Forbes Robinson - "Letters to His Friends"

Various - "Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853"

Various - "The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858"

Thomas Babington Macaulay - "The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North




It was a pitchy, sleety night, the river roaring with the loose ice of
spring flood, the forests noisy with the boisterous March wind. Out on
the maelstrom of ice and flood launched the fifty-three colonists,
March 20, 1658. By April they were safe {103} inside the walls of
Quebec, and chance hunters brought word that what with sleep, and the
measured tramp, tramp of the pig, and the baying of the dogs, and the
clucking of the chickens inside the fort, the escape of the whites had
not been discovered for a week. The Indians thought the whites had
gone into retreat for especially long prayers. Then a warrior climbed
the inner palisades, and rage knew no bounds. The fort was looted and
burnt to the ground.


Peltry traffic was the life of New France. Without it the colony would
have perished, and now the rupture of peace with the Iroquois cut off
that traffic. To the Iroquois land south of the St. Lawrence the
French dared not go, and the land of the Hurons was a devastated
wilderness. The boats that came out to New France were compelled to
return without a single peltry, but there still remained the unknown
land of the Algonquin northwest and beyond the Great Lakes. Year after
year young French adventurers essayed the exploration of that land. In
1634 Jean Nicolet, one of Champlain's wood runners, had gone westward
as far as Green Bay and coasted the shores of Lake Michigan. Jesuits,
where they preached on Lake Superior, had been told of a vast land
beyond the Sweet Water Seas,--Great Lakes,--a land where wandered
tribes of warriors powerful as the Iroquois.

Yearly, when the Algonquins came down the Ottawa to trade, Jesuits and
young French adventurers accompanied the canoes back up the Ottawa,
hoping to reach the Unknown Land, which rumor said was bounded only by
the Western Sea. However, the priests went no farther than Lake
Nipissing; but two nameless French wood runners came back from Green
Bay in August of 1656 with marvelous tales of wandering hunters to the
north called "Christines" (Crees), who passed the winter hunting
buffalo on a land bare of trees (the prairie) and the summer fishing on
the shores of the North Sea (Hudson's Bay). They told also of fierce
tribes south of the Christines (the Sioux), who traded with the Indians
of the Spanish settlements in Mexico.

{104} All New France became fired by these reports. When Radisson
returned from Onondaga in April of 1659, he found his brother-in-law,
Chouart Groseillers, just back from Nipissing, where he had been
serving the Jesuits, with more tales of this marvelous undiscovered
land. The two kinsmen decided to go back with the Algonquins that very
year; for, confessed Radisson in his journal, "I longed to see myself
again in a boat."

Thirty other Frenchmen and two Jesuits had assembled in Montreal to
join the Algonquins. More than sixty canoes set out from Montreal in
June, the one hundred and forty Algonquins well supplied with firearms
to defend themselves from marauding Iroquois. Numbers begot courage,
courage carelessness; and before the fleet had reached the Chaudiere
Falls, at the modern city of Ottawa, the canoes had spread far apart in
utter forgetfulness of danger. Not twenty were within calling distance
when an Indian prophet, or wandering medicine man, ran down to the
shore, throwing his blanket and hatchet aside as signal of peace, and
shouting out warning of Iroquois warriors ambushed farther up the river.

Drunk with the new sense of power from the possession of French
firearms, perhaps drunk too with French brandy obtained at Montreal,
the Algonquins paused to take the strange captive on board, and
returned thanks for the friendly warning by calling their benefactor a
"coward and a dog and a hen." At the same time they took the
precaution of sleeping in mid-stream with their canoes abreast tied to
water-logged trees. A dull roar through the night mist foretold they
were nearing the great Chaudiere Falls; and at first streak of day dawn
there was a rush to land and cross the long portage before the mist
lifted and exposed them to the hostiles.

To any one who knows the region of Canada's capital the scene can
easily be recalled: the long string of canoes gliding through the gray
morning like phantoms; Rideau Falls shimmering on the left like a snowy
curtain; the dense green of Gatineau Point as the birch craft swerved
across the river inshore to the right; the wooded heights, now known as
Parliament Hill, {105} jutting above the river mist, the new foliage of
the topmost trees just tipped with the first primrose shafts of
sunrise; then the vague stir and unrest in the air as the sun came up
till the gray fog became rose mist shot with gold, and rose like a
curtain to the upper airs, revealing the angry, tempest-tossed cataract
straight ahead, hurtling over the rocks of the Chaudiere in walls of
living waters. Where the lumber piles of Hull on the right to-day jut
out as if to span Ottawa River to Parliament Hill, the voyageurs would
land to portage across to Lake Du Chene.

Just as they sheered inshore the morning air was split by a hideous din
of guns and war whoops. The Iroquois had been lying in ambush at the
portage. The Algonquins' bravado now became a panic. They abandoned
canoes and baggage, threw themselves behind a windfall of trees, and
poured a steady rain of bullets across the portage in order to permit
the other canoes to come ashore. When the fog lifted, baggage and
canoes lay scattered on the shore. Behind one barricade of logs lay
the French and Algonquins; behind another, the Iroquois; and woe betide
the warrior who showed his head or dared to cross the open. All day
the warriors kept up their cross fire. Thirteen Algonquins had
perished, and the French were only waiting a chance to abandon the
voyage. Luckily, that night was pitch-dark. The Algonquin leader blew
a long low call through his birch trumpet. All hands rallied and
rushed for the boats to cross the river. All the Frenchmen's baggage
had been lost. Of the white adventurers every soul turned back but
Groseillers and Radisson.

The Algonquins now made up in caution what they had at first lacked.
They voyaged only by night and hid by day. No camp fires were kindled.
No muskets were fired even for game; and the paddlers were presently
reduced to food of _tripe de roche_--green moss scraped from rocks.
Birch canoes could not cross Lake Huron in storm; so the Indians kept
close to the south shore of Georgian Bay, winding among the pink
granite islands, past the ruined Jesuit missions across to the Straits
of Mackinac and on down Lake Michigan to Green Bay.

{106} "But our mind was not to stay here," relates Radisson, "but to
know the remotest people." Sometime between April and July of 1659 the
two white men had followed the Indian hunters across what is now the
state of Wisconsin to "a mighty river like the St. Lawrence." They had
found the Mississippi, first of white men to view the waters since the
treasure-seeking Spaniards of the south crossed the river. They had
penetrated the Unknown. They had discovered the Great Northwest--a
world boundlessly vast; so vast no man forever after in the history of
the human race need be dispossessed of his share of the earth.
Something of the importance of the discovery seems to have impressed
Radisson; for he speaks of the folly of the European nations fighting
for sterile, rocky provinces when here is land enough for all--land
enough to banish poverty.

The two Frenchmen's wanderings with the tribes of the prairie--whether
those tribes were Omahas or Iowas or Mandanes or Mascoutins or
Sioux--cannot be told here. It would fill volumes. I have told the
story fully elsewhere. By spring of 1660 Radisson and Groseillers are
back at Sault Ste. Marie, having gathered wealth of beaver peltries
beyond the dreams of avarice; but scouts have come to the Sault with
ominous news--news of one thousand Iroquois braves on the warpath to
destroy every settlement in New France. Hourly, daily, weekly, have
Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal been awaiting the blow.

The Algonquins refuse to go down to Quebec with Radisson and
Groseillers. "Fools," shouts Radisson in full assembly of their chiefs
squatting round a council fire, "are you going to allow the Iroquois to
destroy you as they destroyed the Hurons? How are you going to fight
the Iroquois unless you come down to Quebec for guns? Do you want to
see your wives and children slaves? For my part, I prefer to die like
a man rather than live a slave."

The chiefs were shamed out of their cowardice. Five hundred young
warriors undertook to conduct the two white men down to Quebec. They
embarked at once, scouts to the fore reconnoitering all portages, and
guards on duty wherever the {107} boats landed. A few Iroquois braves
were seen near the Long Sault Rapids, but they took to their heels in
such evident fright that Radisson was puzzled to know what had become
of the one thousand braves on the warpath. Carrying the beaver pelts
along the portage so they could be used as shields in case of attack,
the Algonquins came to the foot of the Long Sault Rapids near Montreal,
and saw plainly what had happened to the invading warriors. A
barricade of logs the shape of a square fort stood on the shore. From
the pickets hung the scalps of dead Indians and on the sands lay the
charred remains of white men. Every tree for yards round was peppered
with bullet holes. Here was a charred stake where some victim had been
tortured; there the smashed remnants of half-burnt canoes; and at
another point empty powder barrels. A terrible battle had been waged
but a week before. Radisson could trace, inside the barricade of logs,
holes scooped in the sand where the besieged, desperate with thirst,
had drunk the muddy water. At intervals in the palisades openings had
been hacked, and these were blood stained, as if the scene of the
fiercest fighting. Bark had been burnt from the logs in places, where
the assailants had set fire to the fort.

From Indian refugees at Montreal, Radisson learned details of the
fight. It was the battle most famous in early Canadian annals--the
Long Sault. All winter Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal had cowered
in terror of the coming Iroquois. In imagination the beleaguered
garrisons foresaw themselves martyrs of Mohawk ferocity. It was
learned that seven hundred of the Iroquois warriors were hovering round
the Richelieu opposite Three Rivers. The rest of the braves had passed
the winter man-hunting in the Huron country, and were in spring
descending the Ottawa to unite with the lower band.

Week after week Quebec awaited the blow; but the blow never fell, for
at Montreal was a little band of seventeen heroes, led by a youth of
twenty-five,--Adam Dollard,--who longed to wipe out the stain of a
misspent boyhood by some glorious exploit in the service of the Holy
Cross.

{108} When word came that the upper foragers were descending from the
country of the Hurons to unite with the lower Iroquois against
Montreal, Dollard proposed to go up the Ottawa with a picked party of
chosen fighters, waylay the Iroquois at the foot of the Long Sault
Rapids, and so prevent the attack on Montreal. Sixteen young men
volunteered to join him. Charles Le Moyne, now acting as interpreter
at Montreal, begged the young heroes to delay till reenforcements could
be obtained: seventeen Frenchmen against five hundred Mohawks meant
certain death; but delay meant risk, and Dollard coveted nothing more
than a death of glory. At the chapel of the Hotel Dieu the young
heroes made what they knew would certainly be their last confession,
bade eternal farewell to friends, and with crushed corn for provisions
set out in canoes for the upper Ottawa. May 1, they came to the foot
of the Long Sault. Here a barricade of logs had been erected in some
skirmish the year before, and here, too, was the usual camping place of
the Iroquois as their canoes came bounding down the swift waters of the
Ottawa. Dollard and his brave boys landed, slung their kettles for the
night meal, and sent scouts upstream to forewarn when the Iroquois
came. The night was passed in prayer. Next day arrived unexpected
reenforcements. Two bands of forty Hurons and four Algonquins, under a
brave Huron convert of the Christian Islands, had asked Maisonneuve's
permission to join Dollard and wreak their pent vengeance on the
Mohawks. Early one morning the scouts reported five Iroquois canoes
coming slowly downstream, and two hundred more warriors behind. There
was not even care to bring a supply of water inside the barricade or
remove kettles from the sticks. Posted in ambush, the young soldiers
fired as soon as the first canoes came within range. This put the rest
of the Iroquois on guard. The whites rushed for the shelter of their
barricade. The Indians dashed to erect a fort of their own. Inside
Dollard's palisades all was activity. Cracks were plastered up with
mud between logs, four marksmen with double stands of arms posted at
each loophole, and a big musketoon leveled straight for the {109}
Iroquois redoubt. The Iroquois rushed out yelling like fiends, and
jumping sideways as they advanced, to avoid becoming targets; but the
scattering fire of the musketoon caught them full abreast and a Seneca
chief fell dead. The Iroquois then broke up Dollard's canoes and tried
to set fire to the logs; but again the musketoon's scattering bullets
mowed a swath of death in the advancing ranks, and for a second time
the red warriors sought shelter behind the logs. Probably to obtain
truce till they could send word to the other warriors on the Richelieu,
the Iroquois then hung out a flag of parley; but the Huron chief knew
what peace with an Iroquois meant. He it was, on the Christian
Islands, who, when the Iroquois had proposed a similar parley for the
purpose of massacring the Hurons, invited their chiefs into the Huron
camp and brained them for their treachery. Dollard's band made answer
to the flag hoisted above the Iroquois pickets by rushing out, securing
the head of the Seneca chief, and elevating it on a pike above their
fort.

But as the fight went on, the whites had to have water, and a few
rushed for the river to fill kettles. This rejoiced the hearts of the
Iroquois. They could guess if the whites were short of water, it only
required more warriors to surround the barricade completely and compel
surrender. Scouts had meanwhile gone for the Iroquois at Richelieu;
and on the fifth day of the siege a roar, gathering volume as it
approached, told Dollard that the seven hundred warriors were coming
through the forest. Among the newcomers were Huron renegades, who
approached within speaking distance of the fort and called out for the
Hurons to save themselves from death by surrender. Death was plainly
inevitable, and all the Hurons but the chief deserted. This reduced
Dollard's band, from sixty to twenty. The whites were now weak from
lack of food and sleep; but for three more days and nights the marksmen
and musketoon plied such deadly aim at the assailants that the Iroquois
actually held a council whether they should retire. The Iroquois
chiefs argued that it would disgrace the nation forever if one thousand
of their warriors were to retire before a handful of beardless white
boys. {110} Solemnly the bundle of war sticks was thrown on the
ground. Then each warrior willing to go on with the siege picked up a
stick. The chiefs chose first and the rest were shamed into doing
likewise. Inside the fort, Dollard's men were at the last extremities.
Blistered and blackened with powder smoke, the fevered men were half
delirious from lack of sleep and water. Some fell to their knees and
prayed. Others staggered with sleep where they stood. Others had not
strength to stand and sank, muttering prayers, to their knees. The
Iroquois were adopting new tactics. They could not reach the palisades
in the face of the withering fire from the musketoon, so they
constructed a movable palisade of trees, behind which marched the
entire band of warriors. In vain Dollard's marksmen aimed their
bullets at the front carriers. Where one fell another stepped in his
place. Desperate, Dollard resolved on a last expedient. Some accounts
say he took a barrel of powder; others, that he wrapped powder in a
huge bole of birch bark. Putting a light to this, he threw it with all
his might; but his strength had failed; the dangerous projectile fell
back inside the barricade, exploding; marksmen were driven from their
places. A moment later the Iroquois were inside the barricade
screeching like demons. They found only three Frenchmen alive; and so
great was the Mohawk rage to be foiled of victims that they fell on the
Huron renegades in their own ranks and put them to death on the spot.

Such was the Battle of the Long Sault of which Radisson saw the scars
on his way down the Ottawa. It saved New France. If seventeen boys
could fight in this fashion, how--the Iroquois asked--would a fort full
of men fight? A few days later Radisson was conducted in triumph
through the streets of Quebec and personally welcomed by the new
governor, d'Argenson.

It can well be imagined that Radisson's account of the vast new lands
discovered by him aroused enthusiasm at Quebec. Among the Crees,
Radisson and Groseillers had heard of that Sea of the North--Hudson
Bay--to which Champlain had {111} tried to go by way of the Ottawa.
The Indians had promised to conduct the two Frenchmen overland to the
North Sea; but Radisson deemed it wise not to reveal this fact lest
other voyageurs should forestall them. Somehow the secret leaked out.
Either Groseillers told it or his wife dropped some hint of it to her
father confessor; but the two explorers were amazed to receive official
orders to conduct the Jesuits to the North Sea by way of the Saguenay.
They refused point-blank to go as subordinates on any expedition. The
fur trade was at this time regulated by license. Any one who proceeded
to the woods without license was liable to imprisonment, the galleys
for life, death if the offense were repeated. Radisson and Groseillers
asked for a license to go north in 1661. D'Avaugour, a bluff soldier
who had become governor, would grant it only on condition of receiving
half the profits. Groseillers and Radisson set off by night without a
license.

[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE--JESUIT RELATION OF 1662-1663]

{112} This time the Indian canoes struck off into Lake Superior instead
of Lake Michigan, and coasted that billowy inland sea with its iron
shore and shadowy forests. On the northwest side of the lake,
somewhere between Duluth and Fort William, the explorers joined the
Crees, and proceeded northwestward with them, hunting along that Indian
trail to become famous as the fur traders' highway--from Lake Superior
to the Lake of the Woods. The first white man's fort built west of the
Great Lakes, the terrible famine that winter, and the visits of the
Sioux--are all a story in themselves. Spring found the explorers
following the Crees over the height of land from Lake Superior to
Hudson Bay. As soon as the ice loosened, dugouts were launched, and
the voyageurs began that hardest of all canoe trips in America, through
the forest hinterland of Ontario. Here the rivers were a stagnant
marsh, with outlet hidden by dankest forest growth where the light of
the sun never penetrated. There the waters swollen by spring thaw and
broken by the ice jam whirled the {113} boats into rapids before the
paddlers realized. There was wading to mid-waist in ice water. There
were nights when camp was made on water-soaked moss. There were days
when the windfall compelled the canoemen to take the canoes out of the
water and carry them half the time. "At last," writes Radisson, "we
came to the sea, where we found an old house all demolished and
battered with bullets. The Crees told us about Europeans being here;
and we went from isle to isle all that summer." At this time the
canoes must have been coasting the south shore of James Bay, headed
east; for Radisson presently explains that they came to a river, which
rose in a lake near the source of the Saguenay--namely Rupert River.
What was the old house battered with bullets? Was it Hudson's winter
fort of 1610-1611? The Indians of Rupert River to this day have
legends of Hudson having come back to his fort when cast away by the
mutineers.

[Illustration: THE JESUIT MAP OF LAKE SUPERIOR (From the Relation of
1670-1671)]

The furs that Radisson and Groseillers brought back from the north this
time were worth fabulous wealth. The cargo saved New France from
bankruptcy; but the explorers had defied both Church and Governor, and
all the greedy monopolists of Quebec fell on Radisson and Groseillers
with jealous fury. They were fined $20,000 to build a fort at Three
Rivers, though given permission to inscribe their coats of arms on the
gate. A $30,000 fine went to the public treasury of New France, and a
tax of $70,000 was imposed by the Farmers of the Revenue. Of the total
cargo there was left to Radisson and Groseillers only $20,000.


Disgusted, the two explorers personally appealed to the Court of
France; but there the monopolists were all-powerful, and justice was
denied. They tried to induce some of the fishing fleet off Cape Breton
to venture to the North Sea; but there the monopolists' malign
influence was again felt. They were accused of having broken the laws
of Quebec. Zechariah Gillam, a sea captain of Boston, who chanced to
be at Port Royal, offered them his vessel for a voyage to Hudson Bay;
but when the {114} doughty captain came to the ice-locked straits, his
courage failed and he refused to enter. Finally, at Port Royal, with
the last of their meager and dwindling capital, they hired two ships
for a voyage; but one was wrecked on Sable Island while fishing for
supplies, and instead of sailing for Hudson Bay in 1665, Radisson and
Groseillers were summoned to Boston in a lawsuit over the lost vessel.

In Boston they met commissioners of the English government and were
invited to lay their plans before Charles II, King of England. At last
the tide of fortune seemed to be turning. Sailing with Sir George
Carterett, after pirate raid and shipwreck, they reached London to find
the plague raging, and were ordered to Windsor, where Charles received
them, recommended their venture to Prince Rupert, and provided 2 pounds
a week each for their living expenses.

[Illustration: Charles II]

From being penniless outcasts, Radisson and Groseillers suddenly
wakened to find themselves famous. Groseillers seems to have kept in
the background, but Radisson, the younger man, enjoyed the full blaze
of glory, was seen in the King's box at the theater, and was presently
paying furious court to Mistress Mary Kirke, daughter of Sir John
Kirke, whose ancestors had captured Quebec. What with war and the
plague, it was 1668 before the English Admiralty could loan the two
ships _Eaglet_ and _Nonsuch_ for a voyage to Hudson Bay. The expense
was to be defrayed by a band of {115} friends known as the "Gentlemen
Adventurers of England Trading to Hudson Bay," subscribing so much
stock in cash, provision, and goods for trade. Radisson's ship, the
_Eaglet_, was driven back, damaged by storm; but the other, under
Groseillers, went on to Hudson Bay, where the marks set up on the
overland voyage were found at Rupert River, and a small fort was built
for trade. During the delay Radisson was not idle in London. He wrote
the journals of his first four voyages. He married Mary Kirke--some
accounts say, eloped with her. With the help of King Charles and
Prince Rupert he organized what is now known as the Hudson's Bay Fur
Company; for when Groseillers' ship returned in the fall of 1669, its
success in trade had been so great that the Adventurers at once applied
for a royal charter of exclusive monopoly in trade to all the regions,
land and sea, rivers and territories, adjoining Hudson Bay. The
monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company to the Great Northwest was granted
by King Charles in May, 1670.

Here, then, was the situation. England was intrenched south of the St.
Lawrence. England was taking armed possession of all lands bordering
on Hudson Bay and such other lands as the Adventurers might find.
Wedged between was New France with a population of less than six
thousand. If France could have foreseen what her injustice to two poor
adventurers would cost the nation in blood and money, it would have
paid her to pension Radisson like a prince of the blood royal.


NOTE TO CHAPTER VI. The viceroys of New France were shifted so
frequently that little record remains of several but their names. The
official list of the governors under the French regime stands as
follows:

Samuel de Champlain, died at Quebec, Christmas, 1635.

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