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Douçoit, Duchette, Ducette, Dowcette, Dusett, Ducit or Dousette.
    Born in the harbour of Annapolis Royal in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the two coastal brothers enjoyed a brief but intense career as buccaneers. They sacked the towns of New England, rammed and seized several British vessels and ousted overly acquisitive competitors. They even carried out a risky incursion into Boston harbour in the spring of 1702. The business continued until the day Alonzo died of a common case of indigestion. Herménégilde then retired, thanks to the ample booty the two brothers had stashed away in the fogbound coves of Nova Scotia.
    The Doucet family’s calling as corsairs would have surely faded into the quiet mists of retirement had it not been for the signing in 1713 of the Treaty of Utrecht.
    By ceding Acadia to the English, Louis XIV plunged all the settlers into a delicate situation, especially the Doucet family, whose New England raids had not been forgotten. Sensing the coming storm, Herménégilde’s children anticipated the deportation and spread out in all directions, from the Baie des Chaleurs to the Gulf of Mexico.
    The wandering and the political uncertainty put piracy back on the agenda.
    From north to south there appeared swarms of little buccaneers, like Armand Doucet, Euphédime Doucette,Ezéchias Doucett, Bonaventure Douchet and a number of other variably spelled Doucets whose names have hardly been retained by history. Since one pirate always attracts other pirates, many buccaneers joined the Doucet family: Captain Samuel Hall of Nova Scotia, the Newfoundlander Turk Kelly, as well as Louis-Olivier Gamache, the illustrious freebooter of Ellis Bay. Joyce’s grandfather even claimed that Jean Lafitte, the legendary Louisiana pirate, was a distant cousin of sorts.
    Joyce had never heard of Jean Lafitte, but she was perfectly willing to be impressed.
    A century later, Joyce’s great-great-grandfather and his two eldest sons built the legendary Doucet house near Tête-à-la-Baleine. Hastily assembled out of driftwood, it swayed in the nor’easter with foreboding creaks, leaning seaward like a huge marine mammal suffering vain attempts to keep it ashore. At every equinox, the whole village would place bets on the odds that the frame would finally give up and go out with the tide, but the years passed (Grandfather Doucet would declare, while pounding the nearest post with his fist) and the old building was still standing.
    That house was where every Doucet of Tête-à-la-Baleine had been born and had lived: grandfather and grandmother, great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins both male and female, brothers-in-law and mangy dogs. This branch of the family had stopped practising piracy without, however, having made a profession offishing. The absence of any precise role had gone a long way to cutting them off from the rest of the population.
    In any case, the Doucets lived too far from the village not to be suspect. The town braggarts claimed to visit the rickety house to tumble their girls or to get rum, for, though Grandfather Lyzandre had never rammed and boarded any ship whatsoever, he had done his share of smuggling during Prohibition. No more was needed for the secluded house to be branded a brothel, a dive and a den of eternal damnation.
    Weary of the contempt and the gossip, several members of the family considered leaving the village. The exodus began in June 1960 with the departure of Lyzandre’s youngest son, Jonas Doucet.
    This celebrated uncle, hardly fourteen years of age, had gone upriver to Montreal and signed on with a freighter bound for Madagascar, never to be seen again. His family would occasionally receive illegible postcards dispatched from every port in the world, which Grandfather Lyzandre thumbtacked on the walls of the house. In the depths of winter, when the nor’easter swept across the strand, the colourful stamps from Sumatra or Havana spiced up the Doucets’ daily lives and made