What are the characteristics of Acadias?

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There have been several Acadias. To begin with, in 1524 explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano baptized as Arcadia a lush, probably Virginian coastal landscape. He named it in honor of the ancient Greeks' earthly paradise. On later sixteenth-century maps, the name reappeared near the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Both the new location and the ensuing loss of the letter "r" suggest that cartographers had learned of Native Micmac place-names containing, in European renderings, the suffix acadie. French negotiators were apt to label Acadia the entire swath of territory extending from the Gaspé Peninsula to the Kennebec River. Indeed, northern Maine, Abenaki territory that would long remain a disputed fur-trading frontier, was the scene of the first French settlement in the region over the winter of 1604–1605 on St. Croix Island. But increasingly during the seventeenth century, the toponym "Acadia" would refer to peninsular Nova Scotia and the Chignecto Isthmus, where the Micmacs already accepted the presence of French traders and missionaries.