Canada: the Empire of the North
by Agnes C. Laut · English · Gutenberg #20110 · 890,674 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Canada: the Empire of the North
Author: Agnes C. Laut
Release date: December 14, 2006 [eBook #20110]
Most recently updated: March 11, 2025
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CANADA: THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH ***
Transcriber's note:
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed
in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book. For its Index, a page
number has been placed only at the start of that section.
CANADA
THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH
Being the Romantic Story of the
New Dominion's Growth from
Colony to Kingdom
by
AGNES C. LAUT
Author of "The Conquest of the Great North-West" "Lords of the North,"
Etc.
[Frontispiece: Map of Western Canada]
Boston and London
Ginn and Company, Publishers
1909
Copyright, 1909, by Agnes C. Laut
Entered at Stationers' Hall
All Rights Reserved
PREFACE
To re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead
once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's
great dramas again upon the stage of action,--frankly, this may not be
formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present
day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes,
stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on
treaties. Such pictures may not be history, but they breathe life into
the skeletons of the past.
Canada's past is more dramatic than any romance ever penned. The story
of that past has been told many times and in many volumes, with far
digressions on Louisiana and New England and the kingcraft of Europe.
The trouble is, the story has not been told in one volume. Too much
has been attempted. To include the story of New England wars and
Louisiana's pioneer days, the story of Canada itself has been either
cramped or crowded. To the eastern writer, Canada's history has been
the record of French and English conflict. To him there has been
practically no Canada west of the Great Lakes; and in order to tell the
intrigue of European tricksters, very often the writer has been
compelled to exclude the story of the Canadian people,--meaning by
people the breadwinners, the toilers, rather than the governing
classes. Similarly, to the western writer, Canada meant the Hudson's
Bay Company. As for the Pacific coast, it has been almost ignored in
any story of Canada.
Needless to say, a complete history of a country as vast as Canada,
whose past in every section fairly teems with action, could not be
crowded into one volume. To give even the story {iv} of Canada's most
prominent episodes and actors is a matter of rigidly excluding the
extraneous.
All that has been attempted here is such a story--_story, not
history_--of the romance and adventure in Canada's nation building as
will give the casual reader knowledge of the country's past, and how
that past led along a trail of great heroism to the destiny of a
Northern Empire. This volume is in no sense formal history. There
will be found in it no such lists of governors with dates appended, of
treaties with articles running to the fours and eights and tens, of
battles grouped with dates, as have made Canadian history a nightmare
to children.
It is only such a story as boys and girls may read, or the hurried
business man on the train, who wants to know "what was doing" in the
past; and it is mainly a story of men and women and things doing.
I have not given at the end of each chapter the list of authorities
customary in formal history. At the same time it is hardly necessary
to say I have dug most rigorously down to original sources for facts;
and of secondary authorities, from _Pierre Boucher, his Book_, to
modern reprints of _Champlain and L'Escarbot_, there are not any I have
not consulted more or less. Especially am I indebted to the
_Documentary History of New York_, sixteen volumes, bearing on early
border wars; to _Documents Relatifs à la Nouvelle France, Quebec_; to
the _Canadian Archives_ since 1886; to the special historical issues of
each of the eastern provinces; and to the monumental works of Dr.
Kingsford. Nearly all the places described are from frequent visits or
from living on the spot.
{v}
INTRODUCTION
"The Twentieth century belongs to Canada."
The prediction of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of the Dominion, seems
likely to have bigger fulfillment than Canadians themselves realize.
What does it mean?
Canada stands at the same place in the world's history as England stood
in the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth--on the threshold of her future as
a great nation. Her population is the same, about seven million. Her
mental attitude is similar, that of a great awakening, a consciousness
of new strength, an exuberance of energy biting on the bit to run the
race; mellowed memory of hard-won battles against tremendous odds in
the past; for the future, a golden vision opening on vistas too far to
follow. They dreamed pretty big in the days of Queen Elizabeth, but
they did n't dream big enough for what was to come; and they are
dreaming pretty big up in Canada to-day, but it is hard to forecast the
future when a nation the size of all Europe is setting out on the
career of her world history.
To put it differently: Canada's position is very much the same to-day
as the United States' a century ago. Her population is about seven
million. The population of the United States was seven million in
1810. One was a strip of isolated settlements north and south along
the Atlantic seaboard; the other, a string of provinces east and west
along the waterways that ramify from the St. Lawrence. Both possessed
and were flanked by vast unexploited territory the size of Russia; the
United States by a Louisiana, Canada by the Great Northwest. What the
Civil War did for the United States, Confederation did for the Canadian
provinces--welded them into a nation. The parallel need not be carried
farther. If the same development {vi} follows Confederation in Canada
as followed the Civil War in the United States, the twentieth century
will witness the birth and growth of a world power.
To no one has the future opening before Canada come as a greater
surprise than to Canadians themselves. A few years ago such a claim as
the Premier's would have been regarded as the effusions of the
after-dinner speaker. While Canadian politicians were hoping for the
honor of being accorded colonial place in the English Parliament, they
suddenly awakened to find themselves a nation. They suddenly realized
that history, and big history, too, was in the making. Instead of
Canada being dependent on the Empire, the Empire's most far-seeing
statesmen were looking to Canada for the strength of the British
Empire. No longer is there a desire among Canadians for place in the
Parliament at Westminster. With a new empire of their own to develop,
equal in size to the whole of Europe, Canadian public men realize they
have enough to do without taking a hand in European affairs.
As the different Canadian provinces came into Confederation they were
like beads on a string a thousand miles apart. First were the Maritime
Provinces, with western bounds touching the eastern bounds of Quebec,
but in reality with the settlements of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia,
and Prince Edward Island separated from the settlements of Quebec by a
thousand miles of untracked forest. Only the Ottawa River separated
Quebec from Ontario, but one province was French, the other English,
aliens to each other in religion, language, and customs. A thousand
miles of rock-bound, winter-bound wastes lay between Ontario and the
scattered settlement of Red River in Manitoba. Not an interest was in
common between the little province of the middle west and her sisters
to the east. Then prairie land came for a thousand miles, and
mountains for six hundred miles, before reaching the Pacific province
of British Columbia, more completely cut off from other parts of Canada
than from Mexico or Panama. In fact, it would have been easier for
British Columbia to trade with Mexico and Panama than with the rest of
Canada.
{vii} To bind these far-separated patches of settlement, oases in a
desert of wilds, into a nation was the object of the union known as
Confederation. But a nation can live only as it trades what it draws
from the soil. Naturally, the isolated provinces looked for trade to
the United States, just across an invisible boundary. It seemed absurd
that the Canadian provinces should try to trade with each other, a
thousand miles apart, rather than with the United States, a stone's
throw from the door of each province. But the United States erected a
tariff wall that Canada could not climb. The struggling Dominion was
thrown solely on herself, and set about the giant task of linking the
provinces together, building railroads from Atlantic to Pacific, canals
from tide water to the Great Lakes. In actual cash this cost Canada
four hundred million dollars, not counting land grants and private
subscriptions for stock, which would bring up the cost of binding the
provinces together to a billion. This was a staggering burden for a
country with smaller population than Greater New York--a burden as big
as Japan and Russia assumed for their war; but, like war, the
expenditure was a fight for national existence. Without the railroads
and canals, the provinces could not have been bound together into a
nation.
These were Canada's pioneer days, when she was spending more than she
was earning, when she bound herself down to grinding poverty and big
risks and hard tasks. It was a long pull, and a hard pull; but it was
a pull altogether. That was Canada's seed time; this is her harvest.
That was her night work, when she toiled, while other nations slept;
now is the awakening, when the world sees what she was doing. Railroad
man, farmer, miner, manufacturer, all had the same struggle, the big
outlay of labor and money at first, the big risk and no profit, the
long period of waiting.
Canada was laying her foundations of yesterday for the superstructure
of prosperity to-day and to-morrow--the New Empire.
When one surveys the country as a whole, the facts are so big they are
bewildering.
{viii} In the first place, the area of the Dominion is within a few
thousand miles of as large as all Europe. To be more specific, you
could spread the surface of Italy and Spain and Turkey and Greece and
Austria over eastern Canada, and you would still have an area uncovered
in the east alone bigger than the German Empire. England spread flat
on the surface of Eastern Canada would just serve to cover the Maritime
Provinces nicely, leaving uncovered Quebec, which is a third bigger
than Germany; Ontario, which is bigger than France; and Labrador
(Ungava), which is about the size of Austria.
In the west you could spread the British Isles out flat, and you would
not cover Manitoba--with her new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay.
It would take a country the size of France to cover the province of
Saskatchewan, a country larger than Germany to cover Alberta, two
countries the size of Germany to cover British Columbia and the Yukon,
and there would still be left uncovered the northern half of the
West--an area the size of European Russia.
No Old World monarch from William the Conqueror to Napoleon could boast
of such a realm. People are fond of tracing ancestry back to feudal
barons of the Middle Ages. What feudal baron of the Middle Ages, or
Lord of the Outer Marches, was heir to such heritage as Canada may
claim? Think of it! Combine all the feudatory domains of the Rhine
and the Danube, you have not so vast an estate as a single western
province. Or gather up all the estates of England's midland counties
and eastern shires and borderlands, you have not enough land to fill
one of Canada's inland seas,--Lake Superior.
If there were a population in eastern Canada equal to France,--and
Quebec alone would support a population equal to France,--and in
Manitoba equal to the British Isles, and in Saskatchewan equal to
France, and in Alberta equal to Germany, and in British Columbia equal
to Germany,--ignoring Yukon, Mackenzie River, Keewatin, and Labrador,
taking only those parts of Canada where climate has been tested and
lands surveyed,--Canada would support two hundred million people.
{ix} The figures are staggering, but they are not half so improbable as
the actual facts of what has taken place in the United States.
America's population was acquired against hard odds. There were no
railroads when the movement to America began. The only ocean goers
were sailboats of slow progress and great discomfort. In Europe was
profound ignorance regarding America; to-day all is changed. Canada
begins where the United States left off. The whole world is gridironed
with railroads. Fast Atlantic liners offer greater comfort to the
emigrant than he has known at home. Ignorance of America has given
place to almost romantic glamour. Just when the free lands of the
United States are exhausted and the government is putting up bars to
keep out the immigrant, Canada is in a position to open her doors wide.
Less than a fortieth of the entire West is inhabited. Of the Great
Clay Belt of North Ontario only a patch on the southern edge is
populated. The same may be said of the Great Forest Belt of Quebec.
These facts are the magnet that will attract the immigrant to Canada.
The United States wants no more immigrants.
And the movement to Canada has begun. To her shores are thronging the
hosts of the Old World's dispossessed, in multitudes greater than any
army that ever marched to conquest under Napoleon. When the history of
America comes to be written in a hundred years, it will not be the
record of a slaughter field with contending nations battling for the
mastery, or generals wading to glory knee-deep in blood. It will be an
account of the most wonderful race movement, the most wonderful
experiment in democracy the world has known.
The people thronging to Canada for homes, who are to be her nation
builders, are people crowded out of their home lands, who had n't room
for the shoulder swing manhood and womanhood need to carve out
honorable careers. Look at them in the streets of London, or Glasgow,
or Dublin, or Berlin, these _émigrés_, as the French called their
royalists, whom revolution drove from home, and I think the word
_émigré_ is a truer description of the newcomer to Canada than the word
"emigrant." They are {x} poor, they are desperately poor, so poor that
a month's illness or a shut-down of the factory may push them from
poverty to the abyss. They are thrifty, but can neither earn nor save
enough to feel absolutely sure that the hollow-eyed specter of Want may
not seize them by the throat. They are willing to work, so eager to
work that at the docks and the factory gates they trample and jostle
one another for the chance to work. They are the underpinnings, the
underprops of an old system, these _émigrés_, by which the masses were
expected to toil for the benefit of the classes.
"It's all the average man or woman is good for," says the Old Order,
"just a day's wage representing bodily needs."
"Wait," says the New Order. "Give him room! Give him an opportunity!
Give him a full stomach to pump blood to his muscles and life to his
brain! Wait and see! If he fails _then_, let him drop to the bottom
of the social pit without stop of poorhouse or help!"
A penniless immigrant boy arrives in New York. First he peddles
peanuts, then he trades in a half-huckster way whatever comes to hand
and earns profits. Presently he becomes a fur trader and invests his
savings in real estate. Before that man dies, he has a monthly income
equal to the yearly income of European kings. That man's name was John
Jacob Astor.
Or a young Scotch boy comes out on a sailing vessel to Canada. For a
score of years he is an obscure clerk at a distant trading post in
Labrador. He comes out of the wilds to take a higher position as land
commissioner. Presently he is backing railroad ventures of tremendous
cost and tremendous risk. Within thirty years from the time he came
out of the wilds penniless, that man possesses a fortune equal to the
national income of European kingdoms. The man's name is Lord
Strathcona.
Or a hard-working coal miner emigrates to Canada. The man has brains
as well as hands. Other coal miners emigrate at the same time, but
this man is as keen as a razor in foresight and care. From coal miner
he becomes coal manager, from manager {xi} operator, from operator
owner, and dies worth a fortune that the barons of the Middle Ages
would have drenched their countries in blood to win. The man's name is
James Dunsmuir.
Or it is a boy clerking in a departmental store. He emigrates. When
he goes back to England it is to marry a lady in waiting to the Queen.
He is now known as Lord Mount-Stephen.
What was the secret of the success? Ability in the first place, but in
the second, opportunity; opportunity and room for shoulder swing to
show what a man can do when keen ability and tireless energy have
untrammeled freedom to do their best.
Examples of the _émigrés'_ success could be multiplied. It is more
than a mere material success; it is eternal proof that, given a fair
chance and a square deal and shoulder swing, the boy born penniless can
run the race and outstrip the boy born to power.
"Have you, then, no _menial_ classes in Canada?" asked a member of the
Old Order.
"No, I'm thankful to say," said I.
"Then _who_ does the work?"
"The workers."
"But what's the difference?"
"Just this: your menial of the Old Country is the child of a menial,
whose father before him was a menial, whose ancestors were in servile
positions to other people back as far as you like to go,--to the time
when men were serfs wearing an iron collar with the brand of the lord
who owned them. With us no stigma is attached to work. _Your_ menial
expects to be a menial all his life. With our worker, just as sure as
the sun rises and sets, if he continues to work and is no fool, he will
rise to earn a competency, to improve himself, to own his own labor, to
own his own home, to hire the labor of other men who are beginners as
he once was himself."
"Then you have no social classes?"
"Lots. The _ups_, who have succeeded; and the _half-way ups_, who are
succeeding; and the _beginners_, who are going to succeed; and the
_downs_, who never try. And as success doesn't necessarily mean money,
but doing the best at whatever one tries, {xii} you can see that the
_ups_ and the _halfway ups_, and the _beginners_ and the _downs_ have
each their own classes of special workers."
"That," she answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution." She was
thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into
royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry.
"It is not revolution," I explained. "It is rebirth! When you send
your _émigré_ out to us, he is a made-over man."
But it is not given to all _émigré's_ to become great capitalists or
great leaders. Some who have the opportunity have not the ability, and
the majority would not, for all the rewards that greatness offers,
choose careers that entail long years of nerve-wracking, unflagging
labor. But on a minor scale the same process of making over takes
place. One case will illustrate.
Some years before immigration to Canada had become general, two or
three hundred Icelanders were landed in Winnipeg destitute. From some
reason, which I have forgotten,--probably the quarantine of an
immigrant,--the Icelanders could not be housed in the government
immigration hall. They were absolutely without money, household goods,
property of any sort except clothing, and that was scant, the men
having but one suit of the poorest clothes, the women thin homespun
dresses so worn one could see many of them had no underwear. The
people represented the very dregs of poverty. Withdrawing to the
vacant lots in the west end of Winnipeg,--at that time a mere
town,--the newcomers slept for the first nights, herded in the rooms of
an Icelander opulent enough to have rented a house. Those who could
not gain admittance to this house slept under the high board sidewalks,
then a feature of the new town. I remember as a child watching them
sit on the high sidewalk till it was dark, then roll under.
Fortunately it was summer, but it was useless for people in this
condition to go bare to the prairie farm. To make land yield, you must
have house and barns and stock and implements, and I doubt if these
people had as much as a jackknife. I remember how two or three of the
older women used to sit crying each night in despair till they
disappeared in the crowded house, fourteen or {xiii} twenty of them to
a room. Within a week, the men were all at work sawing wood from door
to door at a dollar and a half a cord the women out by the day washing
at a dollar a day. Within a month they had earned enough to buy lumber
and tar paper. Tar-papered shanties went up like mushrooms on the
vacant lots. Before winter each family had bought a cow and chickens.
I shall not betray confidence by telling where the cow and chickens
slept. Those immigrants were not desirable neighbors. Other people
moved hastily away from the region. Such a condition would not be
tolerated now, when there are spacious immigration halls and sanitary
inspectors to see that cows and people do not house under the same
roof. What with work and peddling milk, by spring the people were able
to move out on the free prairie farms. To-day those Icelanders own
farms clear of debt, own stock that would be considered the possession
of a capitalist in Iceland, and have money in the savings banks. Their
sons and daughters have had university educations and have entered
every avenue of life, farming, trading, practicing medicine, actually
teaching English in English schools. Some are members of Parliament.
It was a hard beginning, but it was a rebirth to a new life. They are
now among the nation builders of the West.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that Canada's nation builders
consisted entirely of poor people. The race movement has not been a
leaderless mob. Princes, nobles, adventurers, soldiers of fortune,
were the pathfinders who blazed the trail to Canada. Glory, pure and
simple, was the aim that lured the first comers across the trackless
seas. Adventurous young aristocrats, members of the Old Order, led the
first nation builders to America, and, all unconscious of destiny, laid
the foundations of the New Order. The story of their adventures and
work is the history of Canada.
It is a new experience in the world's history, this race movement that
has built up the United States and is now building up Canada. Other
great race movements have been a tearing down of high places, the
upward scramble of one class on the {xiv} backs of the deposed class.
Instead of leveling down, Canada's nation building is leveling up.
This, then, is the empire--the size of all the nations in Europe,
bigger than Napoleon's wildest dreams of conquest--to which Canada has
awakened.[1]
[1]COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF AREAS OF CANADA AND EUROPE
Canada . . 3,750,000 square miles Europe . . 3,797,410 square miles
Maritime Provinces Square Miles Square Miles
Nova Scotia . . . . . 20,600 England . . . . . 50,867
Prince Edward Island 2,000 Germany . . . . . 208,830
New Brunswick . . . . 28,200 France . . . . . 204,000
------ Italy . . . . . . 110,000
50,800 Spain . . . . . . 197,000
Quebec . . . . . . . . 347,350 Austria and Hungary 241,000
Ontario . . . . . . . . 222,000 Russia in Europe 2,000,000
Manitoba
Saskatchewan 204,000
Alberta . . . . . . . . 350,000
British Columbia . . . 383,000
Unorganized Territory of
Keewatin . . . . . . 756,000
Yukon . . . . . . . . 200,000
MacKenzie River and
Ungava . . . . . . 1,000,000
COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF POPULATION IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
United States Canada
In 1800 . . . 5,000,000 In 1881 . . . 4,300,000
" 1810 . . . 7,000,000 " 1891 . . . 5,000,000
" 1820 . . . 9,600,000 " 1901 . . . 5,500,000
" 1830 . . . 12,800,000 " 1906 . . . 6,500,000
It will be noticed that for twenty years Canada's population becomes
almost stagnant. The reason for this will be found as the story of
Canada is related. If she keeps up the increase at the pace she has
now set, or at the rate the United States' population went ahead during
the same period of industrial development, the results can be forecast
from the following table:
United States in 1840 . . . . . . 17,000,000
" " " 1850 . . . . . . 23,000,000
" " " 1860 . . . . . . 31,000,000
" " " 1870 . . . . . . 38,000,000
" " " 1880 . . . . . . 50,000,000
" " " 1890 . . . . . . 63,000,000
" " " 1900 . . . . . . 85,000,000
{xv} A few years ago, when talking to a leading editor of Canada, I
chanced to say that I did not think Canadians had at that time awakened
to their future. The editor answered that he was afraid I had
contracted the American disease of "bounce" through living in the
United States; to which I retorted that if Canadians could catch the
same disease and accomplish as much by it in the twentieth century as
Americans had in the nineteenth, it would be a good thing for the
country. It is wonderful to have witnessed the complete face-about of
Canadian public opinion in the short space of six years, this editor
shouting as loud as any of his exuberant brethren. Still, as the
outlook in Canadian affairs may be regarded as flamboyant, it is worth
while quoting the comment of the most critical and conservative
newspaper in the world,--the London _Times_. The _Times_ says:
"Without doubt the expansion of Canada is the greatest political event
in the British Empire to-day. The empire is face to face with
development which makes it impossible for indefinite maintenance of the
present constitutional arrangements."
Regarding the Iceland immigrants, to whom reference is made, I recently
met in London a famed traveler, who was in Iceland when the people were
setting out for Canada, Mrs. Alec. Tweedie. She explains in her book
how these people were absolutely poverty-stricken when they left
Iceland. In fact, the sufferings endured the first year in Winnipeg
were mild compared to their privations in Iceland before they sailed.
The explanations of Canada's hard times from Confederation to 1898--say
from 1871, when all the provinces had really gone into Confederation,
to 1897, when the Yukon boom poured gold into the country--can be
figured out. Of a population of 3,000,000, four fifths need not be
counted as taxpayers, as they include women, children, clerks, farmers'
help, domestic help,--classes who pay no taxes but the indirect duty on
clothes they wear and food they eat. This practically means that the
billion-dollar burden of making the ideal of Confederation into a
reality by building railroads and canals was borne by 600,000 people,
which means again a large quota per man to the public treasury. People
forget that you can't take more out of the public treasury than you put
into it, that it is n't like an artesian well, self-supplied, and the
truth is, at this period Canadians were paying more into the public
treasury than they could afford,--more than the investment was bringing
them in.
{xvii}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FROM 1000 TO 1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. FROM 1600 TO 1607 . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
III. FROM 1607 TO 1635 . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
IV. FROM 1635 TO 1666 . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
V. FROM 1635 TO 1650 . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
VI. FROM 1650 TO 1672 . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
VII. FROM 1672 TO 1688 . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
VIII. FROM 1679 TO 1713 . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
IX. FROM 1686 TO 1698 . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
X. FROM 1698 TO 1713 . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
XI. FROM 1713 TO 1755 . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
XII. FROM 1756 TO 1763 . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
XIII. FROM 1763 TO 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
XIV. FROM 1812 TO 1820 . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
XV. FROM 1812 TO 1846 . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
XVI. FROM 1820 TO 1867 . . . . . . . . . . . . 410
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
{xix}
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
PAGE
MAP OF WESTERN CANADA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
VIKING SHIP RECENTLY DISCOVERED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
After a photograph of the Viking Ship at Sandefjord, Norway.
MAP SHOWING DIVISION OF THE NEW WORLD BETWEEN SPAIN AND
PORTUGAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
A TYPICAL "HOLE IN THE WALL" AT "KITTY VIDDY," NEAR
ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
From a photograph.
SEBASTIAN CABOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
After the portrait attributed to Holbein.
JACQUES CARTIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
After the portrait at St. Malo, France, with signature.
WHERE THE FISHER HAMLETS NOW NESTLE, NEWFOUNDLAND . . . . . . 9
From a photograph.
ANCIENT HOCHELAGA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
After a cut in the third volume of Ramusio's _Raccolta_,
Venice, 1565.
THE "DAUPHIN MAP" OF CANADA, _CIRCA_ 1543, SHOWING CARTIER'S
DISCOVERIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
QUEEN ELIZABETH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
After the ermine portrait in Hatfield House, with signature.
THE BOYHOOD OF GILBERT AND RALEIGH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
From the painting by Sir John Millais.
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
After the print in Holland's _Herwologia-Anglica_, 1620.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
After the portrait in the possession of the Duchess of Dorset.
AT EASTERN ENTRANCE TO HUDSON STRAITS . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
From a photograph by Dominion Geological Survey.
HUDSON COAT OF ARMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
From Lenox Collection, New York City.
THE FANTASTIC ROCKS OF GASPÉ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
From a photograph.
{xx}
SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
After the Moncornet portrait, with signature.
PORT ROYAL OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN, 1609 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
From Lescarbot's map.
BUILDINGS ON STE. CROIX ISLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
From _Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain_, Paris, 1613.
PORT ROYAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
From the same.
TADOUSSAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
From the same.
DEFEAT OF THE IROQUOIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
From the same.
THE ONONDAGA FORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
From the same.
VIEW OF QUEBEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
From the same.
QUEBEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
From the same.
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
After an engraved portrait by Marshall.
MAP SHOWING LA TOUR'S POSSESSIONS IN ACADIA . . . . . . . . . 64
CARDINAL RICHELIEU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
After the portrait by Philippe de Champaigne
MAP OF ANNAPOLIS BASIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
MADAME DE LA PELTRIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
After a picture in the Ursuline Convent, Quebec.
PIERRE LE JEUNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
From an engraving in Winsor's America, after an old print.
GEORGIAN BAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
From a photograph by A. G. Alexander.
BRÉBEUF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
From a bust in silver at Quebec.
REMNANTS OF WALLS OF FORT ST. MARY ON CHRISTIAN ISLAND
IN 1891 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
After a photograph reproduced in _Ontario Historical
Society Papers and Records_.
MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES, SHOWING THE TERRITORY OF THE
JESUIT HURON MISSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Bellin's map, 1744.
A CANADIAN ON SNOWSHOES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
From La Potherie's _Histoire de l'Amerique Septentrionale_,
Paris, 1753.
{xxi}
SAUSON'S MAP, 1656 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
TITLE-PAGE--JESUIT RELATION OF 1662-1663 . . . . . . . . . 111
THE JESUIT MAP OF LAKE SUPERIOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
From the Relation, of 1670-1671.
CHARLES II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
After the miniature portrait by Cooper, with signature.
PLAN OF MONTREAL IN 1672 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
From _Quebec Historical Society Papers and Records_.
LA SALLE'S HOUSE NEAR MONTREAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
From a photograph.
KITCHEN, CHÂTEAU DE RAMEZAY, MONTREAL . . . . . . . . . . . 120
From a photograph.
LAVAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
After the portrait in Laval University, Quebec.
A MAP IN THE RELATION OF 1662-1663 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
GALINÉE'S MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES, 1669 . . . . . . . . . . 129
ROBERT DE LA SALLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
After an engraved portrait said to be preserved
in the _Bibliothèque de Rouen_, with signature.
OLD PLAN OF FORT FRONTENAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
From _Mémoirs sur le Canada_, Quebec, 1873.
THE BUILDING OF THE _GRIFFON_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
From Father Hennepin's _Nouvelle Découverte_, Amsterdam, 1704.
PRINCE RUPERT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
After the painting by Sir P. Lely.
MAP OF HUDSON BAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH MAP OF HUDSON BAY AND VICINITY . . . . 155
From La Potherie's _Histoire de l'Amerique Septentrionale_.
LE MOYNE D'IBERVILLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
After a portrait in Margry's _Découvertes Établissemens_.
FORT FRONTENAC AND THE ADJACENT COUNTRY . . . . . . . . . . 164
From _The London Magazine_, 1758.
WILLIAM OF ORANGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
After the portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, with signature.
QUEBEC, 1689 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
From La Potherie's _Histoire de l'Amérique Septentrionale_.
FRENCH SOLDIER OF THE PERIOD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
After a cut in Massachusetts Archives, Documents
collected in France, 111, 3.
SIR WILLIAM PHIPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
After an accepted likeness reproduced
in Winsor's _America_.
{xxii}
COUNT FRONTENAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
From the statue by Hébert at Quebec.
CASTLE ST. LOUIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
After a cut in Hawkins' _Pictures of Quebec_, Quebec, 1834.
ATTACK ON QUEBEC, 1690 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
From La Hontan's _Mémoires_, 1709.
CASTLE ST. LOUIS, QUEBEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
From Sulte's _Canadiens Français_, viii.
PLAN OF QUEBEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
From Franquelin, 1683.
LANDING OF IBERVILLE'S MEN AT PORT NELSON . . . . . . . . . 186
From La Potherie's _Histoire de l'Amérique Septentrionale_.
CAPTURE OF FORT NELSON BY THE FRENCH . . . . . . . . . . . 187
From the same.
CONTEMPORARY MAP, 1689 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
From La Hontan.
HERTEL DE ROUVILLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
After a portrait in Daniel's _Nos Gloires Nationales_.
CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF PORT ROYAL BASIN . . . . . . . . . . . 199
From Bellin's map, 1744.
PAUL MASCARENE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
After a portrait in Savary's edition
of Calnek's _Annapolis_.
LA VÉRENDRYE'S FORTS AND THE RIVER OF THE WEST . . . . . . 207
After Jeffery's map, 1762.
MAP PUBLISHED IN PARIS IN 1752 SHOWING THE SUPPOSED
SEA OF THE WEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
From the Mémoire presented to the Academy
of Sciences at Paris by Buache, August, 1752.
MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH APPROACHES
TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755 . . . . . 211
From the same.
WILLIAM PEPPERRELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
After the portrait by Smibert.
RUINS OF THE FORTIFICATIONS AT LOUISBURG . . . . . . . . . . 219
From a recent photograph.
CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF THE ATTACK ON LOUISBURG . . . . . . . . 221
After a plan reproduced in Winsor's _America_.
FORT HALIFAX, 1755 (Restoration) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF OSWEGO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
From Smith's _History of the Province of New York_.
GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
After a portrait by Ramsay.
{xxiii}
TITLE-PAGE OF WASHINGTON'S JOURNAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
A SKETCH OF THE FIELD OF BATTLE AT BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT . . . . 229
From a contemporary manuscript in the Library
of Harvard University.
PLAN OF FORT BEAUSEJOUR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
From Mante's _History of the Late War in North America_.
GENERAL MONCKTON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
After a mezzotint in the Library of the
American Antiquarian Society.
GENERAL JOHN WINSLOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
After the portrait in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Massachusetts.
MAP OF ACADIA AND THE ADJACENT ISLANDS, 1755 . . . . . . . . 237
SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
After the portrait by Adams.
MAP OF THE REGION OF LAKE GEORGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
From _Documentary History of New York_.
RUINS OF CHÂTEAU BIGOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
From a photograph by Captain Wurtelle.
PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, OTTAWA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
From a photograph.
QUEBEC, CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND THE CITADEL . . . . . . . . . 246
From a photograph.
THE EARL OF LOUDON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
After the portrait by Ramsay.
BOSCAWEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
After the portrait by Reynolds.
THE SIEGE OF LOUISBURG, 1758 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
From a picture in the Lenox Collection,
New York Public Library.
AMHERST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
After the portrait by Reynolds.
THE COUNTRY ROUND TICONDEROGA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
From _Documentary History of New York_.
GENERAL JAMES WOLFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
After the engraved portrait by Houstin.
BOUGAINVILLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
After a cut in Bounechose's _Montcalm_.
THE SITE OF QUEBEC AND THE GROUND OCCUPIED
DURING THE SIEGE OF 1759 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
After a plan in _The Universal Magazine_,
London, December, 1859.
LOUIS JOSEPH, MARQUIS DE MONTCALM . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
After the portrait in the possession of his descendants.
DEATH OF WOLFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
From the painting by West.
{xxiv}
MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
After a mezzotint by an unknown engraver.
Published in London, October 1, 1776
NORTH AMERICA AT THE CLOSE OF THE FRENCH WARS, 1763 . . . . 278
GENERAL MURRAY, FIRST GOVERNOR OF QUEBEC . . . . . . . . . 280
After the portrait by Ramsay.
SETTLEMENTS ON THE DETROIT RIVER . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
From Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_.
BOUQUET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
After the portrait by West.
RETURN OF THE ENGLISH CAPTIVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
After the painting by West.
MONTREAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
After a print in the New York Public Library.
SAMUEL HEARNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
After an engraving published in 1796.
GENERAL RICHARD MONTGOMERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
After the painting by Chappel.
MAP OF QUEBEC DURING THE SIEGE OF CONGRESS TROOPS . . . . . 303
SIR GUY CARLETON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
After an engraving in _The Political Magazine_, June, 1782.
BENEDICT ARNOLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
After the portrait by Tate.
GENERAL HALDIMAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
After the portrait by Reynolds.
JOSEPH BRANT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
After the portrait by Ames.
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR SIMCOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
After an engraving in Scadding's _Toronto of Old_.
CAPTAIN COOK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
After the portrait by Dauce.
FORT CHURCHILL AS IT WAS IN 1777 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
After a print in the _European Magazine_, June, 1797.
TOTEM POLES, BRITISH COLUMBIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
From a photograph.
CAPTAIN GEORGE VANCOUVER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
After the portrait by Abbott.
NOOTKA SOUND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
From an engraving in Vancouver's _Journal_.
FORT CHIPPEWYAN, ATHABASCA LAKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
From a recent photograph.
{xxv}
ALEXANDER MACKENZIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
After the portrait by Lawrence.
CAUSE OF A PORTAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
From a photograph.
SIMON FRASER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
From a likeness in Morice's _The History
of the Northern Interior of British Columbia_.
ASTORIA IN 1813 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
From a cut in Franchere's _Narrative of a Voyage_.
MAP OF WEST COAST, SHOWING THE OGDEN AND ROSS
EXPLORATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
From Laut's _Conquest of the Great North West_.
GENERAL SIR JAMES HENRY CRAIG, GOVERNOR GENERAL OF CANADA,
1807-1811 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
After an engraving at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
WILLIAM HULL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
After the portrait by Stuart, with autograph.
MAP SHOWING THE LOCATION OF THE MILITARY OPERATIONS
ON THE DETROIT RIVER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
MAP SHOWING THE LOCATION OF THE MILITARY OPERATIONS ON
THE NIAGARA FRONTIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
GENERAL BROCK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
After a portrait in the possession of
J. A. Macdonell Esq., Alexandria, Ontario.
BROCK MONUMENT, QUEENSTON HEIGHTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
From a photograph.
YORK (TORONTO) HARBOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
From Bouchette's _British Dominions in North America_.
FITZGIBBONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
After a photograph reproduced in _Proceedings
and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada_, 1900.
LAURA SECORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
From _Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records_.
TWO VIEWS OF THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE . . . . . . . . . . . 364
From prints published in 1815
TECUMSEH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
After the drawing by Pierre Le Drie.
DE SALABERRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
After a portrait in Fannings Taylor's _Portraits of
British Americans_.
SIR GORDON DRUMMOND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
After an engraving at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
MONUMENT AT LUNDY'S LANE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
From a photograph.
{xxvi}
SELKIRK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
From Ontario Archives Collection.
NELSON AND HAYES RIVERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
From a map in Robson's _Hudson Bay_.
FORT GARRY, RED RIVER SETTLEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
From Ross' _Red River Settlement_.
FORT DOUGLAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
After an old engraving.
SKETCH OF THE CITY OF WINNIPEG, SHOWING THE SITES
OF THE EARLY FORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
From Manitoba Historical Society
RED RIVER SETTLEMENT, 1816-1820 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
After a map in Amos' _Report of the Trials Relative
to the Destruction of the Earl of Selkirk's Settlement_.
MONUMENT TO COMMEMORATE THE MASSACRE OF SEVEN OAKS . . . . . 397
After a sketch.
TRACKING ON ATHABASCA RIVER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
From a photograph.
PLANS OF YORK AND PRINCE OF WALES FORTS . . . . . . . . . . 405
From a plate in Robson's _Hudson Bay_.
SIR GEORGE SIMPSON, GOVERNOR OF HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, 1820 406
JOHN MCLOUGHLIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
After a likeness in Laut's _Conquest
of the Great Northwest_.
SIR JOHN SHERBROOKE, GOVERNOR GENERAL OF CANADA, 1816-1818 413
After an engraving at Queen's University,
Kingston, Ontario.
THE FOURTH DUKE OF RICHMOND, GOVERNOR GENERAL OF CANADA,
1818-1819 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
After an engraving at Queen's University,
Kingston, Ontario.
WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
After a likeness in Lindsey's _Life and Times of Mackenzie_.
ALLAN McNAB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
After the portrait in the Speaker's Chambers, Ottawa.
LOUIS J. PAPINEAU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
After a likeness in Fannings Taylor's _British Americans_.
SIR JOHN COLBORNE, GOVERNOR GENERAL OF CANADA, 1838-1841 . . 430
After an engraving at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
LORD DURHAM, SPECIAL COMMISSIONER TO CANADA, 1838 . . . . . 432
After an engraving at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
JOHN A. MACDONALD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
From a photograph.
FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION, 1867 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
From the painting by Hariss.
CANADA
THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH
CHAPTER I
FROM 1000 TO 1600
Early voyages to America--Voyages of the Cabots--The French fisher
folk--Cartier's first voyage--Cartier's second voyage--Cartier's third
voyage--Marguerite Roberval
Who first found Canada? As many legends surround the beginnings of
empire in the North as cling to the story of early Rome.
When Leif, son of Earl Eric, the Red, came down from Greenland with his
Viking crew, which of his bearded seamen in Arctic furs leaned over the
dragon prow for sight of the lone new land, fresh as if washed by the
dews of earth's first morning? Was it Thorwald, Leif's brother, or the
mother of Snorri, first white child born in America, who caught first
glimpse through the flying spray of Labrador's domed hills,--"Helluland,
place of slaty rocks"; and of Nova Scotia's wooded meadows,--"Markland";
and Rhode Island's broken vine-clad shore,--"Vinland"? The question
cannot be answered. All is as misty concerning that Viking voyage as the
legends of old Norse gods.
Leif, the Lucky, son of Earl Eric, the outlaw, coasts back to Greenland
with his bold sea-rovers. This was in the year 1000.
For ten years they came riding southward in their rude-planked ships of
the dragon prow, those Norse adventurers; and Thorwald, Leif's brother,
is first of the pathfinders in America to lose his life in battle with
the "Skraelings" or Indians. Thornstein, another brother, sails south in
1005 with Gudrid, his wife; but a roaring nor'easter tears the piping {2}
sails to tatters, and Thornstein dies as his frail craft scuds before the
blast. Back comes Gudrid the very next year, with a new husband and a
new ship and two hundred colonists to found a kingdom in the "Land of the
Vine." At one place they come to rocky islands, where birds flock in
such myriads it is impossible to land without trampling nests. Were
these the rocky islands famous for birds in the St. Lawrence? On another
coast are fields of maize and forests entangled with grapevines. Was
this part of modern New England? On Vinland--wherever it was--Gudrid,
the Norse woman, disembarks her colonists. All goes well for three
years. Fish and fowl are in plenty. Cattle roam knee-deep in pasturage.
Indians trade furs for scarlet cloth and the Norsemen dole out their
barter in strips narrow as a little finger; but all beasts that roam the
wilds are free game to Indian hunters. The cattle begin to disappear,
the Indians to lurk armed along the paths to the water springs. The
woods are full of danger. Any bush may conceal painted foe. Men as well
as cattle lie dead with telltale arrow sticking from a wound. The
Norsemen begin to hate these shadowy, lonely, mournful forests. They
long for wild winds and trackless seas and open world. Fur-clad, what do
they care for the cold? Greenland with its rolling drifts is safer
hunting than this forest world. What glory, doomed prisoners between the
woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great
fear? The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came
dank and unwholesome to these men. Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff
of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed
to sail. And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid. Ordering the
vessels loaded with timber good for masts and with wealth of furs, she
gathered up her people and led them from the "Land of the Vine" back to
Greenland.
[Illustration: VIKING SHIP RECENTLY DISCOVERED.]
Where was Vinland? Was it Canada? The answer is unknown. It was south
of Labrador. It is thought to have been Rhode Island; but certainly,
passing north and south, the Norse were the first white men to see Canada.
Did some legend, dim as a forgotten dream, come down to Columbus in 1492
of the Norsemen's western land? All sailors of Europe yearly fished in
Iceland. Had one of Columbus's crew heard sailor yarns of the new land?
If so, Columbus must have thought the new land part of Asia; for ever
since Marco Polo had come from China, Europe had dreamed of a way to Asia
by the sea. What with Portugal and Spain dividing the New World, all the
nations of Europe suddenly awakened to a passion for discovery.
[Illustration: DIVISION OF THE NEW WORLD BETWEEN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.]
There were still lands to the north, which Portugal and Spain had not
found,--lands where pearls and gold might abound. At Bristol in England
dwelt with his sons John Cabot, the Genoese master mariner, well
acquainted with Eastern-trade. Henry VII commissions him on a voyage of
discovery--an empty honor, the King to have one fifth of all profit,
Cabot to bear all expense. The _Matthew_ ships from Bristol with a crew
of eighteen in May of 1497. North and west sails the tumbling craft two
thousand miles. Colder grows the air, stiffer the breeze in the bellying
sails, till the _Matthew's_ crew are shivering on decks amid fleets of
icebergs that drift from Greenland in May and June. This is no realm of
spices and gold. Land looms through the mist the last week in June, {4}
rocky, surf-beaten, lonely as earth's ends, with never a sound but the
scream of the gulls and the moan of the restless water-fret along endless
white reefs. Not a living soul did the English sailors see. Weak in
numbers, disappointed in the rocky land, they did not wait to hunt for
natives. An English flag was hastily unfurled and possession taken of
this Empire of the North for England. The woods of America for the first
time rang to the chopper. Wood and water were taken on, and the
_Matthew_ had anchored in Bristol by the first week of August. Neither
gold nor a way to China had Cabot found; but he had accomplished three
things: he had found that the New World was not a part of Asia, as Spain
thought; he had found the continent itself; and he had given England the
right to claim new dominion.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL "HOLE IN THE WALL" AT "KITTY VIDDY," NEAR ST.
JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND]
England went mad over Cabot. He was granted the title of admiral and
allowed to dress in silks as a nobleman. King Henry gave him 10 pounds,
equal to $500 of modern money, and a pension of 20 pounds, equal to $1000
to-day. It is sometimes said that modern writers attribute an air of
romance to these old pathfinders, {5} which they would have scorned; but
"Zuan Cabot," as the people called him, wore the halo of glory with glee.
To his barber he presented an island kingdom; to a poor monk he gave a
bishopric. His son, Sebastian, sailed out the next year with a fleet of
six ships and three hundred men, coasting north as far as Greenland,
south as far as Carolina, so rendering doubly secure England's title to
the North, and bringing back news of the great cod banks that were to
lure French and Spanish and English fishermen to Newfoundland for
hundreds of years.
[Illustration: SEBASTIAN CABOT]
Where was Cabot's landfall?
I chanced to be in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, shortly after the 400th
anniversary of Cabot's voyage. King's Cove, landlocked as a hole in a
wall, mountains meeting sky line, presented on one flat rock in letters
the size of a house claim that it was _here_ John Cabot sent his sailors
ashore to plant the flag on cairn of bowlders; but when I came back from
Newfoundland by way of Cape Breton, I found the same claim there. For
generations the tradition has been handed down from father to son among
Newfoundland fisher folk that as Cabot's vessel, pitching and rolling to
the tidal bore, came scudding into King's Cove, rock girt as an inland
lake, the sailors shouted "Bona Vista--Beautiful View"; but Cape Breton
has her legend, too. It was Cabot's report of the cod banks that brought
the Breton fishermen out, whose name Cape Breton bears.
{6} As Christopher Columbus spurred England to action, so Cabot now
spurred Portugal and Spain and France.
Gaspar Cortereal comes in 1500 from Portugal on Cabot's tracks to that
land of "slaty rocks" which the Norse saw long ago. The Gulf Stream
beats the iron coast with a boom of thunder, and the tide swirl meets the
ice drift; and it isn't a land to make a treasure hunter happy till there
wander down to the shore Montaignais Indians, strapping fellows, a head
taller than the tallest Portuguese. Cortereal lands, lures fifty savages
on board, carries them home as slaves for Portugal's galley ships, and
names the country--"land of laborers"--Labrador. He sailed again, the
next year; but never returned to Portugal. The seas swallowed his
vessel; or the tide beat it to pieces against Labrador's rocks; of those
Indians slaked their vengeance by cutting the throats of master and crew.
And Spain was not idle. In 1513 Balboa leads his Spanish treasure
seekers across the Isthmus of Panama, discovers the Pacific, and realizes
what Cabot has already proved--that the New World is not a part of Asia.
Thereupon, in swelling words, he takes possession of "earth, air, and
water from the Pole Arctic to the Pole Antarctic" for Spain. A few years
later Magellan finds his way to Asia round South America; but this path
by sea is too long.
From France, Normans and Bretons are following Cabot's tracks to
Newfoundland, to Labrador, to Cape Breton, "quhar men goeth a-fishing" in
little cockleshell boats no bigger than three-masted schooner, with
black-painted dories dragging in tow or roped on the rolling decks.
Absurd it is, but with no blare of trumpets or royal commissions, with no
guide but the wander spirit that lured the old Vikings over the rolling
seas, these grizzled peasants flock from France, cross the Atlantic, and
scatter over what were then chartless waters from the Gulf of St.
Lawrence to the Grand Banks.
Just as they may be seen to-day bounding over the waves in their little
black dories, hauling in . . . hauling in the endless line, or jigging
for squid, or lying at ease at the noonday hour {7} singing some old land
ballad while the kettle of cod and pork boils above a chip fire kindled
on the stones used as ballast in their boats--so came the French fisher
folk three years after Cabot had discovered the Grand Banks. Denys of
Honfleur has led his fishing fleet all over the Gulf of St. Lawrence by
1506. So has Aubert of Dieppe. By 1517, fifty French vessels yearly
fish off the coast of New-Found-Land. By 1518 one Baron de Lery has
formed the project of colonizing this new domain; but the baron's ship
unluckily came from the Grand Banks to port on that circular bank of sand
known as Sable Island--from twenty to thirty miles as the tide shifts the
sand, with grass waist high and a swampy lake in the middle. The Baron
de Lery unloads his stock on Sable island and roves the sea for a better
port.
The King of France, meanwhile, resents the Pope dividing the New World
between Spain and Portugal. "I should like to see the clause in Father
Adam's will that gives the whole earth to you," he sent word to his
brother kings. Verrazano, sea rover of Florence, is commissioned to
explore the New World seas; but Verrazano goes no farther north in 1524
than Newfoundland, and when he comes on a second voyage he is lost--some
say hanged as a pirate by the Spaniards for intruding on their seas.
In spite of the loss of the King's sea rover, the fisher folk of France
continue coming in their crazy little schooners, continue fishing in the
fogs of the Grand Banks from their rocking black-planked dories, continue
scudding for shelter from storm . . . here, there, everywhere; into the
south shore of Newfoundland; into the long arms of the sea at Cape
Breton, dyed at sundawn and sunset by such floods of golden light, these
arms of the sea become known as Bras d'Or Lakes--Lakes of Gold; into the
rock-girt lagoons of Gaspé; into the holes in the wall of Labrador . . .;
till there presently springs up a secret trade in furs between the
fishing fleet and the Indians. The King of France is not to be balked by
one failure. "What," he asked, "are my royal brothers to have _all_
America?" Among the Bank fishermen were many sailors of St. Malo.
Jacques Cartier, master pilot, {8} now forty years of age, must have
learned strange yarns of the New World from harbor folk. Indeed, he may
have served as sailor on the Banks. Him the King chose, with one hundred
and twenty men and two vessels, in 1534, to go on a voyage of discovery
to the great sea where men fished. Cartier was to find if the sea led to
China and to take possession of the countries for France. Captain,
masters, men, march to the cathedral and swear fidelity to the King. The
vessels sail on April 20, with the fishing fleet.
[Illustration: Jacques Cartier]
Piping winds carry them forward at a clipper pace. The sails scatter and
disappear over the watery sky line. In twenty days Cartier is off that
bold headland with the hole in the wall called Bona Vista. Ice is
running as it always runs there in spring. What with wind and ice,
Cartier deems it prudent to look for shelter. Sheering south among the
scarps at Catalina, where the whales blow and the seals float in
thousands {9} on the ice pans, Cartier anchors to take on wood and water.
For ten days he watches the white whirl driving south. Then the water
clears and his sails swing to the wind, and he is off to the north, along
that steel-gray shore of rampart rock, between the white-slab islands and
the reefy coast. Birds are in such flocks off Funk Island that the men
go ashore to hunt, as the fisher folk anchor for bird shooting to-day.
Higher rises the rocky sky line; barer the shore wall, with never a break
to the eye till you turn some jagged peak and come on one of those snug
coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle. Reefs white as lace
fret line the coast. Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull
Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways.
Gray finback whales flounder in schools. The lazy humpbacks lounge round
and round the ships, eyeing the keels curiously. A polar bear is seen on
an ice pan. Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of
Newfoundland--Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, rock girt, treeless,
always windy, desolate, with an eternal moaning of the tide over the
fretful reefs.
[Illustration: WHERE THE FISHER HAMLETS NOW NESTLE, NEWFOUNDLAND]
{10} To the north, off a little seaward, is Belle Isle. Here, storm or
calm, the ocean tide beats with fury unceasing and weird reëchoing of
baffled waters like the scream of lost souls. It was sunset when I was
on a coastal ship once that anchored off Belle Isle, and I realized how
natural it must have been for Cartier's superstitious sailors to mistake
the moan of the sea for wild cries of distress, and the smoke of the
spray for fires of the inferno. To French sailors Belle Isle became Isle
of Demons. In the half light of fog or night, as the wave wash rises and
falls, you can almost see white arms clutching the rock.
As usual, bad weather caught the ships in Belle Isle Straits. Till the
9th of June brown fog held Cartier. When it lifted the tide had borne
his ships across the straits to Labrador at Castle Island, Château Bay.
Labrador was a ruder region than Newfoundland. Far as eye could scan
were only domed rocks like petrified billows, dank valleys moss-grown and
scrubby, hillsides bare as slate; "This land should not be called earth,"
remarked Cartier. "It is flint! Faith, I think this is the region God
gave Cain!" If this were Cain's realm, his descendants were "men of
might"; for when the Montaignais, tall and straight as mast poles, came
down to the straits, Cartier's little scrub sailors thought them giants.
Promptly Cartier planted the cross and took possession of Labrador for
France. As the boats coasted westward the shore rock turned to
sand,--huge banks and drifts and hillocks of white sand,--so that the
place where the ships struck across for the south shore became known as
Blanc Sablon (White Sand). Squalls drove Cartier up the Bay of Islands
on the west shore of Newfoundland, and he was amazed to find this arm of
the sea cut the big island almost in two. Wooded mountains flanked each
shore. A great river, amber with forest mold, came rolling down a deep
gorge. But it was not Newfoundland Cartier had come to explore; it was
the great inland sea to the west, and to the west he sailed.
July found him off another kind of coast--New Brunswick--forested and
rolling with fertile meadows. Down a broad shallow stream--the
Miramichi--paddled Indians waving furs {11} for trade; but wind
threatened a stranding in the shallows. Cartier turned to follow the
coast north. Denser grew the forests, broader the girths of the great
oaks, heavier the vines, hotter the midsummer weather. This was no land
of Cain. It was a new realm for France. While Cartier lay at anchor
north of the Miramichi, Indian canoes swarmed round the boats at such
close quarters the whites had to discharge a musket to keep the three
hundred savages from scrambling on decks. Two seamen then landed to
leave presents of knives and coats. The Indians shrieked delight, and,
following back to the ships, threw fur garments to the decks till
literally naked. On the 18th of July the heat was so intense that
Cartier named the waters Bay of Chaleur. Here were more Indians. At
first the women dashed to hiding in the woods, while the painted warriors
paddled out; but when Cartier threw more presents into the canoes, women
and children swarmed out singing a welcome. The Bay of Chaleur promised
no passage west, so Cartier again spread his sails to the wind and
coasted northward. The forests thinned. Towards Gaspé the shore became
rocky and fantastic. The inland sea led westward, but the season was far
advanced. It was decided to return and report to the King. Landing at
Gaspé on July 24, Cartier erected a cross thirty feet high with the words
emblazoned on a tablet, _Vive le Roi de France_. Standing about him were
the painted natives of the wilderness, one old chief dressed in black
bearskin gesticulating protest against the cross till Cartier explained
by signs that the whites would come again. Two savages were invited on
board. By accident or design, as they stepped on deck, their skiff was
upset and set adrift. The astonished natives found themselves in the
white men's power, but food and gay clothing allayed fear. They
willingly consented to accompany Cartier to France. Somewhere north of
Gaspé the smoke of the French fishing fleet was seen ascending from the
sea, as the fishermen rocked in their dories cooking the midday meal.
August 9 prayers are held for safe return at Blanc Sablon,--port of the
white, white sand,--and by September 5 Cartier is {12} home in St. Malo,
a rabble of grizzled sailor folk chattering a welcome from the wharf
front.
He had not found passage to China, but he had found a kingdom; and the
two Indians told marvelous tales of the Great River to the West, where
they lived, of mines, of vast unclaimed lands.
Cartier had been home only a month when the Admiral of France ordered him
to prepare for another voyage. He himself was to command the _Grand
Hermine_, Captain Jalobert the _Little Hermine_, and Captain Le Breton
the _Emerillon_. Young gentlemen adventurers were to accompany the
explorers. The ships were provisioned for two years; and on May 16,
1535, all hands gathered to the cathedral, where sins were confessed, the
archbishop's blessing received, and Cartier given a Godspeed to the music
of full choirs chanting invocation. Three days later anchors were
hoisted. Cannon boomed. Sails swung out; and the vessels sheered away
from the roadstead while cheers rent the air.
Head winds held the ship back. Furious tempests scattered the fleet. It
was July 17 before Cartier sighted the gull islands of Newfoundland and
swung up north with the tide through the brown fogs of Belle Isle Straits
to the shining gravel of Blanc Sablon. Here he waited for the other
vessels, which came on the 26th.
The two Indians taken from Gaspé now began to recognize the headlands of
their native country, telling Cartier the first kingdom along the Great
River was Saguenay, the second Canada, the third Hochelaga. Near Mingan,
Cartier anchored to claim the land for France; and he named the great
waters St. Lawrence because it was on that saint's day he had gone
ashore. The north side of Anticosti was passed, and the first of
September saw the three little ships drawn up within the shadow of that
somber gorge cut through sheer rock where the Saguenay rolls sullenly out
to the St. Lawrence. The mountains presented naked rock wall. Beyond,
rolling back . . . rolling back to an impenetrable wilderness . . . were
the primeval {13} forests. Through the canyon flowed the river, dark and
ominous and hushed. The men rowed out in small boats to fish but were
afraid to land.
As the ships advanced up the St. Lawrence the seamen could scarcely
believe they were on a river. The current rolled seaward in a silver
flood. In canoes paddling shyly out from the north shore Cartier's two
Indians suddenly recognized old friends, and whoops of delight set the
echoes ringing.
Keeping close to the north coast, russet in the September sun, Cartier
slipped up that long reach of shallows abreast a low-shored wooded island
so laden with grapevines he called it Isle Bacchus. It was the Island of
Orleans.
Then the ships rounded westward, and there burst to view against the high
rocks of the north shore the white-plumed shimmering cataract of
Montmorency leaping from precipice to river bed with roar of thunder.
Cartier had anchored near the west end of Orleans Island when there came
paddling out with twelve canoes, Donnacona, great chief of Stadacona,
whose friendship was won on the instant by the tales Cartier's Indians
told of France and all the marvels of the white man's world.
Cartier embarked with several young officers to go back with the chief;
and the three vessels were cautiously piloted up little St. Charles
River, which joins the St. Lawrence below the modern city of Quebec.
Women dashed to their knees in water to welcome ashore these gayly
dressed newcomers with the gold-braided coats and clanking swords.
Crossing the low swamp, now Lower Town, Quebec, the adventurers followed
a path through the forest up a steep declivity of sliding stones to the
clear high table-land above, and on up the rolling slopes to the airy
heights of Cape Diamond overlooking the St. Lawrence like the turret of
some castle above the sea. Did a French soldier, removing his helmet to
wipe away the sweat of his arduous climb, cry out "Que bec" (What a
peak!) as he viewed the magnificent panorama of river and valley and
mountain rolling from his feet; or did their Indian guide point to the
water of the river narrowing like {14} a strait below the peak, and
mutter in native tongue, "Quebec" (The strait)? Legend gives both
explanations of the name. To the east Cartier could see far down the
silver flood of the St. Lawrence halfway to Saguenay; to the south, far
as the dim mountains of modern New Hampshire. What would the King of
France have thought if he could have realized that his adventurers had
found a province three times the size of England, one third larger than
France, one third larger than Germany? And they had as yet reached only
one small edge of Canada, namely Quebec.
Heat haze of Indian summer trembled over the purple hills. Below, the
river quivered like quicksilver. In the air was the nutty odor of dried
grasses, the clear tang of coming frosts crystal to the taste as water;
and if one listened, almost listened to the silence, one could hear above
the lapping of the tide the far echo of the cataract. To Cartier the
scene might have been the airy fabric of some dream world; but out of
dreams of earth's high heroes are empires made.
But the Indians had told of that other kingdom, Hochelaga. Hither
Cartier had determined to go, when three Indians dressed as devils--faces
black as coals, heads in masks, brows adorned with elk horns--came
gyrating and howling out of the woods on the mountain side, making wild
signals to the white men encamped on the St. Charles. Cartier's
interpreters told him this was warning from the Indian god not to ascend
the river. The god said Hochelaga was a realm of snow, where all white
men would perish. It was a trick to keep the white men's trade for
themselves.
Cartier laughed.
"Tell them their god is an old fool," he said. "Christ is to be our
guide."
The Indians wanted to know if Cartier had spoken to his God about it.
"No," answered Cartier. Then, not to be floored, he added, "but my
priest has."
{15} With three cheers, fifty young gentlemen sheered out on September 19
from the St. Charles on the _Emerillon_ to accompany Cartier to Hochelaga.
[Illustration: ANCIENT HOCHELAGA. (From Ramusio)]
Beyond Quebec the St. Lawrence widened like a lake. September frosts had
painted the maples in flame. Song birds, the glory of the St. Lawrence
valley, were no longer to be heard, but the waters literally swarmed with
duck and the forests were alive with partridge. Where to-day nestle
church spires and whitewashed hamlets were the birch wigwams and night
camp fires of Indian hunters. Wherever Cartier went ashore, Indians
rushed knee-deep to carry him from the river; and one old chief at
Richelieu signified his pleasure by presenting the whites with two Indian
children. Zigzagging leisurely, now along the north shore, now along the
south, pausing to hunt, pausing to explore, pausing to powwow with the
Indians, the adventurers came, on September 28, to the reedy shallows and
breeding grounds of wild fowl at Lake St. Peter. Here they were so close
ashore the _Emerillon_ caught her keel in the weeds, and the explorers
left her aground under guard and went forward in rowboats.
{16} "Was this the way to Hochelaga?" the rowers asked Indians paddling
past.
"Yes, three more sleeps," the Indians answered by the sign of putting the
face with closed eyes three times against their hand; "three more nights
would bring Cartier to Hochelaga"; and on the night of the 2d of October
the rowboats, stopped by the rapids, pulled ashore at Hochelaga amid a
concourse of a thousand amazed savages.
It was too late to follow the trail through the darkening forest to the
Indian village. Cartier placed the soldiers in their burnished armor on
guard and spent the night watching the council fires gleam from the
mountain. And did some soldier standing sentry, watching the dark shadow
of the hill creep longer as the sun went down, cry out, "Mont Royal," so
that the place came to be known as Montreal?
At peep of dawn, while the mist is still smoking up from the river,
Cartier marshals twenty seamen with officers in military line, and, to
the call of trumpet, marches along the forest trail behind Indian guides
for the tribal fort. Following the river, knee-deep in grass, the French
ascend the hill now known as Notre Dame Street, disappear in the hollow
where flows a stream,--modern Craig Street,--then climb steeply through
the forests to the plain now known as the great thoroughfare of
Sherbrooke Street. Halfway up they come on open fields of maize or
Indian corn. Here messengers welcome them forward, women singing,
tom-tom beating, urchins stealing fearful glances through the woods. The
trail ends at a fort with triple palisades of high trees, walls separated
by ditches and roofed for defense, with one carefully guarded narrow
gate. Inside are fifty large wigwams, the oblong bark houses of the
Huron-Iroquois, each fifty feet long, with the public square in the
center, or what we would call the courtyard.
It needs no trick of fancy to call up the scene--the winding of the
trumpet through the forest silence, the amazement of the Indian drummers,
the arrested frenzy of the dancers, the sunrise turning burnished armor
to fire, the clanking of swords, {17} the wheeling of the soldiers as
they fall in place, helmets doffed, round the council fire! Women swarm
from the long houses. Children come running with mats for seats.
Bedridden, blind, maimed are carried on litters, if only they may touch
the garments of these wonderful beings. One old chief with skin like
crinkled leather and body gnarled with woes of a hundred years throws his
most precious possession, a headdress, at Cartier's feet.
Poor Cartier is perplexed. He can but read aloud from the Gospel of St.
John and pray Christ heal these supplicants. Then he showers presents on
the Indians, gleeful as children--knives and hatchets and beads and tin
mirrors and little images and a crucifix, which he teaches them to kiss.
Again the silver trumpet peals through the aisled woods. Again the
swords clank, and the adventurers take their way up the mountain--a Mont
Royal, says Cartier.
The mountain is higher than the one at Quebec. Vaster the view--vaster
the purple mountains, the painted forests, the valleys bounded by a sky
line that recedes before the explorer as the rainbow runs from the grasp
of a child. This is not Cathay; it is a New France. Before going back
to Quebec the adventurers follow a trail up the St. Lawrence far enough
to see that Lachine Rapids bar progress by boat; far enough, too, to see
that the Gaspé Indians had spoken truth when they told of another grand
river--the Ottawa--coming in from the north.
By the 11th of October Cartier is at Quebec. His men have built a
palisaded fort on the banks of the St. Charles. The boats are beached.
Indians scatter to their far hunting grounds. Winter sets in. Canadian
cold is new to these Frenchmen. They huddle indoors instead of keeping
vigorous with exercise. Ice hangs from the dismantled masts. Drifts
heap almost to top of palisades. Fear of the future falls on the crew.
Will they ever see France again? Then scurvy breaks out. The fort is
prostrate. Cartier is afraid to ask aid of the wandering Indians lest
they learn his weakness. To keep up show of strength he has his men fire
off muskets, batter the fort walls, march and drill and {18} tramp and
stamp, though twenty-five lie dead and only four are able to keep on
their feet. The corpses are hidden in snowdrifts or crammed through ice
holes in the river with shot weighted to their feet.
In desperation Cartier calls on all the saints in the Christian calendar.
He erects a huge crucifix and orders all, well and ill, out in
procession. Weak and hopeless, they move across the snows chanting
psalms. That night one of the young noblemen died. Toward spring an
Indian was seen apparently recovering from the same disease. Cartier
asked him what had worked the cure and learned of the simple remedy of
brewed spruce juice.
By the time the Indians came from the winter hunt Cartier's men were in
full health. Up at Hochelaga a chief had seized Cartier's gold-handled
dagger and pointed up the Ottawa whence came ore like the gold handle.
Failing to carry any minerals home, Cartier felt he must have witnesses
to his report. The boats are rigged to sail, Chief Donnacona and eleven
others are lured on board, surrounded, forcibly seized, and treacherously
carried off to France. May 6, 1536, the boats leave Quebec, stopping
only for water at St. Pierre, where the Breton fishermen have huts. July
16 they anchor at St. Malo.
Did France realize that Cartier had found a new kingdom? Not in the
least; but the home land gave heed to that story of minerals, and had the
kidnapped Indians baptized. Donnacona and all his fellow-captives but
the little girl of Richelieu die, and Sieur de Roberval is appointed lord
paramount of Canada to equip Cartier with five vessels and scour the
jails of France for colonists. Though the colonists are convicts, the
convicts are not criminals. Some have been convicted for their religion,
some for their politics. What with politics and war, it is May, 1541,
before the ships sail, and then Roberval has to wait another year for his
artillery, while Cartier goes ahead to build the forts.
From the first, things go wrong. Head winds prolong the passage for
three months. The stock on board is reduced to a diet of cider, and half
the cattle die. Then the Indians of Quebec {19} ask awkward questions
about Donnacona. Cartier flounders midway between truth and lie.
Donnacona had died, he said; as for the others, they have become as white
men. Agona succeeds Donnacona as chief. Agona is so pleased at the news
that he gives Cartier a suit of buckskin garnished with wampum, but the
rest of the Indians draw off in such resentment that Cartier deems it
wise to build his fort at a distance, and sails nine miles up to Cape
Rouge, where he constructs Bourg Royal. Noel, his nephew, and Jalobert,
his brother-in-law, take two ships back to France. While Cartier roams
exploring, Beaupré commands Bourg Royal.
In his roamings, ever with his eyes to earth for minerals, he finds
stones specked with mica, and false diamonds, whence the height above
Quebec is called Cape Diamond. It is enough. The crews spend the year
loading the ships with cargo of worthless stones, and set sail in May,
high of hope for wealth great as Spaniard carried from Peru. June 8 the
ships slip in to St. John's, Newfoundland, for water. Seventeen fishing
vessels rock to the tide inside the landlocked lagoon, and who comes
gliding up the Narrows of the harbor neck but Viceroy Roberval, mad with
envy when he hears of the diamond cargoes! He breaks the head of a
Portuguese or two among the fishing fleet and forthwith orders Cartier
back to Quebec.
Cartier shifts anchor from too close range of Roberval's guns and says
nothing. At dead of night he slips anchor altogether and steals away on
the tide, with only one little noiseless sail up on each ship through the
dark Narrows. Once outside, he spreads his wings to the wind and is off
for France. The diamonds prove worthless, but Cartier receives a title
and retires to a seigneurial mansion at St. Malo.
The episode did not improve Roberval's temper. The new Viceroy was a
soldier and a martinet, and his authority had been defied. With his two
hundred colonists, taken from the prisons of France, commanded by young
French officers,--a Lament and a La Salle among others,--he proceeded up
the coast of Newfoundland to enter the St. Lawrence by Belle Isle. {20}
Among his people were women, and Roberval himself was accompanied by a
niece, Marguerite, who had the reputation of being a bold horsewoman and
prime favorite with the grandees who frequented her uncle's castle.
Perhaps Roberval had brought her to New France to break up her attachment
for a soldier. Or the Viceroy may have been entirely ignorant of the
romance, but, anchored off Belle Isle,--Isle of Demons,--the angry
governor made an astounding discovery. The girl had a lover on board, a
common soldier, and the two openly defied his interdict. Coming after
Cartier's defection, the incident was oil to fire with Roberval. Sailors
were ordered to lower the rowboat. One would fain believe that the
tyrannical Viceroy offered the high-spirited girl at least the choice of
giving up her lover. She was thrust into the rowboat with a faithful old
Norman nurse. Four guns and a small supply of provisions were tossed to
the boat. The sailors were then commanded to row ashore and abandon her
on Isle of Demons. The soldier lover leaped over decks and swam through
the surf to share her fate.
Isle of Demons, with its wailing tides and surf-beaten reefs, is a
desolate enough spot in modern days when superstitions do not add to its
terrors. The wind pipes down from The Labrador in fairest weather with
weird voices as of wailing ghosts, and in winter the shores of Belle Isle
never cease to echo to the hollow booming of the pounding surf.
Out of driftwood the castaways constructed a hut. Fish were in plenty,
wild fowl offered easy mark, and in springtime the ice floes brought down
the seal herds. There was no lack of food, but rescue seemed forever
impossible; for no fishing craft would approach the demon-haunted isle.
A year passed, two years,--a child was born. The soldier lover died of
heartbreak and despondency. The child wasted away. The old nurse, too,
was buried. Marguerite was left alone to fend for herself and hope
against hope that some of the passing sails would heed her signals. No
wonder at the end of the third year she began to hear shrieking laughter
in the lonely cries of tide and wind, and to imagine that she saw
fiendish arms snatching through the spume of storm drift.
{21} Towards the fall of 1545, one calm day when spray for the once did
not hide the island, some fishermen in the straits noticed the smoke of a
huge bonfire ascending from Isle Demons. Was it a trick of the fiends to
lure men to wreck, or some sailors like themselves signaling distress?
The boat drew fearfully near and nearer. A creature in the strange
attire of skins from wild beasts ran down the rocks, signaling
frantically. It was a woman. Terrified and trembling, the sailors
plucked up courage to land. Then for the first time Marguerite
Roberval's spirit gave way. She could not speak; she seemed almost
bereft of reason. It was only after the fishermen had nourished her back
to semblance of womanhood that they drew from her the story. On
returning to France, Marguerite Roberval entered a convent. It was there
an old court friend of her château days sought her out and heard the tale
from her own lips.
[Illustration: THE "DAUPHIN MAP" OF CANADA, _CIRCA_ 1543, SHOWING
CARTIER'S DISCOVERIES]
{22} A colony begun under such ill omen was not likely to prosper.
Roberval had proceeded to Cape Rouge, where he landed in July, and before
winter had a respectable fort constructed. Fifty of his colonists died
of scurvy. As many as six were hanged in a single day for
insubordination, and the whipping post became the emblem of an authority
that trembled in the balance. Roberval, in troth, was not thinking of
the colony. He was thinking of those minerals which the Indians said
were at the head waters of the Saguenay. Leaving thirty women at the
fort, he ascended the Saguenay with seventy men in spring and explored as
far as Lake St. John, where the village of Roberval commemorates his
feat; but he found no minerals and lost eight men running rapids. When
Cartier came out in 1543, Roberval took the remaining colonists home, a
profoundly embittered man. Legend has it that he either perished on a
second voyage in 1549, or was assassinated in Paris.
So falls the curtain on the first attempt to colonize Canada.
{23}
CHAPTER II
FROM 1600 TO 1607
English voyages to North America--Sir Humphrey Gilbert--Henry
Hudson--Champlain's first voyage--Founding of Ste. Croix--The colonists
in Acadia
The second attempt to plant a French colony in the New World was more
disastrous than the first.
Though my Lord Roberval fails, the French fishing vessels continue to
bound over the billows of the Atlantic to the New World. By 1578 there
are a hundred and fifty French fishing vessels off Newfoundland alone.
The fishing folk engage in barter. Cartier's heirs ask for a monopoly of
the fur trade in Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the
merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la
Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly,
with many high-sounding titles as Governor, and the added obligation that
he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is
1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred
people taken from jails, all but sixty have obtained their freedom by
paying a ransom. With these sixty La Roche follows the fishing fleet out
to the Grand Banks, then rounds southwestward for milder clime, where he
may winter his people.
Straight across the ship's course lies the famous sand bank, the
graveyard of the Atlantic,--what the old navigators called "the dreadful
isle,"--Sable Island. The sea lies placid as glass between the crescent
horns of the long, low reefs,--thirty miles from horn to horn, with never
a tree to break the swale of the grass waist-high.
The marquis lands his sixty colonists to fish for supplies, while he goes
on with the crew to find place for settlement.
Barely has the topsail dipped over the watery sky before breakers begin
to thunder on the sand reefs. Air and earth lash to fury. Sails are
torn from the ship of the marquis. His {24} masts go overboard, and the
vessel is driven, helpless as a chip in a maelstrom, clear back to the
ports of France. Here double misfortune awaits La Roche. His old
patrons of the court are no longer powerful. He is thrown in prison by a
rival baron.
In vain the colonists strain tired eyes for a sail at sea. Days become
weeks, weeks months, summer autumn; and no boat came back. As winter
gales assailed the sea, sending the sand drifting like spray, the
convicts built themselves huts out of driftwood, and scooped beds for
themselves in the earth like rabbit burrows. Of food there was plenty.
The people had their fishing lines; and the stock, left by the Baron de
Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl,
too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ashore
on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge.
Like Robinson Crusoe cast on a desert isle, the desperate people fought
their fate. Traps were set for the foxes, snares for the birds, and
scouts kept tramping from end to end of the island for sight of a sail.
Racked with despair and anxiety, these outcasts of civilization soon fell
to bitter quarreling. Traps were found rifled. Dead men lay beside the
looted traps; and, doubtless, not a few men lost their lives in spring
when the ice floes drifted down with the seal herds, and the men gave mad
chase from ice pan to ice pan for seal pelts to make clothing. Spring
wore to summer. The graves on the sand banks increased. For a second
winter the dreary snowfall wrapped the island in a mantle white as death
sheet. Then came the same weary monotony,--the frenzied seal hunt over
the blood-stained floes; the long summer days with the drone of the tide
on the sand banks; the men mad with hope at sight of a sail peak over the
far wave tops, only to be plunged in despair as the fisher boat passed
too far for signal; the fading of the grasses to russet in the sad autumn
light; then snowfall again--and despair.
Five years passed before La Roche could aid his people; and the pilot who
went to their rescue won himself immortal contempt by robbing the
castaways of their furs. Word of the {25} rescue came to the ears of the
court. Royalty commanded the refugees brought before the throne. Only
twelve had survived, and these marched before the royal presence clothed
in the skins of seals, hair unkempt, beards to mid-waist, "like river
gods of yore," says the old record. The King was so touched that he
commanded fifty crowns given to each man and the stolen furs restored.
La Roche died of chagrin.
While France is trying to colonize Canada, England has not forgotten that
John Cabot first coasted these northern shores and erected the English
flag.
[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH]
About the time that Marguerite Roberval was left alone on Isle Demons,
two boys--half-brothers--were playing on the sands of the English
Channel, sailing toy boats and listening to sailor yarns of loot on the
Spanish Main. One was Humphrey Gilbert; the other, Walter Raleigh.
These two were destined to lead England's first colonies to America.
Martin Frobisher had already poked the prows of English ships into the
icy straits of Greenland waters, seeking way to {26} China. He had come
out with a fleet of fifteen sails and one hundred mariners in 1578 to
found colonies, but was led away by the lure of "fool's gold." Loading
his vessels with worthless rocks which he believed contained gold enough
"to suffice all the gold gluttons of the world," he sailed back to
England without leaving the trace of a colony. Francis Drake, the very
same year, had for the first time plowed an English furrow around the
seas of the world, chasing Spanish treasure boats up the west coast of
South America and loading his own vessel with loot to the water line.
Afraid to go back the way he had come, round South America, where all the
Spanish frigates lay in wait to catch him, Drake pushed on up the west
coast as far as California, and landing, took possession of what he
called "New Albion" for Queen Elizabeth. But still no colony had been
planted for England.
[Illustration: THE BOYHOOD OF GILBERT AND RALEIGH. (From the painting by
Sir John Millais)]
Gilbert and Raleigh, the two half-brothers, were both zealous for glory.
Both stood high in court favor. Both had fought for Queen Elizabeth in
the wars. Gilbert had fame as seaman and geographer. He asks for the
privilege of founding England's first colony. The Queen will incur no
expense. Gilbert and Raleigh and their friends will fit out the vessels.
Elizabeth deeds to Gilbert all that old domain discovered by John Cabot,
reserving only one fifth of the minerals he may find; and she sends him a
present of a golden anchor as a Godspeed. June 11, 1583, Sir Humphrey
sets sail with a fleet of three splendid merchantmen, fitted out as
men-of-war, and two heavily armed little frigates. The crews number
three hundred and sixty men, but they are for the most part impressed
seamen and riotous. The fleet is only well away when the biggest of the
merchantmen signals that plague has broken out, and flees back to
England. Later, as fog hides the boats from one another, the pirate crew
on board the little frigate _Swallow_ run down an English fisherman on
the Grand Banks, board her, and at bayonet point loot the schooner from
stem to stern. When the ships lower sail to come in on the tide through
the long Narrows, to the rock-girt harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland,
{27} the hundreds of fishing vessels lying at anchor there object to the
pirate _Swallow_; but Sir Humphrey reads his commission from the Queen,
and the fishing fleet roars a welcome that sets the rocks ringing.
Sunday, August 4, the next day after entering, Biscayans and French and
Portuguese and English send their new Governor tribute in
provisions,--fish from the English, marmalade and wines and spices from
the foreigners. The admiral gives a feast to the master mariners each
week he is in port, and entertains--as the old record says--"right
bountifully." Wandering round the rocky harbor, up the high cliff to the
left where remnants of an old fortress may be seen to-day, along the
circular hills to the right where the fishing stages cover the water
front, Gilbert's men find "fool's gold," rock with specks of iron and
mica. Daniel, the refiner of metals, declares it is a rich specimen of
silver. The find goes to Sir Humphrey's head. He sees himself a second
Francis Drake, ships crammed with gold. When the captains of the other
vessels in his fleet would see the treasure, he answers: "Content
yourselves! It is enough! I have seen it but I would have no speech
made of it in harbor; for the Portuguese and {28} Biscayans and French
might learn of it. We shall soon return hither again."
[Illustration: SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT]
Many of the men are in ill health. Gilbert decides to send the invalids
home in the _Swallow_; but he transfers the bold pirate crew of that
frigate to the big ship _Delight_, which carries provisions for the
colony. While planning to make St. John's the headquarters of his new
kingdom, Sir Humphrey wishes to explore those regions where Cartier had
gone and whence the fishing schooners bring such wealth in furs.
August 20 the remainder of his fleet rounds out of St. John's south west
for the Gulf of St. Lawrence,--the _Delight_ with the provisions, the
_Golden Hinde_ with the majority of the people, the little frigate
_Squirrel_ weighted down by artillery stores but under command of Gilbert
himself, because the smaller ship can run close ashore to explore. To
keep up the spirits of the men, there is much merrymaking. Becalmed off
Cape Breton, Sir Humphrey visits the big ship _Delight_, where the
trumpets and the drums and the pipes and the cornets reel off wild sailor
jigs. "There was," says the old record, "little watching for danger."
Wednesday, August 26, the sounding line forewarned the reefs of Sable
Island. Breakers were sighted. The _Delight_ signaled that her captain
wanted to shift southwest to deeper water, but Gilbert wanted to enter
the St. Lawrence and signaled back to go on northwest. That night a
storm raged. The provision ship ran full tilt into the sand banks of
Sable Island, and was battered into chips before the other ships could
come to rescue. All supplies were lost and all the pirate crew perished
but sixteen, who jumped into the pinnace dragging astern, and, with only
one oar, half punted, half drifted for seven days till the wave wash
carried them to the shores of Newfoundland. There they were picked up by
a fishing vessel.
With provisions gone, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colony was doomed. He must
turn back. Saturday, August 31, they reversed the course. When halfway
across the Atlantic the admiral rowed from the little _Squirrel_ across
to the _Golden Hinde_ to have a lame foot treated by the surgeon. "Cheer
{29} up," he urged the men. "Next year her Majesty will loan me 1000
pounds, and we shall come again."
[Illustration: SIR WALTER RALEIGH]
As storm was gathering, the men begged him to remain on the larger ship,
but Gilbert refused to leave the sailors of the _Squirrel_. The frigate
was as safe for him as for them, he said. Some one called his attention
to the fact that the frigate was overweighted with cannon. Gilbert
laughed all danger to scorn. Soon afterwards the waves began to break
short and high--a dangerous sea for a small, overweighted ship. It had
been arranged that both ships should swing lanterns fore and aft to keep
each other in sight at night. On the night of September 9 a
phosphorescent light was seen to gleam above the mainmast of the
_Squirrel_,--certain sign to the superstitious sailors of dire disaster;
but when the _Hinde_ slackened speed, and the great waves threw the
vessels almost together, there was Sir Humphrey sitting aloft, book in
hand, shouting out, "We are as near Heaven by sea as by land." The
_Hinde_ fell to the rear. The _Squirrel_ led away, her stern lanterns
lighting a trail across the shiny dark of the tempestuous billows.
Suddenly, at midnight, the guiding {30} light was lost. The _Squirrel's_
stern lanterns were seen to descend the pitching trough of a mountain
wave, and when the wall of water fell, no light came up. Down into the
abyss the little craft had plunged, never to rise again, carrying
explorer, treasure hunters, colonists, to a watery grave.
It may be added that the disaster took place halfway across the ocean,
and not off Newfoundland, as the ballad relates.
But for all this misfortune, England did not desist. The very next year
Raleigh, who had played on the sands with Humphrey Gilbert, sends out his
colonists to the Roanoke, and lays the foundations for the beginning of
empire in the Southern States. English sailors explore Cape Cod. Ten
years after Frobisher had brought home his cargo of worthless stones from
Labrador, Davis, the master mariner, is out exploring the waters west of
Greenland; and Henry Hudson, the English pilot who had discovered Hudson
River, New York, for the Dutch, is retained by the English in 1610 to
explore those waters west of Greenland where both Frobisher and Davis
reported open passage.
It is midsummer of 1610 when Hudson enters Hudson Straits. The ice jam
of Ungava Bay, Labrador, has almost torn his ships' timbers apart and has
set fear shivering like an aspen leaf among the crew. Old Juett, the
mate, rages openly at Hudson for venturing such a frail ship on such a
sea; but when the ship anchors at the west end of Hudson Straits, five
hundred miles from the Atlantic, there opens to view another sea,--a sea
large as the Mediterranean, that, like the Mediterranean, may lead to
another world. It is as dangerous to go back as forward; and forward
Hudson sails, southwestward for that sea Drake had cruised off
California, the old mate's mutiny rumbling beneath decks like a volcano.
South, southwestward, seven hundred miles sails Hudson, past the high
rocks and airy cataracts of Richmond Gulf, past silence like the realms
of death, on down where Hudson Bay rounds into James Bay and the shallows
plainly show this is no way to a western sea, but a blind inlet,
bowlder-strewn and muddy as swamps.
{31}
[Illustration: AT EASTERN ENTRANCE TO HUDSON STRAITS]
When the ship runs aground and all hands must out to waist in ice water
to pull her ashore as the tide comes in, Juett's rage bursts all bounds.
As they toil, snow begins to fall. They are winter bound and storm bound
in an unknown land. Half the crew are in open mutiny; the other half
build winter quarters and range the woods of James Bay for game. Of game
there is plenty, but the rebels refuse to hunt. A worthless lad named
Green, whom Hudson had picked off the streets of London, turns traitor
and talebearer, fomenting open quarrels till the commander threatens he
will hang to the yardarm the first man guilty of disobedience. So passes
the sullen winter. Provisions are short when the ship weighs anchor for
England in June of 1611. With tears in his eyes, Hudson hands out the
last rations. Ice blocks the way. Delay means starvation. If the crew
were only half as large, Henry Green whispers to the mutineers, there
would be food enough for passage home. The ice floes clear, the sails
swing rattling to the breeze, but as Hudson steps on deck, the mutineers
leap upon him like wolves. He is bound and thrown into the rowboat.
With him are thrust his son and {32} eight others of the crew. The rope
is cut, the rowboat jerks back adrift, and Hudson's vessel, manned by
mutineers, drives before the wind. A few miles out, the mutineers lower
sails to rummage for food. The little boat with the castaways is seen
coming in pursuit. Guilt-haunted, the crew out with all sails and flee
as from avenging ghosts. So passes Henry Hudson from the ken of all men,
though Indian legend on the shores of Hudson Bay to this day maintains
that the castaways landed north of Rupert and lived among the savages.
[Illustration: HUDSON COAT OF ARMS]
Not less disastrous were English efforts than French to colonize the New
World. Up to 1610 Canada's story is, in the main, a record of blind
heroism, dogged courage, death that refused to acknowledge defeat.
Four hundred French vessels now yearly come to reap the harvest of the
sea; in and out among the fantastic rocks of Gaspé, pierced and pillared
and scooped into caves by the wave wash, where fisher boats reap other
kind of harvest, richer than the silver harvest of the sea,--harvest of
beaver, and otter, and marten; up the dim amber waters of the Saguenay,
within the shadow of the somber gorge, trafficking baubles of bead and
red print for furs, precious furs. Pontgravé, merchant prince, comes out
with fifty men in 1600, and leaves sixteen at Tadoussac, ostensibly as
colonists, really as wood lopers to scatter through the forests and learn
the haunts of the Indians. Pontgravé comes back for men and furs in
1601, and comes again in 1603 with two vessels, accompanied by a soldier
of fortune from the French court, who acts as geographer,--Samuel
Champlain, now in his thirty-sixth year, with service in war to his
credit and a journey across Spanish America.
{33} The two vessels are barely as large as coastal schooners; but
shallow draft enables them to essay the Upper St. Lawrence far as Mount
Royal, where Cartier had voyaged. Of the palisaded Indian fort not a
vestige remains. War or plague has driven the tribe westward, but it is
plain to the court geographer that, in spite of former failures, this
land of rivers like lakes, and valleys large as European kingdoms, is fit
for French colonists.
[Illustration: THE FANTASTIC ROCKS OF GASPÉ]
When Champlain returns to France the King readily grants to Sieur de
Monts a region roughly defined as anywhere between Pennsylvania and
Labrador, designated Acadia. This region Sieur de Monts is to colonize
in return for a monopoly of the fur trade. When other traders complain,
De Monts quiets them by letting them all buy shares in the venture. With
him are associated as motley a throng of treasure seekers as ever
stampeded for gold. There is Samuel Champlain, the court geographer;
there is Pontgravé, the merchant prince, on a separate {34} vessel with
stores for the colonists. Pontgravé is to attend especially to the fur
trading. There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son,
Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New
World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons.
Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers
to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with
tongues and fists that the sailors threaten to bury them in the same
grave to see if they can lie at peace in death.
[Illustration: SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN]
Before the boats sight Acadia, it is early summer of 1604. Pontgravé
leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac. De Monts
enters the little bay of St. Mary's, off the northwest corner of Nova
Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.
Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful
as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June
undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company
scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than
to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill.
Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that
he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the
sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that
he is hopelessly lost. The last shafts of {35} sunlight disappear. The
chill of night settles on the darkening woods. The priest shouts till he
is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but
the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl. Aubry
wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by
the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless
ages, . . . on and on, . . . till gray dawn steals through the forest and
midday wears to a second night.
Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions. Could the
Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him?
De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite
of fiercest denials. All night cannon were fired from the vessel and
bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the
priest did not come.
De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay,
and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet
wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of
Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line
of wooded meadows like home-land parks. Poutrincourt is so delighted, he
at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.
On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks,
making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early
voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St.
John's Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking
vainly for more minerals. Westward is another river, known to-day as the
Ste. Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. Dochet Island
at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site. A fort
here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians
say leads back to the St. Lawrence. Thinking more of fort than farms, De
Monts plants his colony on Ste. Croix River, on an island composed mainly
of sand and rock.
While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent
back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals. As {36} the vessel coasts
near St. Mary's Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the
shore. Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement. A hat on the end of a pole
is waved weakly from the beach. The men can scarcely believe their
senses. It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he
disappeared. For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and
roots, before he found his way back to the sea.
[Illustration: PORT ROYAL OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN, 1609 (From Lescarbot's
map)]
Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little
palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of
the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgravé has taken one vessel up the
St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the
other for supplies. A worse beginning could hardly have been made. The
island was little better than a sand heap. No hills shut out the cold
winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried
in ice jam from the south. As the snow began to fall, padding the
stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce
trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness
of winter in a forest chill their hearts. {37} Cooped up on the island
by the ice, they did little hunting. Idleness gives time for repinings.
Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little
cemetery outside the palisades. De Monts has had enough of Ste. Croix.
When Pontgravé comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares
to move. Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a
better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod,
looking for a place to plant the capital of New France. It is amusing to
speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they
had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with
Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with
shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste. Croix in August,
to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia.
While Champlain and Pontgravé volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De
Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.
What had De Monts to show for his two years' labor? His company had
spent what would be $20,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur
trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony. While Champlain
hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgravé bartered furs
during the winter of 1605-1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay
lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and
point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire
in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits. De Monts
remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt
and Lescarbot sail on the _Jonas_ with more colonists and supplies for
Port Royal.
Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis. To
Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland--the silver flood of
the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the
air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and
against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs
and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness.
{38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul
appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The _Jonas_ runs up
the French ensign. Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled
by the old chief Membertou. He signals back to the watchers behind the
gates. Musketry shots ring out welcome. The ship's cannon answer,
setting the waters churning. Trumpets blare. The gates fly wide and out
marches the garrison--two lone Frenchmen. The rest, despairing of a ship
that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from
French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgravé and Champlain,
overjoyed to find the ship from France. Poutrincourt has a hogshead of
wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.
[Illustration: BUILDINGS ON STE. CROIX ISLAND, 1613 (From Champlain's
diagram)]
When Pontgravé carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer
poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the
colonists in Acadia. Poutrincourt and his son {39} attend to trade.
Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand
pranks of the Paris advocate. First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening,
and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his _noblesse_ long enough to wield the
hoe. Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond. The weather
is almost mild as summer until January. The woods ring to many a merry
picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay
Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of
nobility--the Order of Good Times. Each day one of the number must cater
to the messroom table of the fort. This means keen hunting, keen rivalry
for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts. And all is
done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet. When the chapel bell
rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the
Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck,
truncheon in his hand. The gavel strikes, and there enter the
Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand,--moose hump,
beaver tail, bears' paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only
to out-of-doors men. Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites.
Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the
children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.
At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the
shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of
command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master. It is all
child's play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.
Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper,--a handwritten sheet giving
the doings of the day,--perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing.
At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance. As all
the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy,
Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful
excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green. The lawyer's
good spirits proved contagious. The French songs that rang through the
woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper's {40} labors, were the best
antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last.
While L'Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell
from the blue. Instead of De Monts' vessel there came in spring a
fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded. No
more money would be advanced. Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt,
resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the
present all took sad leave of the little settlement--Poutrincourt,
Champlain, L'Escarbot--and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for
France, where they landed in October, 1607.
Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts--all had failed to establish France
in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey's colonists lay bleaching
skeletons at the bottom of the sea.
{41}
CHAPTER III
FROM 1607 TO 1635
Argall of Virginia attacks the French--Champlain on the St.
Lawrence--Champlain and the Iroquois--Champlain explores the
Ottawa--Champlain with the Indians--Discovery of the Great Lakes--War
with the Iroquois--Conflicting interests in New France--The English
take Quebec
Though the monopoly had been rescinded, Poutrincourt set himself to
interesting merchants in the fur trade of Acadia, and the French king
confirmed to him the grant of Port Royal. Yet it was 1610 before Baron
Poutrincourt had gathered supplies to reëstablish the colony, and an
ominous cloud rose on the horizon, threatening his supremacy in the New
World. Nearly all the merchants supporting him were either Huguenots
or moderate Catholics. The Jesuits were all powerful at court, and
were pressing for a part in his scheme. The Jesuit, Father Biard, was
waiting at Bordeaux to join the ship. Poutrincourt evaded issues with
such powerful opponents. He took on board Father La Fléché, a
moderate, and gave the Jesuit the slip by sailing from Dieppe in
February.
To this quarrel there are two sides, as to all quarrels. The colony
must now be supported by the fur trade; and fur traders, world over,
easily add to their profits by deeds which will not bear the censure of
missionaries. On the other hand, to Poutrincourt, the Jesuits meant
divided authority; and the most lawless scoundrel that ever perpetrated
crimes in the fur trade could win over the favor of the priests by a
hypocritical semblance of contrition at the confessional. Contrition
never yet undid a crime; and civil courts can take no cognizance of
repentance.
When the ships sailed in to Port Royal the little fort was found
precisely as it had been left. Not even the furniture had been
disturbed, and old Membertou, the Indian chief, welcomed the white men
back with taciturn joy. Père La Fléché assembles the savages, tells
them the story of the Christian faith, then to the beat of drum and
chant of "Te Deum" receives, one {42} afternoon, twenty naked converts
into the folds of the church. Membertou is baptized Henry, after the
King, and all his frowsy squaws renamed after ladies of the most
dissolute court in Christendom.
Young Biencourt is to convey the ship back to France. He finds that
the Queen Dowager has taken the Jesuits under her especial protection.
Money enough to buy out the interests of the Huguenot merchants for the
Jesuits has been advanced. Fathers Biard and Massé embark on _The
Grace of God_ with young Biencourt in January, 1611, for Port Royal.
Almost at once the divided authority results in trouble. Coasting the
Bay of Fundy, Biencourt discovers that Pontgravé's son has roused the
hostility of the Indians by some shameless act. Young Biencourt is for
hanging the miscreant to the yardarm, but the sinner gains the ear of
the saints by woeful tale of penitence, and Father Biard sides with
young Pontgravé. Instead of the gayety that reigned at Port Royal in
L'Escarbot's day, now is sullen mistrust.
The Jesuits threaten young Biencourt with excommunication. Biencourt
retaliates by threatening _them_ with expulsion. For three months no
religious services are held. The boat of 1612 brings out another
Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet; and the _Jonas_, which comes in 1613 with
fifty more men,--La Saussaye, commander, Fleury, captain,--has been
entirely outfitted by friends of the Jesuits. By this time Baron de
Poutrincourt, in France, was involved in debt beyond hope; but his
right to Port Royal was unshaken, and the Jesuits decided to steer
south to seek a new site for their colony.
[Illustration: PORT ROYAL (From Champlain's diagram)]
Zigzagging along the coast of Maine, Captain Fleury cast anchor off
Mount Desert at Frenchman's Bay. A cross was erected, mass celebrated,
and four white tents pitched to house the people; but the clash between
civil and religious authority broke out again. The sailors would not
obey the priests. Fleury feared mutiny. Saussaye, the commander, lost
his head, and disorder was ripening to disaster when there appeared
over the sea the peak of a sail,--a sail topped by a little red ensign,
the {43} flag of the English, who claimed all this coast. And the sail
was succeeded by decks with sixty mariners, and hulls through whose
ports bristled fourteen cannon. The newcomer was Samuel Argall of
Virginia, whom the Indians had told of the French, now bearing down
full sail, cannon leveled, to expel these aliens from the domain of
England's King. Drums were beating, trumpets blowing, fifes
shrieking--there was no mistaking the purpose of the English ship.
Saussaye, the French commander, dashed for hiding in the woods.
Captain Fleury screamed for some one, every one, any one, "to
fire--fire"; but the French sailors had imitated their commander and
fled to the woods, while the poor Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet, fell
weltering in blood from an English cannonade that swept the French
decks bare and set all sails in flame. In the twinkling of an eye,
Argall had captured men and craft. Fifteen of the French prisoners he
set adrift in open boat, on the chance of their joining the French
fishing fleet off Cape Breton. They were ultimately carried to St.
Malo. {44} The rest of the prisoners, including Father Biard, he took
back to Virginia, where the commission held from the French King
assured them honorable treatment in time of peace; but Argall was
promptly sent north again with his prisoners, and three frigates to lay
waste every vestige of French settlement from Maine to St. John. Mount
Desert, the ruins of Ste. Croix, the fortress beloved by Poutrincourt
at Port Royal, the ripening wheat of Annapolis Basin--all fed the
flames of Argall's zeal; and young Biencourt's wood runners, watching
from the forests the destruction of all their hopes, the ruin of all
their plans, ardently begged their young commander to parley with
Argall that they might obtain the Jesuit Biard and hang him to the
highest tree. To _his_ coming they attributed all the woes. It was as
easy for them to believe that the Jesuit had piloted the English
destroyer to Port Royal, as it had been ten years before for the
Catholics to accuse the Huguenots of murdering the lost priest Aubry;
and there was probably as much truth in one charge as the other.
So fell Port Royal; but out round the ruins of Port Royal, where the
little river runs down to the sea past Goat Island, young Biencourt and
his followers took to the woods--the first of that race of bush lopers,
half savages, half noblemen, to render France such glorious service in
the New World.
When De Monts lost the monopoly of furs in Acadia, Champlain, the court
geographer, had gone home from Port Royal to France. De Monts now
succeeds in obtaining a fresh monopoly for one year on the St.
Lawrence, and sends out two ships in 1608 under his old friends,
Pontgravé, who is to attend to the bartering, Champlain, who is to
explore. With them come some of the colonists from Port Royal, among
others Louis Hebert, the chemist, first colonist to become farmer at
Quebec, and Abraham Martin, whose name was given to the famous plains
where Wolfe and Montcalm later fought.
Pontgravé arrived at the rendezvous of Tadoussac early in June. Here
he found Basque fishermen engaged in the peltry {45} traffic with
Indians from Labrador. When Pontgravé read his commission interdicting
all ships but those of De Monts from trade, the Basques poured a
fusillade of musketry across his decks, killed one man, wounded two,
then boarded his vessel and trundled his cannon ashore. So much for
royal commissions and monopoly!
[Illustration: TADOUSSAC (From Champlain's map)]
At this stage came Champlain on the second boat. Two vessels were
overstrong for the Basques. They quickly came to terms and decamped.
Champlain steered his tiny craft on up the silver flood of the St.
Lawrence to that Cape Diamond where Cartier's men had gathered
worthless stones. Between the high cliff and the river front, not far
from the market place of Quebec City to-day, workmen began clearing the
woods for the site of the French habitation. The little fort was
palisaded, of course, with a moat outside and cannon commanding the
river. The walls were loopholed for musketry; and inside ran a gallery
to serve as lookout and defense. Houses, barracks, garden, and
fresh-water supply completed the fort. One day, as Champlain {46}
worked in his garden, a colonist begged to speak with him. Champlain
stepped into the woods. The man then blurted out how a conspiracy was
on foot, instigated by the Basques, to assassinate Champlain, seize the
fort, and stab any man who dared to resist. One of Pontgravé's small
boats lay at anchor. Champlain sent for the pilot, told him the story
of the plot, gave him two bottles of wine, and bade him invite the
ringleaders on board that night to drink. The ruse worked. The
ringleaders were handcuffed, the other colonists awakened in the fort
and told that the plot had been crushed. The body of Duval, the chief
plotter, in pay of the Basques, swung as warning from a gibbet; and his
head was exposed on a pike to the birds of the air. Though Pontgravé
left a garrison of twenty-eight when he sailed for France, less than a
dozen men had survived the plague of scurvy when the ships came back to
Champlain in 1609.
Champlain's part had been to explore. Now that his fort was built, he
planned to do this by allying himself with the Indians, who came down
to trade at Quebec. These were the Hurons and Montaignais, the former
from the Ottawa, the latter from Labrador. Both waged ceaseless war on
the Iroquois south of the St. Lawrence. After bartering their furs for
weapons from the traders, the allied tribes would set out on the
warpath against the Iroquois. In June, Champlain and eleven white men
accompanied the roving warriors.
The way led from the St. Lawrence south, up the River Richelieu.
Champlain's boat was a ponderous craft; and when the shiver of the
sparkling rapids came with a roar through the dank forest, the heavy
boat had to be sent back to Quebec. Adopting the light birch canoe of
the Indian, Champlain went on, accompanied by only two white men. Of
Indians, there were twenty-four canoes with sixty warriors. For the
first part of the voyage night was made hideous by the grotesque war
dances of the braves lashing themselves to fury by scalp raids in
pantomime, or by the medicine men holding solemn converse with the
demons of earth; the tent poles of the medicine lodge rocked as if by
wind, while eldritch howls predicted victory. {47} Then the long line
of silent canoes had spread out on that upland lake named after
Champlain, the heavily forested Adirondacks breaking the sky line on
one side, the Green Mountains rolling away on the other. Caution now
marked all advance. The Indians paddled only at night, withdrawing to
the wooded shore through the morning mist to hide in the undergrowth
for the day. This was the land of the Iroquois.
[Illustration: DEFEAT OF THE IROQUOIS (From Champlain's drawing)]
On July 29, as the invaders were stealing silently along the west shore
near Crown Point at night about ten o'clock, there were seen by the
starlight, coming over the water with that peculiar galloping motion of
paddlers dipping together, the Iroquois war canoes. Each side
recognized the other, and the woods rang with shouts; but gathering
clouds and the mist rising from the river screened the foes from mutual
attack, though the night echoed to shout and countershout and challenge
and abuse. Through the half light Champlain could see that the
Iroquois were working like beavers erecting a barricade of logs. The
assailants kept to their canoes under cover of bull-hide shields till
daylight, when Champlain buckled on his armor--breastplate, helmet,
thigh pieces--and landing, advanced. There were not less than two
hundred Iroquois. Outnumbering the Hurons three times over, they
uttered a jubilant whoop and {48} came on at a rush. Champlain and his
two white men took aim. The foremost chiefs dropped in their tracks.
Terrified by "the sticks that thundered and spat fire," the Iroquois
fell back in amaze, halted, then fled. The victory was complete; but
it left as a legacy to New France the undying enmity of the Iroquois.
When Champlain came out from France in 1610, he would have repeated the
raid; but a fight with invading Iroquois at the mouth of the Richelieu
delayed him, and the expiration of De Monts' monopoly took him back to
France.
In 1611 trade was free to all comers. Fur traders flocked to the St.
Lawrence like birds of passage. The only way to secure furs for De
Monts was to go higher up the river beyond Quebec; and ascending to
Montreal, Champlain built a factory called Place Royale, with a wall of
bricks to resist the ice jam. This was the third French fort Champlain
helped to found in Canada.
Presently, on his tracks to Montreal, came a flock of free traders.
When the Hurons come shooting down the foamy rapids--here, a pole-shove
to avoid splitting canoes on a rock in mid-rush; there, a dexterous
whirl from the trough of a back wash--the fur traders fire off their
guns in welcome. The Hurons are suspicious. What means it, these
white men, coming in such numbers, firing off their "sticks that
thunder"? At midnight they come stealthily to Champlain's lodge to
complain. Peltries and canoes, the Indians transfer themselves above
the rapids, and later conduct Champlain down those same white
whirlpools to the uneasy amaze of the explorer.
It is clear to Champlain he must obtain royal patronage to stem the
boldness of these free traders. In France he obtains the favor of the
Bourbons; and he obtains it more generously because the world of Paris
has gone agog about a fabulous tale that sets the court by the ears.
From the first Champlain has encouraged young Frenchmen to winter with
the Indian hunters and learn the languages. Brulé is with them now.
Nicholas Vignau has just come back from the Ottawa with a fairy story
of a marvelous voyage he has made with the Indians through {49} the
forests to the Sea of the North--the sea where Henry Hudson, the
Englishman, had perished. As the romance gains the ear of the public,
the young man waxes eloquent in detail, and tells of the number of
Englishmen living there. Champlain is ordered to follow this
exploration up.
May, 1613, he is back at Montreal, opposite that island named St.
Helen, after the frail girl who became his wife, preparing to ascend
the Ottawa with four white men--among them Vignau. What Vignau's
sensations were, one may guess. The vain youth had not meant his love
of notoriety to carry him so far; and he must have known that every
foot of the way led him nearer detection; but the liar is always a
gambler with chance. Mishap, bad weather, Indian war--might drive
Champlain back. Vignau assumed bold face.
The path followed was that river trail up the Ottawa which was to
become the highway of empire's westward march for two and a half
centuries. Mount Royal is left to the rear as the voyageurs traverse
the Indian trail through the forests along the rapids to that launching
place named after the patron saint of French voyageur--Ste. Anne's.
The river widens into the silver expanse of Two Mountains Lake, rimmed
to the sky line by the vernal hills, with a silence and solitude over
all, as when sunlight first fell on face of man. Here the eagle utters
a lonely scream from the top of some blasted pine; there a covey of
ducks, catching sight of the coming canoes, dive to bottom, only to
reappear a gunshot away. Where the voyageurs land for their nooning,
or camp at nightfall, or pause to gum the splits in their birch canoes,
the forest in the full flush of spring verdure is a fairy woods.
Against the elms and the maples leafing out in airy tracery that
reveals the branches bronze among the budding green, stand the silver
birches, and the somber hemlocks, and the resinous pines. Upbursting
from the mold below is another miniature forest--a forest of ferns
putting out the hairy fronds that in another month will be above the
height of a man. Overhead, like a flame of fire, flashes the scarlet
tanager with his querulous call; or the oriole flits from branch to
branch, {50} fluting his springtime notes; or the yellow warbler
balances on topmost spray to sing his crisp love song on the long
journey north to nest on Hudson Bay. And over all and in all,
intangible as light, intoxicating as wine, is the tang of the clear,
unsullied, crystal air, setting the blood coursing with new life.
Little wonder that Brulé, and Vignau, and other young men whom
Champlain sent to the woods to learn wood lore, became so enamored of
the life that they never returned to civilization.
Presently the sibilant rush of waters forewarns rapids. Indians and
voyageurs debark, invert canoes on their shoulders, packs on back with
straps across foreheads, and amble away over the portages at that
voyageurs' dog-trot which is half walk, half run. So the rapids of
Carillon and Long Sault are ascended. Night time is passed on some
sandy shore on a bed under the stars, or under the canoes turned upside
down. Tents are erected only for the commander, Champlain; and at day
dawn, while the tips of the trees are touched with light and the
morning mist is smoking up from the river shot with gold, canoes are
again on the water and paddle blades tossing the waves behind.
The Laurentian Hills now roll from the river in purpling folds like
fields of heather. The Gatineau is passed, winding in on the right
through dense forests. On the left, flowing through the rolling sand
hills, and joining the main river just where the waters fall over a
precipice in a cataract of spray, is the Rideau River with its famous
falls resembling the white folds of a wind-blown curtain. Then the
voyageurs have swept round that wooded cliff known as Parliament Hill,
jutting out in the river, and there breaks on view a wall of water
hurtling down in shimmering floods at the Chaudière Falls. The high
cliff to the left and countercurrent from the falls swirl the canoes
over on the right side to the sandy flats where the lumber piles to-day
defile the river. Here boats are once more hauled up for portage--a
long portage, nine miles, all the way to the modern town of Aylmer,
where the river becomes wide as a lake, Lake Du Chêne of the oak
forests. Here camp for the night was made, and leaks in the canoes
mended with resin, round fires gleaming red as an angry eye across the
{51} darkening waters, while the prowling wild cats and lynx, which
later gave such good hunting in these forests that the adjoining rapids
became known as the Chats, sent their unearthly screams shivering
through the darkness.
Somewhere near Allumette Isle, Champlain came to an Indian settlement
of the Ottawa tribe. He camped to ask for guides to go on. Old Chief
Tessouat holds solemn powwow, passing the peace pipe round from hand to
hand in silence, before the warriors rise to answer Champlain. Then
with the pompous gravity of Abraham dickering with the desert tribes,
they warn Champlain it is unsafe to go farther. Beyond the Ottawa is
the Nipissing, where dwell the Sorcerer Indians--a treacherous people.
Beyond the Nipissing is the great Fresh Water Sea of the Hurons. They
will grant Champlain canoes, but warn him against the trip. Later the
interpreter comes with word they have changed their minds. Champlain
must _not_ go on. It is too dangerous. Attack would involve war.
"What," demanded Champlain, rushing into the midst of the council tent,
"not go? Why, my young man, here"--pointing to Vignau--"has gone to
that country and found no danger."
What Vignau thought at that stage is not told. The Indians turned on
him in fury.
"Nicholas, did _you_ say _you_ had visited the Nipissings?"
Vignau hems and haws, and stammers, "Yes."
"Liar," roars the chief. "You slept here every night, and if you went
to the Nipissings, you went in a dream." Then to Champlain, "Let him
be tortured."
Champlain took the fellow to his own tent. Vignau reiterated his
story. Champlain took him back to the council. The Indians jeered his
answers and tore the story he told to tatters, showing Champlain how
utterly wrong Vignau's descriptions were.
That night, on promise of forgiveness, Vignau fell on his knees and
confessed the imposture to Champlain. When the fur canoes came down
the Ottawa to trade at Montreal, Champlain accompanied them to the St.
Lawrence, and sailed for France. His exploration had been an
ignominious failure.
{52} Champlain was ever Knight of the Cross as well as explorer. He
longed with the zeal of a missionary to reclaim the Indians from
savagery, and at last raised funds in France to pay the expense of
bringing four or five Recollets--a branch of the Franciscan Friars--to
Quebec in May of 1615. With the peaked hood thrown back, the gray garb
roped in at the waist, the bare feet protected only by heavy sandals,
the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all
on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages.
Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to
the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea. Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen,
the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island
where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the
land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two
canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brulé, his interpreter. In order to
hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada,
Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five
hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It
was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations
of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like
wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on
the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from
a chance war party.
Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where
the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the
west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river
amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa.
Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining
flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the
pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became
weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from
voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over
rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening {53}
on a low-lying, clay-colored lake--the country of the Nipissings, with
whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon
lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.
In a few sleeps--they tell him--he will reach the Sweet Water Sea. The
news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and
launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake--French
River. This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the
bodies of countless French voyageurs. It is more dangerous going
_with_ rapids than _against_ them; for the hastening current is
sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before
the roar of the waterfall has given warning. And the country is barren
of game.
As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the
raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is
dependent on chance fishing. Indian hunters are met,--three hundred of
them,--the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their
headdress tipped by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is
very near the Inland Sea.
It comes as discoveries nearly always come--his finding of the Great
Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way
ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the
region. You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters--long
lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels.
Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes. Instead of the earthy
smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of
sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose
itself at the horizon. There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your
view. The river begins to coil in and out among islands. The amber
waters have become sheeted silver. You wind from island to island,
islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted
pine, islands that are in themselves forests. There is no end to these
islands. They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands. Then you
see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line. You
are not on a river at all. You are on an inland sea. You have been on
the lake for hours. One {54} can guess how Champlain's men scrambled
from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep
pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering
vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.
But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea. With
the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him
down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from
French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang. Where these
little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of
forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians
back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.
Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron
tribe. How numerous were they? Records differ. Certainly at no time
more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children.
Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were
sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple
palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century
before.
Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail
to the Huron villages. Here he found the missionary. One can guess
how the souls of these two heroes burned as the deep solemn chant of
the _Te Deum_ for the first time rolled through the forests of Lake
Huron.
But now Champlain must to business; and his business is war. Brulé and
twelve Indians are sent like the carriers of the fiery cross in the
Highlands of Scotland to rally tribes of the Susquehanna to join the
Hurons against the Iroquois. A wild war dance is held with mystic
rites in the lodges of the Hurons; and the braves set out with
Champlain from Lake Simcoe for Lake Ontario by way of Trent River. As
they near what is now New York state, buckskin is flung aside, the
naked bodies painted and greased, and the trail shunned for the
pathless woods off the beaten track where the Indians glide like beasts
of prey through the frost-tinted forest.
{55}
[Illustration: THE ONONDAGA FORT (From Champlain's diagram)]
October 9 they suddenly come on some Onondagas fishing, and they begin
torturing their captives by cutting off a girl's finger, when Champlain
commands them to desist. Presently the forest opens to a farm clearing
where the Iroquois are harvesting their corn. Spite of all Champlain
could do, the wild Hurons uttered their war cry and rushed the field,
but the Iroquois turned on the rabble and drove them back to the woods.
Champlain was furious. They should have waited for Brulé to come with
their allies; and the foolish attack had only served to forewarn the
enemy. He frankly told the Hurons if they were going to fight under
_his_ command, they must fight as white men fight; and he set them to
building a platform from which marksmen could shoot over the walls of
the Iroquois town. But the admonitions {56} fell on frenzied ears. No
sooner was the command to advance given than the Hurons broke from
cover like maniacs, easy marks for the javelin throwers inside the
walls, and hurled themselves against the Iroquois palisades in blind
fury, making more din with yelling than woe with shots. Boiling water
poured from the galleries inside drove the braves back from the walls,
and the poisoned barb of the Iroquois arrows pursued their flight. A
score fell wounded, among them Champlain with an arrow in his knee-cap.
The flight became panic fast and furious, with the wounded carried on
wicker stretchers whose every jolt added agony to pain.
[Illustration: VIEW OF QUEBEC (From Champlain's plan)]
As for Brulé, he arrived with the allies only to find that the Hurons
had fled, and here was he, alone in a hostile land, with Iroquois
warriors rampant as molested wasps. In the swift retreat off the trail
Brulé lost his way. He was without food {57} or powder, and had to
choose between starvation or surrender to the Iroquois. Throwing down
his weapons, he gave himself up to what he knew would be certain
torture. Had he winced or whined as they tore the nails from his
fingers and the hair from his head, the Iroquois would probably have
brained him on the spot for a poltroon; but the young man, bound to a
stake, pointed to a gathering storm as sign of Heaven's displeasure.
The high spirit pleased the Iroquois. They unbound him and took him
with them in their wanderings for three years.
The Hurons had promised to convey Champlain back down the St. Lawrence
to Quebec, but the defeat had caused loss of prestige. The man "with
the stick that thundered" was no more invulnerable to wounds than they.
They forgot their promises and invented excuses for not proceeding to
Quebec. Champlain wintered with the hunters somewhere north of Lake
Ontario, and came down the Ottawa with the fur canoes the next summer.
He was received at Quebec as one risen from the dead.
While Champlain had been exploring, New France had not prospered as a
colony. Royal patron after royal patron sold the monopoly to fresh
hands, and each new master appointed Champlain viceroy. The fur trade
merchants could pay forty per cent dividends, but could do nothing to
advance settlement. Less than one hundred people made up the
population of New France; and these were torn asunder by jealousies.
Huguenot and Catholic were opposed; and when three Jesuits came to
Quebec, Jesuits and Recollets distrusted each other.
Madam Champlain joined her husband at Quebec, in 1620, to stay for four
years, and that same year Champlain built himself a new habitation--the
famous Castle of St. Louis on the cliff above the first dwelling.
Louis Hebert, the apothecary of Port Royal, is now a farmer close to
the Castle of Quebec; and the wife of Abraham Martin has given birth to
the first white child born in New France.
Now came a revolutionary change. Cardinal Richelieu was virtual ruler
of France. He quickly realized that the monopolists {58} were sucking
the lifeblood of the colony in furs and were giving nothing in return
to the country. In 1627, under the great cardinal's patronage, the
Company of One Hundred Associates was formed. In this company any of
the seaport traders could buy shares. Indeed, they were promised
patent of nobility if they did buy shares. Exclusive monopoly of furs
was given to the company from Florida to Labrador. In return the
Associates were to send two ships yearly to Canada. Before 1643 they
were to bring out four thousand colonists, support them for three
years, and give them land. In each settlement were to be supported
three priests; and, to prevent discord, Huguenots were to be banished
from New France.
To Champlain it must have seemed as if the ambition of his life were to
be realized. Just when the sky seemed clearest the bolt fell.
Early in April, 1628, the Associates had dispatched colonists and
stores for Quebec; but war had broken out between France and England.
Gervais Kirke, an English Huguenot of Dieppe, France, who had been put
under the ban by Cardinal Richelieu, had rallied the merchants of
London to fit out privateers to wage war on New France. The vessels
were commanded by the three sons, Thomas, Louis, and David; and to the
Kirkes rallied many Huguenots banished from France.
Quebec was hourly looking for the annual ships, when one morning in
July two men rushed breathless through the woods and up the steep rock
to Castle St. Louis with word that an English fleet of six frigates lay
in hiding at Tadoussac, ready to pounce on the French! Later came
other messengers--Indians, fishermen, traders--confirming the terrible
news. Then a Basque fisherman arrives with a demand, from Kirke for
the keys to the fort. Though there is no food inside the walls, less
than fifty pounds of ammunition in the storehouse, and not enough men
to man the guns, Champlain hopes against hope, and sends the Basque
fisherman back with suave regrets that he cannot comply with Monsieur
Kirke's polite request. Quebec's one chance lay in the hope that the
French vessels might {59} slip past the English frigates by night.
Days wore on to weeks, weeks to months, and a thousand rumors filled
the air; but no ships came. The people of Quebec were now reduced to
diet of nuts and corn. Then came Indian runners with word that the
French ships had been waylaid, boarded, scuttled, and sunk. Loaded to
the water line with booty, the English privateers had gone home.
[Illustration: QUEBEC (From Champlain's map)]
For that winter Quebec lived on such food as the Indians brought in
from the woods. By the summer of 1629 men, women, and children were
grubbing for roots, fishing for food, ranging the rocks for berries.
There are times when the only thing to do is--do nothing; and it is
probably the hardest task a brave man ever has. When the English fleet
came back in July Champlain had a ragamuffin, half-starved retinue of
precisely sixteen men. Yet he haggled for such terms that the English
promised to convey the prisoners to France. On July 20, for the first
time in history, the red flag of England blew to the winds above the
heights of Quebec.
But New France was only a pawn to the gamesters of French and English
diplomacy. Peace was proclaimed; and for the {60} sake of receiving
$200,000 as dowry due his French wife, Charles of England restored to
France the half continent which the Kirkes had captured, David Kirke
receiving the paltry honor of a title as compensation for the loss.
Champlain was back in Quebec by 1633; but his course had run. Between
Christmas eve and Christmas morning, in 1635, the brave Soldier of the
Cross, the first knight of the Canadian wildwoods, passed from the
sphere of earthly life--a life without a stain, whether among the
intriguing courtiers of Paris or in the midst of naked license in the
Indian camp.
{61}
CHAPTER IV
FROM 1635 TO 1666
Frays between La Tour and Charnisay--Madame La Tour defends the
fort--Charnisay's treachery
When Port Royal fell before Argall, it will be remembered, young
Biencourt took to the woods with his French bush lopers and Indian
followers of Nova Scotia. The farms and fort of Annapolis Basin
granted to his father by special patents lay in ruins. Familiar with
the woods as the English buccaneer, who had destroyed the fort, was
with his ship's cabin, Biencourt withdrew to the southwest corner of
Nova Scotia, where he built a rude stronghold of logs and slabs near
the modern Cape Sable. Here he could keep in touch with the French
fishermen off Cape Breton, and also traffic with the Indians of the
mainland.
With Biencourt was a young man of his own age, boon comrade, kindred
spirit, who had come to Port Royal a boy of fourteen, in 1606, in the
gay days of Marc L'Escarbot--Charles de La Tour. Sea rovers, bush
lopers, these two could bid defiance to English raiders. Whether
Biencourt died in 1623 or went home to France is unknown; but he deeded
over to his friend, Charles de La Tour, all possessions in Acadia.
And now England again comes on the scene. By virtue of Cabot's
discovery and Argall's conquest, the King of England, in 1621, grants
to Sir William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, all of Acadia, renamed
Nova Scotia--New Scotland. By way of encouraging emigration, the order
of Nova Scotia Baronets is created, a title being granted to those who
subscribe to the colonization company.
Sir William Alexander's colonists shun the French bush lopers under
Charles de La Tour down at Fort St. Louis on Cape Sable. The seventy
Scotch colonists go on up the Annapolis Basin and build their fort four
miles from old Port Royal. How did they pass the pioneer years--these
Scotch retainers of the {62} Nova Scotia Baronets? Report among the
French fishing fleet says thirty died of scurvy; but of definite
information not a vestige remains. The annals of these colonists are
as completely lost to history as the annals of the lost Roanoke colony
in Virginia.
Under the same English patent Lord Ochiltree lands English colonists in
Cape Breton, the grand summer rendezvous of the French fishermen; but
two can play at Argall's game of raids. French seamen swoop down on
Ochiltree's colony, capture fifty, destroy the settlement, and run up
the white flag of France in place of the red standard of England.
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER]
Charles de La Tour with his Huguenots hides safely ensconced behind his
slab palisades with the swarthy faces of half a hundred Indian
retainers lighted up by the huge logs at blaze on the hearth. Charles
de La Tour takes counsel with himself. English at Port Royal, English
at Cape Breton, English on the mainland at Boston, English ships
passing and repassing his lone lodge in the wilderness, he will be
safer, will Charles de La Tour, with wider distance between himself and
the foe; and he will take more peltries where there are fewer traders.
Still keeping his fort in Nova Scotia, La Tour goes across Fundy Bay
and builds him a second, stronger fort on St. John River, New
Brunswick, near where Carleton town stands to-day.
Then two things happened that upset all plans.
{63} The Hundred Associates are given _all_ Canada--Quebec and Acadia.
Founded by Cardinal Richelieu, the Hundred Associates are violently
Catholic, violently anti-Protestant. Charles de La Tour need expect no
favors, if indeed the grant that he holds from Biencourt be not
assailed. Double reason for moving the most of his possessions across
Fundy Bay to St. John River.
Then the Englishmen, under the Kirke brothers, capture Quebec. As luck
or ill luck will have it, among the French captured from the French
ships of the Hundred Associates down at Tadoussac, is Claude de La
Tour, the father of Charles. Claude de La Tour was a Protestant. This
and his courtly manner and his noble birth commended him to the English
court. What had France done for Claude de La Tour? Placed him under
the ban on account of his religion.
Claude de La Tour promptly became a British subject, received the title
Baronet of Nova Scotia with enormous grants of land on St. John River,
New Brunswick, married an English lady in waiting to the Queen, and
sailed with three men-of-war for Nova Scotia to win over his son
Charles. No writer like Marc Lescarbot was present to describe the
meeting between father and son; but one can guess the stormy
scene,--the war between love of country and love of father, the guns of
the father's vessels pointing at the son's fort, the guns of the son's
fort pointing at the father's vessels. The father's arguments were
strong. What had France done for the La Tours? By siding with England
they would receive safe asylum in case of persecution and enormous
grants of land on St. John River. But the son's arguments were
stronger. The father must know from his English bride--maid in waiting
to the English Queen--that England had no intentions of keeping her
newly captured possessions in Canada, but had already decided to trade
them back to France for a dowry to the English Queen. If Canada were
given back to France, what were English grants in New Brunswick worth?
"If those who sent you think me capable of betraying my country even at
the prayer of my father, they are mightily mistaken," thundered the
young man, ordering his gunners to their places. {64} "I don't
purchase honors by crime! I don't undervalue the offer of England's
King; but the King of France is just as able to reward me! The King of
France has confided the defense of Acadia to me; and I'll defend it to
my last breath."
Stung by his son's rebuke, the elder La Tour retired to his ship, wrote
one more unavailing appeal, then landed his mariners to rush the fort.
But the rough bush lopers inside the palisades were expert marksmen.
Their raking cross fire kept the English at a distance, and the father
could neither drive nor coax his men to the sticking point of courage
to scale palisades in such an unnatural war. Claude de La Tour was now
in an unenviable plight. He dare not go back to France a traitor. He
could not go back to England, having failed to win the day. The son
built him a dwelling outside the fort; and there this famous courtier
of two great nations, with his noble wife, retired to pass the end of
his days in a wildwood wilderness far enough from the gaudy tinsel of
courts. The fate of both husband and wife is unknown.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING LA TOUR'S POSSESSIONS IN ACADIA]
Charles de La Tour's predictions were soon verified. The Treaty of
St.-Germain-en-Laye, in 1632, gave back all Canada to France; and the
young man's loyalty was rewarded by the French King confirming the
father's English patent to the lands of St. John River, New Brunswick.
Perhaps he expected more. He certainly wanted to be governor of
Acadia, and may have looked for fresh title to Port Royal, which
Biencourt had deeded {65} to him. His ambition was embittered.
Cardinal Richelieu of the Hundred Associates had his own favorites to
look after. Acadia is divided into three provinces. Over all as
governor is Isaac Razilli, chief of the Hundred Associates. La Tour
holds St. John. One St. Denys is given Cape Breton; and Port Royal,
the best province of all, falls to Sieur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, friend
and relative of Richelieu; and when Razilli dies in 1635, Charnisay,
with his strong influence at court, easily secures the dead man's
patents with all land grants attached. Charnisay becomes governor of
Acadia.
For a second time La Tour is thwarted. Things are turning out as his
father had foretold. Who began the border warfare matters little.
Whether Charnisay as lord of all Acadia first ordered La Tour to
surrender St. John, or La Tour, holding his grant from Biencourt to
Port Royal, ordered Charnisay to give up Annapolis Basin, war had
begun,--such border warfare as has its parallel only in the raids of
rival barons in the Middle Ages. Did La Tour's vessels laden with furs
slip out from St. John River across Fundy Bay bound for France? There
lay at Cape Sable and Sable Island Charnisay's freebooters, Charnisay's
wreckers, ready to board the ship or lure her a wreck on Sable Island
reefs by false lights. It is unsafe to accept as facts the charges and
countercharges made by these two enemies; but from independent sources
it seems fairly certain that Charnisay, unknown to Cardinal Richelieu,
was a bit of a freebooter and wrecker; for his men made a regular
business of waylaying English ships from Boston, Dutch ships from New
York, as they passed Sable Island; and Charnisay's name became
cordially hated by the Protestant colonies of New England. La Tour,
being Huguenot, could count on firm friends in Boston.
Countless legends cling to Fundy Bay of the forays between these two.
In 1640 La Tour and his wife, cruising past Annapolis Basin in their
fur ships, rashly entered and attacked Port Royal. Their ship was run
aground by Charnisay's vessels and captured; but the friars persuaded
the victor to set La Tour and his wife free, pending an appeal to
France. France, of {66} course, decided in favor of Charnisay, who was
of royal blood, a relative of Richelieu's, in high favor with the
court. La Tour's patent was revoked and he was ordered to surrender
his fort on the St. John.
[Illustration: CARDINAL RICHELIEU]
In answer, La Tour loaded his cannon, locked the fort gates, and bade
defiance to Charnisay. Charnisay sails across Fundy Bay in June, 1643,
with a fleet of four vessels and five hundred men to bombard the fort.
La Tour was without provisions, though his store ship from France lay
in hiding outside, blocked from entering by Charnisay's fleet. Days
passed. Resistance was hopeless. On one side lay the impenetrable
forest; on the other, Charnisay's fleet. On the night of June 12th, La
Tour and his wife slipped from a little sally port in the dark, ran
along the shore, and, evading spies, succeeded in rowing out to the
store ship. Ebb tide carried them far from the four men-of-war
anchored fast in front of the abandoned fort. Then sails out, the
store ship fled for Boston, where La Tour and his wife appealed for aid.
The Puritans of Boston had qualms of conscience about interfering in
this French quarrel; but they did not forget that Charnisay's wreckers
had stripped their merchant ships come to grief on the reefs of Sable
Island. La Tour gave the Boston merchants a mortgage on all his
belongings at St. John, and in return obtained four vessels, fifty
mariners, ninety-two soldiers, {67} thirty-eight cannon. With this
fleet he swooped down on Fundy Bay in July. Charnisay's vessels lay
before Fort St. John, where the stubborn little garrison still held
out, when La Tour came down on him like an enraged eagle. Charnisay's
fur ships were boarded, scuttled, and sunk, while the commander himself
fled in terror for Port Royal. All sails pressed, La Tour pursued
right into Annapolis Basin, wounding seven of the enemy, killing three,
taking one prisoner. Charnisay's one remaining vessel grounded in the
river. A fight took place near the site of the mill which Poutrincourt
had built long ago, but Charnisay succeeded in gaining the shelter of
Port Royal, where his cannon soon compelled La Tour to fly from
Annapolis Basin. Charnisay found it safer to pass that winter in
France, and La Tour gathered in all the peltry traffic of the bay.
Early in 1644 Charnisay returned and sent a friar to secure the
neutrality of the New Englanders. All summer negotiations dragged on
between Boston and Port Royal, La Tour meanwhile scouring land and sea
unchecked, packing his fort with peltries. Finally, Charnisay promised
to desist from all fur trade along the coast if the New England
colonies would remain neutral; and the colonies promised not to aid La
Tour. La Tour was now outlawed by the French government, and Charnisay
had actually induced New England to promise not to convey either La
Tour or his wife to or from Bay of Fundy in English boats.
La Tour chanced to be absent from his fort in 1645. Like a bird of
prey Charnisay swooped on St. John River; but he had not reckoned on
Madame La Tour--Frances Marie Jacqueline. With the courage and agility
of a trained soldier, she commanded her little garrison of fifty and
returned the raider's cannonade with a fury that sent Charnisay limping
back to Port Royal with splintered decks, twenty mangled corpses
jumbled aft, and a dozen men wounded to the death lying in the hold.
With all the power of France at his back Charnisay had been defeated by
a woman,--the Huguenot wife of an outlaw! He must reduce La Tour or
stand discredited before the world. {68} Furious beyond words, he
hastened to France to prepare an overwhelming armament.
But Madame La Tour was not idle. She, too, hastened across the
Atlantic to solicit aid in London. One can imagine how Charnisay
gnashed his teeth. Here, at last, was his chance. The Boston vessels
were not to convey the La Tours back to Acadia. Like a hawk Charnisay
cruised the sea for the outcoming ship with its fair passenger; but
Madame La Tour had made a cast-iron agreement with the master of the
sailing vessel to bring her direct to Boston. Instead of this, the
vessel cruised the St. Lawrence, trading with the Indians, and so
delayed the aid coming to La Tour; but when Charnisay's searchers came
on board off Sable Island, Madame La Tour was hidden among the freight
in the hold. For the delay she sued the sailing master in Boston and
obtained a judgment of 2000 pounds; and when he failed to pay, had his
cargo seized and sold, and with the proceeds equipped three vessels to
aid her outlawed husband. So the whole of 1646 passed, each side
girding itself for the final fray.
April, 1647, spies brought word to Charnisay that La Tour was absent
from his fort. Waiting not a moment, Charnisay hurried ships,
soldiers, cannon across the bay. Inside La Tour's fort was no
confusion. Madame La Tour had ordered every man to his place. Day and
night for three days the siege lasted, Charnisay's men closing in on
the palisades so near they could bandy words with the fighters on the
galleries inside the walls. Among La Tour's fighters were Swiss
mercenaries--men who fight for the highest pay. Did Charnisay in the
language of the day "grease the fist" of the Swiss sentry, or was it a
case of a boorish fellow refusing to fight under a woman's command?
Legend gives both explanations; but on Easter Sunday morning
Charnisay's men gained entrance by scaling the walls where the Swiss
sentry stood. Madame La Tour rushed her men to an inner fort loopholed
with guns. Afraid of a final defeat that would disgrace him before all
the world, Charnisay called up generous terms if she would surrender.
To save the {69} lives of the men Madame La Tour agreed to honorable
surrender, and the doors were opened. In rushed Charnisay! To his
amazement the woman had only a handful of men. Disgusted with himself
and boiling over with revenge for all these years of enmity, Charnisay
forgot his promise and hanged every soul of the garrison but the
traitor who acted as executioner, compelling Madame La Tour to watch
the execution with a halter round her neck amid the jeers of the
soldiery. Legend says that the experience drove her insane and caused
her death within three weeks. Charnisay was now lord of all Acadia,
with 10,000 pounds worth of Madame La Tour's jewelry transferred to
Port Royal and all La Tour's furs safe in the warehouses of Annapolis
Basin; but he did not long enjoy his triumph. He had the reputation of
treating his Indian servants with great brutality. On the 24th of May,
1650, an Indian was rowing him up the narrows near Port Royal.
Charnisay could not swim. Without apparent cause the boat upset. The
Indian swam ashore. The commander perished. Legend again avers that
the Indian upset the boat to be revenged on Charnisay for some
brutality.
[Illustration: MAP OF ANNAPOLIS BASIN]
La Tour had been wandering from Newfoundland to Boston and Quebec
seeking aid, but a lost cause has few friends, and if La Tour turned
pirate on Boston boats, he probably thought he was justified in paying
off the score of Boston's bargain with Charnisay. Later he turned
trader with the Indians from Hudson Bay, and found friends in Quebec.
Word of his wrongs reached the French court. When Charnisay perished,
La Tour was at last appointed lieutenant governor of Acadia. Widow
{70} Charnisay, left with eight children, all minors, made what
reparation she could to La Tour by giving back the fort on the St.
John, and La Tour, to wipe out the bitter enmity, married the widow of
his enemy in February of 1653.
But this was not the seal of peace on his troubled life. Cromwell was
now ascendant in England, and Major Sedgwick of Boston, in 1654, with a
powerful fleet, captured Port Royal and St. John. Weary of fighting
what seemed to be destiny, La Tour became a British subject, and with
two other Englishmen was granted the whole of Acadia. Ten years later
his English partners bought out his rights, and La Tour died in the
land of his many trials about 1666. A year later the Treaty of Breda
restored Acadia to France.
{71}
CHAPTER V
FROM 1635 TO 1650
Mystics come to Canada--A city built of dreams--First night at
Montreal--Maisonneuve fights raiders--Le Jeune joins the
hunters--Brébeuf goes to Lake Huron--Life at the Huron mission--The
scourge of the Iroquois--The fight at St. Louis--Rageneau's converts
resist--Flight of the Hurons
While Charles de La Tour and Charnisay scoured the Bay of Fundy in
border warfare like buccaneers of the Spanish Main, what was Quebec
doing?
The Hundred Associates were to colonize the country; but fur trading
and farming never go together. One means the end of the other; and the
Hundred Associates shifted the obligation of settling the country by
granting vast estates called seigniories along the St. Lawrence and
leaving to these new lords of the soil the duty of bringing out
habitants. Later they deeded over for an annual rental of beaver skins
the entire fur monopoly to the Habitant Company, made up of the leading
people of New France. So ended all the fine promises of four thousand
colonists.
Years ago Pontgravé had learned that the Indians of the Up-Country did
not care to come down the St. Lawrence farther than Lake St. Peter's,
where Iroquois foe lay in ambush; and the year before Champlain died a
double expedition had set out from Quebec in July: one to build a fort
north of Lake St. Peter's at the entrance to the river with three
mouths,--in other words, to found Three Rivers; the other, under Father
Brébeuf, the Jesuit, and Jean Nicolet, the wood runner, to establish a
mission in the country of the Hurons and to explore the Great Lakes.
In fact, it must never be forgotten that Champlain's ambitions in
laying the foundations of a new nation aimed just as much to establish
a kingdom of heaven on earth as to win a new kingdom for France.
Always, in the minds of the fathers of New France, Church was to be
first; State, second. When Charles de Montmagny, Knight of Malta,
landed in Quebec one June morning in 1636, to succeed Champlain as
governor of New France, he noticed a crucifix planted by the path side
where {72} viceroy and officers clambered up the steep hill to Castle
St. Louis. Instantly Montmagny fell to his knees before the cross in
silent adoration, and his example was followed by all the gay train of
beplumed officers. The Jesuits regarded the episode as a splendid omen
for New France, and set their chapel organ rolling a _Te Deum_ of
praise, while Governor and retinue filed before the altars with bared
heads.
It was in the same spirit that Montreal was founded.
The Jesuits' letters on the Canadian missions were now being read in
France. Religious orders were on fire with missionary ardor. The
Canadian missions became the fashion of the court. Ladies of noble
blood asked no greater privilege than to contribute their fortunes for
missions in Canada. Nuns lay prostrate before altars praying night and
day for the advancement of the heavenly kingdom on the St. Lawrence.
The Jesuits had begun their college in Quebec. The very year that
Champlain had first come to the St. Lawrence there had been born in
Normandy, of noble parentage, a little girl who became a passionate
devotee of Canadian missions. To divert her mind from the calling of a
nun, her father had thrown her into a whirl of gayety from which she
emerged married; but her husband died in a few years, and Madame de la
Peltrie, left a widow at twenty-two, turned again heart and soul to the
scheme of endowing a Canadian mission. Again her father tried to
divert her mind, threatening to cut off her fortune if she did not
marry. An engagement to a young noble, who was as keen a devotee as
herself, quieted her father and averted the loss of her fortune. On
the death of her father the formal union was dissolved, and Madame de
la Peltrie proceeded to the Ursuline Convent of Tours, where the
Jesuits had already chosen a mother superior for the new institution to
be founded at Quebec--Marie of the Incarnation, a woman of some fifty
years, a widow like Madame de la Peltrie, and, like Madame de la
Peltrie, a mystic dreamer of celestial visions and divine communings
and heroic sacrifices. How much of truth, how much of self-delusion,
{73} lay in these dreams of heavenly revelation is not for the outsider
to say. It is as impossible for the practical mind to pronounce
judgment on the mystic as for the mystic to pronounce sentence on the
scientist. Both have their truths, both have their errors; and by
their fruits are they known.
[Illustration: MADAME DE LA PELTRIE (After a picture in the Ursuline
Convent, Quebec)]
May 4th, 1639, Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation
embarked from Dieppe for Canada. In the ship were also another
Ursuline nun, three hospital sisters to found the Hôtel Dieu at Quebec,
Father Vimont, superior of Quebec Jesuits, and two other priests. The
boat was like a chapel. Ship's bell tolled services. Morning prayer
and evensong were chanted from the decks, and the pilgrims firmly
believed that their vows allayed a storm. July 1st they were among the
rocking dories of the Newfoundland fishermen, and then on the 15th the
little sailboat washed and rolled to anchor inshore among the fur
traders under the heights of Tadoussac.
At sight of the somber Saguenay, the silver-flooded St. Lawrence, the
frowning mountains, the far purple hills, the primeval forests through
which the wind rushed with the sound of the sea, the fishing craft
dancing on the tide like cockle boats, the grizzled fur traders bronzed
as the crinkled oak forests where they passed their lives, the tawny,
naked savages agape at these white-skinned women come from afar, the
hearts of the {74} housed-up nuns swelled with emotions strange and
sweet,--the emotions of a new life in a new world. And when they
scrambled over the rope coils aboard a fishing schooner to go on up to
Quebec, and heard the deep-voiced shoutings of the men, and witnessed
the toilers of the deep fighting wind and wave for the harvest of the
sea, did it dawn on the fair sisterhood that God must have workers
_out_ in the strife of the world, as well as workers _shut up_ from the
world inside convent walls? Who knows? . . . Who knows? At
Tadoussac, that morning, to both Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the
Incarnation it must have seemed as if their visions had become real.
And then the cannon of Quebec began to thunder till the echoes rolled
from hill to hill and shook--as the mystics thought--the very
strongholds of hell. Tears streamed down their cheeks at such welcome.
The whole Quebec populace had rallied to the water front, and there
stood Governor Montmagny in velvet cloak with sword at belt waving hat
in welcome. Soldiers and priests cheered till the ramparts rang. As
the nuns put foot to earth once more they fell on their knees and
kissed the soil of Canada. August 1st was fête day in Quebec. The
chapel chimes rang . . . and rang again their gladness. The organ
rolled out its floods of soul-shattering music, and deep-throated chant
of priests invoked God's blessing on the coming of the women to the
mission. So began the Ursuline Convent of Quebec and the Hôtel Dieu of
the hospital sisters; but Montreal was still a howling wilderness
untenanted by man save in midsummer, when the fur traders came to
Champlain's factory and the canoes of the Indians from the Up-Country
danced down the swirling rapids like sea birds on waves.
The letters from the Jesuit missions touched more hearts than those of
the mystic nuns.
In Anjou dwelt a receiver of taxes--Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière,
a stout, practical, God-fearing man with a family, about as far removed
in temperament from the founders of the Ursulines as a character could
well be. Yet he, too, had mystic {75} dreams and heard voices bidding
him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the
practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversière
had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum.
Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he
thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness
where there were no people. Also in Paris dwelt a young priest, Jean
Jacques Olier, who heard the self-same voices uttering the self-same
command. These two men were unknown to each other; yet when they met
by chance in the picture gallery of an old castle, there fell from
their eyes, as it were, scales, and they beheld as in a vision each the
other's soul, and recognized in each fellow-helper and comrade of the
spirit. To all this the practical man cries out "Bosh"! Yet Montreal
is no bosh, but a stately city, and it sprang from the dreams--"fool
dreams," enemies would call them--of these two men, the Sulpician
priest and the Anjou tax collector.
Hour after hour, arm in arm, they walked and talked, the man of prayers
and the man of taxes. People or no people at Montreal, money or no
money, they decided that the inner voice must be obeyed. A Montreal
Society was formed. Six friends joined. What would be equal to
$75,000 was collected. There were to be no profits on this capital.
It was all to be invested to the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Unselfish if you like, foolish they may have been, but not hypocrites.
First of all, they must become Seigneurs of Montreal; but the island of
Montreal had already been granted by the Hundred Associates to one
Lauson. To render the title doubly secure, Dauversière and Olier
obtained deeds to the island from Lauson and from the Hundred
Associates.
Forty-five colonists, part soldiers, part devotees, were then gained as
volunteers; but a veritable soldier of Heaven was desired as commander.
Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, was noted for his heroism in
war and zeal in religion. When other officers returned from battle for
wild revels, Maisonneuve withdrew to play the flute or pass hours in
religious {76} contemplation. His name occurred to both Dauversière
and Olier as fittest for command; but to make doubly sure, they took
lodgings near him, studied his disposition, and then casually told him
of their plans and asked his coöperation. Maisonneuve was in the prime
of life, on the way to high service in the army. His zeal took fire at
thought of founding a Kingdom of God at Montreal; but his father
furiously opposed what must have seemed a mad scheme. Maisonneuve's
answer was the famous promise of Christ: "No man hath left house or
brethren or sister for my sake but he shall receive a hundredfold."
Maisonneuve was warned there would be no earthly reward--no pay--for
his arduous task; but he answered, "I devote my life and future; and I
expect no recompense."
Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, thirty-four years old, who had given herself
to good works from childhood, though she had not yet joined the
cloister, now felt the call to labor in the wilderness. Later, in
1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the
mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions
and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than
introspection of the soul. Dauversière and Olier remained in France.
Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of
the cross, carried the heavenly standard to the wilderness.
It was too late to ascend the St. Lawrence when the ship brought the
crusaders to Quebec in August, 1641; and difficulties harried them from
the outset. Was Montmagny, the Governor, jealous of Maisonneuve; or
did he simply realize the fearful dangers Maisonneuve's people would
run going beyond the protection of Quebec? At all events, he
disapproved this building of a second colony at Montreal, when the
first colony at Quebec could barely gain subsistence. He offered them
the Island of Orleans in exchange for the Island of Montreal, and
warned them of Iroquois raid.
"I have not come to argue," answered Maisonneuve, "but to act. It is
my duty to found a colony at Montreal, and thither I go though every
tree be an Iroquois."
{77} Maisonneuve passed the winter building boats to ascend the St.
Lawrence next spring; and Madame de la Peltrie, having established the
Ursulines at Quebec, now cast in her lot with the Montrealers for two
years.
May 8, 1642, the little flotilla set out from Quebec--a pinnace with
the passengers, a barge with provisions, two long boats propelled by
oars and a sweep. Montmagny and Father Vimont accompanied the
crusaders; and as the boats came within sight of the wooded mountain on
May 17, hymns of praise rose from the pilgrims that must have mingled
strangely on Indian ears with the roar of the angry rapids. One can
easily call up the scene--the mountain, misty with the gathering
shadows of sunset, misty as a veiled bride with the color and bloom of
spring; the boats, moored for the night below St. Helen's Island, where
the sun, blazing behind the half-foliaged trees, paints a path of fire
on the river; the white bark wigwams along shore with the red gleam of
camp fire here and there through the forest; the wilderness world
bathed in a peace as of heaven, as the vesper hymn floats over the
evening air! It is a scene that will never again be enacted in the
history of the world--dreamers dreaming greatly, building a castle of
dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness
barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic
shriek where the crusaders' hymn rose that May night. A great city has
risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff
too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! Another
generation may scoff at our too-much-worldliness, with our dreamless
grind and visionless toil and harder creeds that reject everything
which cannot be computed in the terms of traffic's dollar! Well for us
if the fruit of our creeds remain to attest as much worth as the deeds
of these crusaders!
Early next morning the boats pulled in ashore where Cartier had landed
one hundred years before and Champlain had built his factory thirty
years ago. Maisonneuve was first to spring on land. He dropped to his
knees in prayer. The others as {78} they landed did likewise. Their
hymns floated out on the forest. Madame de la Peltrie, Jeanne Mance,
and the servant, Charlotte Barré, quickly decorated a wildwood altar
with evergreens. Then, with Montmagny the Governor, and Maisonneuve
the soldier, standing on either side, Madame de la Peltrie and Jeanne
Mance and Charlotte Barré, bowed in reverence, with soldiers and
sailors standing at rest unhooded, Father Vimont held the first
religious services at Mont Royal. "You are a grain of mustard seed,"
he said, "and you shall grow till your branches overshadow the earth."
Maisonneuve cut the first tree for the fort; and a hundred legends
might be told of the little colony's pioneer trials. Once a flood
threatened the existence of the fort. A cross was erected to stay the
waters and a vow made if Heaven would save the fort a cross should be
carried and placed on the summit of the mountain. The river abated,
and Maisonneuve climbed the steep mountain, staggering under the weight
of an enormous cross, and planted it at the highest point. Here, in
the presence of all, mass was held, and it became a regular pilgrimage
from the fort up the mountain to the cross.
In 1743 came Louis d'Ailleboust and his wife, both zealously bound by
the same vows as devotees, bringing word of more funds for Ville Marie,
as Montreal was called. Montmagny's warning of Iroquois proved all too
true. Within a year, in June, 1743, six workmen were beset in the
fields, only one escaping. Because his mission was to convert the
Indians, Maisonneuve had been ever reluctant to meet the Iroquois in
open war, preferring to retreat within the fort when the dog Pilot and
her litter barked loud warning that Indians were hiding in the woods.
Any one who knows the Indian character will realize how clemency would
be mistaken for cowardice. Even Maisonneuve's soldiers began to doubt
him.
"My lord, my lord," they urged, "are the enemy never to get a sight of
you? Are we never to face the foe?"
Maisonneuve's answer was in March, 1644, when ambushed hostiles were
detected stealing on the fort.
{79} "Follow me," he ordered thirty men, leaving D'Ailleboust in
command of the fort.
Near the place now known as Place d'Armes the little band was greeted
by the eldritch scream of eighty painted Iroquois. Shots fell thick
and fast. The Iroquois dashed to rescue their wounded, and a young
chief, recognizing Maisonneuve as the leader of the white men, made a
rush for the honor of capturing the French commander alive.
Maisonneuve had put himself between his retreating men and the
advancing warriors. Firing, he would retreat a pace, then fire again,
keeping his face to the foe. His men succeeded in rushing up the
hillock, then made for the gates in a wild stampede. Maisonneuve was
backing away, a pistol in each hand. The Iroquois circled from tree to
tree, near and nearer, and like a wildwood creature of prey was
watching his chance to spring, when the Frenchman fired. The pistol
missed. Dodging, the Indian leaped. Maisonneuve discharged the other
pistol. The Iroquois fell dead, and while warriors rescued the body,
Maisonneuve gained the fort gates. This was only one of countless
frays when the dog Pilot with her puppies sounded the alarm of prowlers
in the woods.
What were the letters, what the adventures described by the Jesuits,
that aroused such zeal and inspired such heroism? It would require
many volumes to record the adventures of the Jesuits in Canada, and a
long list to include all their heroes martyred for the faith. Only a
few of the most prominent episodes in the Jesuits' adventures can be
given here.
When Pierre le Jeune reached Quebec after the victory of the Kirke
brothers, he found only the charred remains of a mission on the old
site of Cartier's winter quarters down on the St. Charles. Of houses,
only the gray-stone cottage of Madame Hebert had been left standing.
Here Le Jeune was welcomed and housed till the little mission could be
rebuilt. At first it consisted of only mud-plastered log cabins,
thatch-roofed, divided into four rooms, with garret and cellar. One
room decorated with saints' images and pictures served as chapel;
another, as {80} kitchen; a third, as lodgings; the fourth, as
refectory. In this humble abode six Jesuit priests and two lay
brothers passed the winter after the war. The roof leaked like a
sieve. The snow piled high almost as the top of the door. Le Jeune's
first care was to obtain pupils. These consisted of an Indian boy and
a negro lad left by the English. Meals of porridge given free
attracted more Indian pupils; but Le Jeune's greatest difficulty was to
learn the Indian language. Hearing that a renegade Indian named
Pierre, who had served the French as interpreter, lodged with some
Algonquins camped below Cape Diamond, Le Jeune tramped up the river
bank, along what is now the Lower Road, where he found the Indians
wigwamming, and by the bribe of free food obtained Pierre. Pierre was
at best a tricky scoundrel, who considered it a joke to give Le Jeune
the wrong word for some religious precept, gorged himself on the
missionaries' food, stole their communion wine, and ran off at Lent to
escape fasting.
[Illustration: PIERRE LE JEUNE]
When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more
priests joined the Jesuits' mission. Among them was the lion-hearted
giant, Brébeuf.
If Champlain's bush lopers could join bands of wandering Indians for
the extension of French dominion, surely the Jesuits could dare as
perilous a life "for the greater glory of God,"--as their vows declared.
{81} Le Jeune joined a band of wandering Montaignais, Pierre, the
rascal, tapping the keg of sacramental wine the first night out, and
turning the whole camp into a drunken bedlam, till his own brother
sobered him with a kettle of hot water flung full in the face. That
night the priest slept apart from the camp in the woods. By the time
the hunters reached the forest borderland between Quebec and New
Brunswick, their number had increased to forty-five. By Christmas time
game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not
yet driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters
halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as
a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian
medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had
refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp
was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas
was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth. In vain
the medicine man had pounded his tom-tom and shouted at the Indian gods
from the top of the wigwams and offered sacrifice of animals to be
slain. No game had come as the result of the medicine man's invocation.
Le Jeune gathered the people about him and through Pierre, the
interpreter, bade them try the white man's God. In the largest of the
wigwams a little altar was fitted up. Then the Indians repeated this
prayer after Le Jeune:
Jesus, Son of the Almighty . . . who died for us . . . who promised
that if we ask anything in Thy name, Thou wilt do it--I pray Thee with
all my heart, give food to these people . . . this people promises Thee
faithfully they will trust Thee entirely and obey Thee with all their
heart! My Lord, hear my prayer! I present Thee my life for this
people, most willing to die that they may live and know Thee.
"Take that back," grunted the chief. "We love you! We don't want you
to die."
"I only want to show that I am your friend," answered the priest.
Le Jeune then commanded them to go forth to the hunt, full of faith
that God would give them food.
{82} But alas for the poor father's hopes and the childlike Indian vow!
True, they found abundance of food,--a beaver dam full of beaver, a
moose, a porcupine taken by the Indian medicine man. Father Le Jeune,
with radiant face, met the hunters returning laden with game.
"We must thank your God for this," said the Indian chief, throwing down
his load.
"Bah," says Pierre, "you 'd have found it anyway."
"This is not the time to talk," sneered the medicine man. "Let the
hungry people eat."
And by the time the Indians had gorged themselves with ample measure
for their long fast, they were torpid with sleep. The sad priest was
fain to wander out under the stars. There, in the snow-padded silences
of the white-limned forest, far from the joyous peal of Christmas
bells, he knelt alone and worshiped God.
For five months he wandered with the Montaignais, and now in April the
hunters turned toward Quebec with their furs. At three in the morning
Le Jeune knocked on the door of the mission house at Quebec, and was
welcomed home by the priests. The pilgrimage had taught him what the
Jesuits have always held--the way to power with a people is through the
education of the children. "Give me a child for the first seven years
of its life," said a famous educator, "and I care not what you do with
him the rest of his years." Missions and schools must be established
among the tribes of Hurons and Iroquois.
Consequently, when Champlain sent his soldiers in 1634 to build a fort
at Three Rivers, they were accompanied by three Jesuits, chief of whom
was Jean de Brébeuf, lion-hearted, bound for the land of the Hurons.
The chapel bells of Quebec rang and rang again in honor of the new
Jesuit mission--morning, noon, and night they chimed in airy music,
calling men's thoughts to God, just as you may hear the chimes to-day;
and the ramparts below Quebec thundered and reëchoed with salvos of
cannon when the missionaries set out for Three Rivers.
{83} At Three Rivers waited the Indians of the Up-Country. The Jesuits
embarked with them for the land of the Hurons. The priests traveled
barefoot to avoid injuring the frail bark of the canoes. Barely had
farewell cheers faded on the river, when the canoes spread apart. With
pieces of buckskin hoisted on fishing rods for sail, and a flipping of
paddles as naked, bronzed arms set the pace, the voyage had begun.
Heroism is easy with chapel bells ringing; it is another matter,
barefoot and with sleeves rolled up.
It was the same trail that Champlain had followed up the Ottawa. Only
Champlain was assured of good treatment, for he had promised to fight
in the Indian wars; but the Jesuits were dependent on the caprice of
their conductors. Any one, who, from experience in the wilds, has
learned how the term "tenderfoot" came to be applied, will realize the
hardships endured--and endured without self-pity--by these scholarly
men of immured life. The rocks of the portage cut their naked feet.
The Indians refused to carry their packs overland and flung bundles of
clothing and food into the water. In fair weather the voyageurs slept
on the sand under the overturned canoes; in rain a wigwam was raised,
and into the close confines of this tent crowded men, women, and
children, for the most part naked, and with less idea of decency than a
domestic dog. Each night, as the boats were beached, the priests
wandered off into the woods to hold their prayers in privacy. Soon the
canoes were so far apart the different boats did not camp together, and
the white men were scattered alone among the savages. Robberies
increased till, when Brébeuf reached Georgian Bay, thirty days from
leaving Three Rivers, he had little left but the bundles he had carried
for himself.
Brébeuf had been to the Huron country before with Etienne Brulé,
Champlain's pathfinder; but of the first mission no record exists.
Brébeuf found that Brulé had been murdered near the modern Penetang;
and the Indians had scarcely brought the priest's canoe ashore, when
they bolted through the woods, leaving him to follow as best he could.
{84} Take a map of modern Ontario. Draw a circle round Georgian Bay,
running from Muskoka through Lake Simcoe and up into Manitoulin Island.
Here, on the very stamping ground of the summer tourist, was the scene
of the Jesuits' Huron mission.
[Illustration: GEORGIAN BAY]
When Brébeuf's tall frame emerged from the woods, the whole village of
Ihonateria dashed out to welcome him, shouting, "He has come! He has
come again! Behold, the Black Robe has come again!" Young braves
willingly ran back through the forest for the baggage, which the
voyageurs had thrown aside; and at one o'clock in the morning, as the
messengers came through the moonlit forest, Brébeuf took up his abode
in the house of the leading chief. Later came Fathers Davost and
Daniel. By October the Indians had built the missionaries their
wigwam, a bark-covered house of logs, thirty-six feet long, divided
into three rooms, reception room, living quarters, church. In the
entrance hall assembled the Indians, squatting on the floor, gazing in
astonishment at the religious pictures on the wall, and, above all, at
the clock.
{85} "What does he say?" they would ask, listening solemnly to the
ticking.
"He says 'Hang on the kettle,'" Brébeuf would answer as the clock
struck twelve, and the whole conclave would be given a simple meal of
corn porridge; but at four the clock sang a different song.
"It says 'Get up and go home,'" Brébeuf would explain, and the Indians
would file out, knowing well that the Black Robes were to engage in
prayer.
No holiday in the wildwoods was the Jesuit mission. Chapel bell called
to service at four in the morning. Eight was the breakfast hour. The
morning was passed teaching, preaching, visiting. At two o'clock was
dinner, when a chapter of the Bible was read. After four the Indians
were dismissed, and the missionaries met to compare notes and plan the
next day's campaign.
By 1645, five mission houses had been established, with Ste. Marie on
the Wye, east of Midland, as the central house. Near Lake Simcoe were
two missions,--St. Jean Ba'tiste and St. Joseph; near Penetang, St.
Louis, and St. Ignace. Westward of Ste. Marie on the Wye were half a
dozen irregular missions among the Tobacco Indians. Each of the five
regular missions boasted palisaded inclosures, a chapel of log slabs
with bell and spire, though the latter might be only a high wooden
cross. At Ste. Marie, the central station, were lodgings for sixty
people, a hospital, kitchen garden, with cattle, pigs, and poultry. At
various times soldiers had been sent up by the Quebec governors, till
some thirty or forty were housed at Ste. Marie. In all were eighteen
priests, four lay brothers, seven white servants, and twenty-three
volunteers, unpaid helpers--donnés, they were called, young men
ardently religious, learning woodlore and the Indian language among the
Jesuits, as well as exploring whenever it was possible for them to
accompany the Indians. Among the volunteers was one Chouart
Groseillers, who, if he did not accompany Father Jogues on a preaching
tour to the tribes of Lake Superior, had at least gone as far as the
Sault and learned of the vast unexplored world beyond Lake Superior.
{86} Food, as always, played a large part in winning the soul of the
redskin. On church fête days as many as three thousand people were fed
and lodged at Ste. Marie. That the priests suffered many trials among
the unreasonable savages need not be told. When it rained too heavily
they were accused of ruining the crops by praying for too much rain;
when there was drouth they were blamed for not arranging this matter
with their God; and when the scourge of smallpox raged through the
Huron villages, devastating the wigwams so that the timber wolves
wandered unmolested among the dead, it was easy for the humpback
sorcerer to ascribe the pestilence also to the influence of the Black
Robes. Once their houses were set on fire. Again and again their
lives were threatened. Often after tramping twenty miles through the
sleet-soaked, snow-drifted spring forests, arriving at an Indian
village foredone and exhausted, the Jesuit was met with no better
welcome than a wigwam flap closed against his entrance, or a rabble of
impish children hooting and jeering him as he sought shelter from house
to house.
But an influence was at work on the borders of the St. Lawrence that
yearly rendered the Hurons more tractable. From raiding the
settlements of the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois were sweeping in a
scourge more deadly than smallpox up the Ottawa to the very forests of
Georgian Bay. The Hurons no longer dared to go down to Quebec in
swarming canoes. Only a few picked warriors--perhaps two hundred and
fifty--would venture so near the Iroquois fighting ground.
One winter night, as the priests sat round their hearth fire watching
the mournful shadows cast by the blazing logs on the rude walls,
Brébeuf, the soldier, lion-hearted, the fearless, told in a low, dreamy
voice of a vision that had come,--the vision of a huge fiery cross
rising slowly out of the forest and moving across the face of the sky
towards the Huron country. It seemed to come from the land of the
Iroquois. Was the priest's vision a dream, or his own intuition deeper
than reason, assuming dire form, portending a universal fear? Who can
tell? I can but repeat the story as it is told in their annals.
{87} "How large was the cross?" asked the other priests. Brébeuf gazes
long in the fire.
"Large enough to crucify us all," he answers.
And, as he had dreamed, fell the blow.
St. Joseph, of the Lake Simcoe region, was situated a day's travel from
the main fortified mission of Ste. Marie.
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