as the centre of Prince County, one of the island’s three counties laid out by Samuel Holland. This projected administrative importance belonged to the shore settlement, not to the bay as a political jurisdiction. The bay’s history is therefore best understood through the distinct Indigenous, Acadian and British relationships with its surrounding land, rather than treating the coast as an empty space awaiting European settlement.