Pioneers in Canada
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Title: Pioneers in Canada
Author: Harry Johnston
Illustrator: E. Wallcousins
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PIONEERS IN CANADA
By
SIR HARRY JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B.
With Eight Coloured Illustrations by E. Wallcousins
1912
[Illustration: TYPE OF SHIP SAILED IN BY THE ENGLISH OR FRENCH
PIONEERS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY]
The Pioneer Library
A standard series by Sir Harry Johnston. Tastefully bound.
Pioneers in Australasia.
Pioneers in Canada.
Pioneers in South Africa.
Pioneers in West Africa.
Pioneers in Tropical America.
Pioneers in India.
PREFACE
I have been asked to write a series of works which should deal with
"real adventures", in parts of the world either wild and uncontrolled
by any civilized government, or at any rate regions full of dangers,
of wonderful discoveries; in which the daring and heroism of white men
(and sometimes of white women) stood out clearly against backgrounds
of unfamiliar landscapes, peopled with strange nations, savage tribes,
dangerous beasts, or wonderful birds. These books would again and
again illustrate the first coming of the white race into regions
inhabited by people of a different type, with brown, black, or yellow
skins; how the European was received, and how he treated these races
of the soil which gradually came under his rule owing to his superior
knowledge, weapons, wealth, or powers of persuasion. The books were to
tell the plain truth, even if here and there they showed the white man
to have behaved badly, or if they revealed the fact that the American
Indian, the Negro, the Malay, the black Australian was sometimes cruel
and treacherous.
A request thus framed was almost equivalent to asking me to write
stories of those pioneers who founded the British Empire; in any case,
the first volumes of this series do relate the adventures of those who
created the greater part of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, by
their perilous explorations of unknown lands and waters. In many
instances the travellers were all unconscious of their destinies, of
the results which would arise from their actions. In some cases they
would have bitterly railed at Fate had they known that the result of
their splendid efforts was to be the enlargement of an empire under
the British flag. Perhaps if they could know by now that we are
striving under that flag to be just and generous to all types of men,
and not to use our empire solely for the benefit of English-speaking
men and women, the French who founded the Canadian nation, the Germans
and Dutch who helped to create British Africa, Malaysia, and
Australia, the Spaniards who preceded us in the West Indies, and the
Portuguese in West, Central, and East Africa, in Newfoundland and
Ceylon, might--if they have any consciousness or care for things in
this world--be not so sorry after all that we are reaping where they
sowed.
It is (as you will see) impossible to tell the tale of these early
days in the British Dominions beyond the Seas, without describing here
and there the adventures of men of enterprise and daring who were not
of our own nationality. The majority, nevertheless, were of British
stock; that is to say, they were English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, perhaps
here and there a Channel Islander and a Manxman; or Nova Scotians,
Canadians, and New Englanders. The bulk of them were good fellows, a
few were saints, a few were ruffians with redeeming features.
Sometimes they were common men who blundered into great discoveries
which will for ever preserve their names from perishing; occasionally
they were men of Fate, predestined, one might say, to change the
history of the world by their revelations of new peoples, new lands,
new rivers, new lakes, snow mountains, and gold mines. Here and there
is a martyr like Marquette, or Livingstone, or Gordon, dying for the
cause of a race not his own. And others again are mere boys, whose
adventures come to them because they are adventurous, and whose feats
of arms, escapes, perils, and successes are quite as wonderful as
those attributed to the juvenile heroes of Marryat, Stevenson, and the
author of _The Swiss Family Robinson_.
I have tried, in describing these adventures, to give my readers some
idea of the scenery, animals, and vegetation of the new lands through
which these pioneers passed on their great and small purposes; as well
as of the people, native to the soil, with whom they came in contact.
And in treating of these subjects I have thought it best to give the
scientific names of the plant or animal which was of importance in my
story, so that any of my readers who were really interested in natural
history could at once ascertain for themselves the exact type alluded
to, and, if they wished, look it up in a museum, a garden, or a
natural history book.
I hope this attempt at scientific accuracy will not frighten away
readers young and old; and, if you can have patience with the author,
you will, by reading this series of books on the great pioneers of
British West Africa, Canada, Malaysia, West Indies, South Africa, and
Australasia, get a clear idea of how the British Colonial Empire came
to be founded.
You will find that I have often tried to tell the story in the words
of the pioneers, but in these quotations I have adopted the modern
spelling, not only in my transcript of the English original or
translation, but also in the place and tribal names, so as not to
puzzle or delay the reader. Otherwise, if you were to look out some of
the geographical names of the old writers, you might not be able to
recognize them on the modern atlas. The pronunciation of this modern
geographical spelling is very simple and clear: the vowels are
pronounced _a_ = ah, _e_ = eh, _i_ = ee, _o_ = o, _ô_ = oh,
_[¯o]_ = aw, _ö_ = u in 'hurt', and _u_ = oo, as in German, Italian, or
most other European languages; and the consonants as in English.
H. H. JOHNSTON.
CONTENTS
I. THE WHITE MAN'S DISCOVERY OF NORTH AMERICA............... 15
II. JACQUES CARTIER.......................................... 29
III. ELIZABETHAN PIONEERS IN NORTH AMERICA.................... 45
IV. CHAMPLAIN AND THE FOUNDATION OF CANADA................... 53
V. AFTER CHAMPLAIN: FROM MONTREAL TO THE MISSISSIPPI........ 88
VI. THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONDITIONS OF THE CANADIAN DOMINION.....120
VII. THE AMERINDIANS AND ESKIMO: THE ABORIGINES OF BRITISH
NORTH AMERICA.......................................153
VIII. THE HUDSON BAY EXPLORERS AND THE BRITISH CONQUEST OF
ALL CANADA..........................................202
IX. THE PIONEERS FROM MONTREAL: ALEXANDER HENRY THE ELDER....211
X. SAMUEL HEARNE............................................248
XI. ALEXANDER MACKENZIE'S JOURNEYS...........................277
XII. MACKENZIE'S SUCCESSORS...................................313
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLOURED PLATES
Type of Ship sailed in by the English or French Pioneers in the
Sixteenth Century _Frontispiece_
Icebergs and Polar Bears
Indians hunting Bison
Indians lying in wait for Moose
Caribou swimming a River
Great Auks, Gannets, Puffins, and Guillemots
Scene on Canadian River: Wild Swans flying up, disturbed by Bear
Big-horned Sheep of Rocky Mountains
BLACK-AND-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
Jacques Cartier
Samuel de Champlain and Alexander Henry the Elder
An Amerindian Type of British Columbia
Lake Louise, the Rocky Mountains
Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie
The Upper Waters of the Fraser River
The Kootenay or Head Stream of the Columbia River
A Hunter's "Shack" in British Columbia: After a successful Shoot of
Blue Grouse
Map of Canada
Map of Eastern Canada and Newfoundland
Map of Part of the Coast Region of British Columbia
List of the Chief Authorities
FROM WHOM THE PRINCIPAL FACTS AND INCIDENTS OF THIS BOOK HAVE BEEN
DERIVED, IN ADDITION TO THE AUTHOR'S OWN RESEARCHES AND EXPERIENCES,
AND INFORMATION SUPPLIED BY PROFESSOR R. RAMSAY WRIGHT, OF TORONTO
UNIVERSITY
_The Saint Lawrence Basin_. By Dr. S.E. DAWSON. London. 1905.
Lawrence & Bullen.
_Relation Originale du Voyage de Jacques Cartier au Canada en
1534_; Documents inédits, &c. Publiés par H. MICHELANT et A. RAME.
Paris. Librairie Tross. 1867.
_Voyage de Jacques Cartier au Canada en 1534_, &c. Par H.
MICHELANT. Paris. 1865.
_Champlain's Voyages_: The Publications of the Prince Society.
Boston. 1878. Three volumes.
_Voyage of Verrazano_, &c. By HENRY C. MURPHY. New York. 1875.
(Also the Essay on the Journeys of Verrazano, by Alessandro Bacchiani,
in the Bollettino della Societá Geografica Italiana. Rome. November,
1909.)
_Volume IX of the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of
Canada_. (For the History of Cape Breton and of the Beothiks of
Newfoundland.)
_The Search for the Western Sea_. By Lawrence J. Burpee. London.
Alston Rivers. 1908.
_Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New
France_, &c. Edited by REUBEN GOLD THWAITES. Vol. LIX. Cleveland,
U.S.A. Burrows Bros. 1900.
_Travels and Explorations in Canada and the Indian Territories between
the years 1760 and 1776_. By ALEXANDER HENRY, Esq. New York. 1809.
_Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence through the Continent
of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in the years 1789
and 1793_, &c. &c. By ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, Esq. London. 1801.
_A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern
Ocean_, &c. By SAMUEL HEARNE. London. 1795.
_Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest_. By L.R. MASSON.
Quebec. 1890. Two volumes.
_New Light on the Early History of the Greater North-West_: The
Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry, Jun., and of David Thompson.
Edited by ELLIOTT COUES. Three Volumes. New York. Harper. 1897.
_Sport and Travel in the Northland of Canada_. By DAVID T. HANBURY.
London. Edward Arnold. 1904.
_Henry Hudson the Navigator_, &c. By G.M. ASHER. London. Hakluyt
Society, 1860.
_The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher_. By Rear-Admiral RICHARD
COLLINSON. London. Hakluyt Society. 1867.
_The Voyages and Works of John Davis the Navigator_. By Admiral Sir
ALBERT HASTINGS MARKHAM. London. Hakluyt Society. 1880.
_The Voyages of William Baffin, 1612-1622_. By Sir CLEMENTS R.
MARKHAM. London. 1881.
CHAPTER I
The White Man's Discovery of North America
So far as our knowledge goes, it is almost a matter of certainty that
Man originated in the Old World--in Asia possibly. Long after this
wonderful event in the Earth's history, when the human species was
spread over a good deal of Asia, Europe, and Africa, migration to the
American continents began in attempts to find new feeding grounds and
unoccupied areas for hunting and fishing. How many thousands or
hundreds of thousands of years ago it was since the first men entered
America we do not yet know, any more than we can determine the route
by which they travelled from Asia. Curiously enough, the oldest traces
of man as yet discovered in the New World are not only in South
America, but in the south-eastern parts of South America. Although the
most obvious recent land connection between the Old and New Worlds is
the Aleutian chain of islands connecting Kamschatka with Alaska, the
ethnologist is occasionally led to think by certain evidence that
there may, both earlier and later, have existed another way of
reaching western America from south-eastern Asia through Pacific
archipelagoes and islets now sunk below the sea. In any case it seems
quite probable that men of Mongolian or Polynesian type reached
America on its western coasts long before the European came from the
north-east and east, and that they were helped on this long journey by
touching at islands since submerged by earthquake shocks or tidal
waves.
The aboriginal natives of North and South America seem to be of
entirely Asiatic origin; and such resemblances as there are between
the North-American Indians and the peoples of northern Europe do not
arise (we believe) from any ancient colonization of America from
western or northern Europe, but mainly from the fact that the
North-American Indians and the Eskimo (two distinct types of people)
are descended from the same human stocks as the ancient populations of
the northern part of Europe and Asia.
It was--we think--from the far _north-west_ of Europe that America was
first visited by the true White man, though there has been an ancient
immigration of imperfect "White" men (Ainu) from Kamschatka. Three or
four hundred years after the birth of Christ there were great race
movements in northern and central Europe, due to an increase of
population and insufficiency of food. Not only did these white
barbarians (though they were not as barbarous as we were led to think
by Greek and Roman literature) invade southern Europe, North Africa,
and Asia Minor, but from the fourth century of the Christian era
onwards they began to cross over to England and Scotland. At the same
time they took more complete possession of Scandinavia, driving north
before their advance the more primitive peoples like the Lapps and
Finns, who were allied to the stock from which arose both the Eskimo
and the Amerindian.[1] All this time the Goths and Scandinavians
were either learning ideas of navigation from the Romans of the
Mediterranean or the Greeks of the Black Sea, or they were inventing
for themselves better ways of constructing ships; and although they
propelled them mainly by oars, they used masts and sails as well.[2]
Having got over the fear of the sea sufficiently to reach the coasts
of England and Scotland, the Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands, they
became still more venturesome in their voyages from Norway, until they
discovered the Faroe Archipelago (which tradition says they found
inhabited by wild sheep), and then the large island of Iceland, which
had, however, already been reached and settled by the northern Irish.
[Footnote 1: This is a convenient name for the race formerly called
"American Indian". They are not Indians (i.e. natives of India), and
they are not the only Americans, since there are now about 110,000,000
white Americans of European origin and 24,000,000 negroes and
negroids. The total approximate "Amerindian" or aboriginal population
of the New World at the present day is 16,000,000, of whom about
111,000 live in the Canadian Dominion, and 300,000 in the United
States, the remainder in Central and South America.]
[Footnote 2: It is doubtful whether actual masts and sails were known
in America till the coming of Europeans, though the ancient Peruvians
are said to have used mat sails in their canoes. But the northern
Amerindians had got as far as placing bushes or branches of fir trees
upright in their canoes to catch the force of the wind.]
Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within
the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by
the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite
habitable. It is not almost entirely covered with ice, as Greenland
is; in fact, Iceland should be called Greenland (from the large extent
of its grassy pastures), and Greenland should be called Iceland.
Instead of this, however, the early Norwegian explorers called these
countries by the names they still bear.
The Norse rovers from Norway and the Hebrides colonized Iceland from
the year 850; and about a hundred and thirty-six years afterwards, in
their venturesome journeys in search of new lands, they reached the
south-east and south-west coasts of Greenland. Owing to the glacial
conditions and elevated character of this vast continental island
(more than 500,000 sq. miles in area)--for the whole interior of
Greenland rises abruptly from the sea-coast to altitudes of from 5000
to 11,000 ft.--this discovery was of small use to the early Norwegians
or their Iceland colony. After it was governed by the kingdom of
Norway in the thirteenth century, the Norse colonization of south-west
Greenland faded away under the attacks of the Eskimo, until it ceased
completely in the fifteenth century. When Denmark united herself with
the kingdom of Norway in 1397, the Danish king became also the ruler
of Iceland. In the eighteenth century the Norwegian and Danish
settlements were re-established along the south-east and south-west
coasts of Greenland, mainly on account of the value of the whale,
seal, and cod fisheries in the seas around this enormous frozen
island; and all Greenland is now regarded as a Danish possession.
But the adventurous Norsemen who first reached Greenland from Iceland
attempted to push their investigations farther to the south-west, in
the hope of discovering more habitable lands; and in this way it was
supposed that their voyages extended as far as Massachusetts and Rhode
Island, but in all probability they reached no farther than
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. This portion of North America they
called "Vinland", more from the abundance of cranberries (_vinbær_) on
the open spaces than the few vines to be found in the woods of Nova
Scotia.[3]
[Footnote 3: The grapes and vines so often alluded to by the early
explorers of North America ripened, according to the species, between
August and October. They belong to the same genus--_Vitis_--as that of
the grape vines of the Old World, but they were quite distinct in
species. Nowadays they are known as the Fox Grapes (_Vitis vulpina_),
the Frost Grape (_V. cordifolia_), the _V. aestivalis_, the _V.
labruska_, &c. The fruit of the Fox Grape is dark purple, with a very
dusky skin and a musky flavour. The Frost Grape has a very small
berry, which is black or leaden-blue when covered with bloom. It is
very acid to the taste, but from all these grapes it is easy to make a
delicious, refreshing drink. Champlain, however, says that the wild
grapes were often quite large in size, and his men found them
delicious to eat.]
This brings us down to the year 1008. The Icelandic Norsemen then
ceased their investigations of the North-American Continent, and were
too ignorant to realize the value of their discoveries. Their colonies
on the coasts of Nova Scotia ("Vinland") and Newfoundland
("Estotiland") were attacked probably by Eskimos, at any rate by a
short, thick-set, yellow-skinned ugly people whom the Norsemen called
"Skræling",[4] who overcame the unfortunate settlers, murdered some,
and carried off others into the interior.
[Footnote 4: Perhaps from the Eastern Eskimo national name _Karalit_.]
But about this period, when Europe was going through that dismal era,
the Dark Age which followed the downfall of the Roman Empire of the
west, various impulses were already directing the attention of
European adventurers to the Western Ocean, the Atlantic. One cause was
the increased hold of Roman and Greek Christianity over the peoples of
Europe. These Churches imposed fasts either for single days or for
continuous periods. When people fasted it meant that they were chiefly
denied any form of meat, and therefore must eat fish if they were not
content with oil, bread, or vegetables. So that there was an enormous
and increasing demand for fish, not only amongst those fortunate
people who lived by the seashore, and could get it fresh whenever they
liked, but among those who lived at a distance inland, and were still
required to fast when the Church so directed. Of course in many parts
of Europe they could get freshwater fish from the rivers or lakes. But
the supply was not equal to the demand; and fish sent up from the
seacoast soon went bad, so that the plan of salting and curing fish
was adopted. The Norsemen found it a paying business to fish
industriously in the seas round Iceland, Norway, Scotland, and
Ireland, salt and cure the fish, and then carry it to more southern
countries, where they exchanged it against wine, oil, clothing
materials, and other goods. This led to the Venetians (who had
absorbed so much of the carrying trade of the Mediterranean) sending
their ships through the Straits of Gibraltar into the northern seas
and trading with the Baltic for amber and salt fish. In the course of
this trade some Venetians, such as Antonio Zeno, found their way to
Norway and Iceland.[5] It is thought that by this means Venice became
acquainted with the records of the Icelandic voyages to North
America, and that her explorers thus grew to entertain the idea of a
sea journey westward, or north-westward, of Britain, bringing mariners
to a New World represented by the far-eastern extension of Asia.
[Footnote 5: Antonio Zeno served as pilot to Earl Sinclair of the
Faeroe Islands and of Roslyn, a Norman-Scottish nobleman who owed
joint fealty to the kings of Norway and Scotland. Sinclair was so
impressed with the stories of a "Newland" beyond Greenland that he
sailed to find it about 1390, but only reached Greenland.]
Christopher Columbus, the Genoese, conceived a similar idea, which
also may have owed something to the tradition of the Norsemen's
discovery of Vinland. But Columbus's theories were based on better
evidence, such as the discovery on the coasts of the Azores
archipelago, Madeira, and Portugal of strange seeds, tree trunks,
objects of human workmanship, and even (it is said) the bodies of
drowned savages--Amerindians--which had somehow drifted across, borne
by the current of the Gulf Stream, and escaping the notice of the
sharks.
Whilst Columbus was bestirring himself to find Asia across the
Atlantic, a sea pilot, JOHN CABOT (Zuan Cabota)--Genoese by birth, but
a naturalized subject of Venice--came to England and offered himself
to King Henry VII as a discoverer of new lands across the ocean. At
first he was employed at Copenhagen to settle fishery quarrels about
Iceland, and probably Cabota, or Cabot, visited Iceland in King
Henry's service, and there heard of the Icelandic colonies on the
other side of the Atlantic, only recently abandoned.
In 1496 King Henry VII provided money to cover some of the expense of
a voyage of discovery to search for the rumoured island across the
ocean. The people of Bristol were ordered to assist John Cabot, and by
them he was furnished with a small sailing ship, the _Matthew_, and a
crew of fifteen mariners. Cabot, with his two sons, Luis and Sancio,
sailed for Ireland and the unknown West in May, 1497, and, after a sea
voyage quite as wonderful as that of Columbus, reached the coast of
Cape Breton Island (or "the New Isle", as it was first named[6]) on
June 24, 1497. They found "the land excellent, and the climate
temperate". The sea was so full of fish along these coasts that the
mariners opined (truly) that henceforth Bristol need not trouble about
the Iceland trade. Here along this "new isle" were the predestined
fisheries of Britain.[7]
[Footnote 6: Cape Breton was not then, or for nearly two hundred years
afterwards, known to be an island. It was thought to be part of the
"island" (peninsula) of what we now call Nova Scotia, and the whole of
this region which advances so prominently into the Atlantic was
believed to be at first the great unknown "New Island" of Irish and
English legends--legends based on the Norse discoveries of the
eleventh century. Cape Breton was thus named by the Breton seaman who
came thither soon after the Cabot expeditions to fish for cod. This
large island is separated from Nova Scotia by the Gut of Canso, a
strait no broader than a river.]
[Footnote 7: Dr. S.E. DAWSON (_The St. Lawrence Basin_) says of this
voyage: "When the forest wilderness of Cape Breton listened to the
voices of Cabot's little company (of Bristol mariners) it was the
first faint whisper of the mighty flood of English speech which was
destined to overflow the continent to the shores of another
ocean...."]
They encountered no inhabitants, though they found numerous traces of
their existence in the form of snares, notched trees, and bone netting
needles. John Cabot hoisted the English flag of St. George and the
Venetian standard of St. Mark; then--perhaps after coasting a little
along Nova Scotia--fearful that a longer stay might cause them to run
short of provisions, he turned the prow of the _Matthew_ eastward, and
reached Bristol once more about August 6, and London on August 10,
1497, with his report to King Henry VII, who rewarded him with a
donation of £10. He was further granted a pension of £20 a year (which
he only drew for two years, probably because he died after returning
from a second voyage to the North-American coast), and he received a
renewal of his patent of discovery in February, 1498. In this patent
it is evidently inferred that King Henry VII assumed a sovereignty
over these distant regions because of John Cabot's hoisting of the
English flag on "the new Isle" (Cape Breton Island) in the preceding
year.
The new expedition of 1498 was a relatively important affair. The
king assisted to finance the ventures of the Bristol captains, and
five of his ships formed part of the little fleet. It is probable that
John Cabot was in command, and almost certain that his young son
Sebastian was a passenger, possibly an assistant pilot. The course
followed lay much farther to the north, and brought the little sailing
vessels amongst the icebergs, ice floes, polar bears, and stormy seas
of Greenland and Labrador. Commercially the voyage was a failure,
almost a disaster. The ships returned singly, and after a considerable
interval of time. Nevertheless, some of the king's loans were repaid
to him; and in 1501 a regular chartered company was formed (perhaps at
Bristol), with three Bristolians and three Portuguese as directors.
Henry VII not only gave a royal patent to this association, but lent
more money to enable it to explore and colonize these new lands across
the western sea.
There can be little doubt that between 1498 and 1505 these Bristol
ships, directed by Italian, English, and Portuguese pilots, first
revealed to the civilized world of western Europe the coasts of
Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and
Delaware. They must have got as far south as the State of Delaware
(according to Sebastian Cabot, their southern limit was lat. 38°),
because in 1505 they were able to bring back parrots ("popyngays"), as
well as hawks and lynxes ("catts of the mountaigne"), for the
delectation of King Henry; and parrots even at that period could not
have been obtained from farther north than the latitude of New
York.[8]
[Footnote 8: Almost certainly this was _Conurus carolinensis_, a green
and orange parrakeet still found in the south-eastern States of North
America, but formerly met with as far north as New York and Boston.]
But after 1505 English interest in "the Newe founde launde" and the
"Newe Isle" languished; the exploration of North America was taken up
and carried farther by Portuguese, Bretons and Normans of France,
Italians, and Spaniards.[9] It revived again under Henry VIII, owing
to the irresistible attraction of the Newfoundland fisheries and the
knowledge that the ships from France were returning every autumn with
great supplies of fish cured and salted; for an adequate supply of
salt fish was becoming a matter of great importance to the markets of
western Europe. In 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships under the command of
John Rut to explore the North-American coast, and Captain Rut seems
to have reached the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland
and Labrador (then blocked with ice so that he took them for
a bay), and afterwards to have passed along the east coast of
Newfoundland--already much frequented by the Bretons, Normans, and
Portuguese--and to have stopped at the harbour of St. John's, thence
sailing as far south as Massachusetts.
[Footnote 9: The name _America_ probably appears for the first time in
English print in the old play or masque the _Four Elements_, which was
published about 1518. In a review of the geography of the Earth, as
known at that period, a description is given of this vast New World
across the Ocean: "But these new landys found lately, been called
America, because only Americus did find them first". Americus was a
Florentine bank clerk--Amerigo Vespucci--at Seville who gave up the
counting-house for adventure, sailed with a Spanish captain to the
West Indies and the mainland of Venezuela (off which he notes that he
met an English sailing vessel, and this as early as 1499!), and then
joined the first exploring voyage of the Portuguese to Brazil. He
returned to Europe, and in a letter to a fellow countryman at Paris,
written in the late autumn of 1502, he claimed to have discovered a
New World across the Ocean. His clear statement about what was really
the South American Continent aroused so much enthusiasm in civilized
Europe that five years afterwards the New World was called after him
by a German printer (Walzmüller) at the little Alsatian University of
St. Dié. By 1518 the English writers and mariners were probably aware
that the discoveries of Cabot, Columbus, and the Portuguese indicated
the extension of "America" from the Arctic to the Antarctic, but not
till about 1553 did the scholars and adventurers of England show
themselves fully alive to the gigantic importance of this New World.
Between 1530 and 1553 their attention was distracted from geography
and over-sea adventure by the religious troubles of the Reformation.]
The Portuguese monarchy had begun to take possession of the Azores
archipelago from the year 1432. These islands were probably known to
the Phoenicians, and even to the Arabs of the Middle Ages; between the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had been rediscovered by
Catalans, Genoese, Flemings, and Portuguese; and after 1444 the Azores
began to prove very useful to the sea adventurers of this wonderful
fifteenth century, as they became a shelter and a place of call for
fresh water and provisions almost in the middle of the Atlantic, 800
to 1000 miles due west of Portugal. Portuguese vessels sailed
northwards from the Azores in search of fishing grounds, and thus
reached Iceland, which they called Terra do Bacalhao.[10] They may
even before Cabot have visited in an unrecorded fashion the wonderful
banks of Newfoundland--an immense area of shallow sea swarming with
codfish.
[Footnote 10: _Bacalhao_ in Portuguese (and a similar word in Spanish,
old French, and Italian) means dried, salted fish. It comes from a
Latin word meaning "a small stick", because the fish were split open
and held up flat to dry by means of a cross or framework of small
sticks, the Norse name "stokfiske" meant the same: stockfish or
stickfish.]
As soon as the news of the Cabot voyages reached the King of Portugal
he arranged to send an expedition of discovery to the far north-west,
perhaps to find a northern sea route to Eastern Asia. He gave the
command to Gaspar Corte-Real, a Portuguese noble connected through
family property with the Azores. Starting from the Azores in the
summer of 1500, Corte-Real discovered Newfoundland, and called it
"Terra Verde" from its dense woods of fir trees, which are now being
churned into wood pulp to make paper for British books and newspapers.
He then sailed along the coast of Labrador,[11] and thence crossed
over to Greenland, the southern half of which he mapped with fair
accuracy. His records of this voyage take particular note of the great
icebergs off the coast of Greenland. His men were surprised to find
that sea water frozen becomes perfectly fresh--all the salt is left
out in the process. So that his two ships could supply themselves
with fresh water of the purest, by hacking ice from the masses
floating in these Greenland summer seas. The next year he started
again, but on a more westerly course. His two ships reached the coasts
of New Jersey and Massachusetts, and sailed north once more to
Labrador. They captured a number of Amerindian aborigines, but only
one of the two ships (with seven of these savages on board) reached
Portugal; Gaspar Corte-Real was never heard of again. His brother
Miguel went out in search of him, but he likewise disappeared without
a trace.
[Footnote 11: _Labrador_ (_Lavrador_ in Portuguese) means a labourer,
a serf. The Portuguese are supposed to have brought some Red Indians
from this coast to be sold as slaves.]
Nevertheless these Portuguese expeditions to North America have left
ineffaceable traces in the geography of the Newfoundland coast, of
which (under the name of Terra Nova[12]) the governorship was made
hereditary in the Corte-Real family. Cape Race for example--the most
prominent point of the island--is really the Portuguese _Cabo
Raso_--the bare or "shaved" cape--and this was by the Spaniards
regarded as the westernmost limit of Portuguese sovereignty in that
direction. For the Spaniards were by no means pleased at the intrusion
of other nations into a New World which they desired to monopolize
entirely for the Spanish Crown. They did not so much mind sharing it,
along the line agreed upon in the Treaty of Tordesillas, with the
Portuguese, but the ingress of the English and French infuriated them.
The Basque people of the north-east corner of Spain were a hardy
seafaring folk, especially bold in the pursuit of whales in the Bay of
Biscay, and eager to take a share in the salt-fish trade. This desire
took them in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Ireland and
Iceland. They began to fish off the Newfoundland coasts perhaps as
early as 1525. About this time also the Emperor Charles V, King of
Spain, having through one great Portuguese sea captain--Magalhães
(Magellan)--discovered the passage from Atlantic to Pacific across
the extremity of South America, thought by employing another
Portuguese--Estevão Gomez--to find a similar sea route through North
America, which would prove a short cut from Europe to China. This was
the famous "North-west Passage" the search for which drew so many
great and brave adventurers into the Arctic sea of America between
1500 and 1853, to be revealed at last by our fellow countrymen, but to
prove useless to navigation on account of the enormous accumulation of
ice.
[Footnote 12: Corte-Real's name of Terra Verde ("Greenland") was soon
dropped in favour of the older English name "New Land" (Newfoundland,
Terra Nova). This was at once adopted by the French seamen as "Terre
Neuve".]
Gomez left Corunna in the winter of 1524-5, and reached the
North-American coast somewhere about Florida. He probably only began
to investigate closely after he passed into the broad gulf of Maine,
between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. Here he sighted from the sea the
lofty mountains of New Hampshire, and steered for the mouth of the
Penobscot River (which he named the River of Deer), a title which
sticks to the locality--in Deer Island--at the present day. But this
being no opening of a broad strait, he passed on into the Bay of Fundy
(from Portuguese word, _Fundo_, the bottom of a sack or passage),
explored its two terminal gulfs, then returned along the coast of Nova
Scotia,[13] past Cape Sable, and so to the "gut" or Canal of Canso.
Gomez realized that Cape Breton was an island (we now know that it is
two islands separated by a narrow watercourse), but thought that Cabot
Strait was a great bay, and guessed nothing of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and the chance of securing for Spain the possession of this
mighty waterway into the heart of North America.
[Footnote 13: The name Nova Scotia was not applied to this peninsula
until 1621, by the British Government. It was at first included with
New Brunswick under the Spanish name of Norumbega, and after 1603 was
called by the French "Acadie".]
From Cape North he crossed over to the south coast of Newfoundland,
and followed this more or less till he came to Cape Race. Newfoundland
was a "very cold and savage land", and Gomez decided it was no use
prosecuting any farther his enquiry as to a water passage across North
America, because, if it existed, it must lie in latitudes of frozen
sea and be unnavigable.
At different places along the east coast of North America he kidnapped
natives, and eventually returned to Spain (via Florida and Cuba) with
a cargo of Amerindian slaves.
He had been preceded, by seven or eight months, in his explorations
along the same coast by GIOVANNI DA VERRAZANO, a native of Florence,
who as a navigator and explorer had visited the East, and had
associated himself a good deal with the shipowners of Dieppe. Ever
since the issue of Cabot's voyages was known--at any rate from
1504--ships from Brittany and Normandy had made their way to Cape
Breton Island and Newfoundland for the cod fisheries. In 1508 a Norman
named Aubert was sent out by Jean Ango--a great merchant of Dieppe of
that day--to found a colony in Newfoundland. Aubert failed to do this,
but he captured and brought away at least seven of the natives, no
doubt of the Beothik tribe, from Newfoundland to Rouen, with their
canoe, clothing, and weapons. A good many ships also went out from La
Rochelle on the west coast of France, and took part in the fishing off
the coast of Newfoundland: together with the ships of Brittany and
Dieppe there may have been a French fishing fleet of seventy to eighty
ships plying every summer season between France, Newfoundland, and
Cape Breton. So that when "John from Verrazano" offered his services
to Francis I to make discoveries across the ocean, which should become
possessions of the French Crown, he was quickly provided with the
requisite funds and ships.
Verrazano started on the 17th of January, 1524, for the coast of
North America, but I shall say little about his expedition here,
because it resulted chiefly in the discovery and mapping of what is
now the east coast of the United States. He reached as far as the
south coast of Newfoundland, it is true; he also gave the names of
Nova Gallia and Francesca to the coast regions of eastern North
America, and distinctly intended to take possession of these on behalf
of the French Crown. But his work in this direction did not lead
directly to the creation of the French colony of Canada, because, when
he returned from America, Francis I was at war with Spain, and could
pay no attention to Verrazano's projects. His voyage is worth
recording in the present volume only for these two reasons: he
certainly put it into the minds of French people that they might found
an empire in North America; and he inspired geographers for another
hundred years with the false idea that the great North American
Continent had a very narrow waist, like the Isthmus of Panama, and
that the Pacific Ocean covered the greater part of what is now called
the United States. This mistake arose from his looking across the
narrow belts or peninsulas of sand in North Carolina and Virginia, and
seeing vast stretches of open water to the west. These were found, a
hundred years afterwards, to be merely large shallow lagoons of sea
water, but Verrazano thought they were an extension of the Pacific
Ocean.
Nevertheless, Verrazano's voyage developed into the French
colonization of Canada, just as Cabot drew the British to
Newfoundland, Columbus the Spaniards to Central and South America, and
Amerigo Vespucci showed the Portuguese the way to Brazil. The modern
nations of western Europe owe the inception of their great colonies in
America to four Italians.
CHAPTER II
Jacques Cartier
Verrazano and Gomez, and probably the English captain, John Rut, had
all sought for the opening of a strait of salt water--like Magellan's
Straits in the far south--which should lead them through the great
North-American continent to the regions of China and Japan. Yet in
some incomprehensible way they overlooked the two broad passages to
the north and south of Newfoundland--the Straits of Belle Isle and of
Cabot--which would at any rate lead them into the vast Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and thence to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes; a
natural system of waterways connected each with the other and all with
the Mississippi and Missouri, the Arctic Ocean, and Hudson's Bay; nay,
more, with the North Pacific also; so that with a few "portages", or
carryings of canoes from one watershed to another, a traveller of any
enterprise, accompanied by a sturdy crew, can cross the broad
continent of North America at its broadest from sea to sea without
much walking.
Estevão Gomez noticed Cabot Straits between Cape Breton and
Newfoundland, but thought them only a very deep bay. John Rut and
others discerned the Straits of Belle Isle as a wide recess in the
coast rather than the mouth of a channel leading far inland. And yet,
after thirty years of Breton, English, and Portuguese fishing
operations in these waters, there must have been glimmerings of the
existence of the great Gulf of St. Lawrence behind Newfoundland: and
JACQUES CARTIER (or Quartier), who had probably made already one
voyage to Newfoundland (besides a visit to Brazil), suspected that
between Newfoundland and Labrador there lay the opening of the great
sea passage "leading to China". He proposed himself to Philippe de
Chabot, the Admiral of France, as the leader of a new French adventure
to find the North-west Passage, was accepted by King Francis, and at
the age of forty-three years set out, with two ships, from St. Malo in
Brittany, on April 20, 1534, ten years after Verrazano's voyage, and
reached the coast of Newfoundland after a voyage of only twenty days.
As he sailed northwards, past the deeply indented fiords and bays of
eastern Newfoundland (the shores of which were still hugged by the
winter ice), he and his men were much impressed with the incredible
numbers of the sea fowl settled for nesting purposes on the rocky
islands, especially on Funk Island.[1] These birds were guillemots,
puffins, great auks,[2] gannets (called by Cartier _margaulx_), and
probably gulls and eider duck. To his sailors--always hungry and
partly fed on salted provisions, as seamen were down to a few years
ago--this inexhaustible supply of fresh food was a source of great
enjoyment. They were indifferent, no doubt, to the fishy flavour of
the auks and the guillemots, and only noticed that they were
splendidly fat. Moreover, the birds attracted Polar bears "as large as
cows and as white as swans". The bears would swim off from the shore
to the islands (unless they could reach them by crossing the ice), and
the sailors occasionally killed the bears and ate their flesh, which
they compared in excellence and taste to veal.
[Footnote 1: Funk Island--called by Cartier "the Island of Birds"--is
only about 3 miles round, and 46 feet above the sea level. It is 3
miles distant from the coast.]
[Footnote 2: The Great Auk (_Alca impennis_), extinct since about 1844
in Europe and 1870 in Labrador, once had in ancient times a
geographical range from Massachusetts and Newfoundland to Iceland,
Ireland, Scotland, N.E. England, and Denmark. Perhaps nowhere was it
found so abundantly as on the coasts of Eastern Newfoundland and on
Funk Island hard by. The Great Auk was in such numbers on the
north-east coast of Newfoundland that the Amerindians of that country
and of southern Labrador used it as fuel in the winter time, its body
being very full of oil and burning with a splendid flame. The French
seamen called it _pingouin_ ("penguin") from its fatness, and this
name was much later transferred to the real penguins of the southern
seas which are quite unrelated to the auks.]
Passing through the Straits of Belle Isle, Cartier's ships entered
the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They had previously visited the adjoining
coast of Labrador, and there had encountered their first "natives",
members of some Algonkin tribe from Canada, who had come north for
seal fishing (Cartier is clever enough to notice and describe their
birch-bark canoes). After examining the west coast of Newfoundland,
Cartier's ships sailed on past the Magdalen Islands (stopping every
now and then off some islet to collect supplies of sea birds, for the
rocky ground was covered with them as thickly as a meadow with
grass).[3] He reached the north coast of Prince Edward Island, and
this lovely country received from him an enthusiastic description. The
pine trees, the junipers, yews, elms, poplars, ash, and willows, the
beeches and the maples, made the forest not only full of delicious and
stimulating odours, but lovely in its varied tints of green. In the
natural meadows and forest clearings there were red and white
currants, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, a vetch which
produced edible peas, and a grass with a grain like rye. The forest
abounded in pigeons, and the climate was pleasant and warm.
[Footnote 3: On the shores of these islands they noticed "several
great beasts like oxen, which have two tusks in the mouth similar to
those of the elephant". These were walruses.]
Later on he coasted New Brunswick, and paused for a time over Chaleur
Bay, hoping it might be the opening to the strait across the continent
of which he was in search; but finding it was not, he continued
northwards till he had almost rounded the Gaspé Peninsula, a course
which would have led him straight away into the wonderful discovery of
the St. Lawrence River, but that, being forced by bad weather into
Gaspé Bay, and perhaps hindered by fog, instead of entering the St.
Lawrence he sailed right across to Anticosti Island. After that,
being baffled by bad weather and doubtful as to his resources lasting
out, he decided to return to France through the Strait of Belle Isle.
So far he had failed to realize two of the most important things in
the geography of this region: the broad southern entrance into the
Gulf of St. Lawrence (subsequently called Cabot Strait), which
separates Newfoundland on the north from Cape Breton Island on the
south, and the broad entrance into the River St. Lawrence between
Anticosti Island and the Gaspé Peninsula.
Yet, whilst staying in Gaspé Bay, he had a very important meeting with
Amerindian natives of the Huron-Iroquois stock, who had come down the
River St. Lawrence from the neighbourhood of Quebec, fishing for
mackerel. These bold, friendly people welcomed the French heartily,
greeting them with songs and dances. But when they saw Cartier erect a
great cross on the land at the entrance to Gaspé Bay (a cross bearing
a shield with the arms of France and the letters "Vive le Roi de
France"), they were ill at ease. It is certain that not one word could
be understood in language between the two parties, for there were as
yet no interpreters; but the Amerindians were probably shrewd enough
to perceive that Cartier was making some claim on the land, and they
explained by signs that they considered all this country belonged to
themselves. Nevertheless, Cartier persuaded two youths, the sons of
one of the chiefs, to go back with him to France on his ship, to learn
the French language, to see what France looked like, and to return
afterwards as interpreters. The boys, though they were practically
kidnapped at first, were soon reconciled to going, especially when
they were dressed in French clothes!
[Illustration: JACQUES CARTIER]
When Cartier was on his way home he sailed in a north-easterly
direction in such a way as to overlook the broad channel between the
Gaspé Peninsula and Anticosti Island, but having rounded the
easternmost extremity of that large island, he coasted along its
northern shores until he caught sight of the opening of the Canadian
channel to the west. He believed then that he had discovered the
long-looked-for opening of the trans-continental passage, and sailed
for France with his wonderful news.
On the 19th of May, 1535, Cartier started again from St. Malo with
three ships, the biggest of which was only 120 tons, while the others
were respectively 60 and 40 tons capacity. The crew consisted of about
112 persons, and in addition there were the two Indian youths who had
been kidnapped on the previous voyage, and were now returning as
interpreters. Instead, however, of reaching Newfoundland in twenty
days, he spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic before he reached his
rendezvous with the other ships at Blanc Sablon, on the south coast of
Labrador; for the easy access to the Gulf of St. Lawrence through
Cabot Strait (between Newfoundland and Cape Breton) was not yet
realized. Once past Anticosti Island, the two Huron interpreters began
to recognize the scenery.[4] They now explained to Cartier that he had
entered the estuary of a vast river. This they said he had only to
pursue in ships and boats and he would reach "Canada" (which was the
name they gave to the district round about Quebec), and that beyond
"Canada" no man had ever been known to reach the end of this great
water; but, they added, it was fresh water, not salt, and this last
piece of information much disheartened Cartier, who feared that he had
not, after all, discovered the water route across North America to the
Pacific Ocean. He therefore turned about and once more searched the
opposite coast of Labrador most minutely, displaying, as he did so, a
seamanship which was little else than marvellous, for it is a very
dangerous coast, the seas are very stormy, and the look-out often
hampered by a sudden rising of dense fog; there are islands and rocks
(some of them almost hidden by the water) and sandbanks; but Cartier
made this survey of southern Labrador without an accident.
[Footnote 4: Anticosti Island received from Cartier the name of "the
Island of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin", in consequence of his
having discovered it to be an island on the feast day of that name. It
did not receive its present title until the late seventeenth century.]
At this period, some three hundred and seventy-five years ago, the
northern coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and of Anticosti Island
swarmed with huge walruses, which were described by Cartier as sea
horses that spent the night on land and the day in the water. They
have long since been exterminated by the English and French seamen and
settlers.
At last Cartier set sail for the south-west, intending to explore this
wonderful river and to reach the kingdom of Canada. According to his
understanding of the Amerindian interpreters, the waters of the St.
Lawrence flowed through three great states: _Saguenay_, which was the
mountainous Gaspé Peninsula and the opposite coast; _Canada_, Quebec
and its neighbourhood; and _Hochelaga_, the region between Montreal
and Lake Ontario. At the mouth of the Saguenay River, where Tadoussac
is now situated, he encountered large numbers of white whales--the
Beluga. These are really huge porpoises, allied to the narwhals, but
without the narwhal's exaggerated tusk. When he reached the vicinity
of the modern Quebec,[5] and his Amerindian interpreters found
themselves at their actual home (for they were far away from home on a
fishing expedition when he caught them in Gaspé Bay) there was great
rejoicing; for they were able to tell their relations of the wonderful
country to which they had been across the ocean. Cartier was delighted
with the surroundings of "Canada" (Quebec), near which at that time
was a large settlement (Stadacona) of Huron Indians under a chief
named Donnacona. He decided to lay up his ships here for the winter,
and to pursue the rest of his western explorations in his boats.
[Footnote 5: Then called "Canada". The word Quebec (pronounced
_Kebek_) means the narrow part of a river.]
But the Amerindians for some reason were not willing that he should go
any farther, and attempted to scare him from his projects by arranging
for three of their number to come down river in a canoe, dressed in
dogs' skins, with their faces blackened, and with bisons' horns
fastened to their heads. These devils pretended to take no notice of
the French, but to die suddenly as they reached the shore, while the
rest of the natives gave vent to howlings of despair and
consternation. The three devils were pretending to have brought a
message from a god to these Hurons of "Canada" that the country up
river (Hochelaga) was so full of ice and snow that it would be death
for anyone to go there.
However, this made little or no impression on Cartier; but he consented
to leave a proportion of his party behind with the chief Donnacona as
hostages, and then started up country in his boats with about seventy
picked officers and men. On the 2nd of October, 1535, they reached the
vicinity of the modern Montreal, the chief settlement of Hochelaga.
The Huron town at the foot of the hills was circular in outline,
surrounded by a stockade of three rows of upright tree trunks, which
rose to its highest point in the middle, where the timbers of the
inner and outward sides sloped to meet one another, the height of the
central row being about 8 feet above the ground. All round the inside
there was a platform or rampart on which were stored heavy stones to
be hurled at any enemy who should attempt to scale the fence. The town
was entered by only one doorway, and contained about fifty houses
surrounding an open space whereon the towns-people made their
bonfires. Each house was about 50 feet long by 12 to 15 feet wide.
They were roofed with bark, and usually had attics which were
storerooms for food. In the centre of each of these long houses there
was a fireplace where the cooking for the whole of the house
inhabitants was done. Each family had its own room, but each house
probably contained five families. Almost the only furniture, except
cooking pots, was mats on which the people sat and slept. The food of
the people consisted, besides fish and the flesh of beavers and deer,
of maize and beans. Cartier at once recognized the maize or Indian
corn as the same grain ("a large millet") as that which he had seen in
Brazil.
He gives a description of how they made the maize into bread (or
rather "dampers", "ashcakes"); but as this is not altogether clear, it
is better to combine it with Champlain's description, written a good
many years later, but still at a time when the Hurons were unaffected
by the white man's civilization. According to both Cartier and
Champlain, the women pounded the corn to meal in a wooden mortar, and
removed the bran by means of fans made of the bark of trees. From this
meal they made bread, sometimes mixing with the meal the beans
(_Phaseolus vulgaris_), which had been boiled and mashed. Or they
would boil both Indian corn and beans into a thick soup, adding to the
soup blueberries,[6] dried raspberries, or pieces of deer's fat. The
meal derived from the corn and beans they would make into bread,
baking it in the ashes.
[Footnote 6: The Canada Blueberry (_Vaccinium canadense_), called by
the French _bluës_ or _bluëts_. These bluës were collected and dried
by the Amerindians, and made a sweet nutriment for eating in the
winter.]
Or they would take the pounded Indian corn without removing the bran,
and put two or three handfuls of it into an earthen pot full of water,
stirring it from time to time, when it boiled, so that it might not
adhere to the pot. To this was added a small quantity of fish, fresh
or dry, according to the season, to give a flavour to the _migane_ or
porridge. When the dried fish was used the porridge smelt very badly
in the nostrils of Europeans, but worst of all when the porridge was
mixed with dried venison, which was sometimes nearly putrid! If fish
was put into this porridge it was boiled whole in the mealy water,
then taken out without any attempt to remove the fins, scales, or
entrails, and the whole of the boiled fish was pounded up and put back
into the porridge. Sometimes a great birch-bark "kettle" would be
filled with water, fish, and meat, and red-hot stones be dropped in
till it boiled. Then with a spoon they would collect from the surface
the fat and oil arising from the fish or meat. This they afterwards
mixed with the meal of roasted Indian corn, stirring it with this fat
till they had made a thick soup. Sometimes, however, they were content
to eat the young corn-cobs freshly roasted, which as a matter of fact
(with a little salt) is one of the most delicious things in the world.
Or they would take ears of Indian corn and bury them in wet mud,
leaving them thus for two or three months; then the cobs would be
removed and the rotted grain eaten with meat and fish, though it was
all muddy and smelt horribly. Cartier also noticed that these Huron
Indians had melons and pumpkins, and described their wampum or shell
money.[7]
[Footnote 7: Cartier, in Hakluyt's translation, is made to say (I
modernize the spelling): "They dig their grounds with certain pieces
of wood as big as half a sword, on which ground groweth their corn,
which they call 'offici'; it is as big as our small peason.... They
have also great store of musk melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers,
peas, and beans of every colour, yet differing from ours."
Wampum, or shell money (which recalls the shell money of the Pacific
Islands), consisted either of beads made from the interior parts of
sea shells or land shells, or of strings of perforated sea shells. The
most elaborate kind of wampum was that of the Amerindians of Canada
and the eastern United States, the shell beads of which were generally
white. The commoner wampum beads were black and violet. Wampum belts
were made which illustrated events, dates, treaties of peace, &c, by a
rude symbolism (figures of men and animals, upright lines, &c), and
these were worked neatly on string by employing different-coloured
beads.]
From the eminence on which the Huron city stood, Cartier obtained a
splendid view of rivers and mountains and magnificent forests, and
called the place then and there, in his Norman French, Mont Real, or
Royal Eminence, a name which it will probably bear for all time,
though the actual city of Montreal lies a few miles below.
Montreal was the limit of Cartier's explorations on this journey. He
returned thence to "Canada" or Stadacona, where his men built a fort
armed with artillery, and where his ships were anchored. Here he had
to stay from the middle of November, 1535, to the middle of April,
1536, his ships being shut in by the ice. The experiences of the
French during these five months were mostly unhappy. At first Cartier
gave himself up to the collecting of information. He noticed for the
first time the smoking of tobacco,[8] and collected information about
the products and features of "Canada". The Indians told him of great
lakes in the far west, one of which was so vast that no man had seen
the end of it. They told him that anyone travelling up the Richelieu
River (as it was called sixty years later) would eventually reach a
land in the south where in the winter there was no ice or snow, and
where fruit and nut trees grew in abundance. Cartier thought that they
were talking to him of Florida, but their geographical information can
scarcely have stretched so far; they probably referred to the milder
regions of New Jersey and Virginia, which would be reached by
following southwards the valley of the Hudson and keeping to the
lowlands of the eastern United States.
[Footnote 8: "There groweth also a certain kind of herb whereof in
summer they make a great provision for all the year, making great
account of it, and only men use it; and first they cause it to be
dried in the sun, then wear it about their necks wrapped in a little
beast's skin made like a bag, together with a hollow piece of stone or
wood like a pipe. Then when they please they make powder of it and put
it in one of the ends of the said cornet or pipe, and laying a coal of
fire upon it at the other end, suck so long that they fill their
bodies full of smoke, till that it cometh out of their mouth and
nostrils, even as out of the tunnel of a chimney. They say that this
doth keep them warm and in health: they never go without some of it
about them. We ourselves have tried the same smoke, and having put it
in our mouths, it seemed almost as hot as pepper." The foregoing is
one of the earliest descriptions of tobacco smoking in any European
language, the original words being in Cartier's Norman French.]
As the winter set in with its customary Canadian severity the real
trouble of the French began. They did not suffer from the cold, but
they were dying of scurvy. This disease, from which the natives also
suffered to some extent, was due to their eating nothing but salt or
smoked provisions--forms of meat or fish. They lived, of course, shut
up in the fort, and Cartier's fixed idea was to keep the Hurons from
the knowledge of his misfortune, fearing lest, if they realized how
the garrison was reduced, they might treacherously attack and massacre
the rest; for in spite of the extravagant joy with which their arrival
had been greeted, the Amerindians--notably the two interpreters who
had been to France and returned--showed at intervals signs of disquiet
and a longing to be rid of these mysterious white men, whose coming
might involve the country in unknown misfortunes. In January and
February, also, Donnacona and these two interpreters and many of the
Huron men had been absent hunting in the forests, so that there was no
one among the Amerindians to whom the French could turn for
information regarding this strange disease. At last 25 out of the 112
who had left France were dead, and of the remainder only 10 men,
including Cartier, were not grievously ill. Those who were living
found it sometimes beyond their strength to bury the dead in the
frozen ground, and simply placed their bodies in deep snow. Once or
twice, when Cartier left the fort to go out to the ships, he met
Domagaya, one of the two interpreters, and found that he also was
suffering from this mysterious disease, though not nearly so badly as
the French people. On the body of one young man who died of scurvy
Cartier and his officers, shuddering, made investigations, opening the
corpse and examining the organs to try and find the cause of death.
This was on the afternoon of a day on which they had held a solemn
service before a statue erected to the Virgin Mary on the shore
opposite to the ships. All who were fit to walk went in procession
from the fort to the statue, singing penitential psalms and the Litany
and celebrating Mass.
Some days after this religious service Cartier met the interpreter,
Domagaya, and to his surprise found him perfectly well and strong. He
asked him for an explanation, and was told that the medicine which
cured this disease was made from the leaves and bark of a tree called
ameda.[9] Cartier then ventured to say that one of his servants was
sick of this unknown disease, and Domagaya sent for two women, who
taught the French people how to make an extract from the balsam fir
for drinking, and how to apply the same liquid to the inflamed skin.
The effect on the crews was miraculous. In six days all the sick were
well and strong.
[Footnote 9: This tree was the balsam fir, _Abies balsamea_.]
Then came the sudden spring. Between April 15th and May 1st the ice on
the river was all melted, and on the 6th May, 1536, Cartier started
from the vicinity of Quebec to return to France. But before leaving he
had managed to kidnap Donnacona, the chief of the Huron settlement,
and six or seven other Amerindians, amongst them Tainyoanyi, one of
the two interpreters who had already been to France. He seized these
men, it appears, partly because he wanted hostages and had good reason
to fear that the Indians meditated a treacherous attack on his ships
before they could get away. He also wished for native witnesses at
Court, when he reached France, to testify to the truth of his
discoveries, and even more to convince the King of France that there
was great profit to be obtained from giving effect to Cartier's
explorations. The chief, Donnacona, was full of wonderful stories of
the Saguenay region, and of the great lakes to the northwards of
Quebec. Probably he was only alluding to the wealth of copper now
known to exist in northern Canada, but to Cartier and the other
Frenchmen it seemed as though he spoke of gold and silver, rubies, and
other precious stones.
Donnacona's people howled and wept when their chief was seized; but
Cartier obliged the chief to reassure them, and to say that the French
had promised to bring him back after he had paid a visit to their
great king, who would return him to his country with great presents.
As a matter of fact, not one of these Indians rapt away by Cartier
ever saw Canada again. But this was not the fault of Cartier, but of
the distractions of the times which turned away the thoughts of King
Francis I from American adventures. The Indians were well and kindly
treated in France, but all of them died there before Cartier left St.
Malo to return to Canada in 1541.
One advantage he derived from sailing away with these hostages was (no
doubt) that they could give him geographical information of importance
which materially shortened the return journey. For the first time he
made use of the broad strait between Anticosti Island and Gaspé
Peninsula, and, better still, entered the Atlantic, not by the
dangerous northern route through the straits of Belle Isle, but by
means of Cabot Strait, between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. Of
these discoveries he availed himself on his third and last voyage in
1541.
When in that year he once more anchored his ships near Quebec he found
the attitude of the Hurons changed. They enquired about their friends
and relations who had been carried off five years before, and although
they pretended to be reconciled to their fate when they heard (not
altogether truly) that one or two were dead, and the others had become
great lords in France and had married French women, they really felt a
disappointment so bitter and a hostility so great that Cartier guessed
their expressions of welcome to be false. However, he sent back to
France two of the ships under his command and beached the other three,
landed his stores, built two forts at Cap Rouge, above and below, and
then started off with a few of his men and two boats to revisit the
country of Hochelaga. Here he intended to examine the three rapids or
"saults"--interruptions to the navigation of the St. Lawrence--which
he had observed on his previous journey, and which were later named
the La Chine Rapids (in the belief that they were obstacles on the
river route to China). But these falls proved insuperable obstacles to
his boats, and he gave up any further idea of westward exploration,
returned to his forts and ships near Quebec, and there laid the
foundations of a fortified town, which he called Charlesbourg Royal.
Here he spent a very difficult winter, the Hurons in the neighbourhood
becoming increasingly hostile, and at last, when the spring came, as
he had received no relief from France, he took to his three ships,
abandoned Charlesbourg Royal (having probably to do some fighting
before he could get safely away) and thence sailed for France. Off the
Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland he met the other ships of the
expedition which was to have occupied Canada for France. These were
under the command of the Sieur de Roberval, a French nobleman, who had
really been made head of the whole enterprise, with Cartier as a
subordinate officer, but who, the year before, had allowed Cartier to
go off to Canada and prepare the way, promising to follow immediately.
The interview between Cartier and Roberval, near where the capital of
Newfoundland (St. John's) now stands, was a stormy one. Roberval
ordered Cartier to return at once to Charlesbourg and await his
arrival. However, in the middle of the night which followed this
interview, Cartier took advantage of a favourable wind and set sail
for France, arriving soon afterwards at St. Malo.
But Roberval arrived at Charlesbourg (going the roundabout way through
the straits of Belle Isle, for Cartier had told him nothing of the
convenient passage through Cabot Strait), and there spent the winter
of 1542-3, sending his ships back to France. This winter was one of
horrors. Roberval was a headstrong, passionate man, perfectly reckless
of human life. He maintained discipline by ferocious sentences,
putting many of his men in irons, whipping others cruelly, women as
well as men, and shooting those who seemed the most rebellious. Even
the Indians were moved to pity, and wept at the sight of the woes of
these unhappy French men and women under the control of a bloodthirsty
tyrant, and many of them dying of scurvy, or miserably weak from that
disease.[10]
[Footnote 10: A story was subsequently told of Roberval's stern
treatment which had a germ of truth in it, though it has since been
the foundation of many a romance. On the journey out from France it is
said that Roberval took with him his niece Marguerite, a high-born
lady, who was accompanied by an old companion or nurse. Marguerite was
travelling with her uncle because, unknown to him, she had a lover who
had sailed with him on this expedition and whom she hoped to marry. As
they crossed the Atlantic these facts leaked out, and Roberval
resolved to bide his time and punish his niece for her deception. As
they passed the coast of Southern Labrador Marguerite and her old
nurse were seized and put into a boat, Roberval ordering his sailors
to row them ashore to an island, and leave them to their fate. They
were given four guns with ammunition and a small supply of provisions.
But, as the boat was leaving the ship, Marguerite's lover threw
himself into the sea and swam to the island. Here, according to the
story which Marguerite is supposed to have told afterwards, they
endeavoured to live by killing the wild animals and eating their
flesh; but her lover-husband died, so also did her child soon after it
was born, and then the old nurse, and the unhappy Marguerite was left
alone with the wild beasts, especially the white Polar bears, who
thronged round her hut. Nevertheless she kept them at bay with her
arquebus, and managed somehow to support an existence, until after
nineteen months' isolation the ascending smoke of her fire was seen by
people on one of the many fishing vessels which, by this time,
frequented the coasts of Newfoundland. She was taken off the island
and restored to her home in France. The island to which this tradition
more especially relates is now called Grand Meccatina.]
However, when the weather was warm again, in June, 1543, Roberval
started up the St. Lawrence River in boats to reach the wonderful
country of Saguenay. Apparently he met with little success, and, being
relieved by French ships in the late summer of 1543, he returned to
France.
Thus the splendid work achieved by Cartier seemed to have come to
nothing, for neither he nor Roberval revisited America. The French
settlement near Quebec was abandoned, so far as the officers of the
French king were concerned, and between 1545 and about 1583, if any
other Frenchman or European visited Canada it was some private
adventurer who traded with the natives in furs, or Basques from France
and Spain who frequented the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on
account of the abundance of whales, walruses, and seals. In fact, at
the close of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Basques had
established themselves on shore at Tadoussac and other places, and
seemed likely to colonize the country.
CHAPTER III
Elizabethan Pioneers in North America
Except that the ships of Bristol still no doubt continued to resort to
the banks of Newfoundland for fishing, and that even the captains of
these ships were occasionally elected admirals of the French, Basque,
Portuguese, and English fishing fleets during the summer, the English,
as a nation, took no part in claiming political dominion over North
America after the voyage of Captain John Rut in 1527. This was the
fault of Sebastian Cabot, the son of the man who founded British
America, and who had returned to England long afterwards as the Grand
Pilot appointed by Edward VI to further the discovery of a northern
sea passage to China. Through him the attention of adventurers for a
time was diverted from America to the "discovery" of Russia (as it has
been called). The efforts of Sebastion Cabot were directed towards the
revelation of a north-east passage by way of Arctic Russia to the
Pacific, rather than past Newfoundland and Labrador and across Arctic
America.
But as soon as Elizabeth came to the throne the sea adventurers of
Britain, freed from any subservience to Spanish wishes, developed
maritime intercourse between England, Morocco, and West Africa on the
one hand, and Tropical and North America on the other. Once more the
discovery of the North-west Passage across America to China came into
favour. MARTIN FROBISHER[1] offered himself as a discoverer, and the
Earl of Warwick found the means which provided him with two small
sailing vessels of 25 and 20 tons each, besides a pinnace of 10
tons.[2] Queen Elizabeth confined herself, in the way of
encouragement, to waving her lily hand from her palace of Greenwich as
these three little boats dropped down the Thames on the 8th of June,
1576. She also sent them "an honourable message", which no doubt
reached them at Tilbury.
[Footnote 1: The name was also spelt Furbusher, and in other ways. He
became Sir Martin Frobisher over the wars of the Armada, and died Lord
High Admiral of England in 1592.]
[Footnote 2: It may be of interest to set forth the kind of rations
shipped in those Elizabethan times for the food of the sailors.
According to Frobisher's accounts these consisted of salted beef, salt
pork, salt fish, biscuit, meal for making bread, dried peas, oatmeal,
rice, cheese, butter, beer, and wine, with brandy for emergencies. As
regards beer, the men were to have a ration of 1 gallon a day each.
Altogether it may be said that these rations were superior in
variety--and no doubt in quality--to the food given to seamen in the
British merchant marine in the nineteenth century.]
But the pinnace was soon swallowed up in the high seas; the seamen in
the vessel of 20 tons lost heart and turned their ship homewards.
Frobisher alone, in his 25-ton bark, sailed on and on across the
stormy Atlantic, past the south end of Greenland, and over the great
gulf that separates Greenland from Labrador. He missed the entrance to
Hudson's Bay, but reached a great "island" which he named Meta
Incognita[3]. Here he gathered up stones and, as he believed,
minerals, besides capturing at least one Eskimo, and then returned.
[Footnote 3: We now know Meta Incognita to be the southernmost
peninsula of the vast Baffin Island.]
One of his stones was declared by the refiners of London to contain
gold. There was at once--as we should say in modern slang--a boom for
these Arctic regions. Queen Elizabeth took part in it, and on the 27th
of May, 1577, a considerable fleet, under the command of Frobisher,
sailed past the Orkneys for the south end of Greenland. It did not
reach as far as Meta Incognita, but it brought back large heaps of
earth and pieces of rock, probably from northern Labrador, which
almost certainly contained mica schist, and were therefore believed
to be full of gold. The following year 1578, Frobisher started on his
third American voyage with a fleet of fifteen vessels, mainly financed
by Queen Elizabeth, and manned to a great extent by the sons of the
aristocracy, besides a hundred persons who were going out as
colonists. For this region of ice and snow which was believed to be a
mass of gold-bearing rocks! But the result was one of bitter
disappointment. The captains were bewildered by the immense icebergs,
"so vast that, as they melted, torrents poured from them in sparkling
waterfalls". One iceberg toppled over on to a ship and crushed it,
though most of the sailors were picked up in the sea and saved. In the
thick mists the greater part of the fleet blundered into Hudson's
Straits, yet did not realize that they had found a passage into the
heart of Canada. At last, disgusted with this land of bare rocks, ice,
and snow, they filled up the ships with cargoes of stones supposed to
contain gold, and straggled back to England. No gold was extracted,
however, from these cargoes, and much discouragement ensued.
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, one of the brilliant figures of Elizabeth's
reign--scholar, poet, courageous adventurer, and man of
chivalry--stimulated by the discoveries of Frobisher, obtained a
patent or charter in 1578, and, after several unsuccessful attempts,
led an expedition of small sailing ships to Newfoundland, where he
entered St. John's Bay, and in the presence of the Basque, Portuguese,
and Breton fishermen took formal possession of the country for Queen
Elizabeth, raising a pillar on which the arms of England were engraved
as a token. He then proceeded to grant lands to the fishermen to
reassure them, and loaded his ships with rocks brought from the
interior mountains and supposed to contain minerals. But in his
further explorations of the southern coast of Newfoundland one of the
ships was lost and nearly a hundred men intended as colonists were
drowned.
Gilbert then determined to return to England in his small frigate of
10 tons named the _Squirrel_. He was accompanied by a larger vessel,
the _Golden Hinde_, but refused to leave the men on the _Squirrel_ to
their fate. Consequently, between the Azores and the north coast of
Spain, when the _Squirrel_ was overwhelmed by the heavy seas, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert perished together with all on board.
In spite, however, of the disappointing results of Gilbert's attempt
to found a colony in Newfoundland, the importance of the cod fishery
and the ivory tusks and oil of the walruses drew ever more and more
ships from Bristol and Devonshire to the coasts of that great island
and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence beyond. In 1592 the English
adventurers got as far west as Anticosti Island (in a ship from
Bristol), and in 1597 there is the first record of English ships (from
London--the _Hopewell_ and the _Chancewell_) sailing up the St.
Lawrence River, perhaps as far west as Quebec.
In 1602, stimulated by Sir Walter Raleigh,[4] Bartholomew Gosnold
sailed direct to the coast of North America south of the Newfoundland
latitudes, and anchored his bark off the coast of Massachusetts on the
26th of March, 1602. Failing to find a good harbour here, he stood out
for the south and definitely discovered and named Cape Cod, not far
from the modern city of Boston. From Cape Cod he made his way to the
Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay, and here he built a storehouse and
fort, and may be said to have laid the foundations of the future
colony of New England. He brought back with him a cargo of sassafras
root, which was then much esteemed as a valuable medicine and a remedy
for almost all diseases.
[Footnote 4: In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh, the half-brother of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, financed an expedition to sail to the coast of North
America in a more southerly direction. In this way was founded the
(afterwards abandoned) colony of Roanoke, in North Carolina. It was to
this region that Queen Elizabeth applied the title of Virginia, which
some years afterwards was transferred to the first English colony on
the James River.]
Subsequent expeditions of English ships explored and mapped the coast
of Maine, and took on board Amerindians for exhibition in England.
Their adventures, together with those of the colonists farther south,
led to the creation of chartered companies, and to the great British
colonies of New England, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, which were to become in time the United States of America--a
vast field of adventure which we cannot follow farther in this book.
As regards Newfoundland, James I, in 1610, granted a patent to a
Bristol merchant for the foundation there of a colony, and although
this attempt, and another under Sir George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) in
1616, came almost to nothing through the attacks of the French and the
dislike of the crews of the fishing vessels to permanent settlers who
might interfere with the fishing industry, the English colonization of
Newfoundland to some extent caught hold, so that in 1650 there were
about two thousand colonists of English descent along the east and
south-east coasts of the island. But settlement was prohibited within
six miles of the shore, to please the fishermen, and this regulation
checked for more than two hundred years the colonization of
Newfoundland.
Nova Scotia as a British colony also came into being as another result
of these adventurous British expeditions to North America in the reign
of James I. Under the name of Acadie this region had been declared to
be a portion of New France by De Monts and Champlain in 1604-14. But
the English colonists in 1614 drove the French out of the peninsula of
Nova Scotia on the plea that it was a part of the discoveries made by
the Cabots on behalf of the British Crown. In 1621 James I gave a
grant of all this territory to Sir William Alexander under the name of
Nova Scotia, and both Charles I and Cromwell encouraged settlement in
this beautiful region. When Charles II ceded it to France in 1667 the
English and Scottish colonists who were residing there, and the
English settlers of New England, refused to recognize the effects of
the Treaty of Bréda, and so harassed the French in the years which
followed that in 1713 Nova Scotia was, together with Newfoundland,
recognized as belonging to Great Britain. The French colonists were
allowed to remain, but during the course of the eighteenth century
they combined with the Amerindians (who liked the French and disliked
the British) and made the position of the British colonists so
precarious that they were finally expelled and obliged to transfer
themselves to Louisiana and Canada. This was the departure of the
Acadians so touchingly described by Longfellow.
The British had become tenacious of their rights over the east coast
of Newfoundland, because from the middle of the seventeenth century
onwards they were becoming increasingly interested in the whale
fisheries and the fur trade of the lands bordering on Hudson's Bay,
and would not tolerate any blocking of the sea route thither by the
French.
In the explorations of Arctic America, Frobisher's expeditions had
been succeeded by those of JOHN DAVIS, who in the course of three
voyages, beginning in June, 1585, passed the entrance of Hudson's
Straits and reached a point as far north as 72° 41', a lofty granite
island, which he named Sanderson's Hope. He saw beyond him a great
sea, free, large, very salt, and blue, unobstructed by ice and of an
unsearchable depth, and believed that he had completely discovered the
eastern entrance of the North-West Passage.
[Illustration: ICEBERGS AND POLAR BEARS]
HENRY HUDSON, the great English navigator, who had made two voyages
(1607-8) for the English-Moscovy Company to discover a north-east
passage to India, past Siberia, commanded a third experiment in 1609
at the expense of the Dutch East India Company. He was to discover the
North-West Passage. For this purpose he entered the river now named
the Hudson, but soon found it was only a river; though he returned to
Holland with such an encouraging account of the surrounding country
that the Dutch a little later on, founded on the banks of the Hudson
River their colony of New Amsterdam (afterwards the State of New
York). In 1610 Hudson accepted a British commission to sail beyond
where Davis and Frobisher had passed, and once more seek for the
north-west passage to China. Instead he found the way into Hudson's
Bay. Here his men, alarmed at the idea of being lost in these regions
of ice and snow, mutinied against him, placed him and those who were
faithful to him in a boat, and cast them off, themselves returning to
England with the news of his discovery. Hudson was never heard of
again, and, strange to say, the mutineers apparently received no
punishment.
Between 1602 and 1668, English adventurers from London and Bristol,
notable amongst whom were WILLIAM BAFFIN, LUKE FOX, and CAPTAIN JAMES,
mapped the coasts of Hudson's Bay and Baffin's Bay and brought to the
notice of merchants in England the abundance of whales in these Arctic
waters, and of fur-bearing beasts and fur-trading Indians in the
region of Hudson's Bay.
This last point was most forcibly presented to Charles II and his
Government by a disappointed French Canadian, Pierre Esprit Radisson,
whose adventures will later on be described. Radisson, conceiving
himself to be badly treated by the French Governor of Canada, crossed
over to England with his brother-in-law, Chouart, and the two were
warmly taken up by Prince Rupert of Bavaria, the cousin of Charles II.
They were sent out by Prince Rupert in command of an expedition
financed by him and a number of London merchants, and in 1669 the New
England captain, Gillam, returned to England with Chouart and the
first cargo of furs from Hudson's Bay. This cargo so completely met
the expectations of those who had promoted the venture that it led in
1670 to the foundation of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of
England trading into Hudson's Bay, a company chartered by Charles II
and presided over by Prince Rupert, and an association which proved to
be the germ of British North America, of the vast three-quarters of
the present Dominion of Canada.
CHAPTER IV
Champlain and the Foundation of Canada
From the first voyage of Cartier onwards, Canada was called
intermittently New France, and its possibilities were not lost sight
of by a few intelligent Frenchmen on account of the fur trade. Amongst
these was Amyard de Chastes, at one time Governor of Dieppe, who got
into correspondence with the adventurers who had settled as fur
traders at Tadoussac, prominent amongst whom was Du Pont-Gravé. De
Chastes dispatched with Pont-Gravé a young man whose acquaintance he
had just made, SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN.[1] This was the man who, more than
any other, created French Canada.
[Footnote 1: Afterwards the Sieur de Champlain. The title of _Sieur_
(from the Latin _Senior_) is the origin of the English "sir", and is
about equivalent to an English baronetcy.]
Champlain had had already a most adventurous life. He was born about
1567, at Brouage, in the Saintonge, opposite to the Island of Héron,
on the coast of western France. From his earliest years he had a
passion for the sea, but he also served as a soldier for six years.
His father had been a sea captain, and his uncle as an experienced
navigator was commissioned by the King of Spain to transport by sea to
that country the remainder of the Spanish soldiers who had been
serving in Brittany. The uncle took his nephew with him. Young
Champlain when in Spain managed to ingratiate himself so much with the
Spanish authorities that he was actually commissioned as a captain to
take a king's ship out to the West Indies. No sooner did he reach
Spanish America than he availed himself of the first chance to
explore it. For two years he travelled over Cuba, and above all
Mexico. He visited the narrowest part of Central America and conceived
the possibility of making a trans-oceanic canal across the Panama
isthmus.
When he got back to France he placed before Henry IV a report on
Spanish Central America, together with a project for making a canal at
Panama. Henry IV was so pleased with his work and enterprise that he
gave him a pension and the title of Geographer to the King. Shortly
afterwards he met Governor de Chastes at Dieppe, and was by him sent
out to Canada. The ship which carried Champlain, PONT-GRAVÉ,[2] the
SIEUR DE MONTS,[3] and other French adventurers (together with two
Amerindian interpreters whom Pont-Gravé had brought from Canada to
learn French) arrived at Tadoussac on May 24, 1603.
[Footnote 2: Correctly written this was François Gravé, Sieur du
Pont.]
[Footnote 3: The full name was Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts.
Including de Champlain and de Poutrincourt, who will be described
later, we have here the four great heroes who founded French Canada.]
Champlain lost no time in commencing his explorations. Tadoussac was
at the mouth of an important river, called by the French the Saguenay,
a name which they also applied to the mysterious and wonderful country
through which it flowed in the far north; a country rich in copper and
possibly other precious metals. Champlain ascended the Saguenay River
for sixty miles as far as the rapids of Chicoutima. The Amerindians
whom he met here told him of Lake St. John, lying at a short distance
to the west, and that beyond this lake and the many streams which
entered it there lay a region of uplands strewn with other lakes and
pools; and farther away still began the sloping of the land to the
north till the traveller sighted a great arm of the salt sea, and
found himself amongst tribes (probably the Eskimo) who ate raw flesh,
and to the Indians appeared absolute savages.[4] This was probably
the first allusion, recorded by a European, to the existence of
Hudson's Bay, that huge inlet of the sea, which is one of the leading
features in the geography of British North America.
[Footnote 4: The real name for this remarkable people, the Eskimo, is,
in Alaska and Arctic North America, _Innuit_, and in Labrador and
Greenland, _Karalit_. Eskimo (in French, _Esquimaux_) is said to be a
corruption of the Montagnais-Indian word, Eskimantsik, meaning "eaters
of raw flesh".]
The Montagnais Indians round about Tadoussac received Champlain with
great protestations of friendship, and at the headquarters of their
principal chief or "Sagamore" celebrated this new friendship and
alliance with a feast in a very large hut. The banquet, as usual, was
preceded by a long address from the Sagamore in answer to the
description of France, given by one of the Indian interpreters. The
address was accompanied by the solemn smoking of tobacco, and at every
pause in this grave oration the natives present shouted with one
voice: "Ho! ho! ho!" The repast consisted of elk's meat (which struck
the Frenchmen as being like beef), also the flesh of bear, seal,
beaver, and wild fowl. There were eight or ten stone boilers or
cauldrons full of meats in the middle of the great hut, separated each
six feet from each other, and each one having its own fire. Every
native used a porringer or vessel made of birch bark. When the meat
was cooked a man in authority distributed it to each person. But
Champlain thought the Indians ate in a very filthy manner. When their
hands were covered with fat or grease they would rub them on their own
heads or on the hair of their dogs. Before the meat was cooked each
guest arose, took a dog, and hopped round the boilers from one end of
the great hut to the other. Arriving in front of the chief, the
Montagnais Indian feaster would throw his dog violently to the ground,
exclaiming: "Ho! ho! ho!" after which he returned to his place.
At the close of the banquet every one danced, with the skulls of
their Iroquois enemies slung over their backs. As they danced they
slapped their knees with their hands, and shouted: "Ho! ho! ho!" till
they were out of breath.
The huts of these Indians were low and made like tents, being covered
with the bark of the birch tree. An opening about a foot of the top
was left uncovered to admit light and to allow the smoke to escape.
Though low, the huts were sometimes quite large, and would accommodate
ten families. These slept higgledy-piggledy on skins, with their dogs
amongst them. The dogs in appearance were something like what we know
as Eskimo dogs, and also rather resembled the Chinese chow, with broad
heads and rather short muzzles, prick ears, and a tail inclined to
curl over the back. "All these people have a very cheerful
disposition, laughing often, yet at the same time they are somewhat
phlegmatic. They talk very deliberately, as if desiring to make
themselves well understood, and, stopping suddenly, they reflect for a
long time, when they resume their discourse."
They were agile, well-proportioned people, who in the summertime went
about nearly naked, but in the winter were covered with good furs of
elk, otter, beaver, bear, seal, and deer. The colour of their skin was
usually a pale olive, but the women for some reason made themselves
much darker-skinned than the men by rubbing their bodies with pigments
which turned them to a dark brown. At times they suffered very much
from lack of food, being obliged then to frequent the shore of the
river or gulf to obtain shellfish. When pressed very hard by famine
they would eat their dogs (their only domestic animal) and even the
leather of the skins with which they clothed themselves. In the autumn
they were much given to fishing for eels, and they dried a good deal
of eel flesh, to last them through the winter. During the height of
the winter they hunted the beaver, and later on the elk. Though they
ate wild roots and fruits whenever they could obtain them, they do
not seem to have cultivated any grain or vegetables. In the early
spring they were sometimes dying of hunger, and looked so thin and
haggard that they were mere walking skeletons. They were then ready to
eat carrion that was putrid, so that it is little wonder that they
suffered much from scurvy.
Yet the rivers and the gulf abounded in fish, and as soon as the
waters were unlocked by the melting of the ice in April, the surviving
Indians rapidly grew fat and well, and of course the late summer and
the autumn brought them nuts (hickory and other kinds of walnut, and
hazel nuts), wild cherries, wild plums, raspberries, strawberries,
gooseberries, blackberries, currants,[5] cranberries, and grapes.
[Footnote 5: The wild currants so often mentioned by the early
explorers of Canada are often referred to as red, green, and blue. The
blue currants are really the black currant, now so familiar to our
kitchen gardens (_Ribes nigrum_). This, together with the red currant
(_Ribes rubrum_), grows throughout North America, Siberia, and eastern
Europe. The unripe fruit may have been the green currants alluded to
by Champlain, or these may have been the white variety of our gardens.
The two species of wild strawberry which figure so frequently in the
stories of these early explorers are _Fragaria vesca_ and _F.
virginiana_. From the last-named is derived the cultivated strawberry
of Europe. The wild strawberries of North America were larger than
those of Europe. Champlain does not himself allude to gooseberries
(unless they are his _groseilles vertes_), but later travellers do.
Three or more kinds of gooseberry grow wild in Canada, but they are
different from the European species. The blueberry so often Mentioned
by Champlain (bluëts or bluës) was _Vaccinium canadense_.]
Champlain observed amongst them for the first time the far-famed
Amerindian snowshoes, which he compares very aptly for shape to a
racquet used in tennis.
Champlain next visited the site of Stadacona, but there was no longer
any settlement of Europeans at that place, nor were the native
Amerindians the descendants of the Hurons that had received Jacques
Cartier. For the first time the name Quebec (pronounced Kebek) is
applied to this point where the great River St. Lawrence narrows
before dividing to encircle the Isle of Orleans. In fact, Quebec meant
in the Algonkin speech a place where a river narrows; for a tribe of
the great Algonkin family, _the_ Algonkins, allied to the tribes of
Maine and New Brunswick, had replaced the Hurons as the native
inhabitants of this region.
On the shore of Quebec he noticed "diamonds" in some slate rocks--no
doubt quartz crystals. Proceeding on up the River St. Lawrence he
observed the extensive woods of fir and cypress (some kind of _Thuja_
or _Juniper_), the undergrowth of vines, "wild pears", hazel nuts,
cherries, red currants and green currants, and "certain little
radishes of the size of a small nut, resembling truffles in taste,
which are very good when roasted or boiled". As they advanced towards
the interior the country became increasingly mountainous on the south
(the green mountains of New Hampshire), and was more and more
beautiful--"the pleasantest land yet seen". Landing on the south bank
of the St. Lawrence, west of the entrance of the river of the Iroquois
(the Richelieu), he found magnificent forests, which, besides the
trees already mentioned, included oaks, chestnuts, maples, pines,
walnut-like nut trees,[6] aspens, poplars, and beeches; with climbing
hops and vines, strawberries trailing over the ground, and raspberry
canes and currant bushes "growing in the thick grass". These splendid
woods on the islands and banks of the broad river were full of game:
elks,[7] wapiti deer, Virginian deer, bears, porcupines, hares, foxes,
beavers, otters, and musk rats, besides many animals he could not
recognize.
[Footnote 6: Of the genera _Juglans_ and _Carya_.]
[Footnote 7: The huge deer of the genus _Alces_. Elk is the old
Scandinavian name. _Moose_, derived from the Kri language, is the
Canadian term, "Elk" being misapplied to the wapiti (red) deer.
Champlain calls the elk _orignac_, its name in Algonkin.]
At last his little expedition in "a skiff and canoe" had to draw into
the bank, warned by the noise that they were approaching a great fall
of water--the La Chine or St. Louis Rapids. Champlain wrote: "I saw,
to my astonishment, a torrent of water descending with an impetuosity
such as I have never before witnessed.... It descends as if in steps,
and at each descent there is a remarkable boiling, owing to the force
and swiftness with which the water traverses the fall, which is about
a league in length.... The territory on the side of the fall where we
went overland consists, so far as we saw it, of very open wood, where
one can go with his armour without much difficulty."
From the Algonkin Indians in the neighbourhood of these St. Louis
Rapids, and also from those living near Quebec, Champlain obtained a
good deal of geographical information to add to his own observations.
He was given an idea, more or less correct, of Lake Ontario, the Falls
of Niagara, Lake Erie and Lake Huron, and perhaps also of Lake
Superior, a sea so vast, said the Amerindians, that the sun set on its
horizon. This sheet of water, Champlain calculated, must be 1200 miles
distant to the west, and therefore identical with the "Mer du sud"
(Pacific Ocean), which all North-American explorers for three
centuries wished to reach.
After collecting much information about possible copper mines in the
regions north and south of the Lower St. Lawrence, and of silver[8] in
New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, and a terrible story which he more than
half believed about a monster of prodigious size, the _Gougou_,[9]
Champlain set sail for France at the end of August, 1603.
[Footnote 8: Or lead mixed with silver. The local natives used this
ore, which was white when beaten, for their arrowheads.]
[Footnote 9: The Gougou dwelt on the small island of Miscon, to the
east of the Bay of Chaleurs. It had the form of a woman but was about
a hundred feet high. Its habit was to catch and devour men and women,
whom it first placed in a pocket capacious enough to hold a small
ship. Its roarings and hissings could be heard at times coming from
the island of Miscon, where the Gougou lay concealed. Even a
Frenchman, the Sieur Prévert, had heard these noises. Probably this
islet had a whirlpool communicating with a cavern into which fishermen
were sucked by the current.]
In April, 1604, Champlain accompanied the Sieur de Monts (who had
succeeded the dead Amyard de Chastes as head of a chartered
fur-trading association) in a fresh expedition to North America,
together with a hundred and twenty artisans and several noblemen.
They were to occupy the lands of "Cadie" (Acadia, Nova Scotia),
Canada, and other places in New France. De Monts thought Tadoussac and
Quebec too cold in wintertime, and preferred the sunnier east coast
regions. He aimed indeed at colonizing what is now New England.
On the way to Nova Scotia, the expedition was nearly wrecked on Sable
Island, about one hundred and twenty miles south of Cape Breton
Island, and noticed there the large red cattle run wild from the bulls
and cows landed on Sable Island by the Portuguese some sixty years
earlier. (The Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
deserved well of humanity for the generous way in which they left
cattle, goats, pigs, and rabbits to run wild on desert islands and
serve as provender for shipwrecked mariners like Robinson Crusoe.)
Champlain also speaks of the "fine large black foxes" which he and
other voyagers noticed on Sable Island. How they came there is a
mystery, unless the island had once been part of the mainland.
This same Sable Island had been the scene of an extraordinary
experiment at the end of the previous century. In 1598 the Marquis de
la Roche, given a commission to colonize New France, sailed in a small
ship for North America with sixty convicts from French prisons as
colonists. He landed them on Sable Island, and went away to look for
some good site for his colony. But then a storm arose, and his little
ship was literally blown back to France. The convicts, abandoned thus,
built themselves shelters out of the driftwood of wrecks; killed and
ate the cattle and caught fish. They made themselves warm clothes out
of the skins of the seals which frequented the island coast in
thousands. But these convicts quarrelled and fought among themselves
so fiercely that when at last a ship from Normandy came to take them
away, there were only twelve left--twelve shaggy men with long tangled
hair and beards; and, a legend says, in addition a Franciscan monk
who had been landed on the island with them as a kind of missionary or
chaplain, and who had been so heartbroken at their bloody quarrels and
horrible deeds that when the Norman ship arrived to take the castaways
back to France, the Franciscan refused to go with them, believing
himself to be dying and wishing to end his life undisturbed. So he was
left behind. But after the ship had sailed away he slowly mended, grew
well and strong, and cultivated eagerly his little garden. For food he
ate the whelks, mussels, and oysters that were so abundant on the
shore. Occasionally ships (then as now) were wrecked on Sable Island
in stormy weather, and the good monk ministered to the mariners who
reached the shore. Also he was visited, ever and again, by the Breton
fishing boats, which brought him supplies of necessaries and the bread
and wine for celebrating Mass. Long after his death his spirit was
thought to haunt the desolate island.
Champlain and his companions passed on from Sable Island to the
south-east coast of Nova Scotia, noticing as they landed here and
there the abundance of rabbits[10] and sea birds, especially the Great
Auk, of which they killed numbers with sticks, cormorants (whose fishy
eggs they ate with enjoyment), puffins, guillemots, gulls, terns,
scissorbills, divers, ospreys, buzzards, and falcons; and no doubt the
typical American white-tailed sea eagles, ravens, ducks, geese,
curlews, herons, and cranes. Here and there they found the shore
"completely covered with sea wolves"--seals, of course, probably the
common seal and the grey seal. Of these they captured as many as they
wanted, for the seals, like most of the birds, were quite unafraid of
man.
[Footnote 10: There are no real rabbits in America. This was probably
the Polar Hare (_Lepus timidus glacialis_), or the common small
varying hare (_L. americanus_).]
They then explored the Bay of Fundy, and, after zig-zagging about,
decided to fix on the harbour of St. John's (New Brunswick) as the
site for their colony. The future capital of New France, therefore,
was begun on La Sainte Croix (Dochet) Island, near the mouth of the
wonderful tidal estuary of the Uigudi (Ouygoudy) River.
Here they passed the winter, but suffered so badly from scurvy[11]
that, when in the spring of 1605 Du Pont Gravé arrived from Brittany
with supplies, the remnant of the colony was removed to the opposite
coast of Nova Scotia to Port Royal (afterwards named by the English
Annapolis[12]). The French seem to have fallen in love with this place
from the very first. Nevertheless here they suffered from scurvy
during the winter as elsewhere. Before moving over here, however,
Champlain, together with De Monts, had explored the west of New
England south of New Brunswick as far as Plymouth, just south of
Boston.
[Footnote 11: How awful was this "mal de terre" or scurvy amongst the
French settlers may be seen from this description of Champlain: "There
were produced in the mouths of those who had it great pieces of
superfluous and drivelling flesh, which got the upper hand to such an
extent that scarcely anything but liquid could be taken. Their teeth
became very loose and could be pulled out with the fingers without its
causing them pain.... Afterwards a violent pain seized their arms and
legs, which remained swollen and very hard, all spotted as if with
fleabites; and they could not walk on account of the contraction of
the muscles.... They suffered intolerable pains in the loins, stomach,
and bowels, and had a very bad cough and short breath.... Out of
seventy-nine who composed our party, thirty-five died and twenty were
on the point of death (when spring began in May)."
Scurvy is said to be a disease of the blood caused by a damp, cold,
and impure atmosphere combined with absence of vegetable food and a
diet of salted or semi-putrid meat or fish, such as was so often the
winter food of Amerindians and of the early French pioneers in Canada.
We have already noted Cartier's discovery of the balsam remedy.]
[Footnote 12: From Queen Anne.]
Off the coast of Maine (Richmond's Island) they encountered
agricultural Amerindians of a new tribe, the Penobskot probably, who
cultivated a form of rank narcotic tobacco (_Nicotiana rustica_),
which they called _Petun_. (A variety of this has produced the
handsome garden flower _Petunia_, whose Latin name is derived from
this native word Petun.) They also grew maize or Indian corn, planting
very carefully three or four seeds in little mounds three feet apart
one from the other, the soil in between being kept clear of weeds. The
American farmers of to-day cannot adopt any better method.
The islands round about Portland (Maine) were matted all over with
wild red currants, so that the eye could scarcely discern anything
else. Attracted by this fruit, clouds of wild pigeons had
assembled[13]. They manifested hardly any fear of the French, who
captured large numbers of them in snares, or killed them with guns.
The natives of southern Maine fled with dismay on sighting the French
ships, for they had never before seen sailing vessels, but later on
they timidly approached the French ships in a canoe, then landed and
went through a wild dance on the shore to typify friendliness.
Champlain took with him some drawing paper and a pencil or crayon,
together with a quantity of knives and ship's biscuit. Landing alone,
he attracted the natives towards him by offering them biscuits, and
having gathered them round him (being of course as much unable to
understand their speech as they were French), he proceeded to ask
questions by means of certain drawings, chiefly the outlines of the
coast. The savages at once seized his idea, and taking up his pencil
drew on the paper an accurate outline of Massachusetts Bay, adding
also rivers and islands unknown to the French. They went on by further
intelligent signs to supply information. For instance, they placed six
pebbles at equal distances to intimate that Massachusetts Bay was
occupied by six tribes and governed by as many chiefs. By drawings of
growing maize and other plants they intimated that all these people
lived by agriculture.
[Footnote 13: The pigeons referred to by Champlain were probably the
Passenger pigeon (_Ectopistes_) which at one time was extraordinarily
abundant in parts of North America, though it has now been nearly
killed out by man. It would arrive in flocks of millions on its
migratory journeys in search of food.]
Champlain thought Massachusetts (in his first voyage) a most
attractive region in the summer, what with the blue water of the
enclosed arms of the sea, the lofty forest trees, and the fields of
Indian corn and other crops.
When these French explorers reached the harbour of Boston, the islands
and mainland were swarming with the native population. The Amerindians
were intensely interested in the arrival of the first sailing vessel
they had ever seen. Although it was only a small barque, its size was
greater than any canoe known to them. As it seemed to spread huge
white wings and to glide silently through the water without the use of
paddles or oars, it filled them with surprise and admiration. They
manned all their canoes[14] and came out in a flotilla to express
their honour and reverence for the wonderful white men. But when the
French took their leave, it was equally obvious that the natives
experienced a sense of relief, for they were disquieted as well as
filled with admiration at the arrival of these wonderful beings from
an unknown world.
[Footnote 14: It is interesting to learn from his accurate notes that
in Massachusetts (and from thence southwards) there were no more bark
canoes, but that the canoes were "dug-outs"--trunks of tall trees
burnt and chipped till they were hollowed into a narrow vessel of
considerable length.]
Champlain describes the wigwams or native huts as being cone-shaped,
heavily thatched with reeds, with an opening at the top of the roof
for the smoke to escape. Inside the huts was a low bed raised a foot
from the ground and made of short posts driven into the ground, with a
surface made of boards split from trees. On these boards were laid
either the dressed skins of deer or bear, or thick mattresses made of
reeds or rushes. The beds were large enough for several people to lie
on. Champlain describes the huts as being full of fleas, and likewise
the persons of the nearly naked Indians, who carried these fleas out
with them into the fields when they were working, so that the
Frenchmen by stopping to talk to the natives became covered with
fleas to such an extent that they were obliged to change their
clothes.
In the fields were cultivated not only maize, but beans similar to the
beans grown by the natives of Brazil, vegetable marrows or pumpkins,
Jerusalem artichokes[15], radishes, and tobacco. The woods were filled
with oaks, walnut trees[16], and the red "cedar" of North America,
really a very large juniper, the foliage of which in the summertime
often assumes a reddish colour, together with the trunk. This
Virginian juniper or "red cedar" is now quite a common tree in
England. In warm weather it exhales a delicious aromatic scent.
[Footnote 15: This tuber, which is a well-known and very useful
vegetable in England, comes from the root of a species of sunflower
(_Helianthus tuberosus_). It has nothing to do with the real
artichoke, which is a huge and gorgeous thistle, and it has equally
nothing to do with Jerusalem. The English people have always taken a
special delight in mispronouncing and corrupting words in order to
produce as much confusion as possible in their names for things.
Jerusalem is a corruption of _Girasole_, which is the Italian name
given to this sunflower with the edible roots, because its flower is
supposed always to turn towards the sun. The Jerusalem artichoke was
originally a native of North America.]
[Footnote 16: These walnut trees were afterwards known in modern
American speech as hickories, butter-nuts, and pig-nuts, all of which
are allied to, but distinct from, the European walnut.]
All these natives of the Massachusetts coast were described by
Champlain as being almost naked in the summertime, wearing at most a
small piece of leather round the waist, and a short robe of spun hemp
which hung down over the shoulders. Their faces were painted red,
black and yellow. The men pulled out any hairs which might come on the
chin, and thus were beardless. They were armed with pikes, clubs,
bows, and arrows. The pikes were probably made of wood with the ends
hardened by being burnt to a point in the fire, and the arrow tips
were made of the sharp termination of the tail of the great
king-crab[17].
[Footnote 17: _Limulus polyphemus_. This extraordinary crustacean is
one of the oldest of living animals in its history, as it is closely
related to the Xiphosura and even the Trilobites of the Primary Epoch,
which existed millions of years ago. In a rough way it is a kind of
connecting link between the Crustacea, or crabs and lobsters, and the
Scorpions and spiders.]
These Massachusetts "Indians" described to Champlain a wonderful bird
which at some seasons of the year they caught in snares and ate. This
Champlain at once guessed was the wild turkey, now, of course, quite
extinct in that region. This wild turkey of the eastern half of North
America (including southern Canada) was quite a distinct form from the
Mexican bird, which last is the origin of our domestic turkey.
In July, 1606, as De Monts had not returned from France, and the
little colony at Port Royal was without supplies, they decided to
leave two Frenchmen in charge of the local chief of the Mikmak
Indians, and find their way along the coast to Cape Breton, where they
might get a fishing vessel to take them back to France. But after
travelling in an open boat--a chaloupe--round the coast of Nova Scotia
they met another small boat off Cape Sable, under the charge of the
secretary of De Monts, and learnt that Lieutenant-General DE
POUTRINCOURT[18] (one of the great names amongst the pioneers of
Canada, and the man who had really chosen Port Royal for the French
headquarters at Nova Scotia) had already returned from France with
fresh supplies. Consequently, Champlain and his companions returned to
Port Royal, and all set to work with eagerness to develop the
settlement. Champlain relates in his book how he created vegetable
gardens, trout streams and ponds, and a reservoir of salt water for
sea fish; but he was soon off again on a fresh journey of exploration,
because De Monts was not satisfied with Nova Scotia on account of the
cold in winter. Accordingly Champlain examined the whole coast round
the Bay of Fundy, and down to Cape Cod, and the islands of Martha's
Vineyard and Nantucket. But in this region, already visited in past
times by French, Spanish, and English ships, they found the natives
treacherous and hostile. An unprovoked attack was made on the French
after they landed, and several of the seamen were killed with arrows.
[Footnote 18: Jean de Biencourt, the Sieur de Poutrincourt and Baron
de Saint-Just, were his full titles.]
On the 24th of May, 1607, a small barque of six or seven tons burden
(fancy crossing the wide Atlantic from Brittany to Nova Scotia in a
ship of that size at the present day!) arrived outside Port Royal from
France, with an abrupt notification that De Monts' ten years' monopoly
and charter were _cancelled_ by Henry IV, and that all the colony was
to be withdrawn and brought back to France. Henry IV took this action
simply because De Monts attempted to make his monopoly a real one,[19]
and stop the ships of fur traders who were trading with the
Amerindians of Cape Breton without his licence. These fur traders of
Normandy then complained bitterly that because De Monts was a
Protestant he was allowed not only to have this monopoly, but to
endanger the spiritual welfare of the savages by spreading his false
doctrines! So King Henry IV, volatile and capricious, like most of the
French kings, cancelled a charter which had led to such heroic and
remarkable results.
[Footnote 19: You will observe that neither the French nor the English
sovereigns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went to much
personal expense over the creation of colonies. They simply gave a
charter or a monopoly, which cost them nothing, but which made other
people pay.]
The greater part of the little colony had to leave Port Royal and make
its way in small boats along the Nova Scotia coasts till they reached
Cape Breton Island. Here fishing vessels conveyed them back to
Brittany. It was in this boat journeying along the coast of Nova
Scotia that Champlain discovered Halifax Harbour, then called by the
Indian name of Shebuktu. As they passed along this coast with its many
islands, they feasted on ripe raspberries, which grew everywhere "in
the greatest possible quantity".
Poutrincourt, however, had succeeded in taking back with him samples
of the corn, wheat, rye, barley, and oats which had been so
successfully grown on the island of Sainte Croix and at Port Royal,
and also presented to that monarch five brent-geese[20] which he had
reared up from eggs hatched under a hen. The king was so delighted at
these presents that he once more veered about and gave to De Monts the
monopoly of the fur trade for one more year, in order to enable him to
renew his colonies in New France.
[Footnote 20: _Branta canadensis_, a handsome black-and-brown goose
with white markings, which the French pioneers in Canada styled
"outarde" or "bustard", and whose eggs were considered very good
eating.]
The Sieur de Monts was again appointed by Henry IV Lieutenant-General
in New France. The latter engaged Champlain as his lieutenant, and
also sent out Du Pont Gravé in command of the second vessel, as head
of the trading operations. This time, on the advice of Champlain, the
expedition made its way directly to the St. Lawrence River, stopping
first at Tadoussac, where Du Pont Gravé proceeded to take very strong
measures with the Basque seamen, who were infringing his monopoly by
trading with the natives in furs. Apparently they were still allowed
to continue their whale fishery.
Once more Champlain heard from the Montagnais Indians of the great
Salt Sea to the north of Saguenay, in other words, the southern
extension of Hudson's Bay; and in his book he notes that the English
in these latter years "had gone thither to find their way to China".
However, he kept his intent fixed on the establishment of a French
colony along the St. Lawrence, and may be said to have founded the
city of Quebec (the site of which was then covered with nut trees) on
the 4th of July, 1608. Then his enterprise was near being wrecked by a
base conspiracy got up between a surgeon and a number of French
artisans, who believed that by seizing and killing Champlain, and then
handing over the infant settlement to the Spanish Basques, they might
enable these traders and fishermen with their good strong ships to
overcome Du Pont Gravé, and seize the whole country. Naturally (they
believed) the Basques would reward the conspirators, who would thus at
a stroke become rich men. They none of them wished to go to France,
but would live here independent of outside interference. A
conspirator, however, revealed the plot to Champlain as he was
planting one of the little gardens which he started as soon as he had
been in a place a few days. He went about his business very
discreetly, arrested all the leading conspirators, gave them a fair
trial, had the ringleader executed by Pont Gravé, and sent three
others back to France. After this he settled down at Quebec for the
winter, taking care, however, in the month of October, to plant seeds
and vines for coming up in the spring.
In the summer of 1609 Champlain, apparently with the idea of thus
exploring the country south of the St. Lawrence, decided to accompany
a party of Algonkins and Hurons from Georgian Bay and the
neighbourhood of Montreal, who were bent on attacking the Iroquois
confederacy in the Mohawk country at the headwaters of the Hudson
River. He was accompanied by two French soldiers--Des Marais and La
Routte--and by a few Montagnais Indians from Tadoussac.
The Hurons[21] were really of the same group (as regards language and
descent) as the Iroquois (Irokwá), but in those days held aloof from
the five other tribes who had formed a confederacy[22] and alliance
under the name of _Ongwehonwe_--"Superior Men". The Iroquois
(Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Kayugas, and Senekas) dominated much of
what is now New York State, and from the mountain country of the
Adirondaks and Catskills descended on the St. Lawrence valley and the
shores of Lakes Ontario and Huron to rob and massacre.
[Footnote 21: Huron was a French name given to the westernmost group
of the Iroquois family (see p. 159). The Huron group included the
Waiandots, the Eries or Erigas, the Arendáronons, and the Atiwándoronk
or "neutral" nation. The French sometimes called all these Huron
tribes "the good Iroquois". Iroquois was probably pronounced "Irokwá",
and seems to have been derived from a word like Irokosia, the name of
the Adirondack mountain country.]
[Footnote 22: The confederacy was founded about 1450 by the great
Hiawatha (of Longfellow's Poem), himself an Onondaga from south of
Lake Ontario, but backed by the Mohawks only, in the beginning of his
work.]
The route into the enemy's country lay along the Richelieu River and
across Lake Champlain to its southern end, in sight of the majestic
snow-crowned Adirondak Mountains. On the way the allies stopped at an
island, held a kind of review, and explained their tactics to
Champlain. They set no sentries and kept no strict watch at night,
being too tired; but during the daytime the army advanced as follows:
The main body marched in the centre along the warpath; a portion of
the troops diverged on either side to hunt up food for the expedition;
and a third section was told off for "intelligence" work, namely, they
ran on ahead and roundabout to locate the enemy, looking out
especially along the rivers for marks or signals showing whether
friends or enemies had passed that way. These marks were devised by
the chiefs of the different tribes, and were duly communicated to the
war leaders of tribes in friendship or alliance, like our cipher
codes; and equally they were changed from time to time to baffle the
enemy. Neither hunters nor main body ever got in front of the advance
guard, lest they should give an alarm. Thus they travelled until they
got within two days or so of the enemies' headquarters; thenceforward
they only marched by night, and hid in the woods by day, making no
fires or noise, and subsisting only on cooked maize meal.
At intervals the soothsayers accompanying the army were consulted for
signs and omens; and when the war-chiefs decided on their plan of
campaign they summoned all the fighting men to a smooth place in a
wood, cut sticks a foot long (as many as there were warriors), and
each leader of a division "put the sticks in such order as seemed to
him best, indicating to his followers the rank and order they were to
observe in battle. The warriors watched carefully this proceeding,
observing attentively the outline which their chief had made with the
sticks. Then they would go away and set to placing themselves in such
order as the sticks were in. This manoeuvre they repeated several
times, and at all their encampments, without needing a sergeant to
maintain them in the proper order they were able to keep accurately
the positions assigned to them" (Champlain).
The Hurons who were accompanying Champlain frequently questioned him
as to his dreams, they themselves having a great belief in the value
of dreams as omens and indications of future events. One day, when
they were approaching the country of the Iroquois, Champlain actually
did have a dream. In this he imagined that he saw the Iroquois enemies
drowning in a lake near a mountain. Moved to pity in his dream he
wished to help them, but his savage allies insisted that they must be
allowed to die. When he awoke he told the Amerindians of his dream,
and they were greatly impressed, as they regarded it as a good omen.
Near the modern town of Ticonderoga the Hurons and Algonkins of
Georgian Bay and Ottawa met a party of Iroquois, probably of the
Mohawk tribe. The Iroquois had built rapidly a stockade in which to
retreat if things should go badly with them, but the battle at first
began in the old heroic style with as much ceremony as a French duel.
First the allies from the St. Lawrence asked the Iroquois what time it
would suit them to begin fighting the next day; then the latter
replied: "When the sun is well up, if you don't mind? We can see
better then to kill you all." Accordingly in the bright morning the
Hurons and Algonkins advanced against the circular stockade of the
Iroquois, and the Iroquois marched out to fight in great pomp, their
leaders wearing plumed headdresses. With this exception both parties
fought quite naked, and armed only with bows and arrows.
"I marched twenty paces in advance of the rest" (wrote Champlain)
"till I was within about thirty paces of the Iroquois.... I rested my
musket against my cheek, and aimed directly at one of the three
chiefs. With the same shot two fell to the ground, and one of their
men was so wounded that he died some time afterwards. I had loaded my
musket with four balls. When they saw I had shot so favourably for
them, they (the Algonkins and Hurons) raised such loud cries that one
could not have heard it thunder.
"Meantime the arrows flew on both sides. The Iroquois were greatly
astonished that two men had been so quickly killed, though they were
equipped with armour woven from copper thread and with wood, which was
proof against their arrows."
Whilst Champlain was loading to fire again one of his two companions
fired a shot from the woods, whereupon the Iroquois took to flight,
abandoning their camp and fort. As they fled they threw off their
armour of wooden boards and cotton cloth.
As to the way in which the Hurons tortured their Iroquois prisoners,
Champlain writes of one instance.
"They commanded him (the prisoner) to sing, if he had courage, which
he did, but it was a very sad song." The Hurons kindled a fire, and
when it was well alight they each took a brand from the blaze, the end
of which was red-hot, and with this burnt the bodies of their
prisoners tied to stakes. Every now and then they stopped and threw
water over them to restore them from fainting. Then they tore out
their finger nails and applied fire to the extremities of the fingers.
After that they tore the scalps off their heads, and poured over the
raw and bleeding flesh a kind of hot gum. Then they pierced the arms
of the prisoners near the wrists, and drew up their sinews with sticks
inserted underneath, trying to tear them out by force, and, if
failing, cutting them. One poor wretch "uttered such terrible cries
that it excited my pity to see him treated in this manner, yet at
other times he showed such firmness that one would have said he
suffered scarcely any pain at all".
In this case Champlain, seeing that the man could not recover from his
injuries, drew apart and shot him dead, "thus putting an end to all
the tortures he would have suffered".
But the savage Hurons were not yet satisfied. They opened the corpse
and threw its entrails into the lake. Then they cut off head, arms,
and legs, and cut out the heart; this they minced up, and endeavoured
to force the other prisoners to eat it.
With those of his allies who were Montagnais Indians from Tadoussac,
Champlain returned to that place. As they neared the shore the
Montagnais women undressed themselves, jumped into the river, and swam
to the prows of the canoes, from which they took the heads of the
slain Iroquois. These they hung about their necks as if they had been
some costly chain, singing and dancing meanwhile.
However, in spite of these and other horrors, Champlain had "separated
from his Upper Canadian allies with loud protestations of mutual
friendship", promising to go again into their country and assist them
with continued "fraternal" relations.
From this expedition Champlain learned much regarding the geography of
eastern North America, and he brought back with him to France, to
present to King Henry IV, two scarlet tanagers--one of the commonest
and most beautiful birds of the eastern United States--a girdle of
porcupine quills made from the Canadian porcupine, and the head of a
gar-pike caught in Lake Champlain.[23]
[Footnote 23: Unconsciously, no doubt, he brought away with him to the
King of France one of the most remarkable freshwater fish living on
the North-American continent, for the gar-pike belongs, together with
the sturgeon and its allies, to an ancient type of fish the
representatives of which are found in rock formations as ancient as
those of the Secondary and Early Tertiary periods. Champlain may be
said to have discovered this remarkable gar-pike (_Lepidosteus
osseus_), which is covered with bony scales "so strong that a poniard
could not pierce them". The colour he describes as silver-grey. The
head has a snout two feet and a half long, and the jaws possess double
rows of sharp and dangerous teeth. These teeth were used by the
natives as lancets with which to bleed themselves when they suffered
from inflammation or headache. Champlain declares that the gar-pike
often captures and eats water birds. It would swim in and among rushes
or reeds and then raise its snout out of the water and keep perfectly
still. Birds would mistake this snout for the stump of a tree and
would attempt to alight on it; whereupon the fish would seize them by
the legs and pull them down under the water.]
On Champlain's return from France in 1610 (he and other Frenchmen and
Englishmen of the time made surprisingly little fuss about crossing
the North Atlantic in small sailing vessels, in spite of the storms of
spring and autumn) he found the Iroquois question still agitating the
minds of the Algonkins, Montagnais, and Hurons. Representatives of
these tribes were ready to meet this great captain of the _Mistigosh_
or _Matigosh_[24] (as they called the French), and implored him to
keep his promise to take part in another attack on the dreaded enemy
of the Adirondak heights. Apparently the Iroquois (Mohawks) this time
had advanced to meet the attack, and were ensconced in a round
fortress of logs built near the Richelieu River.[25] The Algonkins and
their allies on this expedition were armed with clubs, swords, and
shields, as well as bows and arrows. The swords of copper(?) were
really knife blades attached to long sticks like billhooks. Before the
barricade, as usual, both parties commenced the fight by hurling
insults at each other till they were out of breath, and shouting "till
one could not have heard it thunder". The circular log barricade,
however, would never have been taken by the Algonkins and their
allies but for the assistance of Champlain and three or four
Frenchmen, who with their musketry fire at short range paralysed the
Iroquois. Champlain and one other Frenchman were wounded with arrows
in the neck and arm, but not seriously. The victory of the allies was
followed by the usual torture of prisoners, which Champlain made a
slight--only slight--attempt to prevent.
[Footnote 24: Spelt by Champlain with a "ch" instead of _sh_.]
[Footnote 25: Then called the Rivière des Iroquois.]
But results far more serious arose from these two skirmishes with the
Iroquois in 1609 and 1610. The Confederacy of the Five Nations
(afterwards six) realized that they had been attacked unprovoked by
the dominant white men of the St. Lawrence, called by the Montagnais
_Mistigosh_, and by the Iroquois _Adoreset[¯u]i_ ("men of iron", from
their armour). They became the bitter enemies of the French, and
tendered help first to the Dutch to establish themselves in the valley
of the Hudson, and secondly to the English. In the great Colonial wars
of the early eighteenth century the Iroquois were invaluable allies to
the British forces, Colonial and Imperial, and counted for much in the
struggle which eventually cost France Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
Maine, the two Canadas, and Louisiana. On the other hand, the French
alliance with the Hurons, Algonkins, and Montagnais, begun by this
brotherhood-in-arms with Champlain, secured for France and the French
such widespread liking among the tribes of Algonkin speech, and their
allies and friends, that the two Canadas and much of the Middle West,
together with Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, became French in
sympathy without any war of conquest. When the French dominion over
North America fell, in 1759, with the capture of Quebec by Wolfe's
army, tribes of Amerindians went on fighting for five years afterwards
to uphold the banner and the rule of the beloved French king.
On Champlain's next visit to Canada, in 1610, he handed over to the
Algonkin Indians a French youth named Étienne Brulé (see p. 88), to
be taught the Algonkin language (the use of which was spread far and
wide over north-east America), and, further, sent a Huron youth to
France to be taught French. Between 1611 and 1616 he had explored much
of the country between Montreal (the foundations of which city he may
be said to have laid on May 29, 1611, for his stockaded camp is now in
the centre of it) and Lakes Huron and Ontario, especially along the
Ottawa River, that convenient short cut (as a water route) between the
St. Lawrence at Sault St. Louis (Montreal) and Lakes Huron and
Superior. With short portages you can get in canoes from Montreal to
the waters of Hudson Bay, or to Lake Winnipeg and the base of the
Rocky Mountains.
In exploring this "River of the Algonkins" (as he called it),
Champlain was nearly drowned between two rocks, and much hurt, from
over bravery and want of knowledge of how to deal with a canoe on
troubled water; but on June 4, 1613, he stood on the site of the
modern city of Ottawa--the capital of the vast Canadian Dominion--and
gazed at the marvellous Rideau or Curtain Fall, where the Rideau River
enters the Ottawa. But the air was resonant with the sound of falling
water. Three miles above the falls of the Gatineau and the Rideau, the
main Ottawa River descended with a roar and a whirl of white foam and
rainbow-tinted mist into the chasm called the Chaudière or Kettle. On
a later occasion he describes the way in which the Algonkins
propitiated the Spirit of the Chasm:
"Continuing our way, we came to the Chaudière Falls, where the savages
carried out their customary ceremony. After transporting their canoes
to the foot of the fall they assemble in one spot, where one of them
takes up a collection on a wooden platter, into which each person puts
a bit of tobacco. The collection having been made, the plate is placed
in the midst of the troop, and all dance about it, singing after
their style. Then one of the captains makes an harangue, setting forth
that for a long time they have been accustomed to make this offering,
by which means they are ensured protection against their enemies, that
otherwise misfortune would befall them from the evil spirit. This
done, the maker of the harangue takes the plate and throws the tobacco
into the midst of the cauldron (the chasm of foaming water), whereupon
they all together raise a loud cry. These poor people are so
superstitious, that they would not believe it possible for them to
make a prosperous journey without observing this ceremony at this
place; for sometimes their enemies (Iroquois) await them at this
portage, not venturing to go any farther on account of the difficulty
of the journey. Consequently they are occasionally surprised and
killed by the Iroquois at this place (the south bank of the Ottawa)."
Above the Chaudière Champlain met the Algonkin chief, Tessouat, and
thus described the burial places of his tribe:
"On visiting the island I observed their cemeteries, and was struck
with wonder as I saw sepulchres of a shape like shrines, made of
pieces of wood fixed in the ground at a distance of about three feet
from each other, and intersecting at the upper end. On the
intersections above they place a large piece of wood, and in front
another upright piece on which is carved roughly, as would be
expected, the figure of the male or female interred. If it is a man,
they add a shield, a sword attached to a handle after their manner, a
mace, and bow and arrows. If it is a chief, there is a plume on his
head, and some other _matachia_ or embellishment. If it is a child,
they give it a bow and arrow, if a woman or girl, a boiler, an earthen
vessel, a wooden spoon, and an oar. The entire sepulchre is six or
seven feet long at most, and four wide; others are smaller. They are
painted yellow and red, with various ornaments as neatly done as the
carving. The deceased is buried with his dress of beaver or other
skins which he wore when living, and they lay by his side all his
possessions, as hatchets, knives, boilers, and awls, so that these
things may serve him in the land whither he goes; for they believe in
the immortality of the soul, as I have elsewhere observed. These
carved sepulchres are only made for the warriors, for in respect to
others they add no more than in the case of women, who are considered
a useless class, accordingly but little is added in their case."
In the summer of 1615 Champlain, returning from France, made his way
up the Ottawa River, and, by a short portage, to Lake Nipissing,
thence down French River to the waters of Lake Huron. On the banks of
the French River he met a detachment of the Ottawa tribe (of the
Algonkin family). These people he styled the _Cheveux Relevés_,
because the men's hair was gathered up and dressed more carefully and
becomingly on the top of the head than (he says) could at that time be
done by a hairdresser in France. This arrangement of the hair gave the
men a very handsome appearance, but here their toilet ended, for they
wore no clothes whatever (in the summertime), making up for this
simplicity by painting their faces in different colours, piercing
their ears and nostrils and decorating them with shell beads, and
tattooing their bodies and limbs with elaborate patterns.
These Ottawas carried a club, a long bow and arrows, and a round
shield of dressed leather, made (wrote Champlain) "from the skin of an
animal like the buffalo".[26] The chief of the party explained many
things to the white man by drawing with a piece of charcoal on the
white bark of the birch tree. He gave him to understand that the
present occupation of his band of warriors was the gathering of
blueberries, which would be dried in the sun, and could then be
preserved for eating during the winter.
[Footnote 26: This was the first intimation probably that any European
sent home for publication regarding the existence of the bison in
North America, though the Spanish explorers nearly a hundred years
before Champlain must have met with it in travelling through
Louisiana, Texas, and northern Mexico. The bison is not known ever to
have existed near Hudson Bay, or in Canada proper (basin of the St.
Lawrence). South of Canada it penetrated to Pennsylvania and the
Susquehanna River, but not farther eastward.]
From French River, Champlain passed southwards to the homeland of the
Hurons, which lay to the east of what Champlain called "the Fresh
Water Sea" (Lake Huron). This country he describes in enthusiastic
terms. The Hurons, like the other Iroquois tribes (and unlike the
hunting races to the north of them), were agriculturists, and
cultivated pumpkins, sunflowers,[27] beans and Indian corn.
[Footnote 27: The Amerindians of the Lake regions made much use of the
sunflowers of the region (_Helianthus multiflorus_). Besides this
species of sunflower already mentioned, which furnishes tubers from
its roots (the "Jerusalem" artichoke) others were valued for their
seeds, and some or all of these are probably the originals of the
cultivated sunflower in European gardens. The largest of these was
called _Soleille_ by the French Canadians. It grew in the cultivated
fields of the Amerindians to seven or eight feet in height, with an
enormous flower. The seeds were carefully collected and boiled. Their
oil was collected then from the water and was used to grease the hair.
This same Huron country (the Simcoe country of modern times) was
remarkable for its wild fruits. There was the Canada plum (_Prunus
americana_), the wild black cherry (_Prunus serotina_), the red
cherries (_P. pennsylvanica_), the choke cherry (_P. virginiana_),
wild apples (_Pyrus coronaria_), wild pears (a small berry-like pear
called "poire" by the French: _Pyrus canadensis_), and the may-apple
(_Podophyllum peltatum_). Champlain describes this may-apple as of the
form and colour of a small lemon with a similar taste, but having an
interior which is very good and almost like that of figs. The
may-apples grow on a plant which is two and a half feet high, with not
more than three or four leaves like those of the fig tree, and only
two fruits on each plant.]
The Hurons persuaded Champlain to go with them to attack the Iroquois
tribe of the Senekas (Entuhónorons) on the south shores of Lake
Ontario. On the way thither he noticed the abundance of stags and
bears, and, near the lake, of cranes, white and purple-brown.[28]
[Footnote 28: The cranes of Canada--so often alluded to by the French
explorers as "Grues"--are of two species, _Grus canadensis_, with its
plumage of a purple-grey, and _Grus americanus_, which is pure white
(see p. 139).]
On the southern shores of the lake[29] were large numbers of chestnut
trees, "whose fruit was still in the burr. The chestnuts are small but
of a good flavour." The southern country was covered with forests,
with very few clearings. After crossing the Oneida River the Hurons
captured eleven of the Senekas, four women, one girl, three boys, and
three men. The people had left the stockade in which their relations
were living to go and fish by the lake shore. One of the Huron
chiefs--the celebrated Iroquet, who had been so much associated with
Champlain from the time of his arrival--proceeded at once to cut off
the finger of one of these women prisoners. Whereupon Champlain,
firmer than in years gone by, interposed and reprimanded him, pointing
out that it was not the act of a warrior such as he declared himself
to be, to conduct himself with cruelty towards women "who had no
defence but their tears, so that one should treat them with humanity
on account of their helplessness and weakness". Champlain went on to
say that this act was base and brutal, and that if he committed any
more of such cruelties he, Champlain, "would have no heart to assist
or favour them in the war". To this Iroquet replied that their enemies
treated them in the same manner, but that since this was displeasing
to the Frenchmen he would not do anything more to women, but he would
not promise to refrain from torturing the men.
[Footnote 29: Lakes Ontario and Huron were probably first actually
reached by Father Le Caron, a Recollett missionary who came out with
Champlain in 1615 (see p. 90), and by Étienne Brulé, Champlain's
interpreter.]
However, in the subsequent fighting which occurred when they reached
the six-sided stockade of the Senekas (a strong fortification which
faced a large pond on one side, and was surrounded by a moat
everywhere else except at the entrance), the Hurons and Algonkins
showed a great lack of discipline. Champlain and the few Frenchmen
with him, by using their arquebuses, drove the enemy back into the
fort, but not without having some of their Indian allies wounded or
killed. Champlain proposed to the Hurons that they should erect what
was styled in French a _cavalier_--a kind of box, with high, loopholed
sides, which was erected on a tall scaffolding of stout timbers. This
was to be carried by the Hurons to within a pike's length of the
stockade. Four French arquebusiers then scrambled up into the
_cavalier_ and fired through the loopholes into the huts of the Seneka
town. Meantime the Hurons were to set fire, if possible, to the wooden
stockade. They managed the whole business so stupidly that the fire
produced no effect, the flames being blown in the opposite direction
to that which was desired. The brave Senekas threw water on to the
blazing sticks and put out the fire. Champlain was wounded by an arrow
in the leg and knee. The reinforcement of the five hundred Hurons
expected by the allies did not turn up. The Hurons with Champlain lost
heart, and insisted on retreating. Only the dread of the French
firearms prevented the retreat being converted into a complete
disaster. Whenever the Senekas came near enough to get speech with the
French they asked them "why they interfered with native quarrels".
Champlain being unable to walk, the Hurons made a kind of basket,
similar to that in which they carried their wounded. In this he was so
crowded into a heap, and bound and pinioned, that it was as impossible
for him to move "as it would be for an infant in his swaddling
clothes". This treatment caused him considerable pain after he had
been carried for some days; in fact he suffered agonies while fastened
in this way on to the back of a savage.
He was afterwards obliged to pass the winter of 1615-6 in the Huron
country. At that time it swarmed with game. Amongst birds, there were
swans, white cranes, brent-geese, ducks, teal, the redbreasted thrush
(which the Americans call "robin"), brown larks (_Anthus_), snipe, and
other birds too numerous to mention, which Champlain seems to have
brought down with his fowling-piece in sufficient quantities to feed
the whole party whilst waiting for the capture of deer on a large
scale.
Meanwhile, many of the Indians were catching fish, "trout and pike of
prodigious size". When they desired to secure a large number of deer,
they would make an enclosure in a fir forest in the form of the two
converging sides of a triangle, with an open base. The two sides of
these traps were made of great stakes of wood closely pressed
together, from 8 to 9 feet high; and each of the sides was 1000 yards
long. At the point of the triangle there was a little enclosure. The
Hurons were so expeditious in this work that in less than ten days
these long fences and the "pound" or enclosure at their convergence
were finished. They then started before daybreak and scattered
themselves in the woods at a considerable distance behind the
commencement of these fences, each man separated from his fellow by
about 80 yards. Every Huron carried two pieces of wood, one like a
drumstick and the other like a flat, resonant board. They struck the
flat piece of wood with the drumstick and it made a loud clanging
sound. The deer who swarmed in the forest, hearing this noise, fled
before the savages, who drove them steadily towards the converging
fences. As they closed up, the Hurons imitated very cleverly the
yapping of wolves. This frightened the deer still more, so that they
huddled at last into the final enclosure, where they were so tightly
packed that they were completely at the men's mercy. "I assure you,"
writes Champlain, "there is a singular pleasure in this chase, which
takes place every two days, and has been so successful that in
thirty-eight days one hundred and twenty deer were captured. These
were made good use of, the fat being kept for the winter to be used as
we do butter, and some of the flesh to be taken to their homes for
their festivities."
Champlain himself, in the winter of 1615, pursuing one day a
remarkable bird "which was the size of a hen, had a beak like a parrot
and was entirely yellow, except for a red head and blue wings, and
which had the flight of the partridge"--a bird I cannot
identify--lost his way in the woods. For two days he wandered in the
wilderness, sustaining himself by shooting birds and roasting them.
But at last he found his way back to a river which he recognized, and
reached the camp of the Hurons, who were extremely delighted at his
return. Had they not found him, or had he not come back of himself,
they told him that they could never again have visited the French for
fear of being held responsible for his death.
By the month of December of this year (1615) the rivers, lakes, and
ponds were all frozen. Hitherto, Champlain had had to walk when he
could not travel in a canoe, and carry a load of twenty pounds, while
the Indians carried a hundred pounds each. But now the water was
frozen the Hurons set to work and made their sledges. These were
constructed of two pieces of board, manufactured from the trunks of
trees by the patient use of a stone axe and by the application of
fire. These boards were about 6 inches wide, and 6 or 7 feet long,
curved upwards at the forward end and bound together by cross pieces.
The sides were bordered with strips of wood, which served as brackets
to which was fastened the strap that bound the baggage upon the
sledge. The load was dragged by a rope or strap of leather passing
round the breast of the Indian, and attached to the end of the sledge.
The sledge was so narrow that it could be drawn easily without
impediment wherever an Indian could thread his way over the snow
through the pathless forests.
The rest of the winter and early spring Champlain spent alone, or in
company with Father Joseph Le Caron (one of the Recollet
missionaries), visiting the Algonkin and Huron tribes in the region
east of Lake Huron. He has left this description of the modern country
of Simcoe, the home, three hundred years ago, of the long-vanished
Hurons[30]; and gives us the following particulars of their home
life. The Huron country was a pleasant land, most of it cleared of
forest. It contained eighteen villages, six of which were enclosed and
fortified by palisades of wood in triple rows, bound together, on the
top of which were galleries provided with stores of stones, and
birch-bark buckets of water; the stones to throw at an enemy, and the
water to extinguish any fire which might be put to the palisades.
These eighteen villages contained about two thousand warriors, and
about thirty thousand people in all. The houses were in the shape of
tunnels, and were thatched with the bark of trees. Each lodge or house
would be about 120 feet long, more or less, and 36 feet wide, with a
10-foot passage-way through the middle from one end to the other. On
either side of the tunnel were placed benches 4 feet high, on which
the people slept in summer in order to avoid the annoyance of the
fleas which swarmed in these habitations. In winter time they slept on
the ground on mats near the fire. In the summer the cabins were filled
with stocks of wood to dry and be ready for burning in winter. At the
end of each of these long houses was a space in which the Indian corn
was preserved in great casks made of the bark of trees. Inside the
long houses pieces of wood were suspended from the roof, on to which
were fastened the clothes, provisions, and other things of the
inmates, to keep them from the attacks of the mice which swarmed in
these villages. Each hut might be inhabited by twenty-four families,
who would maintain twelve fires. The smoke, having no proper means of
egress except at either end of the long dwelling, and through the
chinks of the roof, so injured their eyes during the winter season
that many people lost their sight as they grew old.
[Footnote 30: They were almost completely exterminated by the Iroquois
confederacy between thirty and forty years after Champlain's visit.]
"Their life", writes Champlain, "is a miserable one in comparison
with our own, but they are happy amongst themselves, not having
experienced anything better, nor imagining that anything more
excellent could be found."
These Amerindians ordinarily ate two meals a day, and although
Champlain and his men fasted all through Lent, "in order to influence
them by our example", that was one of the practices they did _not_
copy from the French.
The Hurons of this period painted their faces black and red, mixing
the colours with oil made from sunflower seed, or with bears' fat. The
hair was carefully combed and oiled, and sometimes dyed a reddish
colour; it might be worn long or short, or only on one side of the
head. The women usually dressed theirs in one long plait. Sometimes it
was done up into a knot at the back of the head, bound with eelskin.
The men were usually dressed in deerskin breeches, with gaiters of
soft leather. The shoes ("Moccasins") were made of the skin of deer,
bears, or beavers. In addition to this the men in cold weather wore a
great cloak. The edges of these cloaks would often be decorated with
bands of brown and red colour alternating with strips of a
whitish-blue, and ornamented with bands of porcupine quills. These,
which were originally white or grey in colour, had been previously
dyed a fine scarlet with colouring matter from the root of the
bed-straw (_Galium tinctorum_). The women were loaded with necklaces
of violet or white shell beads, bracelets, ear-rings, and great
strings of beads falling below the waist. Sometimes they would have
plates of leather studded with shell beads and hanging over the back.
[Illustration: SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN; ALEXANDER HENRY THE ELDER]
In 1616 Champlain returned to France, but visited Quebec in 1617 and
1618. During the years spent at Quebec, which followed his
explorations of 1616, he was greatly impeded in his work of
consolidating Canada as a French colony by the religious strife
between the Catholics and Huguenots, and the narrow-minded greed of
the Chartered company of fur-trading merchants for whom he worked. But
in 1620 he came back to Canada as Lieutenant-Governor (bringing his
wife with him), and after attending to the settlement of a violent
commercial dispute between fur-trading companies he tried to compose
the quarrel between the Iroquois and the Algonkins, and brought about
a truce which lasted till 1627.
In 1628 came the first English attack on Canada. A French fleet was
defeated and captured in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and in the
following year Champlain, having been obliged to surrender Quebec (he
had only sixteen soldiers as a garrison, owing to lack of food),
voyaged to England more or less as a prisoner of state in the summer
of 1629. He found, on arriving there, that the cession of Quebec was
null and void, peace having been concluded between Britain and France
two months before the cession. Charles I remained true to his compact
with Louis XIII, and Quebec and Nova Scotia were restored to French
keeping. In 1633 Champlain returned to Canada as Governor, bringing
with him a considerable number of French colonists. _It is from 1633
that the real French colonization of Canada begins_: hitherto there
had been only one family of settlers in the fixed sense of the word;
the other Frenchmen were fur traders, soldiers, and missionaries. But
Champlain only lived two years after his triumphant return, and died
at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635.
His character has been so well summed up by Dr. S.E. Dawson, in his
admirable book on the _Story of the St. Lawrence Basin_, that I cannot
do better than quote his words:
"Champlain was as much at home in the brilliant court of France as in
a wigwam on a Canadian lake, as patient and politic with a wild band
of savages on Lake Huron as with a crowd of grasping traders in St.
Malo or Dieppe. Always calm, always unselfish, always depending on
God, in whom he believed and trusted, and thinking of France, which he
loved, this single-hearted man resolutely followed the path of his
duty under all circumstances; never looking for ease or asking for
profit, loved by the wild people of the forest, respected by the
courtiers of the king, and trusted by the close-fisted merchants of
the maritime cities of France."
CHAPTER V
After Champlain: from Montreal to the Mississippi
A very remarkable series of further explorations were carried out as
the indirect result of Champlain's work. In 1610 he had allowed a
French boy of about eighteen years of age, named ÉTIENNE BRULÉ, to
volunteer to go away with the Algonkins, in order to learn their
language. Brulé was taken in hand by Iroquet,[1] a chief of the
"Little Algonkins", whose people were then occupying the lands on
either side of the Ottawa River, including the site of the now great
city of Ottawa. After four years of roaming with the Indians, Brulé
was dispatched by Champlain with an escort of twelve Algonkins to the
headwaters of the Suskuehanna, far to the south of Lake Ontario, in
order to warn the Andastes[2] tribe of military operations to be
undertaken by the allied French, Hurons, and Algonkins against the
Iroquois. This enabled Brulé to explore Lake Ontario and to descend
the River Suskuehanna as far south as Chesapeake Bay, a truly
extraordinary journey at the period. This region of northern Virginia
had just been surveyed by the English, and was soon to be the site of
the first English colony in North America.[3]
[Footnote 1: Mentioned on p. 80.]
[Footnote 2: The Andastes were akin to the Iroquois, but did not
belong to their confederacy; they lived in Pennsylvania.]
[Footnote 3: The inaccurate statement has frequently been written
about Newfoundland being "the first British American colony".
Newfoundland was reached by the ship in which John Cabot sailed on his
1497 voyage of discovery, and a few years afterwards its shores were
sought by the English in common with the French and the Portuguese,
and later on the Spaniards and Basques, for the cod fishery. But no
definite British settlement, such as subsequently grew into an actual
colony, was founded in Newfoundland until the year 1624; the island
was not recognized as definitely British till 1713, and no governor
was appointed till 1728. The first permanent English colonial
settlement in America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; and
in the Bermudas and Barbados (West Indies) soon afterwards.]
In attempting to return to the valley of the St. Lawrence in 1616,
with his Andaste guides, Brulé lost his way, and to avoid starvation
surrendered himself to the Seneka Indians (the westernmost clan of the
Iroquois) against whom the recent warlike operations of the French
were being directed. Discovering his nationality, the Senekas decided
to torture him before burning him to death at the stake. As they tore
off his clothes they found that he was wearing an _Agnus Dei_ medal
next his skin. Brulé told them to be careful, as it was a medicine of
great power which would certainly kill them. By a coincidence, at that
very moment a terrific thunderstorm burst from a sky which until
recently had been all sunshine. The Senekas were so scared by the
thunder and lightning that they believed Brulé to be a person of
supernatural powers. They therefore released him, strove to heal such
slight wounds as he had incurred, and carried him off to their
principal town, where he became a great favourite. After a while they
gave him guides to take him north into the country of the Hurons.
His further adventures led him to discover Lake Superior and the way
thither through the Sault Ste. Marie, and to reach a place probably
not far from the south coast of Hudson Bay, in which there was a
copper mine. Then he explored the Montagnais country north of Quebec,
and even at one time (in 1629) entered the service of the English, who
had captured Quebec and Tadoussac from the French. When the English
left this region Brulé travelled again to the west and joined the
Hurons once more.
His licentious conduct amongst his Indian friends seems to have
roused them to such a pitch of anger that in 1632 they murdered him,
then boiled and ate his body. But immediately afterwards misfortune
seemed to fall on the place. The Hurons were terrified at what they
had done, and thought they heard or saw in the sky the spirits of the
white relations of Brulé--some said the sister, some the
uncle--threatening their town (Toanche), which they soon afterwards
burnt and deserted.
In 1615 Champlain, returning from France, had brought out with him
friars of the Récollet order.[4] These were the pioneer missionaries
of Canada, prominent amongst whom was FATHER LE CARON, and these
Récollets traversed the countries in the basin of the St. Lawrence
between Lake Huron and Cape Breton Island, preaching Christianity to
the Amerindians as well as ministering to the French colonists and fur
traders. One of these Récollet missionaries died of cold and hunger in
attempting to cross New Brunswick from the St. Lawrence to the Bay of
Fundy, and another--Nicholas Viel--was the first martyr in Canada in
the spread of Christianity, for when travelling down the Ottawa River
to Montreal he was thrown by the pagan Hurons (together with one of
his converts) into the waters of a rapid since christened Sault le
Récollet. Another Récollet, Father d'Aillon, prompted by Brulé,
explored the richly fertile, beautiful country known then as the
territory of the Neutral nation, that group of Huron-Iroquois
Amerindians who strove to keep aloof from the fierce struggles between
the Algonkins and Hurons on the one hand and the eastern Iroquois
clans on the other. This region, which lies between the Lakes
Ontario, Erie, and Huron, is the most attractive portion of western
Canada. Lying in the southernmost parts of the Dominion, and nearly
surrounded by sheets of open water, it has a far milder climate than
the rest of eastern Canada.
[Footnote 4: The Récollet (properly Recollect) friars were a strict
branch of the Franciscan order that were sometimes called the
Observantines. They were also known as "Recollects" (pronounced in
French _récollet_) because they were required to be constantly keeping
guard over their thoughts. This development of the Franciscan order of
preaching missionary friars was originally a Spanish one, founded
early in the sixteenth century, and becoming well established in the
Spanish Netherlands. Many of them were Flemings or Walloons.]
In 1626 the Jesuit order supplanted the Récollets, and commenced a
campaign both of Christian propaganda and of geographical exploration
which has scarcely finished in the Canada of to-day.
In 1627 the war between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Huron and
Algonkin tribes recommenced, and this, together with the British
capture of Quebec and other portions of Canada, put a stop for several
years to the work of exploration. This was not resumed on an advanced
scale till 1634, when Champlain, unable himself, from failing health,
to carry out his original commission of seeking a direct passage to
China and India across the North-American continent, dispatched a
Norman Frenchman named JEAN NICOLLET to find a way to the Western Sea.
Nicollet, as a very young man, had lived for years amongst the
Amerindian tribes, especially amongst the Nipissings near the lake of
that name. Being charged, amongst other things, with the task of
making peace between the Hurons and the tribes dwelling to the west of
the great lakes, Nicollet discovered Lake Michigan. He was so
convinced of the possibility of arriving at the Pacific Ocean, and
thence making his way to China, that in the luggage which he carried
in his birch-bark canoe was a dress of ceremony made of Chinese damask
silk embroidered richly with birds and flowers. He was on his way to
discover the Winnebago Indians, or "Men of the Sea", of whom Champlain
had heard from the Hurons, with whom they were at war. But the great
water from which they derived their name was not in this instance a
sea, but the Mississippi River. The Winnebago Indians were totally
distinct from the Algonkins or the Iroquois, and belonged to the
Dakota stock, from which the great Siou confederation[5] was also
derived.
[Footnote 5: See p. 160.]
Nicollet advanced to meet the Winnebagos clad in his Chinese robe and
with a pistol in each hand. As he drew near he discharged his pistols,
and the women and children fled in terror, for all believed him to be
a supernatural being, a spirit wielding thunder and lightning.
However, when they recovered from their terror the Winnebagos gave him
a hearty welcome, and got up such lavish feasts in his honour, that
one chief alone cooked 120 beavers at a single banquet.
Nicollet certainly reached the water-parting between the systems
of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and under that
name--Misi-sipi--"great water"--he heard through the Algonkin Indians
of a mighty river lying three days' journey westward from his last
camp. Winnebago (from which root is also derived the names of the
Lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis much farther to the north-west) meant
"salt" or "foul" water. Both terms might therefore be applied to the
sea, and also to the lakes and rivers which, in the minds of the
Amerindians, were equally vast in length or breadth.
From 1648 to 1653 the whole of the Canada known to the French settlers
and explorers was convulsed by the devastating warfare carried on by
the Iroquois, who during that period destroyed the greater part of the
Algonkin and Huron clans. The neutral nation of Lake Erie (the Erigas)
was scattered, and between the shores of Lakes Michigan and Huron and
Montreal the country was practically depopulated, except for the
handfuls of French settlers and traders who trembled behind their
fortifications. Then, to the relief and astonishment of the French,
one of the Iroquois clans--the Onondaga--proposed terms of peace,
probably because they had no more enemies to fight of their own
colour, and wished to trade with the French.
The fur trade of the Quebec province had attracted an increasing
number of French people (men bringing their wives) to such settlements
as Tadoussac and Three Rivers. Amongst these were the parents of
PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON. This young man went hunting near Three Rivers
station and was captured in the woods by Mohawks (Iroquois) who
carried him off to one of their towns and intended to burn him alive.
Having bound him at a stake, they proceeded to tear out some of his
finger nails and shoot arrows at the less vital parts of his body. But
a Mohawk woman was looking on and was filled with pity at the
sufferings of this handsome boy. She announced her intention of
adopting him as a member of her family, and by sheer force of will she
compelled the men to release him. After staying for some time amongst
the Mohawks he escaped, but was again captured just as he was nearing
Three Rivers. Once more he was spared from torture at the intercession
of his adopted relations. He then made an even bolder bid for freedom,
and fled to the south, up the valley of the Richelieu and the Hudson,
and thus reached the most advanced inland post of Dutch America--then
called Orange, now Albany--on the Hudson River. From this point he was
conveyed to Holland, and from Holland he returned to Canada.
Soon after his return he joined two Jesuit fathers who were to visit a
mission station of the Jesuits amongst the Onondagas (Iroquois) on a
lakelet about thirty miles south-east of the present city of
Rochester. The Iroquois (whose language Radisson had learnt to speak)
received them with apparent friendliness, and there they passed the
winter. But in the spring Radisson found out that the Onondaga
Iroquois were intending to massacre the whole of the mission.
Instructed by him, the Jesuits pretended to have no suspicions of the
coming attack, but all the while they were secretly building canoes at
their fort. As soon as they were ready for flight, and the sun of
April had completely melted the ice in the River Oswego, the French
missionaries invited the Onondagas to a great feast, no doubt making
out that it was part of the Easter festivities sanctioned by the
Church. They pointed out to their guests that from religious motives
as well as those of politeness it was essential that the _whole_ of
the food provided should be eaten, "nothing was to be left on the
plate". They set before their savage guests an enormous banquet of
maize puddings, roast pigs, roast ducks, game birds, and fish of many
kinds, even terrapins, or freshwater turtles. The Iroquois ate and ate
until even _their_ appetites were satisfied. Then they began to cry
off; but the missionaries politely insisted, and even told them that
in failing to eat they were neglecting their religious duties. To help
them in this respect they played hymn and psalm tunes on musical
instruments. At last the Onondagas were gorged to repletion, and sank
into a stertorous slumber at sunset. Whilst they slept, the Jesuits,
their converts, and Radisson got into the already prepared canoes and
paddled quickly down the Oswego River far beyond pursuit.
Radisson next joined his brother-in-law, Medard Chouart, and after
narrowly escaping massacre by the Iroquois (once more on the warpath
along the Ottawa River) reached the northern part of Lake Huron, and
Green Bay on the north-west of Lake Michigan. From Green Bay they
travelled up the Fox River and across a portage to the Wisconsin,
which flows into the Mississippi. Down this river they sped, meeting
people of the great Siou confederation and Kri (Cree) Indians, these
last an Algonkin nation roaming in the summertime as far north as
Hudson's Bay, until at length they reached the actual waters of the
Mississippi, first of all white men. Returning then to Lake Michigan,
the shores of which seemed to them an earthly paradise with a climate
finer than Italy, they journeyed northwards into Lake Huron, and
thence north-westwards through the narrow passages of St. Mary's River
into Lake Superior. The southern coast of Lake Superior was followed
to its westernmost point, where they made a camp, and from which they
explored during the winter (in snowshoes) the Wisconsin country and
collected information regarding the Mississippi and its great western
affluent the Missouri. The Mississippi, they declared, led to Mexico,
while the other great forked river in the far west was a pathway,
perhaps, to the Southern Sea (Pacific).
The Jesuits, on the other hand, were convinced that Hudson's Bay (or
the "Bay of the North") was at no great distance from Lake Superior
(which was true) and that it must communicate to the north-west with
the Pacific Ocean or the sea that led to China.
In 1661, without the leave of the French Governor of Canada, who
wanted them to take two servants of his own with them and to give him
half the profits of the venture, Chouart and Radisson hurried away to
the west, picked up large bodies of natives who were returning to the
regions north of Lake Huron, with them fought their way through the
ambushed Iroquois, and once more navigated the waters of Lake
Superior. Once again they started for the Mississippi basin and
explored the country of Minnesota, coming thus into contact with
native tribes which lived on the flesh of the bison. In Minnesota they
met a second time the Kri or Kinistino Indians of north-central
Canada, and joined one of their camps in the spring of 1662, somewhere
to the west of Lake Superior. With Kri guides they started away to the
north and north-east, no doubt by way of the Lake of the Woods, the
English River, Lake St. Joseph, and the Albany River, thus reaching
the salt sea at James Bay, the southernmost extension of Hudson Bay.
Or they may have proceeded by an even shorter route, though with
longer portages for canoes, through Lake Nipigon to the Albany.
The summer of 1662 they passed on the islands and shores of James Bay
hunting "buffalo"[6] with the Indians. Then, in 1663, travelling back
along the same route they had followed in the previous year, they
regained Lake Superior, and so passed by the north of Lake Huron to
the Ottawa River and the St. Lawrence. But on their return to Three
Rivers they were arrested by the French Governor, D'Avaugour, who
condemned them to imprisonment and severe fines. The courts of France
gave them no redress, and in their furious anger Chouart and Radisson
went over to the English, offered their services to England, and so
brought about the creation of the Hudson Bay Company.
[Footnote 6: More probably musk oxen.]
Radisson's journey from England to Hudson Bay has been treated of in
an earlier chapter: it is preferable to follow out to its finish the
great, western impulse of the French, which led them to neglect for a
time the doings of the British on the east coast of North America and
in the sub-Arctic regions of Hudson Bay.
From 1660 onwards the Jesuit missionaries again took up vigorously
that work of Christianizing the Amerindians which had been so
completely checked by the frightful ravages of the Iroquois between
1648 and 1654.
By 1669 the Jesuits had three permanent stations in western Canada.
The first was the mission station at Sault Ste. Marie, the second was
the station of Ste. Esprit, on Lake Superior (not far from the modern
town of Ashland), and the third was the station of St. François Xavier
at the mouth of the Fox River, on Green Bay, Lake Michigan.
As regards some of the sufferings which these missionaries had to go
through when travelling across Canada in the winter, I quote the
following from _The Relations of the Jesuits_ (p. 35):--
"I [Father de Crépieul] set out on the 16th of January, 1674, from the
vicinity of Lake St. John, near the Saguenay River, with an Algonkin
captain and two Frenchmen. We started after Mass, and walked five long
leagues on snowshoes with much trouble, because the snow was soft and
made our snowshoes very heavy. At the end of five leagues, we found
ourselves on a lake four or five leagues long all frozen over, on
which the wind caused great quantities of snow to drift, obscuring the
air and preventing us from seeing where we are going. After walking
another league and a half with great difficulty our strength began to
fail. The wind, cold, and snow were so intolerable that they compelled
us to retrace our steps a little, to cut some branches of fir which
might in default of bark serve to build a cabin. After this we tried
to light a fire, but were unable to do so. We were thus reduced to a
most pitiful condition. The cold was beginning to seize us to an
extraordinary degree, the darkness was great, and the wind blew
fearfully. In order to keep ourselves from dying with cold, we resumed
our march on the lake in spite of our fatigue, without knowing whither
we were going, and all were greatly impeded with the wind and snow.
After walking a league and a half we had to succumb in spite of
ourselves and stop where we were. The danger we ran of dying from cold
caused me to remember the charitable Father de Noue, who in a similar
occasion was found dead in the snow, kneeling and with clasped
hands.... We therefore remained awake during the rest of the night....
On the following morning two Frenchmen arrived from Father Albanel's
cabin very opportunely, and kindled a great fire on the snow.... After
this we resumed our journey on the same lake, and at last reached the
spot where Father Albanel was.... A serious injury, caused by the fall
of a heavy load upon his loins, prevented him from moving, and still
more, from performing a missionary's duties."
One of the Jesuit fathers, Allouez, in founding the station of St.
François Xavier on Green Bay, Lake Michigan, had gained further
information about the wonderful Mississippi, which he called "Messi
Sipi". He also thoroughly explored Lake Nipigon, to the north of Lake
Superior. In 1669 two missionaries, named Dollier de Casson and
Galinée, started from the seminary of St. Sulpice (Montreal) to reach
the great tribes of the far west, supposed to be eager to learn of
Christianity and known to be much more tractable than the Iroquois.
These two missionaries, in their expedition of seven canoes and
twenty-one Amerindians, were accompanied by a remarkable young man
commonly known as La Salle, but whose real name was Robert
Cavalier.[7]
[Footnote 7: La Salle was the name of his property in France.]
Before leaving Lake Ontario, they actually passed the mouth of the
Niagara River and heard the falls, but had not sufficient curiosity to
leave their canoes and walk a short distance to see them. The
wonderful cascades of Niagara, where the St. Lawrence leaving Lake
Erie plunges 328 feet down into Lake Ontario (which is not much above
sea level), remained nearly undiscovered and undescribed until the
year 1678, when they were visited by Father Hennepin. Near the western
end of Lake Ontario the two Sulpician missionaries met another
Frenchman, Jolliet, who had come down to Lake Superior by way of the
Detroit passage, which is really the portion of the St. Lawrence
connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie. Jolliet told the missionary de
Casson of a great tribe in the far west, the Pottawatomies, who had
asked for missionaries, and who were of Algonkin stock. La Salle, on
the other hand, was determined to make for the rumoured Ohio River,
which lay somewhere to the south-west of Lake Erie.
The two Sulpicians wintered in "the earthly paradise" to the north of
Lake Erie, passing a delightful six months there in the amazing
abundance of game and fish. They then met with various disasters to
their canoes, and consequently gave up their western journey, passing
northwards through Detroit and Lake St. Clair into Lake Huron, and
thence to the Jesuit mission station of the Sault Ste. Marie. Here
they were received rather coldly, as being rivals in the mission field
and in exploration. They in their turn accused the Jesuits of thinking
mainly, if not entirely, of the foundation of French colonies, and
very little of evangelizing the natives.
JOLLIET, a Canadian by birth,[8] was dispatched by the Viceroy of
Canada in 1672 to explore the far west. Two years--1670--previously
the French Government had for the first time adopted a really definite
policy about Canada, and had taken formal possession of the Lake
region and of all the territories lying between the lakes and the
Mississippi. A great assembly of Indians was held at Sault Ste. Marie,
near the east end of Lake Superior; and here a representative of the
French Government, accompanied by numerous missionaries and by
Jolliet, read a proclamation of the sovereignty of King Louis XIV of
France and Navarre. Below a tall cross was erected a great shield
bearing the arms of France. Father Allouez addressed the Indians in
the Algonkin language, and told them of the all-powerful Louis XIV,
who "had ten thousand commanders and captains, each as great as the
Governor of Quebec". He reminded them how the troops of this king had
beaten the unconquerable Iroquois, of how he possessed innumerable
soldiers and uncountable ships; that at times the ground of France
shook with the discharge of cannon, while the blaze of musketry was
like the lightning. He pictured the king covered with the blood of his
enemies and riding in the middle of his cavalry, and ordering so many
of his enemies to be slain that no account could be kept of the number
of their scalps, whilst their blood flowed in rivers. The Amerindians
being what they were, addicted to warfare, and only recognizing the
right of the strongest, it may be that this gospel of force was not
quite so shocking and unchristian as it reads to us nearly 250 years
afterwards, though it jars very much as coming from the lips of a
missionary of Christianity. However, it must be remembered that but
for the valour of the French soldiers in the awful period between 1648
and 1666 (when the Mohawks received a thorough and well-deserved
thrashing) many of the tribes addressed on this occasion by the Jesuit
missionaries would have been completely exterminated; the Iroquois
would have depopulated much of north-eastern America. It is obvious,
indeed, from our study of the conditions of life amongst the
Amerindians, that one reason why the New World was so poorly populated
at the time of its discovery by Europeans was the wars of
extermination between tribe and tribe; for America between the Arctic
regions and Tierra del Fuego is marvellously well supplied with
natural food products--game, fish, fruits, nuts, roots, and
grain--much more so than any area of similar extent in the Old World.
[Footnote 8: Born at Quebec in 1645.]
Jolliet was to be accompanied on his westward expedition by Father
JACQUES MARQUETTE,[9] a Jesuit missionary who had become well
acquainted with the tribes visiting Lake Superior, and had learnt the
Siou dialect of the Illinois people. On May 17, 1673, Jolliet and
Marquette started from the Straits of Michili-Makinak with only two
bark canoes and five Amerindians. They coasted along the north coast
of Lake Michigan, passed into Green Bay, and thence up the River Fox.
They were assisted by the Maskutins, or Fire Indians, and were given
Miami guides. Thence the natives assisted them to transport their
canoes and baggage over the very short distance that separates the
upper waters of the Fox River from the Wisconsin River, and down the
Wisconsin they glided till they reached the great Mississippi. The
Governor of Quebec, who had sent Jolliet on this mission, believed
that the Great River of the west would lead them to the Gulf of
California, which was then called the Vermilion Sea by the Spaniards,
because it resembled in shape and colour the Red Sea.
[Footnote 9: Father Jacques Marquette was born in the province of
Champagne, eastern France. He came to Canada when he was twenty-nine
years old, having already been prepared by the Jesuits for priesthood
and missionary work since his seventeenth year. He spent nine years in
Canada, and died at the age of thirty-eight. He has left an enduring
memory for goodness, courage, and purity of life.]
"On the 17th of June (1673)", writes Father Marquette, "we safely
entered the Mississippi with a joy that I cannot express. Its current
is slow and gentle, the width very unequal. On its banks there are
hardly any woods or mountains. The islands are most beautiful, and
they are covered with fine trees. We saw deer and cattle (bison),
geese, and swans. From time to time we came upon monstrous fish, one
of which struck our canoe with such violence that I thought it was a
great tree. On another occasion we saw on the water a monster with the
head of a tiger, a sharp nose like that of a wild cat, with whiskers
and straight erect ears. The head was grey, and the neck quite black
(possibly a lynx).... We found that turkeys had taken the place of
game, and the _pisikiou_, or wild cattle, that of the other animals."
Father Marquette, of course, by his wild cattle means the bison, of
which he proceeds to give an excellent description. He adds: "They are
very fierce, and not a year passes without their killing some savages.
When attacked, they catch a man on their horns if they can, toss him
in the air, throw him on the ground, then trample him under foot and
kill him. If a person fires at them from a distance with either a bow
or a gun, he must immediately after the shot throw himself down and
hide in the grass, for if they perceive him who has fired they run at
him and attack him."
Soon after entering the Mississippi, Marquette noticed some rocks
which by their height and length inspired awe. "We saw upon one of
them two painted monsters which at first made us afraid, and upon
which the boldest savages dare not long rest their eyes. They are as
large as a calf; they have horns on their heads like those of deer, a
horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger's, a face somewhat like
a man's, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds
all round the body and ends like that of a fish. Green, red, and black
are the three colours composing the picture. Moreover, these two
monsters are so well painted that we cannot believe that any savage is
their author, for good painters in France would find it difficult to
paint so well, and, besides, they are so high up on the rock that it
is difficult to reach that place conveniently to paint them."[10]
[Footnote 10: These remarkable rock pictures were situated immediately
above the present city of Alton, Illinois. In 1812 they still remained
in a good state of preservation, but the thoughtless Americans had
gradually destroyed them by 1867 in quarrying the rock for building
stone.]
As the Jolliet expedition paddled down the Mississippi--ever so easily
and swiftly--a marvellous panorama unfolded itself before the
Frenchmen's fascinated gaze. Immense herds of bison occasionally
appeared on the river banks, flocks of turkeys flew up from the glades
and roosted in the trees and on the river bank. Everywhere the natives
seemed friendly, and Father Marquette was usually able to communicate
with them through his knowledge of the Illinois Algonkin dialect,
which the Siou understood.
[Illustration: INDIANS HUNTING BISON]
On their first meeting with the Mississippi Indians, the French
explorers were not only offered the natives' pipes to smoke in token
of peace, but an old man amongst the latter uttered these words to
Jolliet: "How beautiful the sun is, O Frenchman, when thou comest to
visit us. Our village awaits thee, and thou shalt enter all our cabins
in peace."... "There was a crowd of people," writes Marquette; "they
devoured us with their eyes, but nevertheless preserved profound
silence. We could, however, hear these words addressed to us from time
to time in a low voice: 'How good it is, my brothers, that you should
visit us'.
"... The council was followed by a great feast, consisting of four
dishes, which had to be partaken of in accordance with all their
fashions. The first course was a great wooden platter full of
sagamité, that is to say, meal of Indian corn boiled in water, and
seasoned with fat. The Master of the Ceremonies filled a spoon with
sagamité three or four times, and put it to my mouth as if I were a
little child. He did the same to Monsieur Jollyet. As a second course
he caused a second platter to be brought, on which were three fish. He
took some pieces of them, removed the bones therefrom, and, after
blowing upon them to cool them, he put them in our mouths as one would
give food to a bird. For the third course, they brought a large dog
that had just been killed, but, when they learned that we did not eat
this meat, they removed it from before us. Finally, the fourth course
was a piece of wild ox, the fattest morsels of which were placed in
our mouths.... We thus pushed forward and no longer saw so many
prairies, because both shores of the river are bordered with lofty
trees. The cotton wood, elm and bass wood are admirable for their
height and thickness. There are great numbers of wild cattle whom we
hear bellowing. We killed a little parroquet, with a red and yellow
head and green body.... We have got down to near the 33° of
latitude.... We heard from afar savages who were inciting one another
to attack us by their continual yelling. They were armed with bows and
arrows, hatchets, clubs, and shields.... Part of them embarked in
great wooden canoes, some to ascend, others to descend the river in
order to surround us on all sides.... Some young men threw themselves
into the water and seized my canoe, but the current compelled them to
return to land. One of them hurled his club, which passed over without
striking us. In vain I showed the calumet (pipe of peace), and made
them signs that we were not coming to war against them. The alarm
continued; they were already preparing to pierce us with arrows from
all sides when God suddenly touched the hearts of the old men who were
standing at the water's edge, who checked the ardour of their young
men.... Whereon we landed, not without fear on our part. First we had
to speak by signs, because none of them understood the six languages
which I spoke. At last we found an old man who could speak a little
Illinois. We informed them that we were going to the sea.
"The next day was spent in feasting on Indian corn and dogs' flesh.
The people here had an abundance of Indian corn, which they sowed at
all seasons. They cook it in great earthen jars which are very well
made, and also have plates of baked earth. The men go naked and wear
their hair short; they pierce their noses, from which, as well as from
their ears, hang beads.... Their cabins are made of bark, and are long
and wide. They sleep at the two ends, which are raised two feet above
the ground. They know nothing of the beaver, and their wealth consists
in the skins of wild cattle. They never see snow in their country, and
recognize the winter only through the rains."
The expedition had passed the confluence of the Missouri and that of
the Ohio, and had finally reached the place where the Arkansas River
enters the Mississippi. Here the Frenchmen gathered from the natives
that the sea was only ten days distant, and this sea they knew (for
Jolliet was able to take astronomical observations and to make a rough
survey) could only be the Gulf of Mexico. Jolliet feared if he
prosecuted his journey any farther, he and his people would fall into
the hands of the Spaniards and be imprisoned, if not killed.
Therefore, at this point on the Lower Mississippi, the expedition
turned back. Its return journey was a weary business, for the current
was against the canoes as they were propelled northwards up the Great
River. But Jolliet learnt from the natives of a better homeward route,
that of following the Illinois River upstream until the expedition
came within a very short distance of Lake Michigan, near where Chicago
now stands. The canoes were carried over a low ridge of ground,
launched again in the Chicago River, and so passed into Lake Michigan.
(There is, in fact, at this point the remains of an ancient water
connection between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, and a canal
now connects the two systems.) Jolliet, in describing this region,
realized that by cutting a canal through two miles of prairie it would
be possible to go "in a small ship" from Lake Erie or Lake Superior
"to Florida".
Father Marquette remained at his new mission on the Fox River (he died
two years afterwards on the shores of the Straits of Michili-makinak).
Jolliet, on returning by way of the Ottawa River to Quebec, was nearly
drowned in the La Chine Rapids (Montreal), and all his papers and maps
were lost. The natives with him also perished, but he struggled to
shore with difficulty, and went on his way to Quebec to report his
wonderful discoveries to the Governor, Frontenac. Fortunately Father
Marquette had also kept a journal and had made maps, and these
reaching the superior of his mission arrived in time to confirm
Jolliet's statements.
Jolliet married at Quebec, and proceeded to explore and develop the
regions along the north coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, travelling
in this work as far as Hudson's Bay. He was given by the French
Government the Island of Anticosti as a reward for his achievements,
but the work and capital which he put into the development of this
long-neglected island came to nothing; for it was captured by the
English, and Jolliet died a poor man whilst attempting to explore the
coast of Labrador.
As to ROBERT CAVALIER DE LA SALLE, he had, after all, discovered the
Ohio, and had descended that river as far as the site of the present
town of Louisville. Then he interested the Governor (Frontenac) of
Canada in his enterprises. A fort, called Fort Frontenac, was built at
what is now Kingston, at the point where the St. Lawrence leaves Lake
Ontario. La Salle returned to France, and obtained the grant of the
lordship of this fort and the surrounding country on conditions of
maintaining the whole cost of the establishment, and making a
settlement of colonists. Another visit to France in 1677-8 secured him
further support and capital, and he returned from France with a
companion, Henry de Tonty.
La Salle, with de Tonty, started from Fort Frontenac in September,
1678, so intensely anxious to commence his discoveries that he
disregarded the difficulties of the winter season. On his way to
Niagara he paid a visit to the Iroquois to conciliate them, and
cleverly got from them permission to build a vessel on Lake Erie and
also to erect a blacksmith's forge, near where Niagara now stands. The
blacksmith's forge grew rapidly into a fort before the Indians were
aware of what was being done. By August, 1679, he had built and
launched (in spite of extraordinary calamities and misfortunes) on the
Upper Niagara River the first sailing boat which ever appeared on the
four great upper lakes of the St. Lawrence basin.
In this ship he sailed through Lake Erie and past Detroit into Lake
Huron, and thence to Green Bay (Lake Michigan), stopping at intervals
amongst the canoes of the amazed natives, who for the first time heard
the sound of cannon, for he had armed his vessel with guns. At Green
Bay he collected a large quantity of furs, which had been obtained in
trade by the men he had sent on in advance. He loaded up his sailing
boat, the _Griffon_, and sent her on a voyage back to the east to
transport this splendid load of furs to the merchants with whom he had
become deeply indebted. Unhappily the _Griffon_ foundered in a storm
on Lake Michigan, and was never heard of again. Meantime La Salle,
with de Tonty and Father HENNEPIN, the discoverer of Niagara, had
travelled in canoes to the south-east end of Lake Michigan, had passed
up the Joseph River, and thence by portage into the Kankaki, which
flows into the Illinois. This river he descended till he stopped near
the site of the modern Peoria. Below this place he built a fort--for
it was winter time--and although the natives were not very friendly he
collected enough information from them to satisfy himself that he
could easily pass down the Illinois to the Mississippi.
He sent one of the Frenchmen, Michel Accault, together with Father
Hennepin, to explore the Illinois down to the Mississippi; de Tonty he
placed in charge of the fort with a small garrison; and then himself,
on the last day of February, 1680, started to walk overland from Lake
Michigan to Detroit. Eventually, by means of a canoe, which he
constructed himself, he regained Fort Frontenac and Montreal. When he
returned to Fort Crèvecoeur, on the Illinois River,[11] it was to meet
with the signs of a horrible disaster. The Iroquois in his absence had
descended on the place with a great war party. They had massacred the
Illinois people dwelling in a big settlement near the fort, and the
remains of their mutilated bodies were scattered all over the place.
Their town had been burnt; the fort was empty and abandoned. There
were no traces of the Frenchmen, however, amongst the skulls and
skeletons lying around him; for the skulls retained sufficient hair to
show that they belonged to Amerindians. Nevertheless, he deposited his
new stock of goods and most of his men in the ruins of the Fort
Crèvecoeur, and descended the River Illinois to the Mississippi. But
he was obliged to turn back. On the west bank of the river were the
scared Illinois Indians, on the east the raging Iroquois. Whenever La
Salle could safely visit a deserted camp he would examine the remains
of the tortured men tied to stakes to see if amongst them there was a
Frenchman.
[Footnote 11: He had named this place "Heartbreak" because when
building it he had learnt of the loss of his sailing ship _Griffon_,
with the splendid supply of furs which was to have paid off his debts,
with all his reserve supplies and his men. This was not the limit of
his troubles; for, after the overland journey of appalling hardships
through a country of melting ice, flood, swamp, and hostile
Iroquois--the Iroquois being furious with La Salle for having
outwitted them in the building of this fort, and seeking him
everywhere to destroy him--when he got to Montreal it was only to
learn that a ship, coming from France with further supplies for his
great journey had been wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence!]
But de Tonty was not dead. After incredible adventures he had escaped
the raids of the Iroquois and had reached the Straits of
Michili-makinak, between Lakes Michigan and Huron, and there met La
Salle, who was once more on his way to Montreal.
Again de La Salle and de Tonty, in the winter of 1681, returned to the
south end of Lake Michigan, and made their way over the snow to the
Illinois River. On the 6th February, 1682, they left the junction of
the Illinois and the Mississippi to trace that great river to its
outlet in the sea. La Salle reached the delta on the 6th April, 1682,
having on the way taken possession of the country in the name of the
King of France. Accault and Father Hennepin had meantime paddled up
the Northern Mississippi as far as its junction with the Wisconsin. At
this place their party was surrounded and captured by a large band of
Siou warriors.
The Frenchmen were at first in danger of being killed, as the Sious
refused to smoke with them the pipe of peace. But being much less
bloodthirsty than the Iroquois, they soon calmed down and treated
their captives with a certain rough friendliness. All their goods were
taken from them, even the vestments worn by Father Hennepin. But they
were well supplied with food such as the country produced--bison,
beef, fish, wild turkeys, and the grain of the wild rice, which made
such excellent flour. They were gradually conveyed by the Siou[12] to
a large settlement of that tribe on the shore of Mille Lacs, a sheet
of water not far distant from the westernmost extremity of Lake
Superior. Whilst staying at this Siou town Hennepin conversed with
Indians from the far north and north-west, and from what they told him
came to the conclusion that there was no continuous waterway or
"Strait of Anian" across the North-American continent, but that
the land extended to the north-west till it finally joined the
north-eastern part of Asia--a guess that was not very far wrong. But
he also surmised that there were rivers in the far west which led to
an ocean--the Pacific--across which ships might go to Japan and China
without passing to the southward of the Equator.
[Footnote 12: The real name of the Siou, as far as we can arrive at it
through the records of the French pioneers, was Issati or Naduessiu.]
Whilst moving up and down the northern Mississippi, bison-hunting with
the Indians, the Frenchmen were met near the site of St. Paul by one
of the great French pioneers of the seventeenth century, the Sieur
DANIEL DE GREYSOLON DU L'HUT. This remarkable man, who was an officer
of the French army, had already planted the
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