A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. V
by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas · English · Gutenberg #34080 · 780,023 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. V
Author: Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas
Release date: October 16, 2010 [eBook #34080]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE BRITISH COLONIES, VOL. V ***
Produced by Ron Swanson
HISTORY OF CANADA
PART I (NEW FRANCE)
_C. P. LUCAS_
HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE BRITISH COLONIES VOL. V
CANADA--PART I HISTORICAL
BY
C. P. LUCAS, C.B.
OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD AND THE COLONIAL OFFICE
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MDCCCCI
OXFORD
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAP. I. EUROPEAN DISCOVERERS IN NORTH AMERICA TO THE END OF
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAP. II. SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN AND THE FOUNDING OF QUEBEC . . . . 35
CHAP. III. THE SETTLEMENT OF CANADA AND THE FIVE NATION INDIANS 79
CHAP. IV. FRENCH AND ENGLISH DOWN TO THE PEACE OF UTRECHT . . 123
CHAP. V. THE MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA . . . . . . . . . . . 147
CHAP. VI. ACADIA AND HUDSON BAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
CHAP. VII. LOUISBOURG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
CHAP. VIII. THE PRELUDE TO THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR . . . . . . . . 216
CHAP. IX. THE CONQUEST OF CANADA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
CHAP. X. THE CONQUEST OF CANADA (_continued_) . . . . . . . . 289
CHAP. XI. GENERAL SUMMARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
APPENDIX I. LIST OF FRENCH GOVERNORS OF CANADA . . . . . . . . 350
APPENDIX II. DATES OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF
CANADA DOWN TO 1763 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
LIST OF MAPS
1. Map of the French and English possessions in North America in
the middle of the eighteenth century
2. Map of New England, New York, and Central Canada, showing the
waterways
3. Map of Louisbourg
4. Map of Quebec
[Illustration: Map of the French and English Possessions in NORTH
AMERICA in the Middle of the 18th Century]
{1}
HISTORY OF CANADA
CHAPTER I
EUROPEAN DISCOVERERS IN NORTH AMERICA TO THE END OF THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
[Sidenote: _The British possessions in North America._]
The British possessions in North America consist of Newfoundland and
the Dominion of Canada. Under the Government of Newfoundland is a
section of the mainland coast which forms part of Labrador, extending
from the straits of Belle Isle on the south to Cape Chudleigh on the
north.
The area of these possessions, together with the date and mode of
their acquisition, is as follows:--
_Name._ _How acquired._ _Date._ _Area in square miles._
Newfoundland Settlement 1583-1623 40,200
and Labrador 120,000
Canada Cession [Quebec] 1763 3,653,946
[Sidenote: _British possessions in North America and West Indies
contrasted._]
In the Introduction to a previous volume,[1] it was pointed out that
all the British possessions in the New World have one common feature;
viz. that they have been, in the main, fields of European settlement,
and not merely trading stations or conquered dependencies; but that,
in other respects--in climate, in geography, and in what may be
called the strata of colonization--the West Indian and North American
provinces of the Empire stand at opposite poles to each other. It may
be added that, in North America, European colonization was later in
time and slower in development than {2} in the central and southern
parts of the continent; and, in order to understand why this was the
case, some reference must be made to the geography of North America,
more especially in its relation to Europe, and also to its first
explorers, their motives, and their methods.
[Footnote 1: Vol. ii, _West Indies_, pp. 3, 4.]
[Sidenote: _Geographical outline of America._]
The Old World lies west and east. In the New World the line of length
is from north to south. The geographical outline of America, as
compared with that of Europe and Asia, is very simple. There is a
long stretch of continent, with a continuous backbone of mountains,
running from the far north to the far south. The mountains line the
western coast; on the eastern side are great plains, great rivers,
broken shores, and islands. Midway in the line of length, where the
Gulf of Mexico runs into the land, and where, further south, the
Isthmus of Darien holds together North and South America by a narrow
link, the semicircle of West Indian islands stand out as
stepping-stones in the ocean for wayfarers from the old continent to
the new.
[Sidenote: _North and South America._]
The two divisions of the American continent are curiously alike. They
have each two great river-basins on the eastern side. The basin of
the St. Lawrence is roughly parallel to that of the Amazon; the basin
of the Mississippi to that of La Plata. The North American coast,
however, between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and that of the
Mississippi, is more varied and broken, more easy of access, than the
South American shores between the Amazon and La Plata. On the other
hand, South America has an attractive and accessible northern coast,
in strong contrast to the icebound Arctic regions; and the Gulf of
Venezuela, the delta of the Orinoco, and the rivers of Guiana, have
called in traders and settlers from beyond the seas.
[Sidenote: _South America colonized from both sides, North America
only from the eastern side._]
The history of colonization in North America has been, in the main,
one of movement from east to west. In South America, on the other
hand, the western side played almost from the first at least as
important a part as the eastern. {3} The story of Peru and its Inca
rulers shows that in old times, in South America, there was a
civilization to be found upon the western side of the Andes, and the
shores of the Pacific Ocean. European explorers penetrated into and
crossed the continent rather from the north and west than from the
east; and Spanish colonization on the Pacific coast was, outwardly at
least, more imposing and effective than Portuguese colonization on
the Atlantic seaboard. The great mass of land on the earth's surface
is in the northern hemisphere; and in the extreme north the shores of
the Old and New Worlds are closest to each other. Here, where the
Arctic Sea narrows into the Behring Straits, it is easier to reach
America from the west than from the east, from Asia than from Europe;
but to pass from the extremity of one continent to the extremity of
another is of little avail for making history; and the history of
North America has been made from the opposite side, which lies over
against Europe, where the shores are indented by plenteous bays and
estuaries, and where there are great waterways leading into the heart
of the interior.
[Sidenote: _The rivers of North America._]
[Sidenote: _English colonization in North America._]
The main outlets of North America are, as has been said, the St.
Lawrence and the Mississippi; while, on the long stretch of coast
between them, the most important river is the Hudson, whose valley is
a direct and comparatively easy highroad from the Atlantic to Lake
Champlain and the St. Lawrence basin; and here it may be noticed
that, though a Bristol ship first discovered North America, and
though, from the time of Ralegh onwards, North America became the
main scene of British colonization, the English allowed other nations
to secure the keys of the continent, and ran the risk of being cut
off from the interior. The French forestalled them on the St.
Lawrence, and later took possession of the mouth of the Mississippi.
The Dutch planted themselves on the Hudson between New England and
the southern colonies, and New York, the present chief city of
English-speaking America, was once New Amsterdam. Of all {4}
colonizing nations the English have perhaps been the least scientific
in their methods; and in no part of the world were their mistakes
greater than in North America, where their success was eventually
most complete. There was, however, one principle in colonization to
which they instinctively and consistently held. While they often
neglected to safeguard the obvious means of access into new-found
countries, and, as compared with other nations, made comparatively
little use of the great rivers in any part of the world, they laid
hold on coasts, peninsulas, and islands, and kept their population
more or less concentrated near to the sea. Thus, when the time of
struggle came, they could be supported from home, and were stronger
at given points than their more scientific rivals. If the French laid
their plans to keep in their own hands the Mississippi, the Ohio, and
the St. Lawrence, and thereby to shut off the colonies of the
Atlantic seaboard from the continent behind, those colonies had the
advantage of close contact with the sea, of comparatively continuous
settlement, and of yearly growing power to break through the weak and
unduly extended line with which the competing race tried to hem them
in.
But this contest between French and English, based though it was on
geographical position, belongs to the Middle Ages of European
colonization in America: let us look a little further back, and see
how the Old and the New Worlds first came into touch with each other.
[Sidenote: _Bacon on the discovery of North America._]
In his history of King Henry VII, Bacon refers to the 'memorable
accident' of the Cabots' great discovery, in the following
passage:--'There was one Sebastian Gabato, a Venetian living in
Bristow, a man seen and expert in cosmography and navigation. This
man, seeing the success and emulating perhaps the enterprise of
Christopherus Columbus in that fortunate discovery towards the
south-west, which had been by him made some six years before,
conceited with himself that lands might likewise be discovered
towards {5} the north-west. And surely it may be he had more firm and
pregnant conjectures of it than Columbus had of his at the first. For
the two great islands of the Old and New World, being in the shape
and making of them broad towards the north and pointed towards the
south, it is likely that the discovery first began where the lands
did nearest meet. And there had been before that time a discovery of
some lands which they took to be islands, and were indeed the
continent of America towards the north-west.'[2] Bacon goes on to
surmise that Columbus had knowledge of this prior discovery, and was
guided by it in forming his own conjectures as to the existence of
land in the far west; and it is at least not unlikely that, when he
visited Iceland in 1477, he would have heard tales of the Norsemen's
voyages to America.[3]
[Footnote 2: Spedding's edition of Bacon's works, 1870, vol. vi, p.
196.]
[Footnote 3: For this visit, see Washington Irving's _Life and
Voyages of Columbus_, bk. i, ch. vi.]
[Sidenote: _Pre-Columbian explorations._]
It would be out of place in this book to make more than a passing
reference to the much-vexed question, how far the New World was known
to Europeans before the days of Columbus and the Cabots. Indeed, if
all the stories on the subject were proved, the fact would yet remain
that, for all practical purposes, America was first revealed to the
nations of Europe, when Columbus took his way across the Atlantic. It
was likely that, when his discovery had been made, men would rise up
to assert that it was not so great and not so new as had been at
first imagined. The French claimed priority for a countryman of their
own;[4] stories of Welsh and Irish settlement in America passed into
circulation; the romance of the brothers Zeni was published, a tale
of supposed Venetian adventure in the fourteenth century to the
islands of the far north; and it was contended, more prosaically and
with greater show of reason, that Basque fishermen had frequented {6}
the banks of Newfoundland, before that island was discovered for
England and thereby earned its present name.
[Footnote 4: Cousin of Dieppe, who claimed to have discovered America
in 1488, four years before Columbus reached the West Indies.]
[Sidenote: _Voyages of the Norsemen._]
The story of the Norsemen's voyages has a sounder foundation than any
other of these early traditions and tales. Iceland is nearer to
Greenland than to Norway: it has been abundantly proved that colonies
were established and fully organized in Greenland in the Middle Ages;
and it seems on the face of it unlikely that the enterprise and
adventure of the seafaring sons of the north would have stopped short
at this point, instead of carrying them on to the mainland of
America.
[Sidenote: _Their alleged discovery of North America._]
The Norse are said to have come to Iceland about 875 A.D., where
Christian Irish had already preceded them; and, in the following
year, rocks far to the west were sighted by Gunnbiorn. A century
later, in 984, Eric the Red came back from a visit to Gunnbiorn's
land, calling it by the attractive name of Greenland. About 986,
Bjarni Herjulfson, sailing from Iceland to Greenland, sighted land to
the south-west; and, a few years later, about the year 1000, Leif,
the son of Eric, who had brought the Christian religion to Greenland,
sailed in search of the south-western land which Bjarni had seen. The
record of his voyage claims to be the record of the discovery of
America. He found the rocky barren shores of Labrador and
Newfoundland, and called them from their appearance Helluland, or
'slateland.' He passed on to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and to
Nova Scotia, calling it Markland, or the 'land of woods.' Then
sailing still further south, he came to a land where vines grew wild,
and which he called Vinland. This last was, it would seem, the New
England coast, between Boston and New York; and here in after times,
for a like reason, English settlers gave the name of Martha's or
Martin's Vineyard to an island, which lies close to the shore south
of Cape Cod.[5] In Vinland, it is stated, a Norse colony was {7}
founded a few years after Leif's visit; and trade--mainly a timber
trade--was carried on with Greenland down to the year 1347, after
which all is a blank.
[Footnote 5: A little further to the south on the coast of New
Jersey, or Maryland, Verrazano 'saw in this country many vines
growing naturally' (Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 360, 1810 ed.).]
No authentic inscriptions or remains, indicating Scandinavian
discovery or settlement in America, have, it is said, been found
anywhere outside Greenland, except at one point in the very far
north;[6] and in their absence these northern tales cannot be
absolutely verified. It can only be said that, in all probability,
America was known to the Northmen in the Middle Ages, but that what
happened in these dark days in the extreme north of Europe and the
extreme north of America has no direct bearing upon the history of
European colonization.
[Footnote 6: See Justin Winsor's _Narrative and Critical History of
America_, (vol. i, chap. ii) on 'Pre-Columbian Explorations.' The
writer says, 'Nowhere in America, except on an island on the east
shore of Baffin's Bay, has any authentic runic inscription been found
outside of Greenland.' Reference should be made to the first chapter
of Mr. Raymond Beazley's _John and Sebastian Cabot_ ('Builders of
Greater Britain' series, 1898), in which the dates and particulars of
the Norse discovery of America, as given above, are somewhat
modified.]
[Sidenote: _The way to the East._]
At the time when modern history opens, there were two parts of the
world which were--to use the Greek philosopher's phrase--'ends in
themselves.' One was Europe or rather Southern Europe, the other was
the East Indies; and the great problem was to find the best and
shortest way from the one point to the other.
[Sidenote: _Africa and America places on the road._]
The overland trade routes through Syria and Egypt--by which Genoa,
Venice, and the other city states of the Middle Ages had grown
rich--had fallen in the main under Moslem control; and, accordingly,
the growing nations of Europe began to take to the open sea. On the
ocean, India can be reached from Europe either by going east or by
going west. In the former case Africa comes in the way, in the latter
America; and the position of these {8} two continents in the modern
history of the world is, in their earliest stage, that of having been
places on the road, not final goals.
The Portuguese tried the way by Africa and succeeded. Vasco de Gama
rounded the Cape, sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, and crossed
to India. The Spaniards set sail in the opposite direction, and,
failing in their original design, found instead a New World.
Let us suppose that the conditions had been reversed, that Southern
Africa, when reached, had proved as attractive as the West Indies;
that its shores had been fertile and easy of access; that its rivers
had been navigable, and that its turning-point had been as distant as
Cape Horn; that, on the contrary, Columbus had discovered a channel
through America, where he sought for it at the Isthmus of Darien, had
found the American coasts and islands as little inviting as Africa,
and behind them an expanse of sea no wider than the Indian Ocean. In
that case America would have remained the Dark Continent, to be
passed by, as Africa was passed by, on the way to the East; and
hinging on this one central fact, that the Indies were the goal of
discovery, the whole history of colonization would have been changed.
As it was, the Spaniards, in the first place, found their way barred
by America; and, in the second place, found America too good to be
passed by, even if a thoroughfare had been found. Thus they assumed
that they had really reached the Indies on their furthest side; and,
by the time that the mistake had been finally cleared up, the riches
and wonders of the New World had given it a position and standing of
its own, over and above all considerations respecting the best way to
the East.
America then was discovered by being taken on the way to some other
part of the world; it could not be passed by like Africa; and it was
more attractive than Africa. Thus it was early colonized, while the
great mass of the African {9} continent was left, almost down to our
own day, unexplored and unknown.
[Sidenote: _Reasons why the discovery and settlement of North America
was later than that of Central and South America._]
This statement, however, only holds true of that part of America
which the Spaniards made their own; and the further question
arises--Why was the discovery and settlement of North America a much
slower process than the Spanish conquest and colonization of Central
America and the West Indies? The north of Newfoundland is in the same
latitude as the south of England; the mouth of the St. Lawrence lies
directly over against the ports of Brittany; a line drawn due east
from New York would almost pass through Madrid: therefore it seems as
though sailors going westward from Europe would naturally make their
way in the first instance to the North American coast; and, as a
matter of fact, Cabot probably sighted the shores of Newfoundland,
Nova Scotia, or Labrador before Columbus set foot upon the mainland
of South America.
[Sidenote: _Spain and Portugal the natural centres for Western
discovery._]
[Sidenote: _The Spaniards went to the south-west._]
There are, however, ample historical and geographical reasons for the
fact that, at the beginning of modern history, the stream of European
discovery and colonization took a south-westerly rather than a
westerly direction. The main course of European civilization has on
the whole been from south-east to north-west. Its centre gradually
shifted from Asia Minor and Phoenicia to Greece, from Greece to Rome,
and finally from the shores of the Mediterranean to those of the
Atlantic. The peninsula of Spain and Portugal stands half-way between
the inner and the outer sea, and accordingly geography marked out
this country to be the birthplace of the new and wider history of the
world. Further, at the time when modern history begins, the Spaniards
and Portuguese were better trained, more consolidated, more nearly
come to their prime, more full of expansive force than the peoples of
Northern Europe; so that their history combined with their
geographical position to place them in {10} the front rank among the
movers of the world. But Spain and Portugal look south-west: both
countries are hot, sunny lands, and, while adventurers to the unknown
would in any case be more attracted to regions where they would
expect light and heat and tropical growth and colour, than to the
bare, bleak stretches of the north, most of all would a southern race
set out to find a new world in a southerly or south-westerly
direction. Again, as has been seen, the early explorers were seeking
for a sea-road to the Indies; and, as the tales of the Indies were
glowing tales of glowing lands, men were more likely at first to
start in search of them by way of the Equator than by way of the
Pole.
And they had guidance in their course. The Canaries, Madeira, and the
Azores, lying away in the ocean to the south-west, were the
half-mythical goals of ancient navigation. The Spaniards would
naturally make for them in the first instance, and so far help
themselves on their westward way. Wind and tide would prescribe the
same line of discovery. The way to the West Indies is made easy by
the north-easterly trade winds, whereas the passage to North America
is in the teeth of the prevailing wind from the west. Those who take
ship from Europe to North America meet the opposing force of the Gulf
Stream; voyagers to the south-west, on the contrary, are borne by the
Equatorial Current from the African coast to the Caribbean Sea.
[Sidenote: _The West Indies more attractive than North America._]
Easier to reach than North America, the West Indies and Central
America were also more attractive when reached. The Spaniards found
riches beyond their hopes, pearls in the sea, gold and silver in the
land, and a race of natives who could be forced to fish for the one
and to mine for the other. When they had discovered the New World,
there was every inducement to make them forthwith conquer and
colonize in countries where living promised to be more luxurious than
in their own land. Adventurers to North America, on the contrary,
found greater cold than they had {11} left behind them in the same
latitudes in Europe, desolate shores, little trace of precious metal,
and natives whom it was dangerous to offend and impossible to
enslave. In the far north the cod fisheries were discovered, and furs
were to be obtained by barter from the North American Indians; but
such trade was not likely to lead to permanent settlement in the near
future. Its natural outcome was not the founding of colonies, the
building of cities, and the subjugation of continents, but, at the
most, repeated visits in the summer time to the Newfoundland banks,
or spasmodic excursions up the course of the St. Lawrence. Thus, for
a century after Columbus first sailed to the west, while Central and
South America became organized into a collection of Spanish
provinces, the extreme north was left to Basque, Breton, and English
fishermen; and the coast between the St. Lawrence and the
Mississippi, where the English race was eventually to make its
greatest effort and achieve its greatest success--this, the present
territory of the United States, was, with the exception of Florida,
little visited and scarcely known.
[Sidenote: _Effect of finding mineral wealth in Central America._]
The discovery of minerals in a district brings about dense population
and a hurried settlement. Men come to fisheries or hunting-grounds at
stated times, and leave to come again. The progress of agricultural
colonization, if steady and continuous, is usually very slow. Thus,
where Central America gave gold and silver, there adventurers from
Europe hurried in and stayed. The fisheries of Newfoundland saw men
come and go; the sea was there the attraction, not the land. The
agricultural resources of Virginia and New England were left
undeveloped by Europeans, until the time came when business-like
companies were formed by men who could afford to wait, and when
enthusiasts went over the Atlantic not so much to make money as to
live patiently and in the fear of God.
[Sidenote: _The North-West Passage._]
But, though the sixteenth century passed away before men's eyes,
which were dazzled with the splendour of the {12} tropics, had given
more than passing glances to the sober landscape of North America,
discoverers from Cabot onwards were not idle; and from the first, the
ever powerful hope of finding a new road to the Indies took
adventurers to the north-west in spite of cold and wind and tide.
Because North America was unattractive in itself, therefore men seem
to have imagined that it must be on the way to something better; and
also, because it was unattractive in itself, they did not wait to see
what could be made out of it, but kept perpetually pushing on to a
further goal. They argued, as Bacon shows in the passage already
quoted, and argued rightly, that in the north the Old and New Worlds
were nearest together, and that here therefore was the point at which
to cross from one to the other. They found sea channels evidently
leading towards the west; they saw the great river of Canada[7] come
widening down from the same quarter; and thus, long after the quest
of the Indies had in Central America been swallowed up in the riches
found on the way, in North America it remained the one great object
of the men who went out from Europe, and of the Kings who sent them
out.
[Footnote 7: The idea that there was a way to the Indies by the St.
Lawrence long continued. Thus Lescarbot writes (_Nova Francia_,
Erondelle's translation, 1609, chap. xiii, p. 87) of the great river
of Canada as 'taking her beginning from one of the lakes which do
meet at the stream of her course (and so I think), so that it hath
two courses, the one from the east towards France, the other from the
west towards the south sea.']
As the first discoverer, Cabot, set sail to find the passage to
Cathay, 'having great desire to traffic for the spices as the
Portingals did,'[8] so all who came after during the century of
exploration kept the same end firmly in view. Francis I of France
dispatched Verrazano to find the passage to the East; Cartier, the
Breton sailor, came back from the St. Lawrence with tales which
savoured of the Indies, of 'a river that goeth south-west, from
whence there is a whole {13} month's sailing to go to a certain land
where there is neither ice nor snow seen'[9]--of a 'country of
Saguenay, in which are infinite rubies, gold and other
riches'[10]--of 'a land where cinnamon and cloves are gathered';[11]
and his third voyage was, in his King's words, 'to the lands of
Canada and Hochelaga, which form the extremity of Asia towards the
west.'[12] Frobisher's voyage in 1576 led to the formation of a
company of Cathay. As early as 1527, Master Robert Thorne wrote 'an
information of the parts of the world' discovered by the Spaniards
and Portuguese, and 'of the way to the Moluccas by the north.' Sir
Humphrey Gilbert published 'a discourse' 'to prove a passage by the
north-west to Cathaia and the East Indies'; and Richard Hakluyt
himself, in the 'epistle dedicatory' to Philip Sydney, which forms
the preface to his collection of _Divers Voyages touching the
discovery of America_,[13] sums up the arguments for the existence of
'that short and easy passage by the north-west which we have hitherto
so long desired.' In short, the record of the sixteenth century in
North America was, in the main, a record of successive voyagers
seeking after a way to the East, supplemented by the fishing trade
which was attracted to the shores of Newfoundland.
[Footnote 8: Gomara, quoted by Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 30 (1810 ed.).]
[Footnote 9: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 278.]
[Footnote 10: Ibid. p. 281.]
[Footnote 11: Ibid. p. 285.]
[Footnote 12: See Parkman's _Pioneers of France in the New World_
(25th ed., 1888), p. 217.]
[Footnote 13: Published in 1582; edited by the Hakluyt Society in
1850.]
[Sidenote: _The early voyagers to North America were of various
nationalities._]
The two men who opened America to Europe were of Italian
parentage--Columbus the Genoese, and Cabot, born at Genoa, domiciled
at Venice.[14] The two great trading republics of the Middle Ages at
once crowned their work in the world, and signed their own death
warrant, in providing Spain and England with the sailors whose
discoveries transferred the centre of life and movement from the
Mediterranean {14} to the Atlantic. The King of France too turned to
Italy for a discoverer to rival Columbus and Cabot, and sent
Verrazano the Florentine, at the end of 1523, to search out the
coasts of North America.
[Footnote 14: As to Cabot's parentage see below, p. 18. If the
voyages of the Zeni were genuine, the Venetians could have claimed a
yet older share in the record of European connexion with America.]
At the first dawn of discovery those coasts were not wholly given
over to French or English adventurers. Though Florida was the
northern limit of Spanish conquest and settlement, Spanish claims
extended indefinitely over the whole continent; and the French King's
scheme for the colonization of Canada, in 1541, under the leadership
of Cartier and Roberval, roused the suspicion of the Spanish court as
an attempt to infringe an acknowledged monopoly. The Portuguese at
the very first took part in north-western discovery, and with good
reason; for it was their own Indies which were the final goal, and
they could not afford to leave to other nations to find a shorter way
thither than their own route round the Cape. Thus it was that Corte
Real set out from Lisbon for the north-west in the year 1500, having
'craved a general license of the King Emmanuel to discover the
Newfoundland,' and 'sailed unto that climate which standeth under the
north in 50 degrees of latitude.'[15] We find, too, records of
Portuguese working in the same direction under foreign flags. In 1501
two patents were granted by Henry VII of England to English and
Portuguese conjointly to explore, trade, and settle in America;[16]
and, in 1525, Gomez, who had served under Magellan, and who, like
Magellan, was a Portuguese in the service of Spain, set out from the
Spanish port of Corunna to search for the North-West Passage.[17]
[Footnote 15: See Purchas' _Pilgrims_, pt. 2, bk. x, chap. i. A brief
'collection of voyages, chiefly of Spaniards and Portugals, taken out
of Antoine Galvano's Book of the Discoveries of the World.']
[Footnote 16: See Doyle's _History of the English in America_, vol.
i, chap. iv.]
[Footnote 17: See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, p. 10.]
[Sidenote: _The Basque fishermen._]
Basque fishermen were among the very first visitors to Newfoundland,
and, even after the North American continent {15} was becoming a
sphere of French and English colonization, to the exclusion of the
southern nations of Europe, the Spaniards and Portuguese still held
their own in the fisheries. The record of almost every voyage to
Newfoundland notices Spanish or Portuguese ships plying their trade
on the banks.[18] A writer[19] in the year 1578, on 'the true state
and commodities of Newfoundland,' tells us that, according to his
information, there were at that date above one hundred Spanish ships
engaged in the cod fisheries, in addition to twenty or thirty whalers
from Biscay; that the Portuguese ships did not exceed fifty, and that
those owned by French and Bretons numbered about one hundred and
fifty. Edward Hayes, the chronicler of Gilbert's last voyage in 1583,
relates how the Portuguese at Newfoundland provisioned the English
admiral's ships for their return voyage, and adds that 'the Portugals
and French chiefly have a notable trade of fishing upon this
bank.'[20]
[Footnote 18: See Parkman's _Pioneers of France in the New World_
(25th ed., 1888), pp. 189, 190, and notes.]
[Footnote 19: Anthony Parkhurst. The letter was written to Hakluyt,
and published in his collection, vol. iii, p. 171.]
[Footnote 20: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 190.]
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Government still
claimed for its subjects the right to fish on the Newfoundland coast,
among other grounds on that of prior discovery, a claim which was
only finally relinquished under the provisions of the Peace of Paris
in 1763;[21] and, writing {16} about the same date, the author of the
_European Settlements in America_ noted that the Spaniards still
shared in the fishery.[22]
[Footnote 21: As to the question whether Basque fishermen had found
their way to Newfoundland before Cabot, see the note to p. 189 of Mr.
Parkman's _Pioneers of France in the New World_. The reasons for
thinking that these fishermen forestalled Cabot seem to be--(1) the
argument of probability; (2) assertions of old writers to that
effect; (3) the application of the Basque name 'Baccalaos' to
Newfoundland, and the statement of Peter Martyr that Cabot found that
word in use for codfish among the natives; (4) the claim advanced by
the Spanish Government to right of fishing at Newfoundland on the
ground of prior discovery by Biscayan fishermen. As to this last
point, see _Papers relative to the rupture with Spain, 1762_. One
source of friction at this time between Great Britain and Spain was
what Pitt styles in a dispatch (p. 3) 'the stale and inadmissible
pretensions of the Biscayans and Guipuscoans to fish at
Newfoundland.' As to this claim, the Earl of Bristol, British
minister at Madrid, writes (p. 53), 'With regard to the Newfoundland
fishery, Mr. Wall urged, what I have also conveyed in some former
despatches, that the Spaniards indeed pleaded, in favour of their
claim to a share of the Bacallao trade, the first discovery of that
island.']
[Footnote 22: _European Settlements in America_, pt. 6, chap. xxviii,
'Newfoundland.' The author (? Burke) says, 'The French and Spaniards,
especially the former, have a large share (in the fishery).']
Hayes, who has just been quoted, tells us that more than thirty years
before he wrote, i.e. about 1550, the Portuguese had touched at Sable
Island and left there 'both neat and swine to breed.' In the same way
they left live stock at Mauritius on their way to and from the East;
and in like manner the Spaniards landed pigs at the Bermudas[23] on
their early voyages to the West Indies.
[Footnote 23: See vol. i of this series, p. 163, and vol. ii, p. 6
and note. Lescarbot states that the French Baron de Lery, who
attempted to found a colony in North America in 1518, left cattle on
Sable Island. See Parkman's _Pioneers of France_, p. 193, and Doyle's
_History of the English in America_, vol. i, chap. v, p. 111.]
[Sidenote: _Names in North America indicate visits from Southern
Europe._]
If evidence were wanted that, in the oldest days of movement from
Europe to the West, southern sailors did not go only to tropical
America, it would be found in the naming of the North American coasts
and islands. The first point on the coast of North America, sighted
by the first discoverer--the Italian Cabot--was spoken of under the
Italian name of Prima Terra Vista. The name Baccalaos[24] tells of
voyages of the Basques, as Cape Breton of visitors from Brittany;
and, {17} after Corte Real's voyages, the east coast of Newfoundland
was, as old maps testify, christened for a while Terra de Corte
Reall.[25] Soon, however, the Spaniards found Mexico, Peru, and
Central America enough and more than enough to absorb their whole
attention; the Portuguese were over-weighted by their eastern empire
and Brazil: and North America was given over, first to be explored
and then to be settled, by the peoples of the north of Europe; who
gathered strength as their southern rivals declined, and whose work
was more lasting because more slow.
[Footnote 24: 'Baccalaos' is the Spanish name for codfish. It is of
Basque origin. Cabot, it is stated, gave the name generally to the
lands which he found. The name was subsequently applied more
especially to Newfoundland. Thus Edward Hayes in his account of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert's last voyage, under the heading 'a brief relation
of the Newfoundland and the commodities thereof' (Hakluyt, iii, 193),
speaks of 'that which we do call the Newfoundland and the Frenchmen
Bacalaos.' Various small islands, however, in these parts were also
given this name by different writers. At the present day, on the maps
of Newfoundland, an islet off the east coast, at the extreme north of
the peninsula of Avalon, bears the name of Baccalieu. See Parkman, p.
189 note as above, and the chapter on the voyages of the Cabots in
Justin Winsor's history, vol. iii.]
[Footnote 25: The name 'Labrador' is supposed to have been derived
from the fact that some North American natives, brought back in one
of the ships which accompanied Corte Real on this second voyage, were
said to be 'admirably calculated for labour and the best slaves I
have ever seen.' Hence the name 'Laboratoris terra,' or Labrador. On
Thorne's map (1527) printed in the _Divers Voyages to America_, there
appears 'Nova terra Laboratorum dicta.' Sir Clements Markham, in his
edition of the _Journal of Columbus, Cabot, and Corte Real_ (Hakluyt
Society, 1893, Int. p. 51, note), says: 'There is no reference to
Labrador in any of the authorities for the voyages of Corte Real. The
King of Portugal is said to have hoped to derive good slave labour
from the lands discovered by Corte Real. That is all. The name
Labrador is not Portuguese; and Corte Real was never on the Labrador
coast.' Another derivation given is: 'This land was discovered by the
English from Bristol, and named Labrador because the one who saw it
first was a labourer from the Azores.' One more derivation is that
Labrador was the name of the Basque captain of a fishing-vessel. See
Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, pp. 2, 46, and Parkman's _Pioneers
of France in the New World_, p. 216, note.]
[Sidenote: _The Cabots._]
On March 5, 1496, King Henry VII of England granted a patent to 'John
Cabot, citizen of Venice,' and to his three sons--Lewis, Sebastian,
and Sancius--empowering them 'to discover unknown lands under the
king's banner.'[26] Under this patent--'the earliest surviving
document which connects England with the New World'[27]--North
America was discovered.
[Footnote 26: Quoted from the marginal note to the patent. See
Hakluyt's _Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America_,
published by the Hakluyt Society, 1850, p. 21.]
[Footnote 27: From Doyle's _History of the English in America_, vol.
i, chap. iv.]
Almost every point connected with the voyages of the Cabots is dark
and doubtful. What the father did and what {18} the son, whence they
came, and whither they went, is all uncertain. The tale of Columbus
and his voyages is known to all the world; but readers are left to
grope after the Cabots, as the latter groped after the strange wild
regions of the north-west.
John Cabot, it would seem, was a Genoese who settled in Venice. There
he was admitted to the rights of citizenship. He married a Venetian
lady, and in Venice probably his three sons were born and passed
their childhood. He travelled on the sea, visiting the coasts of
Arabia, and forming, it may be, schemes to discover a new route to
the far East. He came to England, having previously attempted to gain
support for his projected voyages in Spain and Portugal, and he took
up his residence in either London or Bristol. The exact date of his
arrival in this country is unknown; but, either shortly before or
shortly after he came, Columbus crossed the Atlantic for the first
time in 1492. The news gave a stimulus to other would-be discoverers,
and encouraged the Kings of Europe to further their plans. Hence
Cabot and his sons obtained their patent in 1496. It was little that
King Henry VII gave to the Italian sailors. Their voyages were to be
made 'upon their own proper costs and charges,' and in return for his
licence, the King was to receive a fifth of the profits. The
enterprise was countenanced but not supported by the state, and the
English Government in these early days, as in the times which came
after, left the work of discovery and colonization in the hands of
private adventurers. Bristol was the port of departure, and a Bristol
book contains the following notice of the voyage:--'In the year 1497,
the 24th of June, on St. John's day, was Newfoundland found by
Bristol men in a ship called the _Matthew_.'[28] John Cabot and
Sebastian his son probably both sailed in the _Matthew_, and they
commanded a crew of English sailors. The voyage {19} was a short
summer venture, beginning in May and ending with the close of July or
the beginning of August. America was seen and touched, the land-fall
being either the northern end of Cape Breton island, or the coast of
Labrador, or Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland. The English flag was
planted on American soil, but no exploration took place; nothing was
achieved but the one great fact of discovery. In the following
February, new letters patent were issued--on this occasion to John
Cabot alone; and a second time, in the summer of 1498, the ships
started from Bristol. Again, it is conjectured, both father and son
were on board; and this time the North American coast seems to have
been skirted from the region of icebergs and the banks of
Newfoundland as far south as the Carolinas. In reference to this
second voyage, Sebastian Cabot wrote that he sailed 'unto the
latitude of sixty-seven degrees and a half under the North Pole,' and
'finding still the open sea without any manner of impediment, he
thought verily by that way to have passed on still the way to Cathaio
which is in the East.'[29] The way to the East, however, was left
unopened, to tantalize after-comers, and to be a kind of 'will o' the
wisp,' leading men on to barren shores and Arctic seas, though the
continent which they had already found was worth all the riches of
the Indies.
[Footnote 28: Barrett's _History and Antiquities of Bristol_
(Bristol, 1789), p. 172.]
[Footnote 29: From Ramusio, quoted in 'a note of Sebastian Cabot's
voyage of discovery' (Hakluyt's _Divers Voyages_, p. 25). For the
much-vexed question of the Cabots and their voyages, reference should
be made to _John Cabot the Discoverer of North America and Sebastian
his son_, by Henry Harrisse, London, 1896; to the _Journal of
Columbus, Cabot, and Corte Real_, edited for the Hakluyt Society by
Sir Clements Markham, 1893; to Doyle's _History of the English in
America_, vol. i, Appendix B, 'The Cabots and their Voyages'; and to
Mr. Raymond Beazley's _John and Sebastian Cabot_ ('Builders of
Greater Britain' series, 1898). The result of a great deal of
learning is after all little but conjecture.]
[Sidenote: _Corte Real._]
The next great voyager to North America was Gaspar Corte Real, a
Portuguese. Twice he sailed to the north-west, in 1500 and 1501, on
the earlier voyage sighting Greenland {20} and the east coast of
Newfoundland, and on the later working north from Chesapeake Bay. He
was lost on the second voyage; and his brother Miguel, who went in
search of him in 1502, after finding 'many entrances of rivers and
havens,' was lost also.[30]
[Footnote 30: The voyages of the Corte Reals are given in Purchas'
_Pilgrims_, pt. 2, bk. x. See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, on
Cortereal, Verrazano, &c. See also the volume of the Hakluyt Society
referred to in the previous note.]
[Sidenote: _French explorers._]
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, if not earlier, Frenchmen
took their place among the explorers of the world, and the Norman and
Breton seaports began to send their ships across the Atlantic. Denys
of Honfleur is said to have reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1506;
in 1508, Aubert of Dieppe brought American Indians back to France;
and in 1518 Baron de Lery made the first, a stillborn, attempt to
found a French colony in North America.[31]
[Footnote 31: See above, p. 16, note 23.]
[Sidenote: _Verrazano._]
At the end of the fifteenth century, the consolidation of France had
been completed by the marriage of Charles VIII with Anne of Brittany,
and from this time France began to compete with Spain. Francis I came
to the throne in 1515, and his personal rivalry with Charles V,
German Emperor and Spanish King in one, quickened the competition
between the French and Spanish peoples. Thus it was that the French
court turned its attention to the work of exploration, and Francis
sent forth the Italian Verrazano with four ships from Dieppe 'to
discover new lands by the ocean.'[32] Sailing at the end of 1523,
Verrazano was driven back by tempest; but, starting again, he left
Madeira to cross the Atlantic on January 17, 1524. He reached the
shores of Carolina; then coasted northward, landing at various
points; and, having sailed as far north as {21} Newfoundland--'the
land that in times past was discovered by the Britons (Bretons),
which is in fifty degrees'--he 'concluded to return into France.'
[Footnote 32: From 'The relation of John Verarzanus,' given in
Hakluyt's _Divers Voyages_, p. 55, and there also headed 'The
Discovery of Morum Bega' (Norumbega). It is given too in the ordinary
collection, vol. iii, p. 357.]
He brought home to his King a sober and systematic report of the
North American coast--a report which meant business, and was not
tricked out with vague surmises and impossible tales; but, within a
year from his return, the strength of France was for a while broken
at the battle of Pavia. He himself died soon afterwards, hanged, it
is said, by the Spaniards as a pirate; and for ten years there is no
record of any French explorer following in his steps, though French
ships found their way over the ocean to the cod-fisheries of
Newfoundland.
[Sidenote: _Cartier._]
The year 1534 is a memorable one in the annals alike of France and of
North America. It is the year from which must be dated the first
beginnings of New France on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The
discoverer of Canada was Jacques Cartier, a Breton sailor of St.
Malo. He went out to explore the unknown world, not at his own risk,
but as the agent of Brian Chabot, High Admiral of France. Sailing
from St. Malo, on April 20, 1534, he came to Newfoundland, passed
through the straits of Belle Isle, and entered the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. He sailed into Chaleurs Bay under the July sun, describing
the country as 'hotter than the country of Spain, and the fairest
that can possibly be found';[33] and, having set up a cross on Gaspe
Peninsula, he reached St. Malo again on September 5, bringing with
him two Indian children as living memorials of his voyage.
[Footnote 33: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 257.]
He had discovered a hot, fair land, widely different from the bleak
and rock-bound coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador; and the good
report which he brought of his discoveries was more than enough to
find him backing for a second venture. Accordingly, in the following
year, on May 19, 1535, he sailed again from St. Malo, and, reaching
{22} the straits of Belle Isle after storm and tempest, took his way,
the first of European explorers, up the great river of Canada. He
moored his three ships below the rock of Quebec--then the site of
Stadacone, a native Indian village, and the dwelling-place of a chief
Donnaconna, who is styled in the narrative the Lord of Canada. There
he left his two larger vessels, and pushed on in his pinnace and
boats to the town of Hochelaga. That town, the Indians had told him,
was the capital of the land; and he found it, palisaded and fortified
in native fashion, where Montreal now stands.[34] The Frenchmen were
received as gods by the Indians; they were asked, like the Apostles
of old, to touch and heal the sick; and, ever mindful of the duty of
spreading the Christian religion, they read the gospel to their
savage admirers in the strange French tongue, to cure their souls if
they could not mend their bodies.
[Footnote 34: As Mr. Parkman points out (_Pioneers of France_, p.
212), Quebec and Montreal were in old days, as now, the centres of
population in Lower Canada. 'Stadacone and Hochelaga, Quebec and
Montreal, in the sixteenth century, as in the nineteenth, were the
centres of Canadian population.']
Returning down stream to their ships, they passed the winter
underneath Quebec, amid ice and snow, stricken with scurvy, and
distrustful of their Indian neighbours; and at length, on the return
of summer, they set sail for France, carrying away the Indian chief
Donnaconna and some of his companions, to die in a far-off land. They
reached St. Malo in the middle of July, 1536, and so ended Cartier's
second voyage to 'the New found lands by him named New France.'[35]
[Footnote 35: End of the narrative of Cartier's second voyage in
Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 285.]
[Sidenote: _Failure of Roberval's attempt at colonization._]
Between four and five years passed, and then the Breton sailor set
out again. This time a definite scheme of settlement was projected,
the instructions were more elaborate than before, the preparations
were on a larger scale. The money {23} was found by the crown, and
the King was to receive one-third of the profits. A French nobleman,
De Roberval, was to go out as the King's lieutenant in the New World,
and was given the title of Lord of Norumbega,[36] while Cartier was
appointed Captain-General. The objects of the expedition were to
explore, to colonize, and to convert the heathen; and its leaders
were, like Columbus, empowered to recruit colonists from the prisons
at home. Cartier set out in advance of Roberval, in May, 1541. Again
he sailed up the St. Lawrence, reached in his boats a point above
Montreal, and, as before, wintered on the river; but this time at the
mouth of the Cap Rouge, some way higher up than Quebec. His leader,
Roberval, did not start till April, 1542; and, when in June he
reached St. John's harbour in Newfoundland, he was met by Cartier,
who had broken up his colony in disgust, and was on his way home to
France. In spite of Roberval's remonstrances, Cartier left by night
on his return voyage, and the Lord of Norumbega went on alone to the
St. Lawrence. He planted his settlement at Cap Rouge, where Cartier
had last sojourned, but it proved a miserable failure. The supplies
were insufficient, the Governor turned out a savage despot, and after
about a year the colony came to an end.
[Sidenote: _Norumbega._]
[Footnote 36: As to Norumbega, see Parkman's _Pioneers of France_,
pp. 216 and 253, notes, and Justin Winsor, vol. iii, chap. vi, on
'Norumbega and its English explorers.' The writer of this latter
chapter (p. 185) says the territory of Norumbega never included
Baccalaos, 'though Baccalaos, an old name of Newfoundland, sometimes
included New England.' Norumbega, an Indian name, covered the
district now included in the state of Maine, and was sometimes
extended to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on the north, and part of
New England on the south. Michael Loki's map (1582) makes Norumbega
the whole district between the river and gulf of St. Lawrence and the
Hudson. The river of Norumbega was the Penobscot, and on it a city of
Norumbega was given a fabulous existence. Lescarbot (_Histoire de la
Nouvelle France_, 1609, bk. i, chap. i) speaks of 'pais qu'on a
appelle d'un nom Alleman Norumbega, lequel est par les quarante cinq
degrez.']
With this disappointing and disastrous failure, the curtain fell on
the prologue of the great drama of New France, and did not rise again
for more than fifty years. For the French, {24} as for the English,
the sixteenth century was a time of exploring, of training, of making
experiments; and it was not till the seventeenth century dawned that
permanent colonization began. Then in the Bourbons the French had
rulers who, with all their faults, were abler and stronger than the
princes of the house of Valois; and in Champlain they had a leader as
daring as, and more statesmanlike than, Cartier. But it was by
Cartier that the ground had been broken and the seed first sown. His
voyages made Canada[37] in some sort familiar to Europeans. He opened
the St. Lawrence to be the highway into North America,[38] and he
gave to the hill above the native town of Hochelaga the name of the
Royal Mount, which is still perpetuated in Montreal. He brought the
French into Canada, and, though his settlement failed, the French
connexion remained. Fishermen and fur-traders followed in his steps,
and in fullness of time the New France, which his discoveries
conceived, was brought to birth and grew to greatness.
[Footnote 37: For the meaning of the name 'Canada,' see Parkman's
_Pioneers of France_, p. 202, note. It is of Indian origin, probably
meaning 'town.' Cartier called the country about Quebec Canada,
having Saguenay below and Hochelaga above. Donnaconna, the native
chief at Quebec, was called Lord of Canada.]
[Footnote 38: On his second voyage Cartier sailed into a bay at the
mouth of the St. Lawrence, where he stayed from the eighth to the
twelfth of August, and 'named the said gulf St. Lawrence his bay'
(Hakluyt, iii, 263), St. Lawrence's Day being the 10th of August.
Hence the river, which he called the river of Hochelaga or the great
river of Canada, derived its name. See Parkman, p. 202.]
[Sidenote: _English exploration in North America in the sixteenth
century._]
[Sidenote: _Hore's voyage._]
[Sidenote: _Acts of Parliament relating to the Newfoundland
fisheries._]
A Bristol ship[39] having first discovered North America, it might
have been expected that the years succeeding Cabot's voyages would
have been fruitful in English adventure to the West; but, as far as
records show, little was done by Englishmen during the first half of
the sixteenth century to open up the New World; and even Cartier's
bold exploits roused little or no spirit of rivalry in Great Britain.
Indeed, all through {25} this century no English voyager seems to
have turned his mind to Canada and its river. The explorers went to
the Arctic seas, the would-be colonizers to Newfoundland or Virginia.
Between 1500 and 1550 two voyages alone have been actually
chronicled, though passing reference is made to others. Of these two,
the first was in 1527, when Albert de Prado, a canon of St. Paul's,
sailed with two ships in search of the Indies, reaching Newfoundland
and the North American coast. The second was in 1536, under a leader
named Hore--a voyage of which a graphic account is given in Hakluyt.
On the coast of Newfoundland the adventurers suffered the last
extremes of starvation, until at length even cannibalism began among
them; and the survivors owed their safety to the coming of a French
ship, which they seized and in which they returned home. It is clear,
however, that before the middle of the century the Newfoundland
fisheries had become a recognized branch of English trade, for the
traffic was safeguarded by two Acts of Parliament, one passed in
1540, in Henry VIII's reign, the other in 1548, in the reign of King
Edward VI. The object of the second Act was to prohibit the exaction
of any dues by way of licence from men engaged in the Iceland or
Newfoundland fishing trade, and Hakluyt's note upon it is that 'by
this Act it appeareth that the trade out of England to Newfoundland
was common and frequented about the beginning of the reign of Edward
VI, namely, in the year 1548.'[40]
[Footnote 39: For this passage, see Doyle's _History of the English
in America_, vol. i, chap. iv.]
[Footnote 40: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 170.]
[Sidenote: _Return of Sebastian Cabot to England._]
About this date Sebastian Cabot again appears upon the scene. In 1512
he had entered the Spanish service; and, after a visit to England,
had returned to Spain, where, from 1518 to 1547, he held the
appointment of Pilot-Major to the King and Emperor Charles V.[41] At
the end of 1547 or the beginning of 1548, he was induced in his old
age to come back to the land, for and from which, more than half a
century {26} before, his or his father's great discovery had been
made; and King Edward VI rewarded his services by appointing him
Grand Pilot in England. His mind was still set on finding a way to
the Indies by the Northern Sea. He became governor of 'the mystery
and company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of regions,
dominions, islands, and places unknown'; and in Hakluyt's pages[42]
may be found his instructions 'for the direction of the intended
voyage for Cathay.'
[Footnote 41: See _The Dictionary of National Biography_, s. v.]
[Footnote 42: Vol. i, p. 251.]
[Sidenote: _The North-East Passage and Sir Hugh Willoughby._]
[Sidenote: _The Muscovy Company._]
The company was not finally incorporated by royal charter till
1554-5, but in the preceding year, 1553, they sent out an expedition
of three ships to try for a North-East Passage. The leader of the
expedition, Sir Hugh Willoughby, was, with the crews of two ships,
frozen to death on the coast of Lapland; but Richard Chancellor, the
captain of the third ship, reached the port on which the town of
Archangel now stands, and made his way overland to Moscow. This was
the beginning of British trade with Russia. The Merchant Adventurers
became known as the Muscovy Company, and their efforts were directed
to the overland traffic between Asia and Europe, which came by
Bokhara, Astrakhan, and the Volga, to the meeting of the east and
west at Novgorod.
[Sidenote: _Martin Frobisher._]
But, important as was this new development of trade, the British
explorers, whose names have lived, still took their way for the most
part over the Atlantic, making ever for the West. In June, 1576,
Martin Frobisher sailed from Blackwall to the north-west 'for the
search of the straight or passage to China.'[43] He sighted
Greenland; and, sailing west, came to the inlet in the American
coast, north of the Hudson Straits, which, after him, was called
Frobisher Bay. This arm of the sea he took to be a passage between
the two continents, the right-hand coast, as he went west, seeming to
be Asia, the left-hand coast America. He came back {27} to Harwich in
October, bringing with him a sample of black stone supposed to
contain gold; and thus, to the vain hope of a short passage to the
Indies, he added the more dangerous attraction of possible mineral
wealth in the Arctic regions. Men's hopes were raised; a company of
Cathay was formed, with Michael Lok for governor; and, as their
Captain-General, Frobisher sailed again in May, 1577, 'for the
further discovering of the passage to Cathay.'[44] Again he sighted
Greenland. Again he reached the bay which had been the turning-point
of his former voyage. He took possession of the barren northern land
in his Queen's name; and, when he came back in September, 'Her
Majesty named it very properly Meta Incognita, as a mark and bound
utterly hitherto unknown.'[45] The voyage was fruitless, but the
stones brought home were still thought to promise gold, and so, in
the following May, Frobisher started once more on a third voyage to
the north. Fifteen ships went with him from Harwich, bearing 'a
strong fort or house of timber'[46] to be set up on arrival in the
Arctic regions, and intended to shelter one hundred men through the
coming winter. The hundred men included miners, goldfiners,
gentlemen, artisans, 'and all necessary persons'[46]--as though this
desolate region were to become the scene of a thriving colony. They
set sail, reached the coast of Greenland, and claimed it in the
Queen's name. They fell in with the Esquimaux; they crossed the
channel now known as Davis Strait to the Meta Incognita; and they
came back in the autumn with no result beyond the report of a new
imaginary island. This was the end of Frobisher's enterprise, but in
the next forty years other English sailors followed where he had gone
before, and opened up to geographical knowledge fresh stretches of
icebound coast and wintry sea. Davis, Hudson, Baffin, and others,
gave their names to straits and bays, but it is impossible here to
trace the record of their courage and endurance. {28} No quest has
ever been so fruitful of daring, patient seamanship, none has ever
been so barren of practical results, as that for the North-West
Passage. What Frobisher went to find in the sixteenth century,
Franklin still sought in the nineteenth: and through all the ages of
British exploration has run the ever receding hope of finding a short
way through ice and snow to the sunny lands of the East.
[Footnote 43: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 52.]
[Footnote 44: Ibid. p. 56.]
[Footnote 45: Ibid. p. 104.]
[Footnote 46: Ibid. p. 105.]
[Sidenote: _Sir Humphrey Gilbert._]
In Great Britain the sixteenth century was the age of adventurers,
casting about for ways to other worlds, or freebooting where Spain
and Portugal claimed ownership of land and sea; but in that time two
men stand out as having had definite views of settlement, and as
having been colonizers in advance of their age. They are Sir Humphrey
Gilbert and his half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh. Edward Hayes, the
author of a narrative of Gilbert's attempt to found a colony in
Newfoundland, speaks of him as 'the first of our nation that carried
people to erect an habitation and government in those northerly
countries of America,'[47] and no nobler Englishman could well be
found to head the list of English colonizers of the New World.
Chivalrous in nature, bold in action, he was at the same time 'famous
for his knowledge both by sea and land';[48] and it was his
_Discourse to prove a passage by the north-west to Cathaia and the
East Indies_, which is said to have determined Frobisher to explore
the north.
[Footnote 47: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 185.]
[Footnote 48: From Fuller's _Worthies of Devonshire_.]
[Sidenote: _His patent of colonization._]
In June, 1578, Gilbert obtained from Queen Elizabeth his celebrated
patent 'for the inhabiting and planting of our people in
America.'[49] The grant was a wide one. It gave him full liberty to
explore and settle in any 'remote heathen and barbarous lands,
countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian
prince or people'; and it constituted him full owner of the land
where he settled, within {29} a radius of two hundred leagues from
the place of settlement. It was subject only to a reservation to the
Crown of one-fifth of the gold and silver found, and to a condition
that advantage should be taken of the grant within six years. For
three or four years Gilbert's efforts to colonize under this patent
were fruitless; he organized an expedition which came to nothing, and
other men, to whom he temporarily resigned his rights, were equally
unsuccessful.
[Footnote 49: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 174.]
[Sidenote: _His voyage to Newfoundland._]
At length, on June 11, 1583, he set sail from Cawsand Bay, near
Plymouth, to try his luck for the last time in the western world.
There were five ships, one of which was fitted out by Ralegh,[50] and
one, the _Golden Hind_, had for its captain and owner, Edward Hayes,
the chronicler of the voyage. The company numbered 260 men all told,
including shipwrights, carpenters, and other artisans, 'mineral men
and refiners,' 'morris dancers' and other caterers of amusement 'for
solace of our people and allurement of the savages.'[51] These last
were evidence that more was projected than mere temporary
exploration. It was intended, writes Hayes, 'to win' the savages 'by
all fair means possible'; and with this end in view the freight of
the ships included 'petty haberdashery wares to barter with those
simple people.' On the third of August the little fleet entered the
harbour of St. John's in Newfoundland, where they found thirty-six
ships of all nations. They came expecting resistance, but met with
none. When Gilbert made known his intention to proclaim British
sovereignty over the island, the sailors and fishermen present seem
to have willingly acquiesced; and when he wanted to revictual and
refit his ships, the necessary supplies were readily forthcoming.[52]
[Footnote 50: This ship deserted soon after starting.]
[Footnote 51: Hakluyt, vol. iii, pp. 189, 190.]
[Footnote 52: Hayes says, 'The Portugals (above other nations) did
most willingly and liberally contribute' (Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 192).
See above, p. 15.]
[Sidenote: _Newfoundland declared to be a British possession._]
The want of a settled authority, of some guarantee for law {30} and
order, in the harbours and on the coasts of Newfoundland, was no
doubt felt by those who came year by year to the fisheries, and Sir
Humphrey Gilbert's name and high repute may well have been known to
others than his own countrymen. Two days after his arrival he took
formal possession of the land, with ceremony of rod and turf, in the
name of his sovereign; the arms of England were set up; three simple
laws were enacted--providing that the recognized religion should be
in accordance with the forms of the Church of England, safeguarding
the sovereign rights of the Queen of England, and enjoining due
respect for her name; and then Gilbert issued land grants as
proprietor of the soil. In the words of one of the accounts which
Hakluyt has preserved,[53] 'he did let, set, give, and dispose of
many things as absolute Governor there, by virtue of Her Majesty's
letters patents.'
[Footnote 53: Peckham's account, Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 209.]
Thus was Newfoundland declared to be a British possession, and such
are its claims to be our oldest colony. The annexation was complete
in form and substance; no protest was entered against it by those
whom it concerned; land was granted by the recognized proprietor, and
nothing was wanting to constitute a claim which should last, and has
lasted, to all time. Frobisher proclaimed the sovereignty of England
over Arctic lands, but his proclamation was as barren as the shores
over which it extended. Gilbert, on the contrary, went to a place
where European sailors had long foregathered; he went there as an
English Governor; his authority was unquestioned, his grants were
accepted, and when he read his commission and set up the arms of
England at the harbour of St. John, he took the first step, and a
very long step, towards British dominion in the New World.
[Sidenote: _Gilbert's death._]
Gilbert had great hopes of finding precious metal in Newfoundland;
and his principal mining expert, a Saxon, {31} promised him a rich
yield of silver from the ore which was collected in the island. That
ore, however, was lost early on the voyage home, and the miner
himself was lost with it in the wreck of the largest ship--the
_Delight_. A far greater loss, however, was in store for the
ill-fated expedition. They left St. John's on August 20, making for
Sable Island, which had been stocked years before by the
Portuguese.[54] In a few days the _Delight_ foundered on a rock; and
the weather became so bad that, at the end of the month, Gilbert
consented to make for home. He was in the smallest ship, the
_Squirrel_, a little ten-ton vessel, as being the best suited to
explore the creeks and inlets of the American coast; and, in spite of
the remonstrances of his companions, he would not leave her on the
return voyage. 'We are as near heaven by sea as by land,' were his
last words, before the ship went down in the middle of the Atlantic
with all on board; and thus, fearless and faithful unto death, he
found his resting-place in the sea. The story is one which stands out
to all time in the annals of English adventure and English
colonization. It was meet and right that the founder of the first
English colony should be a Devonshire sailor of high repute, of
stainless name, chivalrous, unselfish, strong in the fear of God. It
was no less meet that his grave should be in the stormy Atlantic,
midway between the Old World and the New. Thus those who came after
had a forerunner of the noblest type; and the ships, which from that
time to this have carried Englishmen to America, may ever have been
passing by where Humphrey Gilbert went to his rest.
[Footnote 54: See above, p. 16.]
[Sidenote: _Sir Walter Ralegh._]
[Sidenote: _His attempts to colonize Virginia._]
Gilbert's half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, was cast in the same
mould, but the record of his doings lies in the main beyond the range
of this book. Virginia and Guiana were the scenes of his attempts at
colonization, not Newfoundland or the coasts and rivers of Canada. In
1584, the year after {32} Gilbert had been lost at sea, Ralegh
obtained from Queen Elizabeth a patent which was practically the same
as Gilbert's grant of 1578; and, at the end of April, he sent out two
ships, commanded by two captains named Amidas and Barlow, to explore
and report upon a likely place for an English settlement.[55]
[Footnote 55: Accounts of this and the following voyages are given in
the third volume of Hakluyt. See also the first book of John Smith's
general history of Virginia, _The English Voyages to the Old
Virginia_, in Mr. Arber's edition, _The English Scholar's Library_.]
They sailed more towards the south than previous English explorers,
and eventually reached the island of Roanoke, which is now within the
limits of North Carolina. Everything seemed bright and sweet and
healthful, and the natives of the country were friendly and
hospitable, 'such as live after the manner of the golden age.'[56] So
they came back in the autumn with a story full of hope for the
future, and the virgin Queen christened the land of promise Virginia.
[Footnote 56: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 304.]
Ralegh lost no time in sending out settlers. In the next year, 1585,
seven ships started with 108 colonists on board. The expedition was
commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, and among other captains with him
was Thomas Cavendish, afterwards celebrated, like Drake, for sailing
round the world. Ralph Lane, a soldier of fortune, was chosen to
remain in charge of the colony, and with him was Amidas, the explorer
of the previous year, who was styled 'Admiral of the country.' They
went by the West Indies, touching at the Spanish islands of Porto
Rico and Hispaniola, and, at the end of June, they reached Roanoke.
Here they formed their settlement, and, when Grenville and his ships
left in August and September, they brought back as bright a report as
Amidas and Barlow had given the year before.
Already, however, before Grenville's departure, there had been
friction between the Indians and the new-comers; and, as months went
on, the new-born colony became in constant {33} danger of
extermination. Still Lane contrived to hold his own, exploring north
and west, gleaning reports of pearls and mines, and a possible
passage to the south sea, until the winter and spring were past and
the month of June had come again. A fleet of twenty-three ships was
then seen out at sea, and, to the joy of the settlers, proved to be
an English expedition under Sir Francis Drake, who was returning home
laden with spoils from the Spanish main. Drake, at Lane's request,
placed one of his ships with seamen and supplies at the disposal of
the colony; but a storm arose, and the ship was blown out to sea.
Daunted by this fresh trouble, the settlers determined to give up
their enterprise and return home. They asked for passages on board
Drake's vessels: the request was granted; and they abandoned Roanoke
only a fortnight before Grenville arrived with relief, long expected
and long delayed. Finding the island deserted, Grenville left fifteen
men in possession and himself came home.
So far, Ralegh's scheme had failed; but the failure was due to
untoward circumstances, not to the nature of the country, and he
still persevered in his efforts. The very next year, in 1587, he sent
out a fresh band of settlers, 150 in number; giving them for a leader
John White, who had taken part in the former expedition. The
arrangements for forming a colony were more fully organized than
before; and to White and twelve Assistants Ralegh 'gave a charter and
incorporated them by the name of Governor and Assistants of the city
of Ralegh in Virginia.'[57] When the colonists reached Roanoke, they
found that the fifteen men left by Grenville had disappeared, driven
out, as they learnt, by the Indians. Notwithstanding, they renewed
the old settlement; and, in the face of native enmity, began again
the work of colonizing America. Before the end of the summer, White
sailed for England, to give an account of what had been done; and, on
his return home, Ralegh prepared to send {34} relief to the colony.
But war with Spain was now on hand, freebooting was more attractive
than colonizing, one attempt and another to send ships to Virginia
miscarried; and when at length, late in 1589, White reached the scene
of his settlement, he found it dismantled and deserted. So ended the
first attempt to colonize Virginia. Success was not to come for a few
more years, until the sixteenth century had passed and gone.
[Footnote 57: Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 341.]
[Sidenote: _General results of the sixteenth century._]
Before 1600, Newfoundland had been annexed by Great Britain, but not
one single English or French colony had as yet taken root in America.
Nevertheless the century was far from barren of results. The way had
been made plain, the ground had been cleared, the wild oats of
adventure and knight-errantry had been sown, and the peoples were
sobering down to steadier and more prudent enterprise. Beaten on the
sea, raided and plundered in their own tropical domain, the Spaniards
were ceasing to be a terror and a hindrance to the nations of
Northern Europe; and, as the latter grew from youth to lusty manhood,
the map of the great North American continent unfolded itself before
their eyes. Then Champlain went to work in Canada, and John Smith in
Virginia; Jesuits on the St. Lawrence, and Puritans in the New
England states; and so the grain of mustard-seed, cast into American
soil, grew into a great tree, which already, before three centuries
have ended, bids fair to overshadow the earth.
N.B.--The references to Hakluyt made in the notes above are to the
1810 edition.
Among modern books most use has been made in this chapter of:--
PARKMAN'S _Pioneers of France in the New World_;
DOYLE'S _History of the English in America_, vol. i; and
JUSTIN WINSOR'S _Narrative and Critical History of America_.
Reference should also be made to Sir J. BOURINOT'S monograph on 'Cape
Breton,' first published in the _Proceedings and Transactions of the
Royal Society of Canada_, vol. ix, 1891, and since published
separately.
{35}
CHAPTER II
SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN AND THE FOUNDING OF QUEBEC
The history of Canada has been so often and so well told, that an
attempt simply to reproduce the narrative would be worse than
superfluous. The scheme of the present series is, in the field of
colonization and within the present limits of the British Empire, to
trace the connexion between history and geography; and from this
point of view more especially the story of New France will be
recorded.
[Sidenote: _New France._]
Various parts of the world, now British possessions, were once owned
by other European nations, notably by the Dutch or French. The last
volume of the series dealt with what was in past times a dependency
of the Netherlands, the Cape Colony, the mother colony of South
Africa. The present volume deals with a land which the French made
peculiarly their own; where, as hardly anywhere else, they settled,
though not in large numbers; not merely conquering or ruling the
conquered, not only leaving a permanent impress of manners, law, and
religion, but slowly and partially colonizing a country and forming a
nation.
Lower Canada, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was rightly included
under the wider name of New France, for here France and the French
were reproduced in weakness and in strength. It was a land well
suited to the French character and physique. Much depended on tactful
dealings with the North American Indians, a species of diplomacy in
which Frenchmen excelled. The commercial value of Canada consisted
mainly in the fur trade, an adventurous kind of traffic more
attractive to the {36} Frenchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries than plodding agriculture or the life of a counting-house.
On the rivers and lakes, coming and going was comparatively easy; the
short bright summers and the long winters made the country one of
strong contrasts. To a bold, imaginative, somewhat restless people
there was much to charm in Canada.
But Canada meant far less in earlier days than now it means. It meant
the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and of the lakes
from which it flows. The Maritime Provinces of the present Dominion,
or at any rate Nova Scotia, were not in Canada properly so called,
but bore the name of La Cadie or Acadia,[1] and the great North-West
was an unknown land.
[Footnote 1: For the derivation of the name 'Acadia,' see Parkman's
_Pioneers of France in the New World_, p. 243, note. _Cadie_ is an
Indian word meaning place or region. 'It is obviously a Micmac or
Souriquois affix used in connexion with other words to describe the
natural characteristics of a place or locality' (Bourinot's monograph
on 'Cape Breton,' _Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society
of Canada_, vol. ix, sec. 2, p. 185). For the name 'Canada,' see
above, p. 24. note 37.]
By the end of the seventeenth century the French had three spheres of
influence and colonization in North America--the country of the St.
Lawrence, the seaboard between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the
New England colonies, and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi.
To join them and encircle the English colonies was the aim of French
statesmanship. It was an impossible aim, inevitably frustrated by
geographical conditions and by want of colonists; but the conception
was a great one, large as the new continent in which it was framed,
and able men tried to work it out, but tried in vain.
[Sidenote: _The French as colonizers._]
Much has been written of French methods of colonization; writers have
been at pains to enumerate the shortcomings of the French, and have
carefully explained whence those mistakes arose. But there is less to
wonder at in the failures than in the great successes to be credited
to France. Being {37} part of the continent of Europe, and ever
embroiled in continental politics, when she competed with England as
a colonizing power, she competed with one hand tied.[2] Changeable,
it is said, were the French and their policy; their kings and
courtiers may have been changeable, but the charge does not lie
against the French nation.
[Footnote 2: This is pointed out in Professor Seeley's _Expansion of
England_, course i, lecture 5.]
They were trading up the Senegal early in the seventeenth century,
and there they are at the present day. From the dawn of their
colonial enterprise they tried to obtain possession of Madagascar;
they have their object now. Nearly four centuries ago they fished off
the coasts of Newfoundland, and England has good cause to know that
they fish there still. To the St. Lawrence went Cartier from St.
Malo, and by the same route generations of Frenchmen entered steadily
into America, until Quebec had fallen and the St. Lawrence was theirs
no more. The French were versatile in their colonial dealings; they
were quickly moving and constantly moving; but they saw clearly and
they followed tenaciously; they were strong and staunch, and they
proved themselves to be a wonderful people.
Yet there must have been some element of weakness in the French
character, in that they bred and obeyed bad rulers who did not live
for France, but for whom France was sacrificed; who crushed liberty,
political and religious, who drove out industry with the Huguenots,
and squandered the heritage of the nation. Englishmen, comparatively
early in their history, reckoned with priests first and with kings
afterwards. They did most of their work at home before they made
their colonial empire; they colonized new worlds as a reformed
people; the French tried to colonize under absolutism and
priestcraft. It might not have been so, it probably would not have
been so, if the religious policy of the French Government had been
other than it was. {38} The Huguenots, if not persecuted and
eventually in great measure driven out, would have given France the
one thing wanting to make her colonization successful, the spirit of
private enterprise independent of court favour, the child and the
parent of freedom, the determined foe of a deadening religious
despotism.
[Sidenote: _Attempts at French colonization in Brazil and Florida._]
In the sixteenth century, after Cartier's voyages to the St.
Lawrence, we hear little of the French in North America. The Breton
fishermen followed their calling, crossed the Atlantic year after
year, and came back with cargoes of fish and with furs procured by
barter with the Indians; but no French settlement was founded either
in Canada or in Acadia. In France itself the last half of the century
was a time of civil war; the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place,
the house of Valois came to an end, and in 1589 Henry of Navarre
became King of France. Before his accession to the Crown, two
attempts at French colonization were made, in Brazil and in Florida.
The colonists were mainly Huguenots, and their enterprise was backed
by the great Protestant leader Coligny. The earlier attempt, designed
to plant a settlement on the harbour of Rio Janeiro, was short-lived,
because ill led by a violent tyrannical man, Villegagnon. The first
settlers arrived in 1555; by the end of 1558 they had all
disappeared. Still more tragical was the outcome of the venture in
Florida. In 1562 a band of would-be colonists sailed from Dieppe,
under the command of Jean Ribault. They reached Florida in safety,
and built a small fort towards the northern end of the peninsula, in
which thirty men were left behind while Ribault returned to France.
In the following year, the survivors of the thirty came back to
Europe, having abandoned the fort and experienced every extremity of
thirst and hunger while crossing the Atlantic in a ship of their own
making. Again in 1564, a Huguenot expedition, under Rene de
Laudonniere, sailed for Florida, and the settlers planted themselves
on the {39} St. John's river, then known as the river of May. In 1565
Ribault joined them with reinforcements and supplies. Well known from
its surpassing horror is the story of the French settlement. A
Spanish force under Menendez, a fanatic as treacherous and as savage
as Philip II himself, took up a position to the south where the town
of St. Augustine now stands, and overpowering the Frenchmen in
detachments, butchered them with every accompaniment of cruelty and
guile. The French fort passed into Spanish hands, but within three
years time an avenging freebooter came from France, Domenic de
Gourgues; the Spaniards in their turn were shot and hung, and the
banks of the St. John's river were left desolate.
Ill managed, badly supported were these French ventures to Brazil and
Florida. Had they been well led and given some little encouragement
and assistance, the result might have been far different. Protestants
might have gained a firm foothold in Central and Southern America.
France might have won from Spain and Portugal a great domain. As it
was, the attempts resulted in utter failure, and great opportunities
were lost never to be regained.
[Sidenote: _La Roche's patent._]
As the sixteenth century drew to a close, a patent was issued by the
French King to a Breton nobleman, the Marquis de la Roche, to
colonize in North America. The terms of the patent were
preposterously wide, conferring sovereignty over Canada, together
with a monopoly of trade. The results were proportionately small. La
Roche set sail in 1598, in a single ship with a cargo of convicts. He
landed them at Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and sailed
back to France, leaving them to their fate. Five years later, in
1603, eleven of the number, who had survived, were rescued and
brought home again.
[Sidenote: _Chauvin and Pontgrave._]
[Sidenote: _De Chastes._]
About a year after La Roche's fruitless voyage, in 1599 or 1600, two
other Frenchmen, Chauvin, a sea captain, and Pontgrave, a St. Malo
merchant, also obtained a patent to {40} colonize in Canada. Their
object was to monopolize the fur trade, and they attempted a
settlement at Tadoussac, where the Saguenay river flows into the St.
Lawrence. During a whole winter a small party was left at the
station, but no permanent colony was formed; and a second and third
voyage had no lasting results. Chauvin died, and in 1602 or 1603 a
new patent was granted to De Chastes, a man of rank and station, who
associated with himself Pontgrave, and secured the services of Samuel
Champlain.
[Sidenote: _Samuel Champlain._]
In order of time, Champlain's name stands second in the list of the
men to whom New France in America was due. It stands second in time
to the name of Cartier; in order of merit it heads the list. Cartier
was a great explorer, but his work ended with discovery; Champlain
founded a colony. The history of Canada as a French possession has
gained in attractiveness, in that it began and ended with a
high-minded, chivalrous leader. It began with Champlain, it ended
with Montcalm. Born on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, the
adventurous son of a seafaring father, Champlain fought for the King
in Brittany, and was given by him a retainer in the shape of a small
pension. The war over, he travelled for two years in the Spanish
Indies, and, visiting Panama, conceived the idea of a ship canal
across the isthmus. After his return home, he took service under De
Chastes' company, and in 1603 sailed with Pontgrave for the St.
Lawrence. The voyage was one of exploration only. Champlain ascended
the river as far as Montreal, gathering geographical information from
the Indians, but attempting no settlement; and when he returned to
France in a few months' time, he found that his employer, De Chastes,
was dead.
[Sidenote: _De Monts' patent._]
[Sidenote: _The first French settlement in Acadia._]
[Sidenote: _Port Royal._]
Yet another royal patent was granted, in 1603, to De Monts, a
Huguenot gentleman of the French court, its object being the
colonization of Acadia, and Acadia being defined as extending from
the fortieth degree of north latitude, which runs {41} through[3]
Philadelphia, to the forty-sixth degree, which is north of Montreal.
De Monts took into partnership the members of De Chastes' company,
and in 1604 two vessels sailed for America. They carried a mixed
freight, Huguenots and Roman Catholics, gentlemen of fortune, and
vagrants impressed under the King's commission. De Monts and
Champlain were on board the first ship, Pontgrave followed in the
second, with supplies for the future colony. They steered not for the
St. Lawrence, but for the coast of Nova Scotia; and entering the Bay
of Fundy they discovered Annapolis harbour, which was given the name
of Port Royal. The first settlement, however, was made on an islet
off the mouth of the St. Croix river, which now forms the boundary
between New Brunswick and the state of Maine; and there through the
winter De Monts and Champlain stayed with a scurvy-stricken company,
numbering seventy-nine in all, of whom nearly half died. On the
return of spring and the advent of relief from France, the leaders
coasted south along the shores of Maine, and of what were in after
years the New England states; and coming back to their station in
August, they moved the settlement across the Bay of Fundy, and
established themselves on the inlet of Annapolis harbour. De Monts
then returned to France, leaving Pontgrave and Champlain to hold the
post through the winter of 1605.
[Footnote 3: For De Monts' patent see the _Calendar of State Papers_,
Colonial, 1574-1660, p. 4, entry 10, Nov. 8, 1603. It was a patent
'for inhabiting Acadia, Canada, and other places in New France,' and
De Monts was appointed the French King's Lieutenant-General 'for to
represent our person in the countries, territories, coasts, and
confines of La Cadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degree.']
[Sidenote: _Lescarbot._]
In the following summer, ships came back from France just in time to
prevent the settlement at Port Royal from being broken up in despair.
They brought with them the advocate Lescarbot, the historian of New
France. Again there was exploring down the American coast, and again
Champlain and his associates held their own through the winter. The
{42} outlook of the little colony was promising. The season was mild,
the natives were friendly, supplies were plentiful, gardens were laid
out and corn was sown. But in the late spring of 1607 news came from
home that the patent had been cancelled, and before the summer ended
Port Royal was abandoned.
[Sidenote: _De Poutrincourt._]
[Sidenote: _Jesuit influence._]
For nearly three years the place was left desolate, and then, in
1610, one of De Monts' associates came back again. It was the Baron
de Poutrincourt, to whom the harbour, when first discovered, had been
granted by De Monts. The Jesuits were at the time strong at the
French court, stronger still after the assassination of King Henry IV
in this same year. They, or the ladies of the court, who were their
tools, bought shares in the venture, and Jesuit priests went out to
Acadia, thwarting and quarrelling with Poutrincourt and his son. Both
the two great dangers which always threatened and finally ruined the
French power in North America came into being at this date, the
exclusive influence of the Jesuits and English competition.
[Sidenote: _Argall's raid from Virginia._]
[Sidenote: _Destruction of Port Royal._]
In 1606 the Virginia company was incorporated, and in the following
year British colonization on the mainland of North America began with
the founding of Jamestown. There are many miles of coast between
Acadia and Virginia, between the Bay of Fundy and Chesapeake Bay, but
French and English soon crossed each other's paths. In 1613 a ship
sailed from France, sent out under Jesuit influence, with a view to
founding a settlement on the North American coast. After touching at
Port Royal, the party sailed southwards to the coast of Maine, and
landed in the region of the Penobscot river. Hardly had their tents
been set up on the shore, when an English ship came in sight,
captured the French vessel, which was lying at anchor, uprooted the
would-be colony, and took all the Frenchmen prisoners. The invaders
hailed from Jamestown; they were commanded by Samuel Argall, an
unscrupulous freebooter. {43} His pretext was that the Frenchmen were
taking up ground within the limits of the patents granted by the
English King to his subjects, but his act was little more than
piracy. Some of the Frenchmen were set adrift in an open boat, and
eventually reached France in safety; the rest were carried prisoners
to Jamestown, whence Argall set sail again, commissioned by the
governor of Virginia to attack Port Royal. He reached, plundered, and
burnt the fort, its commander, Biencourt, with the rest of the
settlers, being absent in the fields, for it was harvest time; but
the colony was not finally blotted out, and the French still kept a
foothold in Acadia.
[Sidenote: _Champlain on the St. Lawrence._]
Champlain's first voyage to North America in 1603 had taken him to
the St. Lawrence. From 1604-7 Acadia had been the scene of his
labours, until De Monts' patent had been revoked. In 1608 he returned
to the river of Canada. On the line of the St. Lawrence he carried
out the work of his life, and by its banks he died. In the course
which French colonization in America and its first great leader took,
may be traced the influence on history of geography and race.
[Sidenote: _Comparison of English and French colonization in North
America._]
[Sidenote: _English colonial enterprise in the seventeenth century
the result of private co-operation._]
In English colonial history, as writers on the subject have pointed
out,[4] the age of adventure was distinct from the age of settlement.
Ralegh was the latest product of the times of romance, an his
attempts at colonization were premature and unsuccessful. To some
extent a similar distinction may be made in French colonial history:
Cartier may be taken as a representative of the earlier age,
Champlain of the later; but the line of demarcation is much fainter,
much less real, in the case of the French than in that of the
English. To English and French alike adventure had meant private
enterprise, usually but not always countenanced by kings, generally
carried out under cover of royal licences or patents, so vague as to
be almost meaningless, granted one day, liable to be {44} cancelled
the next. When the age of romance passed away in England with the
passing of the sixteenth century, adventurers in the ordinary sense
in great measure disappeared, with the exception of the Arctic
explorers, who, like Hudson and Baffin, still sailed to the desolate
North. Private enterprise, on the other hand, not only survived, but
it grew stronger, more business-like, more independent of court
favour. It was private enterprise still, but under new forms, the
enterprise not of individual freebooters, or of knights errant, but
of associations of citizens, some of the associations being chartered
commercial companies, while others were bands of colonizers and
colonists united by a common antagonism and a common creed. Their
objects were not in the air, they did not live in dreamland, they
went out or sent out others, not so much to discover new lands, as to
occupy and appropriate lands which had already been found, to make
new English homes on the other side of the Atlantic.
[Footnote 4: See e.g. Doyle's _History of the English in America_,
vol. i, chap. vi.]
[Sidenote: _The new patents of English colonization._]
[Sidenote: _Motives of English colonization in the seventeenth
century._]
[Sidenote: _The English kept near to the sea._]
In theory the commercial companies were, like the individual
patentees of the former generation, working under the authority of
the Crown. Indeed that authority was far more strongly proclaimed
than before, and for vague generalities were substituted very
definite restrictions; but this was only a sign of a new time. It
indicated that a stage had been reached when more was known, when
practical business was being taken in hand, and when, therefore, the
slipshod patents, which had hitherto sufficed, would no longer avail.
Because private enterprise really meant more, therefore the
Government said more, and the very defining of the work and
circumscribing of its sphere made the results sounder, more lasting,
and more substantial. It was not the lust of conquest, it was not the
glamour of adventure, it was not a wish to proselytize in religion or
to add new provinces to the domain of a European kingdom which made
the English colonize North America. There were two {45} main motives
at work. One was the desire to find or to do something which would
pay, the other was a longing to live under more independent
conditions than existed in the mother country. The settlers went to
lands where natives dwelt, and, therefore, dealings with the North
American Indians in war and peace ensued; but the English did not go
to the New World in the main to conquer or to convert the Indians,
they went to live and to make their living pay. Instinct was at work
in English colonization, the instinct of self-preservation, of
extension, of always moving a little further and winning a little
more; but there was no high scheme of universal dominion for the
English King or the English creed. Against any such views the New
England colonies were a living protest, and in Virginia, Maryland, or
Carolina they found no place. All of these colonies were prosaic,
unromantic communities: they were groups of Englishmen, living,
grumbling, working and squabbling, with varieties of opinions and
differences of outward forms, half protected, half worried by the
home Government, building up unconsciously, illogically, amid much
that was mean and small, what was to be in the end a mighty nation.
Instinct, too, kept the colonists for the most part near to the sea.
They fringed the Atlantic over which they had come, and ever renewed
their strength as more emigrants came in; they strayed no doubt to
some extent as years went on, taking up farms inland and clearing the
backwoods; but, on the whole, there was continuity of colonization, a
gradual widening of the belt of settlement, expansion on the part of
the settlers themselves, as opposed to planting in the heart of the
continent military outposts, or isolated mission stations.
[Sidenote: _The French colonized inland._]
[Sidenote: _Comparison of French colonization in Canada and Dutch
colonization in South Africa._]
With the French in Canada the case was different. Except in Acadia
and Cape Breton Island, and to a limited extent in Newfoundland, they
had no hold on the sea coast: and Acadia had for many years little
connexion with the {46} land of the St. Lawrence. Canada, as a sphere
of colonization, began when the open sea had been left far behind. It
was an inland territory with a great river and great lakes. No two
parts of the world are more unlike than Canada and South Africa.
Canada has a river highway into it, excellent water communication by
lake and stream, and, until the Rocky mountains are reached, no
mountain barriers are interposed to cut off the interior from the
coast regions or one district from another. South Africa is almost
devoid of natural harbours, its rivers are valueless for purposes of
navigation. Its ranges of hills or mountains rise one behind the
other, barring the way from the coast to the interior, severing one
section of the territory from another. Yet, curiously enough,
somewhat similar results followed from diametrically opposite
geographical conditions. No two races in the world were and are more
unlike each other than the Dutch and the French, unlike in character,
in tradition, in political and religious training. But the Dutch in
South Africa and the French in Canada resembled each other in this,
that they were and remained very few in number, planted in an
unlimited area, and that men lived in either case under a rigid
system. The restrictive rule of the Netherlands East India Company in
South Africa led to trekking, to wandering in the wilderness, and the
difficulties of communication increased the wandering tendency,
because the wanderers, who wished no longer to be controlled by the
government at Cape Town, could not easily be followed up. The French
rule in Canada was restrictive too, restrictive in matters of
politics, of commerce, and of religion. It was a despotism which
allowed no vestige of freedom or self-government; but it was a far
stronger and more active despotism than that of the Netherlands
Company. The Dutch sought a trade monopoly, the French a territorial
dominion. The Dutch were at pains to minimize their responsibilities.
The French policy was {47} one of conquest and conversion; they
looked to holding in subjection the lands and the peoples of the New
World. They worked under a government which was absolute, but whose
absolutism, in the main, encouraged perpetual moving forward, and
they worked in a land where moving forward was comparatively easy.
Thus dispersion ensued on a greater scale than in South Africa. The
negative force which promoted trekking in the Cape Colony was present
also in Canada--antipathy to a rigid system, to hard and fast rules;
and the counterpart of the Dutch voortrekkers, though under very
different conditions, was to be found in the Canadian fur-traders and
_coureurs de bois_. But in South Africa the positive force was
wanting which shaped Canadian history, the forward policy of an
ambitious state. The agents of the French Government in Canada,
military and religious, went far afield--adventurous and
enterprising, intriguing with savage races, establishing outposts in
the interior, strong to carry out a preconceived plan of a great
French dominion. The malcontent Dutchmen in South Africa moved slowly
and sleepily away in their wagons to be out of reach; the country
aided their intent by being difficult of access. Along the rivers and
the lakes of Canada the Frenchmen lightly passed, those who worked
the will of the Government as well as those who were impatient of
control.
[Sidenote: _Contrast between English and French in North America._]
The rivalry then between the two European nations who colonized North
America, the English and the French, was rivalry at every point. It
was a conflict of race, of religion, of geographical conditions, of
new and old, of European government and American colonists. On the
one side were seaboard settlements, comparatively continuous, in
which there was much instinct and little policy, much freedom and
little system; where the population steadily grew by natural causes
and by immigration, democratic communities in which the real work was
done from below, the products of {48} a wholly different era from
that which preceded it, and in which picturesque adventurers had
failed to colonize. On the other side were the beginnings of
continental colonization along the natural lines of communication.
The dispersion was great, the settlers were few, the settlements were
weak. All was done from above, except where unlicensed adventurers
roamed the woods. The elements of an older day were preserved and
stereotyped, attractive but unprogressive. Old forms transplanted to
a New World did not lose their life, but renewed it. Feudal customs
took root in the soil. Despotism, supported by the Roman Catholic
Church, did not survive merely, but grew stronger. The adventurer
remained an adventurer, and did not turn into a businesslike
colonist. There was much that was great, there was more that was
uniform, but there was little or no growth.
[Sidenote: _Elements of strength on the French side._]
The ultimate outcome of such a contest must necessarily have been, in
the course of generations, the triumph of the side on which were the
forces and the views of the coming time. But, while the struggle
lasted, the French gained not a little from being less vulnerable
than the English, as being more dispersed; from being better situated
for purposes of attack; from being organized, so far as there was
organization, under one government and one system instead of many;
from the extraordinary energy and quickness of some of the French
leaders in Canada; from the strong military element in the
population; from the fanatical devotion of the French missionaries;
and last, but not least, from the Frenchmen's better handling of the
natives.
[Sidenote: _The waterways of North America._]
The sources of the Mississippi are close to the western end of Lake
Superior, and the eastern half of North America is therefore nearly
an island, created by the Mississippi, the great lakes, the St.
Lawrence, and the sea. An inner circle is formed by the Mississippi,
the Ohio, Lakes Erie, Ontario, and the St. Lawrence, the head waters
of the Ohio river being within easy distance of Lake Erie. The course
of the Ohio {49} is from north-east to north-west. It flows, very
roughly, parallel to the Alleghany mountains, and drains their
western sides. The Alleghanies in their turn are parallel to the
Atlantic, and between them and the sea is a coast belt from north to
south. Here was the scene of the English settlements. Here, cut off
by mountain ranges from the Mississippi valley and from the inland
plains, the Virginians and the New Englanders made their home. 'The
New England man,' writes Parkman, 'had very little forest experience.
His geographical position cut him off completely from the great
wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action.'[5]
[Footnote 5: _The Old Regime in Canada_, chap. xxi, p. 399 (14th ed.,
1885).]
[Sidenote: _The Hudson river and Lake Champlain._]
But there is one direct route, with nearly continuous waterways, from
the Atlantic seaboard to the St. Lawrence. It runs due north up the
Hudson river, is continued by Lakes George and Champlain between the
Adirondack mountains on the west, and on the east the Green mountains
of Vermont; and from the northern end of Lake Champlain it follows
the outlet of that lake, the Richelieu river, for seventy to eighty
miles into the St. Lawrence. The head waters of the Hudson are hard
by Lake George, but at the present day navigation ceases at Troy, 151
miles from the sea, where is the confluence of the Mohawk river, and
from whence the Champlain canal runs direct to Lake Champlain. The
distance from Troy to Lake George is in straight line about fifty
miles. This route was all-important for attack and defence in the
wars between England and France, and it was well for Great Britain
that, at a comparatively early stage in the colonization of America,
she took over the Dutch settlements in the valley of the Hudson,
gaining control of that river and linking New England to the southern
colonies.
[Sidenote: _The St. Lawrence._]
From the mouth of the Hudson at New York to where the Richelieu joins
the St. Lawrence, a straight line drawn on {50} the map from south to
north measures rather under 400 miles. It is much the same distance,
on a very rough estimate, from the confluence of the Richelieu and
the St. Lawrence to the point where the St. Lawrence opens into the
sea. This point is generally taken to be the Point de Monts, which is
on the northern bank of the river, in north latitude 49 degrees 15
minutes, and west longitude 67 degrees 30 minutes, though the Gaspe
peninsula, on the southern side of the estuary, extends much further
to the east. Thus the centre of the St. Lawrence basin is equidistant
from the mouth of that river and from the mouth of the Hudson,[6] and
between these two points, before the days of railways, there was no
easily accessible route from the sea to Montreal.
[Footnote 6: Hennepin in _A New Discovery of a vast Country in
America_ (English ed., London, 1698, pt. 2, p. 129), speaking of the
St. Lawrence, says: 'The middle of the river is nearer to New York
than to Quebec, the capital town of Canada.' This is of course
incorrect, but it shows appreciation of the directness of the route
to the St. Lawrence by the Hudson river.]
Following up the St. Lawrence from the Point de Monts, at about a
distance of 140 miles, the mouth of the Saguenay is reached on the
northern side. There stood and stands Tadoussac, in old days a great
centre of the fur trade, and the earliest foothold of the French in
Canada. From the mouth of the Saguenay to Quebec is about 120 miles,
and from Quebec to Montreal is rather over 160. Nearly halfway
between Quebec and Montreal, over seventy miles from the former and
over ninety from the latter, is the town of Three Rivers, situated on
the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, at its confluence with the St.
Maurice river, one of the oldest and one of the most important French
settlements in Canada. Here is the limit of the tideway, and above
this point the St. Lawrence expands for some thirty miles into Lake
St. Peter. At the upper end of this lake or expanse of river, on the
southern side, the Richelieu joins the St. Lawrence, with the town of
Sorel at {51} its mouth, and forty-five miles higher up is Montreal.
From Montreal to Kingston, where the St. Lawrence issues from Lake
Ontario, is a distance of 180 to 190 miles by river, past rapids well
known to readers and to tourists, and past the Thousand islands. Thus
the total length of the St. Lawrence, from the lakes to the opening
into the gulf, is rather over 600 miles.
[Sidenote: _The great lakes._]
The great lakes of the St. Lawrence basin cover a surface of nearly
100,000 square miles--an area larger than that of Great Britain.
Lakes Ontario and Erie, connected by the Niagara river, continue the
direct line of the St. Lawrence, Lake Erie more especially lying due
south-west and north-east; but from the extreme end of this
last-named lake the channel of communication takes a sharp curve to
the north in the Detroit river, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair
river, which link together Lakes Erie and Huron. Lake Huron, the
centre of the whole group, stretches back towards the east and
south-east in Georgian Bay, while on the north-west it is connected
with Lake Michigan by the straits of Michillimackinac or Mackinac,
and with Lake Superior by St. Mary's straits and rapids, the Sault
St. Marie. The rivers which feed Lake Superior are the head waters of
the St. Lawrence, and one of them, the St. Louis, which enters the
lake at its extreme western end, has its source hard by the source of
the Mississippi. The total length of lake and river on the line of
the St. Lawrence is over 2,000 miles.
[Sidenote: _The route of the Ottawa river._]
It has been said that Lakes Ontario and Erie continue the main course
of the St. Lawrence in its south-westerly and north-easterly
direction, that the channel which feeds Lake Erie at its western end
comes down from the north, and that the central lake which is then
reached--Lake Huron--breaks back towards the east. Thus the direct
line from Montreal to the centre of the lake system is not up the St.
Lawrence, but along one of its largest tributaries, which enters the
main river at Montreal. This tributary is the Ottawa, flowing {52}
from the north-west in a course broken by falls and rapids. One
hundred and thirty miles from its confluence with the St. Lawrence,
just below the Chaudiere falls, now stands the city of Ottawa, the
capital of the Canadian Dominion, connected with Lake Ontario by the
Rideau canal; and rather under 200 miles above Ottawa, where the
Mattawa river enters from the west, there is nearly continuous water
communication in a due westerly direction with Lake Nipissing, which
lake is in turn connected by the French river with the great inlet of
Lake Huron known as Georgian Bay. Champlain early explored this
route--the direct route to the west, and along it as far as Lake
Nipissing now runs the Canadian Pacific Railway. French river flows
into the northern end of Georgian Bay. At its south-easternmost end,
that bay runs into the land in the direction of Lake Ontario; and in
the middle of the broad isthmus between the two lakes lies Lake
Simcoe.
[Sidenote: _Canada a geographical federation._]
Such in rough outline is the basin of the St. Lawrence. It is a
network of lakes and rivers which finds no parallel, unless it be in
Central Africa. The present Dominion of Canada is not merely a
political federation; it is a federation of regions which are
geographically separate from each other. There is the eastern
seaboard, the old Acadia; there is the basin of the St. Lawrence;
there are the plains of the North-West and the regions of the Hudson
Bay; and there are the lands of the Pacific coast. Only one of these
four regions, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was the main scene of
early Canadian history. Acadia comes into the story, it is true, but
until the eighteenth century only indirectly, in connexion with the
English colonies on the Atlantic coast rather than with the French in
Canada. English and French collided on the shores of Hudson Bay; they
collided also in Newfoundland; but Hudson Bay and Newfoundland alike
were outside the sphere of Canada. The great prairies of the
North-West were a possibility of the distant future; but not {53}
till the days of railways did the western half of the present
Dominion come within the range of practical politics. Along the St.
Lawrence and its tributaries the drama of Canadian history was
played; the furthest horizon was the Mississippi and the whole line
of the lakes; a nearer view was bounded by the Ohio valley; while the
immediate foreground was formed by the St. Lawrence from Quebec to
Lake Ontario, the centremost point being the confluence of the
Richelieu with the main river.
Movement, constant movement, these waterways suggested; exploration,
adventure, and ultimately conquest; pressing onward by strength or
skill through a boundless area, with something unknown always beyond;
making portages round impossible rapids, forcing paths through
interminable forests, dealing with half-hidden foes. The land was one
for the traveller, the explorer, the missionary, the soldier, the
hunter, the fur-trader, but not so much for the settler and the
agriculturist. Thus it was that the age of adventurers was
perpetuated along the St. Lawrence, while the English colonists
between the Alleghanies and the sea were living steady lives attached
to the soil.
[Sidenote: _The main object of North American exploration was a route
to the East._]
The great motive force of modern adventure was, as has been seen, the
search for a direct route to the East. Engaged in this search Henry
Hudson, in 1609, piloted the Dutch into the Hudson river.[7]
Champlain's first expedition up the Ottawa was due to a lying tale
that along that river had been found a way to the sea. La Salle, the
explorer of the Mississippi, had his mind ever set on the East, and
his Seigniory above Montreal was named La Chine; for, 'like {54}
Champlain and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the
south sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and
Japan.'[8] Many long years passed before the geography of North
America was known with any accuracy, and in the meantime the recesses
of the continent, from which the rivers flowed, seemed to hide the
secret of a thoroughfare by the West to the East. Similarly, from the
time when Columbus sought for and thought he had found the Indies in
the New World, down to our own day, the natives of America have been
known as Indians.
[Footnote 7: Hudson in 1609 sought for a North-West Passage about the
fortieth degree of latitude. 'This idea had been suggested to Hudson
by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him
from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea
leading into the western ocean by the north of Virginia.' See _A
Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets
relating to New Netherland_, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam,
Frederick Mueller, 1868), Introd. pp. xxv, xxvi.]
[Footnote 8: Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_
(1885 ed.), p. 8.]
[Sidenote: _The Indians of North America._]
[Sidenote: _The Algonquins._]
The two native races, with which the history of Canada is mainly
concerned, are the Algonquins and the Huron Iroquois. The former were
far the more numerous of the two, and were spread over a much larger
area. They included under different names the Indians of the lower
St. Lawrence, of Acadia, New England, and the Atlantic states as far
as the Carolinas--the Montagnais, the Abenakis, the Micmacs, the
Narragansetts, the Pequods, and others. The Delawares, too, were
members of the race, and Algonquin tribes were to be found on the
Ottawa, at Lake Nipissing, on the further shores of the great lakes,
in Michigan and Illinois. From the day when Champlain joined forces
with them against their hereditary foes the Iroquois, they ranged
themselves for the most part on the side of the French.
[Sidenote: _The Huron Iroquois._]
The Hurons or Wyandots and the Iroquois were distinct from the
Algonquins and akin to each other. When Cartier visited the St.
Lawrence, the native towns which he found on the sites of Quebec and
Montreal seem to have been inhabited by Indians of this race; but by
Champlain's time the towns had disappeared, and those who dwelt in
them had sought other strongholds. Though related in blood and
speech, these two groups of tribes were deadly foes of each other.
The Hurons, like the Algonquins, were allied to the {55} French; the
Iroquois, guided partly by policy and partly by antipathy to the
European intruders into Canada and their Indian friends, were as a
rule to be found in amity with the English. The region of the upper
St. Lawrence and of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, was the home of
the Huron Iroquois race. The Huron country lay between Georgian Bay
of Lake Huron and Lake Simcoe. South of the Hurons, the northern
shore of Lake Erie and both sides of the Niagara river were held by
the Neutral Nation, neutral as between the Iroquois and the Hurons,
and akin to both. The Eries on the southern side of Lake Erie, and
the Andastes on the lower Susquehanna, were also of Huron Iroquois
stock; but the foremost group of the race, the strongest by far,
though not the most numerous, of all the North American Indians, were
the Iroquois themselves, the celebrated Five Nations of Canadian
story.
[Sidenote: _The country of the Five Nations._]
The Erie canal, which, in its 352 miles of length, connects Lake Erie
at Buffalo with the Hudson river at West Troy and Albany, runs
through the country of the Five Nations. That country extended along
the southern side of Lake Ontario from the Genesee river on the west
to the Hudson on the east, while due north of the Hudson, the outlet
of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, the Richelieu river, was in
old days known as the river of the Iroquois. The Mohawk river, along
which the Erie canal is now carried, was, on the Atlantic side, the
highway to the land of the Iroquois, and it bore the name of the best
known of the Five Nations, the whole confederacy being sometimes
spoken or written of as Mohawks.[9] The route up the river provided
nearly continuous communication by water between the Hudson and Lake
Ontario. From its confluence with the Hudson the Mohawk was followed
to the head of its navigation, whence there was a short portage of
about four miles {56} to Wood Creek, a stream running into the Oneida
lake, and the Oneida lake was linked to Lake Ontario by the Oswego
river. All this line was under Iroquois control; and the westernmost
of the Five Nations, the Senecas, commanded also the trade route to
Lake Erie.
[Footnote 9: The Mohawks, however, were not the strongest of the five
in number. They were outnumbered by the Senecas.]
[Sidenote: _The Five Nations._]
The name 'Iroquois' is said to be of French origin: the true title of
the Five Nations was an Indian word,[10] signifying 'people of the
long house.' Their dwellings were oblong in form, often of great
length; and, as were their dwellings, so also was their
dwelling-place. Side by side the Five Nations stretched in line from
west to east, as may be told by lakes and rivers in New York State,
which to this day bear their names. Farthest to the west were the
Senecas; next came the Cayugas, the people of the marsh. The third in
line, the central people of the league, within whose borders was the
federal Council house, were the Onondagas, the mountaineers; the
Oneidas followed; and easternmost of all were the Mohawks.[11]
[Footnote 10: Hodenosaunee.]
[Footnote 11: In a report of a committee of the Council held at New
York, Nov. 6, 1724, on the subject of a petition of the London
merchants against the Act of 1720, given in Colden's _History of the
Five Indian Nations of Canada_ (3rd ed., London, 1755), p. 226, the
Five Nations are placed as follows: the Mohawks but 40 miles due west
of Albany, and within the English settlements; the Oneidas about 100
miles west of Albany, and near the head of the Mohawk river; the
Onondagas about 130 miles west of Albany; the Cayugas 160; and the
Senecas 240.]
[Sidenote: _Small numbers of the Iroquois._]
[Sidenote: _Their geographical position. They held the border line
between French and English._]
In all the history of European colonization no group of savages,
perhaps, ever played so prominent a part as the Iroquois; none were
so courted and feared; none made themselves felt so heavily for a
long period of years together. This fact was not due to their
numbers, for they were comparatively few, and Parkman estimates that
'In the days of their greatest triumphs their united cantons could
not have mustered four thousand warriors.'[12] Yet they attacked and
{57} blotted out other Indian races equal to or outnumbering
themselves. They nearly destroyed the French settlements in Canada;
and all through the contest between Great Britain and France in
America, they were a force to be reckoned with by either side. Their
alliance was sought, their enmity was dreaded. Their strength was due
to the geographical position which they held, and to their national
characteristics; while their policy was influenced by the differing
conditions of the white people with whom they had to deal. Their home
has been described. It was the southern frontier of central Canada,
the borderland between the French and English spheres of trade and
settlement. Here they lived, in a position where a weak race would
have been ground in pieces between opposing forces, but where a
strong race, conscious of its advantages and able to use them, could
more than hold its own. 'Nothing,' wrote Charlevoix, 'has contributed
more to render them formidable than the advantage of their situation,
which they soon discovered, and know very well how to take advantage
of it. Placed between us and the English, they soon conceived that
both nations would be obliged to court them; and it is certain that
the principal attention of both colonies, since their settlement, has
been to gain them or at least to engage them to remain neuter.'[13]
[Footnote 12: _Conspiracy of Pontiac_ (1885 ed.), vol. i, chap. i, p.
21. Charlevoix says: 'All their forces joined together have never
amounted to more than 5,000 or 6,000 fighting men' (_Letters to the
Duchess of Lesdiguieres_, Engl. tr., London, 1763, p. 185). On the
other hand, in _A Concise Account of North America_, by Major Robert
Rogers (London, 1765), p. 206, it is stated that 'when the English
first settled in America they (the Iroquois) could raise 15,000
fighting men.']
[Footnote 13: Charlevoix, as above, pp. 184-5.]
[Sidenote: _Their strength of character and policy._]
A strong race the Iroquois were. In cruelty and endurance, in bold
conception and swift execution, they had few, if any, rivals among
the natives of North America, and in their grasp of something like
state policy they had no equals. As savages, pure and simple, they
reached the highest level; they might indeed have had a greater and
more lasting future, if their level had not been so high. The Kaffir
races of South Africa in our own time have produced good {58}
fighting material; some of their leaders have shown skilful
generalship and no small statecraft; but they have been loosely knit
together, little bound as a whole by the ties of country or of kin;
and from this very weakness has come their salvation, in that they
could and can be recast in a new mould. It was not so with the North
American Indians, least of all with the Iroquois. They were
stereotyped in savagery, and, when the white men came among them, it
was too late for them to change; but, as savages of the most
ferocious type, as ruthless murdering hunters of men, they developed
an organization which was evidence at once of intellectual and
physical strength, and of a wild kind of moral discipline.
[Sidenote: _Their political organization._]
It is rare to find among savages a confederacy which will outlive a
single expedition or one season's war. When there is cohesion, it is
usually under savage despots like the Zulu Kings, who habituate their
followers to military discipline, and keep them attached partly by
fear and partly by the memory or hope of successful bloodshed; but
among the Five Nations the rule of one man had no place, and, though
warring was their normal condition, the federation lasted in peace as
well. They were doubly federated. Not only were there five nations or
tribes, but there were also eight clans which included the whole of
the Five Nations, members of each clan being found in each nation.
The five nations had in fact originally been one, composed of eight
clans. Each clan was named after some beast or bird, which formed its
totem or coat of arms, the three leading clans bearing those of the
tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.[14] The {59} clan tie was a family
tie; the members of each clan, to whichever nation they belonged,
were as brothers and sisters, and there was no intermarrying between
them. Inheritance ran in the female line, and the children belonged
to the mother's clan. The clans gave the chieftains to the separate
nations and to the confederacy. The highest chiefs were known as
_sachems_, a civil rather than a military title, and the Council of
fifty sachems formed the principal governing body of the league, the
place of honour being given to the head sachem of the Onondagas.
There was also a Council of subordinate chiefs, and a wider body, a
Senate--in whose deliberations men of age and experience took part,
irrespective of hereditary rank. The form of government was the same
for each of the five nations as for the whole confederacy. There was
no law but much custom, despotism was unknown, and so was anarchy.
There was something Homeric about the Iroquois. Like the Greeks of
the legendary age, they were perpetually fighting in spasmodic
fashion, with great cruelty, with every form of guile as well as
force; and when not fighting they held innumerable councils, making
many and long-winded speeches. Apart from personal bravery, the one
sound element in their system and character was, strange as it may
appear, some measure of what the early Greeks valued under the term
[Greek: aidos] or reverence. The Iroquois reverenced long-standing
customs, social position, and the voice of age. War was their trade,
but the highest dignities attached to the civil chieftain more than
to the successful warrior. They dealt out shameless violence to all
beyond their pale, but within the ranks of their own people they
recognized much more than mere physical strength or skill in
butchery.
[Footnote 14: These three leading clans so put into the shade all the
others that in some old writers these alone are recognized. Thus
Colden says (vol. i, p. 1): 'Each of these nations is again divided
into three tribes or families, who distinguish themselves by three
different arms or ensigns, the tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.' A
full account of the Iroquois organization is given by Parkman in the
first chapter of the _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, and in the introduction
to _The Jesuits in North America_. See also the chapter on Canadian
and Iroquois Indians in Sir J. G. Bourinot's _Canada_, in the 'Story
of the Nations' series. It will be seen from the note to the
Introduction, p. lv, of _The Jesuits in North America_ (1885 ed.),
that the number of the clans as given above, and their presence in
each tribe, is not absolutely certain.]
[Sidenote: _The Iroquois in some respects resembled the Spartans._]
In their organization they had advanced beyond the stage {60} which
is outlined in the Iliad. They were far more democratic than the
Greeks of Homeric time. In savage sort they framed and kept a polity
of the kind which Aristotle tells us is the most perfect type of
constitution, being a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. The
hereditary principle was strong, but chieftainship did not pass from
father to son owing to the rule of female succession. The councils of
the nation found place for all whose qualifications were for the
public good. High standing, age, experience, eloquence, strength of
arm, all were recognized in this strange community. To Sparta Colden
likens the confederacy of the Five Nations, in that, in either case,
the national customs trained the minds and the bodies of the people
for war;[15] but the likeness extends to other points as well. As far
as a Greek state and a band of North American savages can be
compared, in their social and political training, in their inflexible
rules, in their recognition of merit combined with unswerving
adherence to the principle of priority of families and clans, no less
than in their heartless indifference to pain whether inflicted on
themselves or others, the Iroquois Indians resembled the citizens of
the famous Greek state. But whatever comparison may be made with
either ancient or modern communities, the story of the Five Nations
presents the curious problem of a group of savages of the very worst
type, who yet in some sort solved the difficulties which the most
civilized peoples find so great--those of reconciling democracy with
hereditary privileges, and federal union with local independence.
[Footnote 15: P. 14., 'On these occasions the state of Lacedaemon
ever occurs to my mind, which that of the Five Nations in many
respects resembles, their laws and customs being in both framed to
render the minds and bodies of the people fit for war.' Parkman, too,
says of them, 'Never since the days of Sparta were individual life
and national life more completely fused into one'; see _The Jesuits
in North America_ (1885 ed.), Introduction, p. lx.]
[Sidenote: _Principle of adoption among the Iroquois._]
Constantly weakened by the strain of war, to some extent {61} they
renewed their strength by the principle of adoption.[16] Of the
prisoners whom they took, most were put to death with nameless
tortures, but many were admitted to their tribes; and in one instance
they incorporated a whole people. This was the Tuscaroras, a kindred
tribe from the Carolinas, driven north by war with the colonists
early in the eighteenth century. About 1715, they were admitted into
the league as a sixth nation, though not on equal terms, and were
assigned a dwelling-place among the Oneidas and Onondagas.
[Footnote 16: 'They strictly follow one maxim, formerly used by the
Romans to increase their strength, that they encourage the people of
other nations to incorporate with them' (Colden, p. 5).]
[Sidenote: _Their sphere of influence._]
[Sidenote: _Their feud with the French._]
The tribes of the Huron Iroquois stock were agriculturists to a
greater extent than the Algonquins. In other words, they had passed
out of the nomad stage and made permanent homes. Still, they lived in
great measure by the chase; they were born hunters as they were born
warriors, and furs and beaver skins were the products which they
bartered for the white man's goods. The Five Nations hunted and
raided far beyond the limits of their cantons. In 1687, Dongan,
Governor of New York, wrote of them: 'The Five Nations are the most
warlike people in America, and are a bulwark between us and other
tribes. They go as far as the South Sea, the North-West Passage, and
Florida to war.'[17] Their interests as well as their pride demanded
that on the upper St. Lawrence, as well as on Lakes Erie and Ontario,
their power should be paramount. As far as other groups of Indians
were concerned, they ensured their object, conquering and in great
measure exterminating the Hurons, the Neutral Nation, and the Eries;
but they knew well that the few Frenchmen in Canada were more
dangerous to their ascendency, and possibly to their existence, than
any native tribe or race, however numerous. The French began by
making the Iroquois their foes. Champlain had hardly {62} settled at
Quebec, when he joined the Hurons and Algonquins in an expedition
against them. Thenceforward the Five Nations were the enemies of
France. This result would probably have followed in any case, and it
is difficult to suppose that one early action determined all
succeeding history. It was rather the beginning of an inevitable
struggle for the control of the upper St. Lawrence and of the
Canadian fur trade. On all sides of their own country the Iroquois,
like other masterful peoples, extended their sphere of influence; but
their real outlet was to the north, towards the lakes and the great
river. On this side the white men were most active and restless, ever
sending their emissaries a little further on, ever putting themselves
in evidence in some new tribe or village.[18] The French were not
content to live outside the Indians; nor were they content, having
found a resting-place, to stay there. To be in and among the natives,
to control and to convert them, to be the recognized protectors of
the land and its peoples, to be the ultimate recipients of the
produce of the country, and the guardians of the channels by which
the produce was conveyed--no smaller aims sufficed for the French in
Canada. In the pursuit of these objects they directly competed with
the Iroquois Indians. Great was the territory, few in number were the
Frenchmen and Iroquois alike; but they were rivals for ascendency on
the same river, and there was not room for both.
[Footnote 17: _Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1685-8, No. 1160,
pp. 328-9, Dongan to the Lords of Trade, March, 1687.]
[Footnote 18: 'But this justice must be done to the French, that they
far exceeded the English in the daring attempts of some of their
inhabitants, in travelling very far among unknown Indians,
discovering new countries, and everywhere spreading the fame of the
French name and grandeur' (Colden, p. 35).]
Because they were enemies of the French, the Iroquois naturally
became the allies of the English; but before they had much, if any
experience of the latter, they had come into contact with a third
European people, the Dutch on the Hudson river.
[Sidenote: _The Dutch on the Hudson river._]
[Sidenote: _New Netherland._]
In 1609, the year after the founding of Quebec, Henry {63} Hudson, an
Englishman in the Netherlands service, sailed at the beginning of
September into the river which still bears his name, seeking, as he
sought till his death, a North-West Passage to Asia. The name of New
Netherland was formally given to the scene of his discovery in 1614,
and in 1615 a small fort was built on Manhattan Island--the first
little seed of the city of New York. In 1621, the Netherlands West
India Company came into being; and in the following year New
Netherland, with the beaver trade, which was its chief attraction,
was placed in the hands of the company. In settling on the Hudson the
Dutch conflicted with English claims, and the Government of the
Netherlands seem to have recognized that there was a flaw in their
title. However, the existence of New Netherland as a Dutch possession
continued till the year 1664, when it was surrendered to an English
force sent out by the Duke of York, who had obtained from his
brother, Charles II, a grant of the territory. The English occupation
was confirmed by the Peace of Breda in 1667; and though a Dutch fleet
recovered the colony in 1673, in the following year, by the Treaty of
Westminster, it was finally given up to the English.
New Amsterdam, afterwards New York, was the chief settlement of New
Netherland; but Dutch trade and colonization extended up the valley
of the Hudson, where tracts of land were obtained by _patroons_ or
large landowners, who were granted exclusive privileges by the
company on condition of planting families of settlers upon their
holdings. The chief inland colony was Rensselaerswyck, called after
an Amsterdam merchant of the name of Rensselaer, and its centre was
Fort Orange, now Albany; while on the Mohawk river, about twenty
miles above its confluence with the Hudson, and rather less in a
direct line from Albany, was the settlement of Schenectady.[19]
[Footnote 19: For an account of the Dutch on the Hudson see _A
Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets
relating to {64} New Netherland_, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam,
Frederick Mueller, 1868), referred to above. See also Justin Winsor's
_Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. iv, chap. viii.]
[Sidenote: _Friendship between the Dutch and the Iroquois._]
Traders wherever they went, all the world over, the Dutchmen were at
pains to keep peace with the Iroquois. Their dealings with them were
on the same lines as the dealings of their countrymen with the
Hottentots in the early days of the Cape Colony.[20] They bought and
sold, and got good value for their money, paying, for instance, no
more than forty florins for Manhattan Island. But the mere fact of
paying for what they took was in their favour, for it was a
recognition that the natives were the rightful owners of the land. In
course of time they came into conflict with the Mohican Indians along
the banks of the Hudson; but with the Five Nations, the nearest of
whom were the Mohawks, they were ever in friendship. They were not
actually in the Mohawk country, but on its borders; they were
neighbours, not intruders; they took the furs which the Indians had
to barter, giving in exchange European goods, and notably firearms.
Thus Albany became a friendly meeting-place between the Iroquois
Indians and the white men of the Hudson colony. The two peoples did
not clash with one another in any way, but met as friends and equals,
and supplied each others' wants.
[Footnote 20: See vol. iv of this series, chap. ii, p. 43.]
The one object of the Dutch being to trade, and the whole people
being traders, a twofold result followed, promoting friendly
relations between them and the Mohawks. Not only did the Indians
realize that they had nothing to fear, and much to gain, from having
for their neighbours Europeans who had no views of war or conquest,
and through whose agency they could arm themselves against the more
aggressive Europeans on the Canadian side; but also, as we may well
suppose, the Dutch traders included the best of the Dutchmen, which
was not the case with either the French or the English. At any rate,
we read that the Dutch in the Hudson valley 'gained the hearts of the
Five Nations by {65} their kind usage',[21] and in memory of a
Dutchman named Cuyler, whom the Indians held in special honour, the
Iroquois in after years always gave to the British Governor of New
York the title of 'Corlaer'.[22]
[Footnote 21: Colden, vol. i, p. 34.]
[Footnote 22: Parkman's _Count Frontenac_ (1885 ed.), p. 93, note.]
[Sidenote: _The English inherited the Iroquois alliance._]
Into this kindly heritage the English entered;[23] and, though their
treatment of the Indians left much to be desired, the alliance, if
often strained, was, in the case of the Mohawks at any rate, never
sundered; and finally, at the close of the War of Independence, many
of the Five Nation Indians, after fighting for England, migrated into
Canada, and were assigned lands in the province of Ontario, where
their descendants are still to be found. In the words of the Indian
orators, a chain of friendship held together the English and the
Iroquois. 'Our chain,' they said, 'is a strong chain, it is a silver
chain, it can neither rust nor be broken';[24] and it would be
difficult to overrate the advantage which accrued to the English
colonies from their traditional alliance with the strongest natives
of North America.
[Footnote 23: Colden, as above, 'In 1664, New York being taken by the
English, they likewise entered into a friendship with the Five
Nations.']
[Footnote 24: Colden, p. 125.]
[Sidenote: _The founding of Quebec._]
In the summer of 1608, Champlain founded the first French settlement
at Quebec. A year before, the English had settled at Jamestown in
Virginia. A year later, the Dutch found their way to the Hudson. Till
his death, at the end of 1635, the story of Champlain is the story of
Canada. His colleagues in the new enterprise were men with whom he
had already worked in Acadia--De Monts and Pontgrave. De Monts had
obtained from the King one year's monopoly of the Canadian fur trade,
and two ships which he sent to the St. Lawrence were in charge of
Pontgrave and Champlain respectively. Pontgrave, the merchant, stayed
at Tadoussac through the summer, bartering with the Indians and
coming to blows with Basque traders, who held {66} the French King's
patent of little account. Champlain, the explorer, went higher up the
river, and erected wooden buildings by the water-side, on the site of
the lower town of Quebec. There he stayed through the winter, while
his friend went home, and, when Pontgrave returned in the following
summer, travels and adventures began which made Champlain's name
great among the Indian tribes of Canada.
[Sidenote: _Champlain's explorations and collision with the
Iroquois._]
His first expedition, in 1609, was to the lake which is still called
after him. He went as an ally of the Huron and the Algonquin Indians
against their enemies the Iroquois. Up the St. Lawrence, up the
Richelieu, and on to Lake Champlain he took his way, and at the head
of the lake, somewhere near the site where Fort Ticonderoga
afterwards stood, the white men's firearms dispersed the warriors of
the Five Nations and won a victory. The summer of 1609 ended, and
Champlain went back to France, returning to Canada in the following
spring.[25]
[Footnote 25: Canada was first known as New France after Champlain's
return to Europe, in 1609 (Charlevoix's _Histoire Generale de la
Nouvelle France_, 1744 ed., vol. i, bk. iv, p. 149).]
[Sidenote: _His difficulties in France._]
De Monts' monopoly had expired and had not been renewed, but none the
less he and his associates persevered in their enterprise, opening up
the trade of the St. Lawrence, while others shared the profits. Again
Champlain joined forces with the friendly Indians against the
Iroquois, and a second victory was the result. Before the summer of
1610 ended, he was back in Europe, having learnt in the meantime that
his friend and patron, King Henry IV, had been stabbed to death in
the streets of Paris. On his next visit to Canada, in 1611, he
cleared the ground for a future settlement at Montreal, having noted
its advantages as a meeting-place for the Indian tribes from the
Ottawa and the great lakes. The late months of that year and the
whole of 1612 he spent in France, trying to devise some organization
under which the work of building up the French power in Canada {67}
might be successfully carried on. There was now no company in
existence, there was no royal mandate; personal favour and protection
had passed away with the death of Henry of Navarre. The French court
was a scene of growing priestly influence and of numberless
intrigues; while New France on the St. Lawrence was a 'no man's
land,' infested in summer time by crowds of fur-traders, who owned no
rule and knew no law, in winter deserted by white men, except the few
struggling settlers at Quebec. To form some kind of trade's union
under an acknowledged authority was the one thing needful, and with a
view to this end Champlain sought for and obtained the patronage of a
member of the royal house. The Count de Soissons, a Bourbon prince,
was appointed Lieutenant-General of the King for New France, and when
he died, shortly after his appointment, the place was taken by
another Bourbon, the Prince of Conde. The deputy of these princes was
Champlain himself; he was given control over the Canadian fur trade,
and he endeavoured to reconcile the rival interests of the western
ports of France by forming a combination of traders, to which all
could be admitted who had an interest in Canada. The scheme was
partially carried out, but unfortunately jealousies, commercial and
religious, precluded the establishment of a single united company.
[Sidenote: _The imposture of Nicolas de Vignau._]
To make money by trade for himself or others was not the first object
of Champlain's life. Exploration, with the Indies as its final goal,
was in his mind, and the formation of a colony which should indeed be
New France. While he still sojourned in Europe, a Frenchman, Nicolas
de Vignau, came back from Canada, telling a tale that up the Ottawa
river and beyond its sources he had found an outlet to the sea. Early
in 1613 Champlain recrossed the Atlantic, went up the St. Lawrence to
Montreal Island, and thence, taking De Vignau with him, followed the
course of the Ottawa as far as the Ile des Allumettes. He went no
further. The {68} story of a way to the sea was exposed, as a
cunningly devised fable, by the Indians of the upper Ottawa, among
whom the impostor had sojourned when he concocted his lies; and, but
for Champlain's interposition, he would then and there have paid for
his falsehood with his life. Champlain, however, spared him, retraced
his steps, and went back again to France, where he spent a year and
more before he again visited Canada.
[Sidenote: _The Recollet friars._]
[Sidenote: _Le Caron._]
[Sidenote: _The first mission to the Hurons._]
Towards the end of May, 1615, he reached Quebec. He brought with him
this time a small band of missionaries, four friars of the Recollet
branch of the Franciscan order; and now mission work began in Canada.
One of the friars, Le Caron, with twelve other Frenchmen in the
company, visited for the first time the Huron country, and Champlain
followed close upon his steps. Ascending the Ottawa for the second
time, he passed the point which he had reached two years before, and
by the Mattawa river and Lake Nipissing came to the shores of Lake
Huron. Coasting southward along Georgian Bay, he found himself at
length among the Huron towns, where Le Caron was already busy
preaching a new faith to the heathen. An expedition against the
Iroquois had been determined on, and with the Huron warriors and
their allies, Champlain set out for the enemy's land. His route took
him across Lake Simcoe, down the series of small lakes which feed the
river Trent, and by that river to Lake Ontario, then seen by him for
the first time. Crossing the lake, he landed at the site of Oswego,
and marched into the midst of the Five Nations' cantons. From the
military point of view the expedition was a disastrous failure, for
an attack on a palisaded Iroquois town miscarried, Champlain himself
was wounded, and the invaders retreated beaten and disheartened.
Among the Hurons Champlain spent the winter; next year, returning
down the Ottawa, he came back to Quebec, in the midsummer of 1616,
and subsequently he sailed for France.
{69} [Sidenote: _Result of the first eight years of New France._]
Eight years had now passed since the founding of Quebec. Lakes Huron
and Ontario had been reached, the Ottawa route had been explored, the
friendship of the Hurons had been secured at the price of enmity with
the Iroquois, missionaries were converting or trying to convert the
Indians, and fur trading was briskly carried on; but colonization had
made as yet little or no way. There were a few permanent residents at
Quebec; but lower down at Tadoussac, and higher up at Three Rivers
and Montreal, where in the summer white men and coloured foregathered
to exchange their wares, in the winter no Frenchmen were to be found,
unless it were one or other of the much enduring Recollet
missionaries. In France it was the trade of Canada, not its
settlement, that was matter of concern. As in the case of
Newfoundland, the merchants of the western seaports of England set
themselves to keep the island from being permanently colonized,
anxious that the fishing traffic should remain in their own hands: so
in the case of Canada, the merchants of the western seaboard of
France regarded colonization as at best a useless expense, at worst a
measure by which they might lose command of the fur trade. The
climate of Newfoundland and of the St. Lawrence region was not such
as to induce Englishmen or Frenchmen to make these lands their homes.
Rather they seemed places for summer trips alone, to be left in
winter icebound and desolate. Trade interests and nature combined to
check the colonization of Canada; that anything was done in the way
of settlement in the early years of the seventeenth century was due
to missionary enthusiasm and to the foresight and tenacity of
Champlain.
[Sidenote: _Dispute among French traders._]
[Sidenote: _Company of the One Hundred Associates formed by
Richelieu._]
He had formed a company of merchants, chiefly connected with Rouen
and St. Malo, who nominally controlled the trade of the St. Lawrence;
but they were not at one amongst themselves, some were Catholics,
others were Huguenots, while the merchants of La Rochelle refused to
join the combination, {70} and traded in defiance of the monopoly
which the rival towns claimed to possess. Various changes followed.
About the beginning of 1620, Conde was succeeded as Viceroy of New
France by the Duc de Montmorency, and in 1625 the latter sold his
office to his nephew the Duc de Ventadour. In 1621, the privileges
enjoyed by the Rouen and St. Malo company were transferred to two
Huguenot merchants, the brothers De Caen: the result was ill feeling,
and on the St. Lawrence open feuds between the old and the new
monopolists, until in 1623 some kind of union was formed. Eventually,
in 1627, all former privileges were annulled, and the control of
Canada passed into the hands of a new strong company, known as the
One Hundred Associates, at the head of which was Richelieu.
[Sidenote: _Building of the fort at Quebec._]
During these troubled years, amid the squabbles of conflicting
interests, the one source of strength and steadfastness for the
Frenchmen on the St. Lawrence was Champlain's own personality, while
the two principal events were the building of the fort at Quebec, and
the coming of the Jesuit missionaries. As Lieutenant of the King and
representative of the Viceroys of New France, Champlain's difficult
task was to hold the balance even between the rival traders and to
maintain some semblance of law and order along the water highway of
Canada. In former years, as an explorer he had obtained unrivalled
influence among the Indians; now, as Governor, he brought the same
qualities of tact and firmness into play in keeping the peace among
his turbulent countrymen. From 1620 to 1624, he was continuously in
Canada, and on the rock of Quebec he built a fort stronger and more
substantial than the wooden buildings which abutted on the river
below. Well situated, able to withstand ten thousand men,[26] such
was an English account a few years later of this fort, when enlarged
and completed--the fort {71} St. Louis at Quebec. The merchants
grudged the money and the men for the work, but the building of a
substantial fortress on the St. Lawrence was a step forward towards
the French dominion of Canada.
[Footnote 26: _Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1574-1660, p.
139, under the year 1632.]
[Sidenote: _Coming of the Jesuits to Canada._]
[Sidenote: _Their policy._]
[Sidenote: _Supported by the French Government._]
The year 1625 was the year in which the first Jesuit missionaries
came into Canada. In that year the Duc de Ventadour became Viceroy of
New France: he was closely connected with the Jesuit order, and began
his regime by sending out priests at his own expense. Their coming
marked an epoch in Canadian history. The Franciscan brethren, who
were already in the field, and who welcomed the new-comers on their
arrival, were men of a different stamp. Devoted missionaries, they
kept to their work; they claimed, outwardly at least, no religious
monopoly; they had no wish to control the temporal power; and they
lived at peace with all men. The Jesuits, on the other hand, imported
religious despotism. The Jesuit emissaries were brave men, none more
so; they were self-sacrificing to an extreme, venturesome and
tenacious, indifferent to danger, and fearless of death. They were
tactful in their dealings with the Indians, and were trained in a
school of diplomacy which has never been excelled. But they were the
champions of exclusiveness, and the enemies of freedom. Their coming
meant that one form of religion was to supplant all others--that the
spiritual power was, as far as in them lay, to dominate all things
and all men; and that while much was to be done, it was to be done
for instead of by the colonists and the natives, from above instead
of from below, on a rigid system--strong in itself but inimical to
healthy growth, to that variety of life, of thought, and of outward
form which helps on the expansion of a young community. From their
training and their organization, the Jesuits would in any case have
had great influence on the fortunes of the land to which they came;
but their influence was greater in that their despotic views
harmonized for the time being with the policy {72} of the Bourbon
Kings and their ministers. For absolute monarchy had taken root in
France; and in the French dependencies, as in the mother country,
there was to be henceforth political and religious despotism. That
the spiritual power might grow too strong was a distant danger, and
in France hardly a practical possibility. In the meantime Kings and
priests went hand in hand, co-operating against liberty in church and
state alike. Protestantism meant liberty. The Jesuits abhorred the
Huguenots because they deemed them heretics: the French Kings and
their ministers oppressed them rather on political than on religious
grounds, but were glad to use the religious argument in support of
political aims.
[Sidenote: _Oppression of the Huguenots in France._]
[Sidenote: _Its effects in Canada._]
[Sidenote: _The Huguenots excluded from New France._]
On the death of Henry IV in 1610, his young son, Louis XIII, became
King of France. In 1624 Richelieu became his minister. In 1627 the
discontent of the Huguenots culminated in the open revolt of the town
of La Rochelle; and its fall, after a ten months' siege, gave the
King and the cardinal mastery over the Protestants of France. The
effect on Canada of this unsuccessful rising was twofold. It involved
the exclusion of Huguenot settlers, and it involved also the
hostility of England. The patent granted in 1627 to the company of
New France, known as the One Hundred Associates, provided that every
colonist who went out to Canada must be a Catholic, and when in the
following year Richelieu received the submission of the Rochellois,
he was well able to enforce this arbitrary provision. It is difficult
at the present day to comprehend a policy, initiated and approved by
a statesman of consummate ability, which could not but result in
blighting the infancy of the greatest French colony. The English
colonies were in the main pre-eminently homes of freedom,
dwelling-places for men whose political and religious opinions found
scant favour in the United Kingdom. For the English race the New
World redressed the balance of the Old; and though the {73} colonists
who went out from Europe to America, were in their turn prejudiced
and narrow-minded, their want of tolerance was not forced upon them
from without, and members of one or other unpopular sect, when
persecuted in one province, could find refuge in another. Maryland
was a British colony, founded under Roman Catholic auspices; its
neighbour, Pennsylvania, was founded and dominated by Quaker
influence; throughout British North America there were examples of
all opinions and of all creeds. The men on the spot quarrelled with
and persecuted each other; but persecution and exclusion were not
ordained from home. It would have been bad for the British Empire if
from all settlements, which the English formed and maintained, Roman
Catholics had been rigidly kept out; but it was far worse for France
when her Kings and ministers closed the French colonies to the
Huguenots.
[Sidenote: _Merits of the Huguenots as colonists._]
[Sidenote: _War between England and France._]
The Huguenots were the best of the French traders; they were men of
substance; they were capable, enterprising, and resolute. They were
beyond others of their countrymen, the pioneers of trade and
colonization, and had led the way in the New World. De Monts was a
Huguenot, the De Caens were Huguenots, Champlain himself is said to
have been of Huguenot parentage. The exclusion of the French
Protestants from Canada meant depriving Canada of the class of
Frenchmen who were most capable of colonizing the country and
developing its trade. Their fault, in the eyes of the French
Government, was their independence; that they did not conform to the
state religion, and that by not conforming they were politically an
element of danger. But what was deemed a fault in France would, in
colonizing America, have been a virtue; inasmuch as in the field of
adventure, trade, and settlement in new lands, the men who are least
bound by old-world systems and traditional views are of most value.
If fair play had been given to the French Protestants, Canada would
have been far stronger than it {74} ever was while it belonged to
France, and probably it would have continued to belong to France down
to the present day. For the closing of Canada to the Huguenots,
followed as it was afterwards by their ejection from France, not only
weakened France and her colonies, but strengthened the rival nations
and their colonies. The French citizens who had begun to build up the
French colonial empire, helped to build up instead the colonial
empires of other European nations; and the oppressions which they
suffered brought them the sympathy, at times the armed sympathy, of
the Protestant nations of Europe. The rising of the citizens of La
Rochelle was accompanied by war between England and France.
Buckingham's expedition for the relief of the city, ill planned and
ill led, was a fiasco, completing the ruin of the Rochellois instead
of bringing them relief; but on the other side of the Atlantic, where
English adventurers could take advantage of a time of war without
being hampered by court favourites, there was a different tale to
tell.
[Sidenote: _David Kirke_]
Sir William Alexander,[27] a Scotch favourite of James I, had in the
year 1621 obtained from the King a grant of Acadia, or, as it was
styled in the patent, Nova Scotia. The patent was renewed by Charles
I. When war broke out between Great Britain and France, Alexander
combined with certain London merchants, styled 'Adventurers to
Canada,' or 'Adventurers in the Company of Canada,' to strike a blow
at the French in North America. Prominent among these merchants was
George Kirke, a Derbyshire man, who had married the daughter of a
merchant of Dieppe. Three ships were fitted out under the command of
Kirke's three sons, David, Lewis, and Thomas, David Kirke being in
charge of the expedition. The Kirkes were furnished with letters of
marque from the King, authorizing {75} them to attack French ships
and French settlements in America; and, well armed and equipped, they
sailed over the Atlantic, entering the St. Lawrence at the beginning
of July, 1628.
[Footnote 27: A further account of Sir William Alexander is given
below, p. 173.]
[Sidenote: _attacks the French on the St. Lawrence_]
[Sidenote: _and destroys a French fleet._]
Below Quebec was the trading station at Tadoussac, and higher up than
Tadoussac, less than thirty miles below Quebec, there was a small
farming establishment--a 'petite ferme'--at Cape Tourmente, whence
the garrison at Quebec drew supplies. Kirke took up his position at
Tadoussac, and sent a small party up the river, who burnt and rifled
the buildings at Cape Tourmente and killed the cattle. He then
dispatched some of his prisoners to Quebec and called upon Champlain
to surrender. The summons was rejected, though the garrison was in
sore straits. The Iroquois had been of late on the warpath, and the
inroads of Indians on the one hand and of English on the other, meant
starvation to the handful of men on the rock of Quebec. Yet Richelieu
had not been unmindful of Canada. While these events were happening,
a French fleet of eighteen vessels had sailed from Dieppe, laden with
arms and supplies, and bringing also some settlers with their
families, and the inevitable accompaniment of priests. It was the
first effort made by the newly formed French company, an earnest of
their intention to give strength and permanence to New France. The
expedition reached Gaspe Point, at the entrance of the St. Lawrence;
but between them and Quebec were the Kirkes and their ships. Instead
of moving up the river to attack Quebec, the English admiral went
down the river to intercept the new-comers. The English ships were
but three to eighteen; but the three ships were fitted and manned for
war. The French vessels were transports only, freighted with stores
and non-combatants, unable either to fight or to escape. On July 18,
Kirke attacked them, and seventeen out of the eighteen ships fell
into his hands. Ten vessels he emptied and burnt, the rest of his
prizes, {76} with all the cargo and prisoners, he carried off in
triumph to Newfoundland.
[Sidenote: _First English capture of Quebec._]
There was bitterness in France when the news came of this great
disaster; there was distress and hopelessness at Quebec, where
Champlain still held out through the following winter. Kirke had gone
back to England; but when July came round again in 1629, he
reappeared in the St. Lawrence, with a stronger fleet than before.
The Frenchmen at Quebec were by this time starved out, they had no
alternative but to surrender; and on July 22, 1629, the English flag
was for the first time hoisted on the rocky citadel of Canada. There
was little booty for the conquerors, nothing but beaver skins, which
were subsequently sequestrated, and Canadian pines were cut down to
freight the English ships. Kirke's ships carried back to England
Champlain and his companions, who thence returned to their homes in
France; and Quebec was left in charge of an English garrison.
[Sidenote: _Convention of Susa and Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye._]
[Sidenote: _Canada given back to France._]
The Merchant Adventurers had done their work well. With little or no
loss, unaided by the Government, they had driven the French from
Canada and annexed New France. Had Queen Elizabeth been on the throne
of England, she would have scolded and then approved; and would have
kept for her country the fruits of English daring and English
success. The bold freebooter, Kirke, would have found favour in her
eyes; she would have honoured and rewarded him, as she honoured and
rewarded Drake. But the Stuarts were cast in a different mould, and
no English minister at the time was a match for Richelieu. Before
Quebec had fallen, Charles of England and Louis of France had
concluded the Convention of Susa, on April 24, 1629; and the Treaty
of St. Germain-en-Laye, signed nearly three years later, on March 29,
1632, definitely restored to France her possessions in North
America.[28] No consideration was {77} embodied in the treaty for the
surrender of Canada, but State Papers have made clear that the price
was the unpaid half of Queen Henrietta Maria's marriage dowry. For
this sum, already due and wrongly outstanding, Canada was sold. It
was a pitiful proceeding, unworthy of an English King, but typical of
a Stuart. It is noteworthy that early in the seventeenth century both
the Cape and Canada might have become and remained British colonies.
In 1620 two sea captains formally annexed the Cape, before any
settlement had as yet been founded at Table Bay; but their action was
never ratified by the Government at home.[29] Nine years later Kirke
took Quebec, and again the work was undone. So the Dutch in the one
case, and the French in the other, made colonies where the English
might have run their course; and generations afterwards, Great
Britain took again, with toil and trouble, what her adventurers, with
truer instinct than her rulers possessed, had claimed and would have
kept in earlier days. It is noteworthy, too, that state policy was in
great measure responsible for the earlier French loss of Canada, as
it was mainly responsible for the later. It is true that Quebec was
taken while the French Protestants were still to some extent
tolerated, and that a Protestant, De Caen, was selected to receive it
back again, when the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye was carried into
effect. But there were Huguenots on board Kirke's ships, serving
under a commander whose mother was of Huguenot blood; and the schism
which had broken out in France and {78} culminated for the time in
the siege and fall of La Rochelle, left the best of the French
traders and colonizers half-hearted servants of France. Canada was
given back, but it was given back to the French Government rather
than to the French people; and, as years went on, the St. Lawrence
saw no more of the stubborn, strong heretics who had sung their
Protestant hymns on its banks. Frenchmen, as gallant as they were,
had afterwards the keeping of Canada; but, state-ridden and
priest-ridden, they lacked initiative and commercial enterprise.
Freedom was to be found in the backwoods among the _coureurs de
bois_, but it was the freedom of lawlessness, unleavened by the
steadfast sobriety which marked the Calvinists of France.
[Footnote 28: The Convention of Susa provided that all acts of
hostility should cease, and that the articles and contracts as to the
marriage of the English Queen should be confirmed. The Treaty of St.
Germain-en-Laye, or rather one of two treaties signed on the same
day, provided for the restitution to France of all places occupied by
the English in New France, Acadia, and Canada. Instructions to make
restitution were to be given to the commanders at Port Royal, Fort
Quebec, and Cape Breton. General de Caen was named in the treaty as
the French representative to arrange for the evacuation of the
English. The places were to be restored in the same condition as they
had been in at the time of capture, all arms taken were to be made
good, and a sum was to be paid for the furs, &c., which had been
carried off.]
[Footnote 29: See vol. iv of this series, pt. 1, p. 19.]
[Sidenote: _Death of Champlain._]
In July, 1632, the French regained Quebec. In May, 1633, Champlain
came back to Canada. For two and a half years he governed it under
the French company, and on Christmas Day, 1635, he died at Quebec in
the sixty-ninth year of his age. New France owed all to him. Amid
every form of difficulty and intrigue, in Europe and in America,
among white men and among red, he had held resolutely to his purpose.
His life was pure, his aims were high, his judgment sound, and his
foresight great. He lived for the country in which he was born and
for that in which he died; but 'the whole earth is the sepulchre of
famous men',[30] and not in France or Canada alone is lasting honour
paid to his name.
[Footnote 30: Thuc., bk. ii, chap. xliii (Jowett's translation).]
NOTE.--For Canadian history down to the death of Champlain, see,
among modern books, more especially
PARKMAN'S _Pioneers of France in the New World_, and
KINGSFORD'S _History of Canada_, vol. i.
{79}
CHAPTER III
THE SETTLEMENT OF CANADA AND THE FIVE NATION INDIANS
[Sidenote: _Colonization by the medium of Chartered Companies
characteristic of the nations of Northern Europe._]
To trade and to colonize through the medium of Chartered Companies
has been characteristic of the nations of Northern Europe. Chartered
Companies have not been peculiar to England. The Dutch worked
entirely through two great companies; the Danes adopted the same
system; and various companies played their part in the early history
of French colonization. Herein lay the main difference, in the field
of colonial enterprise, between the northern peoples and the
southerners who had preceded them. In the case of Spain and Portugal
all was done under the immediate control of the Crown. These two
nations were concerned with conquest rather than with settlement;
and, if the Portuguese were traders, their commerce was not the
result of private venture, but was created and supported by the
Government. The Spaniards and Portuguese were first in the field.
East and West lay before them, and they divided the world in secure
monopoly. The northerners came in--they came in tentatively; policy
kept the Governments in the background for fear of incurring war, and
freedom of individual action was more ingrained in these races than
in the Latin peoples of the south. So freebooters sailed here and
there, at one time honoured, at another in disgrace; merchants took
shares in this or that venture, and Chartered Companies came into
being.
[Sidenote: _French Chartered Companies._]
In the case of Holland, the Netherlands East India Company and the
Netherlands West India Company practically {80} included the whole
nation: the state and the companies were co-extensive. In England,
the companies were really private concerns, licensed by the
Government, often thwarted by the Government, but, in the main,
working out their own salvation or their own ruin, as the case might
be. In France there was a mixture of the northern and the southern
systems, as of the northern and the southern blood. There, as in
England, the companies were private associations, but Court favour
was to them the breath of life. Kings and ministers constantly
interfered, created and undid, conferred licences and revoked them,
until in no long time the Chartered Company system lost all that
makes it valuable, and Frenchmen learnt to look to the Crown alone.
[Sidenote: _The company of the One Hundred Associates._]
Trade jealousies hampered the beginnings of Canadian settlement;
there was neither free trade in Canada nor unquestioned monopoly. To
cure this evil Richelieu, in 1627, brought into being the company of
the One Hundred Associates, nominally a private association, really
the offspring of the Government. Its sphere extended from Florida to
the North Sea, and from east to west as far as discovery should
extend along the rivers of Canada. It controlled all trade except the
fisheries, and it enjoyed sovereign rights in so far that it was
entitled to confer titles and tenures, subject to the approval of the
Crown. The chief officers were to be nominated by the King, but under
the Sovereign the company was feudal lord of New France; of its soil
and its inland waters, with all that they produced. A statesman
projected the company, and, with keen insight into the wants of New
France, Richelieu laid down as one of the terms of its charter that
settlers were to be introduced in specified numbers, especially and
immediately settlers of the artisan class; but these provisions were
made to a large extent barren by excluding the Huguenots. At the
outset the new French company, with all its backing, was foiled in
its efforts by the English Merchant Adventurers. The first transports
{81} sent out, bearing settlers and supplies, were captured by Kirke.
Quebec fell and New France was lost. The Convention of Susa and the
Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye were signed and executed, and the One
Hundred Associates resumed their charge of Canada. Under them
Champlain held the government of New France till he died, being
succeeded by a soldier, M. de Montmagny, who reached Quebec in June,
1636.
[Sidenote: _Three Rivers. Montreal. Sorel._]
In 1634, while Champlain was still alive, a fort was begun at Three
Rivers. The first permanent settlement at Montreal dates from the
spring of 1642, and in the same year Fort Richelieu was founded on
the site of the present town of Sorel,[1] where the Richelieu--the
river of the Iroquois--joins the St. Lawrence. For many years Quebec,
Three Rivers, and Montreal practically comprised New France. Outside
them were fur-traders and Jesuit missionaries, carrying their lives
in their hands. A few farms were taken up along the river above and
below Quebec, but colonization was almost non-existent, and small
groups of priests and soldiers at two or three points on the St.
Lawrence feebly upheld the power of France in North America.
[Footnote 1: 'So called from M. de Saurel, who reconstructed the fort
in 1665' (Kingsford's _History of Canada_, vol. i, p. 185).]
[Sidenote: _Slow progress of Canada up to 1663._]
The company of the One Hundred Associates lasted till 1663, and
little they did for the land or for themselves. At the end of their
tenure, the whole French population of Canada hardly reached 2,500
souls. It had been an integral part of the company's programme to
people Canada with French men and French women, but, inasmuch as
Huguenots were rigidly excluded, the motive for emigration was
wanting. The Catholic citizens of France were comfortable at home.
They might wish to trade with Canada, but they did not wish to spend
their lives there. The soldiers of France went out only under orders;
they looked for brighter battlefields than the North American
backwoods. Priests and nuns {82} alone felt a call to cross the
Atlantic, to face the most rigorous winters and the most savage foes.
The French religion was firmly planted in North America during these
early years, but the French people were left behind.
De Montmagny was Governor for twelve years, till 1648. His successors
under the company's regime were D'Ailleboust, De Lauzon, the Vicomte
d'Argenson, and Baron d'Avaugour. Under the Governors there were
commandants of the garrisons at Three Rivers and Montreal; and from
1636 onwards there was some kind of Council for framing ordinances
and regulating the administration of justice, the Governor and the
leading ecclesiastics being always members, and representatives of
the settlers being from time to time admitted. In 1645, moreover, the
company was reorganized, and the fur trade, which had been vested in
the Associates, was handed over to the colonists. Notwithstanding,
there was little increase of strength and little growth of population
till the year 1663, and up to that date the history of Canada is no
more than a record of savage warfare and missionary enterprise.
[Sidenote: _The foundation of Montreal._]
Religious enthusiasts founded Montreal, and the foundation of
Montreal was a challenge to the Iroquois. Always the enemies of the
French, the Five Nations saw in the settlement a new menace to their
power. Above the Richelieu river, they looked on the St. Lawrence as
more especially within their own domain; and when Frenchmen took up
ground on the island of Montreal, the Indians resented the intrusion
with savage bitterness and with more than savage foresight. On the
part of the French, state policy had nothing to say to the new
undertaking, nor was it a commercial venture. It was simply and
solely the outcome of religious zeal untempered by discretion.
[Sidenote: _The Jesuits in Canada._]
[Sidenote: _They did not promote colonization._]
The Jesuits had abundantly advertised in France the spiritual needs
of Canada. They had much to tell, and they told it well, skilful in
narrative as they were bold in action. {83} They attracted money to
the missionary cause, they enlisted brave men, and, still more, brave
and beautiful women. Convents were founded in America, and hospitals;
priests and nuns led and lost heroic lives, to widen the influence of
the Roman Catholic Church, and to convert the heathen. The deeds
done, and the sufferings endured, commanded, and still command
admiration, yet withal there was an element of barrenness in the
work; it was magnificent, but it was not colonization. It was unsound
in two main essentials. First and foremost, liberty was wanting. The
white men and the red were to be dominated alike: North America and
its peoples were to be in perpetual leading strings, prepared for
freedom in the world to come by unquestioning obedience on this side
the grave. The Protestant, however narrow and prejudiced in his
dealings and mode of life, in theory held and preached a religion
which set free, a gospel of glorious liberty. The Roman Catholic
missionary preached and acted self-sacrifice so complete, that all
freedom of action was eliminated. There was a second and a very
practical defect in the system. What Canada wanted was a white
population, married settlers, men with wives and children. What the
Jesuits asked for, and what they secured, was a following of
celibates, men and women sworn to childlessness. The Protestant
pastor in New England lived among his flock as one of themselves; he
made a human home, and gave hostages to fortune; a line of children
perpetuated his name, and family ties gave the land where he settled
another aspect than that of a mission field. The Roman Catholic
priest was tied to his church, but to nothing else. At her call he
was here to-day, and, it might be, gone to-morrow. He more than
shared the sufferings and the sorrows of those to whom he ministered,
but his life was apart from theirs, and he left no children behind
him. Martyrs and virgins the Roman Catholic Church sent out to
Canada, but it did not send out men and women. In comparing {84}
English and French colonization in America, two points of contrast
stand out above all others--the much larger numbers of English
settlers, and the much greater activity of French missionaries. Both
facts were in great measure due to the influence of the Roman
Catholic religion, and notably to the celibacy of its ministers.
[Sidenote: _Religious enthusiasts in Canada._]
Histories of Canada give full space to the names, the characters, and
the careers of the bishops, priests, and nuns who moulded the
childhood of New France, and to the struggle for supremacy between
the Jesuits and rival sects. We have portraits of the Jesuit heroes
Breboeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, Isaac Jogues, and many others; of the
ladies whose wealth or whose personal efforts founded the Hotel Dieu
at Quebec and at Montreal; of Madame de la Peltrie, Marie Guyard the
Mere de l'Incarnation, Jeanne Mance, and Marguerite Bourgeoys; of
Laval the first of Canadian bishops; but the record of their devoted
lives has only an indirect bearing on the history of colonization. It
will be enough to notice very shortly the founding of Montreal, and
the episode of the Huron missions, as being landmarks in Canadian
story.
[Sidenote: _Montreal settled by a company connected with St.
Sulpice._]
Montreal, it will be remembered, had been in Cartier's time the site
of an Indian town, which afterwards disappeared. Champlain had marked
it out as a place for a future settlement, and the keen eyes of the
Jesuits looked to the island as a mission centre. It had become the
property of De Lauzon, one of the One Hundred Associates and
afterwards Governor of Canada, and he transferred his grant to a
company, the Company of Montreal, formed exclusively for the service
of religion, and especially connected with the priests of St.
Sulpice. The first settlers numbered about sixty in all, in charge of
a chivalrous soldier, De Maisonneuve, and including one of the
religious heroines of the time, Mdlle. Jeanne Mance, who was
entrusted with funds by a rich French lady to found a hospital. They
arrived in Canada in 1641, {85} and in spite of the warnings of the
Governor, who urged that they should settle within reach of Quebec on
the Island of Orleans, they chose their site at Montreal in the same
autumn, and in the following spring began to build a settlement.
Ville Marie was the name given to it at the time, the enterprise
being dedicated to the Virgin. At the first ceremony, on landing, a
Jesuit priest bade the little band of worshippers be of good courage,
for they were as the grain of mustard seed; and now the distant,
dangerous outpost of France in North America, which a few
whole-hearted zealots founded, has become the great city of Montreal.
[Sidenote: _The influence of religion on colonization._]
Religion has been a potent force in colonial history. On the one hand
it has promoted emigration. It carried the Huguenots from France to
other lands. It peopled New England with Puritans. On the other hand,
it has sent forerunners of the coming white men among the coloured
races, bearers of a message of peace, but too often bringing in their
train the sword. As explorers and as pioneers, missionaries have done
much for colonization; but from another point of view they have
endangered the cause by going too fast and too far. In South Africa,
a hundred years ago, the work, the speeches, and the writings of
Protestant missionaries led indirectly to the dispersion of
colonists, to race feuds, and to political complications which, but
for this agency, would certainly have been postponed, and might
possibly never have arisen. Similarly in Canada, Jesuit activity and
forwardness added to the difficulties and dangers with which the
French settlers and their rulers had to contend.
[Sidenote: _Montreal and the Five Nations._]
The Governor, who vainly attempted to dissuade the founders of
Montreal from going so far afield, was right in his warnings. Very
few were the French in North America, their struggle for existence
was hard, their enemies were watchful and unrelenting. Safety lay in
concentration, in making Quebec a strong and comparatively populous
centre, in keeping aloof from the Iroquois, instead of straying
within {86} their range. To form a weak settlement 160 miles higher
up the river than Quebec, within striking distance of the Five
Nations, was to provoke the Indians and to offer them a prey. This
was the immediate result of the foundation of Montreal. Year after
year went by, and there was the same tale to tell: a tale of a hand
to mouth existence, of settlers cooped up within their palisades,
ploughing the fields at the risk of their lives, cut off by twos and
threes, murdered or carried into captivity. Moreover, between
Montreal in its weakness and the older and stronger settlement at
Quebec, there was an element of jealousy. What with rival commandants
and rival ecclesiastics, controversy within and ravening Iroquois
without, the early days of the French in Canada were days of sorrow.
[Sidenote: _The Huron missions._]
Far away from civilization in the seventeenth century was Montreal,
but further still was the Huron country. The first white man to visit
the Hurons was the Recollet friar, Le Caron, in the year 1615, and
from that date onward, till Kirke took Quebec, a very few Franciscan
and Jesuit priests preached their faith by the shores of Georgian
Bay. Suspended for a short time, while the English held Canada, the
missions were resumed by the Jesuits in 1634, foremost among the
missionaries being Father de Breboeuf, who had already worked among
the Hurons, and came back to work and die.
Few stories are so dramatic, few have been so well told[2] as the
tale of the Huron missions. No element of tragedy is wanting. The
background of the scene gives a sense of distance and immensity. The
action is comprised in very few years, years of bright promise,
speedily followed by absolute desolation. The contrast between the
actors on either side is as great as can be found in the range of
human life, between savages almost superhuman in savagery, and
Christian preachers almost superhuman in endurance and {87}
self-sacrifice; and all through there runs the pity of it, the pathos
of a religion of love bearing as its first-fruits barren martyrdom
and wholesale extermination.
[Footnote 2: By Francis Parkman in _The Jesuits in North America_.]
Between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay the Hurons dwelt, accessible to
the Frenchmen only by the Ottawa river and Lake Nipissing, for the
Iroquois barred the alternative route up the St. Lawrence and by Lake
Ontario. Montreal was left far behind, and many miles of a toilsome,
dangerous route were traversed, until by the shores of the great
freshwater sea were found the homes of a savage but a settled people.
To men inspired by religion and by Imperial views of religion, who
looked to be the ministers of a world-wide power, including and
dominating all the kingdoms of the earth, the greatness of the
distances, the remoteness of the land, the unbounded area of unknown
waters stretching far off to the west, were but calls to the
imagination and incentives to redoubled effort.
But, ambitious as they were, the Jesuits were not mere enthusiasts:
they were practical and politic men, diplomatists in the American
backwoods as at the Court of France. Not wandering outcasts, like the
Algonquins of the lower St. Lawrence; not, like the Iroquois, wholly
given to perpetual murder; with some peaceful impulses, traders to a
small extent, and tillers of the ground, and above all, since
Champlain first came among them, sworn allies of the French--the
Hurons seemed such a people as might be moulded to a new faith, and
become a beacon attracting other North American natives to the light
of Christianity. So the Jesuit fathers went among them in 1634, and
in 1640 built and fortified a central mission station--St. Marie--a
mile from where a little river--the Wye--flows into an inlet of Lake
Huron.
To convert a race of suspicious savages is no easy task. The priests
carried their lives in their hands. They were pitted against native
sorcerers, they were called upon to give {88} rain, they were held
responsible for small-pox. Yet year by year, by genuine goodness and
by pious fraud, they made headway, until some eleven mission posts
were in existence among the Hurons and the neighbouring tribes, the
most remote station being at the outlet of Lake Superior. The promise
was good. Money was forthcoming from France. There were eighteen
priests at work, there were lay assistants, there was a handful of
French soldiers. Earthly as well as spiritual wants were supplied at
St. Marie, and far off in safety at Quebec was a seminary for Huron
children. It seemed as though on the far western horizon of discovery
and colonization, the Roman Catholic Church was achieving a signal
triumph, its agents being Frenchmen, and its political work being
credited to France. Yet after fifteen years all was over, and the
land was left desolate without inhabitants. The heathen learnt from
their Christian teachers to obey and to suffer, but in learning they
lost the spirit of resistance and of savage manhood. As in Paraguay,
a more submissive race, under Jesuit influence, dwindled in numbers,
so even the Hurons, after the French priests came among them, seem to
have become an easier prey than before to their hereditary foes.
[Sidenote: _Destruction of the missions by the Iroquois._]
[Sidenote: _Dispersion of the Hurons._]
In July, 1648, the mission station of St. Joseph, fifteen miles from
St. Marie, was utterly destroyed, the priest in charge was shot dead,
and 700 prisoners were carried off. In the following year 1,200
warriors of the Five Nations swept like a torrent through the Huron
cantons, fifteen native towns were attacked, ravaged, and burnt, and
the brave priest, De Breboeuf, was tortured and slain. Other devoted
missionaries shared his fate; the shepherds were slaughtered, and the
survivors of the flock were scattered abroad. For the Hurons made
little or no attempt to defend themselves; fear came upon them and
trouble; they fell down, and there was none to help them. The fort at
St. Marie stood, for even the Iroquois hesitated to attack armed
walls; but its purpose {89} was gone with the slaughter and
dispersion of the Huron clans. The priests who still lived abandoned
it, and spent a miserable winter with a crowd of Indian fugitives on
a neighbouring island in Lake Huron. There too they built a fort; but
famine and the Iroquois followed them, and in 1650 they left the
country, taking with them to Quebec some 300 Huron converts. The
refugees were settled on the Isle of Orleans; yet even there, five or
six years later, they were attacked by the Iroquois, and at length
they found a secure abiding-place at Lorette, near the banks of the
river St. Charles. The rest of their kinsfolk were scattered abroad.
Some were incorporated in the Five Nations. Others, driven from point
to point, were found in after years at the northern end of Lake
Michigan or at Detroit, and, under the new name of Wyandots, played
some part in later Canadian history; but the Huron nation was blotted
out, the Huron country became a desert, and the light which had shone
brightly for a few years in the far-off land was put out for ever.
[Sidenote: _Weakness of the French in Canada._]
Most readers of the story of the Huron missions will study it mainly
as an episode in religious enterprise. They will note the heroism of
the Jesuit priests--their faithfulness unto death, their constancy
under torture and suffering not surpassed by the stoicism of the
North American Indians themselves. They will mourn the failure of
their efforts, the butchery, the martyrdom, but will record that all
was not absolutely thrown away; for even in the lodges of the Five
Nations we read that some of the nameless Hurons held to the faith
which their French teachers loved and served so well. But this is not
the true moral of the story. The significance of the events lay in
proving the French to be weak and the Iroquois to be strong, in
demonstrating with horrible thoroughness that the white men in Canada
were powerless to protect their friends, in thus making more
difficult what was difficult enough already, in retarding the
progress of {90} European colonization in Canada. The want of
concentration, the attempt to do too much, the somewhat paralysing
influence of the particular form of the Christian religion which the
French brought with them--all these elements of weakness came out in
connexion with the Huron missions; and meanwhile precious years were
lost to France which could not be afterwards made good; for in these
same years the English, not producing martyrs and heroes, so much as
fathers of families, were taking firm root in North American soil,
plodding slowly but surely along the road to colonization.
[Sidenote: _The strength and ferocity of the Iroquois._]
The Iroquois were like man-eating tigers. The taste of human blood
whetted their appetite for more. Fresh from the slaughter of the
Hurons, in 1650-1 they fell upon the Neutral Nation, whose home was
on the northern shore of Lake Erie, stretching to the east across the
Niagara river. The Neutrals had held aloof from Iroquois and Huron
alike, whence their name; but their neutrality did not protect them
from utter extermination at the hands of the Five Nations. Over
against them on the southern side of the lake were the Eries, second
to none as ferocious savages, and known to the French as the 'Nation
of the Cats.' Their turn came next, in 1654-5. They fought hard,
behind palisades and with poisoned arrows; but they too were blotted
out, and only on the south were left native warriors to cope with the
conquering Iroquois. These were the Andastes, on the line of the
Susquehanna river, who year after year gave blow for blow, until they
too succumbed to superior numbers.
Nothing withstood the Five Nations; yet their fighting men were few,
and their losses great. For the time they nearly ruined the French
cause in Canada, but in the end their work of destruction rendered
the triumph of the white man more inevitable and more complete. They
broke up and killed out tribes, whose forces, if united to their own,
might have overwhelmed the Europeans; and in doing so {91} they
sapped their own strength. They kept up their numbers only by the
incorporation of natives who had learned to look to Europeans for
guidance and support; and in course of time, fallen from their high
estate, they found salvation not as leaders of red men but as allies
of white.
[Sidenote: _Mission of Le Moyne to the Five Nations._]
It seems marvellous that the confederation held together, and there
were, it is true, occasional outbursts of inter-tribal jealousy and
suspicion. Difference of geographical position tended to difference
of policy. The most determined foes of the French were the
Mohawks--the easternmost nation, supplied with firearms by the
Dutchmen at Albany, and having easy access to the St. Lawrence. At
the other end of the line the Senecas had their hands full in the
Erie war, and were little disposed, while it lasted, to molest the
Europeans. In the centre, the Onondagas, always few in numbers and
already recruited by captive Hurons, were minded to attract to their
ranks the Huron refugees at Quebec. So about the autumn of 1653,
overtures of peace were made to the French, even the Mohawks for the
moment dissembling their enmity; and in the following year a Jesuit
priest, Le Moyne, was sent as an envoy to the Iroquois country.
The mission was notable in more ways than one. Le Moyne was the first
white man to follow up the St. Lawrence from Montreal to Lake
Ontario, and his journey marked the beginning of diplomatic relations
between the French and the Iroquois. Thenceforward there was always
the nucleus of a French party among the Five Nations, the elements of
a divided policy in lieu of solid hostility to the French. Here was
an illustration too of the value of the Jesuit priests to the French
cause, as well as of the danger of employing them. None equalled
these priests in the statecraft necessary for dealing with savages,
but none were at the time in question so ready in season or out of
season to promote a forward policy, involving future complications
and dispersion of strength.
{92} [Sidenote: _Attempt at a French settlement among the Five
Nations._]
Le Moyne's mission was to the Onondagas, and its result was an
application from that tribe that a French settlement should be
established among them. The invitation was accepted; and in the
summer of 1656 between forty and fifty Frenchmen established
themselves on Lake Onondaga, in the very heart of the Iroquois
country. It was a desperate enterprise. The men could ill be spared
from Quebec, and they were but hostages among the Five Nations. The
Indians pretended peace, but even while the Onondagas were escorting
the Frenchmen up the river, the Mohawks attacked the expedition, and
subsequently under the very guns of Quebec carried off Huron captives
from the Isle of Orleans. For a little less than two years, the small
band of French colonists remained amid the Onondagas, in hourly peril
of their lives; and finally, towards the end of 1658, at dead of
night, while the Indians were overcome by gluttony and debauch, they
launched their boats and canoes on the Oswego river, reached Lake
Ontario and the St. Lawrence, and found themselves once more at
Montreal.
It was a fit ending to the first stage of Canadian history--a
hopeless venture, a confession of weakness, a hairsbreadth escape. So
far there had been no colonization of Canada. There had been one
wise, far-seeing man--Champlain. Brave soldiers had come from France,
and still braver priests. There had been going in and out among the
natives, toil and hardship, adventure and loss of life. But the
French had as yet no real hold on Canada. Between Quebec and the
Three Rivers--between the Three Rivers and Montreal, not they but the
Iroquois were masters of the St. Lawrence. A trading company claimed
to rule: its rule was nothingness. Within Quebec bishops and
Governors quarrelled for precedence: under its walls the Mohawks
yelled defiance. Montreal, the story goes, was only saved by a band
of Frenchmen, who, in a log hut on the Ottawa, sold their lives as
dearly as the heroes of Greek or Roman legend; and to crown it all,
{93} at the beginning of 1663, the shock of a mighty earthquake was
felt throughout the land, making the forts and convents tremble,
sending, as it were, a shiver through the feeble frame of New France.
[Sidenote: _The One Hundred Associates surrender their charter._]
It was the prelude of a better time. In March, 1663, the One Hundred
Associates surrendered their charter to the Crown. A century later,
by the Peace of Paris in 1763, France lost Canada. In those hundred
years a fair trial was given to French colonization. How much was
done to leave the impress of a great nation on Canada, the province
of Quebec to-day will testify. Wherein the work was found wanting is
told in history.
[Sidenote: _The Company of the West._]
In 1663, we read, Canada became a Royal Province. It passed out of
the keeping of a company and came under the direct control of the
French King and his ministers. The statement requires some
modification, for in 1664 Colbert created a new Chartered Company,
the Company of the West, whose sphere, like that of the Netherlands
West India Company, included the whole of the western half of the
world, so far as it was or might be French--America North and South,
the West Indies, and West Africa. Canada was within the terms of its
charter, which included a monopoly of trade for forty years and, on
paper, sovereign rights within the wide limits to which the charter
extended. Thus the members of the company claimed to be feudal
Seigniors of the soil of New France and to nominate the Council of
Government, with the exception of the Governor and Intendant; while
from the dues which they levied the cost of government was to be
defrayed.
Such was the outline and the intention of the scheme: the actual
result was that the carrying trade was monopolized by the company,
together with one-fourth of the beaver skins of all Canada, and the
whole of the traffic of the lower St. Lawrence, which centred at
Tadoussac. Out of their monopoly they paid all or part of the
expenses of government, {94} but the administration practically
remained in the hands of the Crown. Like its predecessor, this
company was a miserable failure. It lasted for ten years only, and
during those years it was an incubus on Canada.
[Sidenote: _Chartered Companies ill suited to France._]
The truth was that Chartered Companies were alien to the genius of
France, or at any rate of Roman Catholic France--the France of the
Bourbons. Her greatest ministers, Richelieu and Colbert, were, it is
true, loth to discard the system. They wished to give French
merchants a direct interest in building up a colonial empire. They
saw the English working by means of companies. They saw the Dutch
giving to the state the outward semblance of private enterprise.
Companies, they argued, would promote French trade and colonization,
as they had promoted the trade and colonization of rival nations. But
Richelieu and Colbert were despotic ministers of arbitrary Kings; the
companies which they created were as lifeless and as helpless as
their titles were high-sounding and pretentious. They lasted as long,
and only as long, as they were backed by the Crown. They were swept
away as easily as they were formed; and they left no lasting impress
on French colonial history.
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