Canada: the Empire of the North

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

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[Illustration: LE MOYNE D'IBERVILLE]

Eastward of Moose was Rupert Fort, where the company's ship anchored.
Hither the raiders plied their canoes by sea. Look at the map! Across
the bottom of James Bay projects a long tongue of swamp land. To save
time, Iberville portaged across this, and by July 1 was opposite Prince
Rupert's bastions. At the dock lay the English ship. That day
Iberville's men kept in hiding, but at night he had ambushed his men
along shore and paddled across to the ship. Just as Iberville stepped
on the deck a man on guard sprang at his throat. One blow of
Iberville's sword killed the Englishman on the spot. Stamping to call
the crew aloft, Iberville sabered the men as they scrambled up the
hatches, till the Governor himself threw {159} up hands in
unconditional surrender. The din had alarmed the fort, and hot shot
snapping fire from the loopholes kept the raiders off till the Le Moyne
brothers succeeded in scrambling to the roofs of the bastions, hacking
holes through the rough thatch and firing inside. This drove the
English gunners from their cannon. A moment later, and the raiders
were on the walls. It was a repetition of the fight at Moose Factory.
The English, taken by surprise, surrendered at once; and the French now
had thirty prisoners, a good ship, two forts, but no provisions.

Northwestward three hundred miles lay Albany Fort. Iberville led off
in canoes with his bushrovers. De Troyes followed on the English boat
with French soldiers and English prisoners. To save time, as the bay
seemed shallow, Iberville struck out from the shore across seas. All
at once a north wind began whipping the waters, sweeping down a
maelstrom of churning ice. Worse still, fog fell thick as wool. Any
one who knows canoe travel knows the danger. Iberville avoided
swamping by ordering his men to camp for the night on the shifting ice
pans, canoes held above heads where the ice crush was wildest, the
voyageurs clinging hand to hand, making a life line if one chanced to
slither through the ice slush. When daylight came with worse fog,
Iberville kept his pistol firing to guide his followers, and so pushed
on. Four days the dangerous traverse lasted, but August 1 the
bushrovers were in camp below the cliffs of Albany.

Indians had forewarned Governor Sargeant. The loopholes of his
palisades bristled with muskets and heavy guns that set the bullets
flying soon as De Troyes arrived and tried to land the cannon captured
from the other forts for assault on Albany. Drums beating, flags
flying, soldiers in line, a French messenger goes halfway forward and
demands of an English messenger come halfway out the surrender of Sieur
Jan Pere, languishing in the dungeons of Albany. The English Governor
sends curt word back that Pere has been sent home to France long ago,
and demands what in thunder the French mean by these raids in time of
peace. The French retire that night to consider. {160} Cannon they
have, but they have used up nearly all their ammunition. They have
thirty prisoners, but they have no provisions. The prisoners have told
them there are 50,000 pounds worth of furs stored at Albany.

Inside the fort the English were in almost as bad way. The larder was
lean, powder was scarce, and the men were wildly mutinous, threatening
to desert _en masse_ for the French on the excuse they had not hired to
fight, and "_if any of us lost a leg, the company could not make it
good_."

At the end of two days' desultory firing, the company Governor captured
down at Rupert came to Sargeant and told him frankly that the
bloodthirsty bushrovers were desperate; they had either to conquer or
starve, and if they were compelled to fight, there would be no quarter.
Men and women alike would be butchered in hand-to-hand fight. Still
Sargeant hung on, hoping for the annual frigate of the company. Then
powder failed utterly. Still Sargeant would not show the white flag;
so an underfactor flourished a white sheet from an upper window.
Chevalier De Troyes came forward and seated himself on one of the
cannon. Governor Sargeant went out and seated himself on the same
cannon with two bottles of wine. The English of Albany were allowed to
withdraw to Charlton Island to await the company ship. As for the
other prisoners, those who were not compelled to carry the plundered
furs back to Quebec, were turned adrift in the woods to find their way
overland north to Nelson. Iberville's bushrovers were back in Montreal
by October.

{161}

CHAPTER IX

FROM 1686 TO 1698

War with the Iroquois--The year of the massacre--Frontenac returns--The
heroine of Vercheres--Indian raid and counter-raid--Massacre and
Schenectady--The massacre at Fort Loyal--Boston roused to
action--Quebec besieged--Phips and Frontenac--Retreat of the
English--Iberville's gallant sea fight--Nelson surrenders

For ten years Hudson Bay becomes the theater of northern buccaneers and
bushraiders. A treaty of neutrality in 1686 provides that the bay
shall be held in common by the fur traders of England and France; but
the adventurers of England and the bushrovers of Quebec have no notion
of leaving things so uncertain. Spite of truce, both fit out raiders,
and the King of France, according to the shifting diplomacy of the day,
issues secret orders "to permit not a vestige of English possession on
the northern bay."

Maricourt Le Moyne held the newly captured forts on the south shore of
James Bay till Iberville came back overland in 1687. The fort at
Rupert had been completely abandoned after the French victory of the
previous summer, and the Hudson's Bay Company sloop, the _Young_, had
just sailed into the port to reestablish the fur post. Iberville
surrounded the sloop by his bushrovers, captured it with all hands, and
dispatched four spies across to Charlton Island, where another sloop,
the _Churchill_, swung at anchor. Here Iberville's run of luck turned.
Three of his four spies were captured, fettered, and thrown into the
hold of the vessel for the winter. In the spring of 1688 one was
brought above decks to help the English sailors. Watching his chance,
the grizzled bushrover waited till six of the English crew were up the
ratlines. Quick as flash the Frenchman tiptoed across decks in his
noiseless moccasins, took one precautionary glance over his shoulder,
brained two Englishmen with an ax, liberated his comrades, and at
pistol point kept the other Englishmen up the masts till he and his
fellows had righted the ship and steered the vessel across to Rupert
River, where the provisions were just in time to save Iberville's party
from starvation.

{162} This episode is typical of what went on at the Hudson's Bay forts
for ten years. Each year, when the English ships came out to Nelson on
the west coast, armed bands were sent south to wrest the forts on James
Bay from the French; and each spring, when Iberville's bushrovers came
gliding down the rivers in their canoes from Canada, there was a fight
to drive out the English. Then the Indians would scatter to their
hunting grounds. No more loot of furs for a year! The English would
sail away in their ships, the French glide away in their canoes; and
for a winter the uneasy quiet of calm between two thunderclaps would
rest over the waters of Hudson Bay.

In the spring of 1688, about the time that the brave bush-rovers had
brought the English ship from Charlton Island across to Rupert River,
two English frigates under Captain Moon, with twenty-four soldiers over
and above the crews, had come south from Nelson to attack the French
fur traders at Albany. As ill luck would have it, the ice floes began
driving inshore. The English ships found themselves locked in the ice
before the besieged fort. Across the jam from Rupert River dashed
Iberville with his Indian bandits, portaging where the ice floes
covered the water, paddling where lanes of clear way parted the
floating drift. Iberville hid his men in the tamarack swamps till
eighty-two Englishmen had landed and all unsuspecting left their ships
unguarded. Iberville only waited till the furs in the fort had been
transferred to the holds of the vessels. The ice cleared. The
Frenchman rushed his bushrovers on board, seized the vessel with the
most valuable cargo, and sailed gayly out of Albany for Quebec. The
astounded English set fire to the other ship and retreated overland.

But the dare-devil bushrovers were not yet clear of trouble. As the
ice drive jammed and held them in Hudson Straits, they were aghast to
see, sailing full tilt with the roaring tide of the straits, a fleet of
English frigates, the Hudson's Bay Company's annual ships; but
Iberville sniffed at danger as a war horse glories in gunpowder. He
laughed his merriest, and as the ice drive locked all the ships within
gunshot, ran up an {163} English flag above his French crew and had
actually signaled the captains of the English frigates to come aboard
and visit him, when the ice cleared. Hoisting sail, he showed swift
heels to the foe. Iberville's ambition now was to sweep _all_ the
English from Hudson Bay, in other words, to capture Nelson on the west
coast, whence came the finest furs; but other raids called him to
Canada.

It will be recalled that La Salle's enemies had secretly encouraged the
Iroquois to attack the tribes of the Illinois; and now the fur traders
of New York were encouraging the Iroquois to pillage the Indians of the
Mississippi valley, in order to divert peltries from the French on the
St. Lawrence to the English at New York. Savages of the north, rallied
by Perrot and Duluth and La Motte Cadillac, came down by the lakes to
Fort Frontenac to aid the French; but they found that La Barre, the new
governor, foolish old man, had been frightened into making peace with
the Iroquois warriors, abandoning the Illinois to Iroquois raid and
utterly forgetful that _a peace which is not a victory is not worth the
paper it is written on_.

For the shame of this disgraceful peace La Barre was recalled to France
and the Marquis de Denonville, a brave soldier, sent out as governor.
Unfortunately Denonville did not understand conditions in the colony.
The Jesuit missionaries were commissioned to summon the Iroquois to a
conference at Fort Frontenac, but when the deputies arrived they were
seized, tortured, and fifty of them shipped to France by the King's
order to serve as slaves on the royal galleys. It was an act of
treachery heinous beyond measure and exposed the Jesuit missionaries
among the Five Nations to terrible vengeance; but the Iroquois code of
honor was higher than the white man's. "Go home," they warned the
Jesuit missionary. "We have now every right to treat thee as our foe;
but we shall not do so! Thy heart has had no share in the wrong done
to us. We shall not punish thee for the crimes of another, tho' thou
didst act as the unconscious tool. But leave us! When our young {164}
men chant the song of war they may take counsel only of their fury and
harm thee! Go to thine own people"; and furnishing him with guides,
they sent him to Quebec.

Though Denonville marched with his soldiers through the Iroquois
cantons, he did little harm and less good; for the wily warriors had
simply withdrawn their families into the woods, and the Iroquois were
only biding their time for fearful vengeance.

This lust of vengeance was now terribly whetted. Dongan, the English
governor of New York, had been ordered by King James of England to
observe the treaty of neutrality between England and France; but this
did not hinder him supplying the Iroquois with arms to raid the French
and secretly advising them "not to bury the war hatchet,--just to hide
it in the grass, and stand on their guard to begin the war anew."

[Illustration: FORT FRONTENAC AND THE ADJACENT COUNTRY]

Nor did the treaty of neutrality prevent the French from raiding Hudson
Bay and ordering shot in cold blood any French bushrover who dared to
guide the English traders to the country of the Upper Lakes.

In addition to English influence egging on the Iroquois, the treachery
of the Huron chief, The Rat, lashed the vengeance {165} of the Five
Nations to a fury. He had come down to Fort Frontenac to aid the
French. He was told that the French had again arranged peace with the
Iroquois, and deputies were even now on their way from the Five Nations.

"Peace!" The old Huron chief was dumbfounded. What were these fool
French doing, trusting to an Iroquois peace? "Ah," he grunted, "that
may be well"; and he withdrew without revealing a sign of his
intentions. Then he lay in ambush on the trail of the deputies, fell
on the Iroquois peace messengers with fury, slaughtered half the band,
then sent the others back with word that he had done this by order of
Denonville, the French governor.

"There," grunted The Rat grimly, "I 've killed the peace for them! We
'll see how Onontio gets out of this mess."

Meanwhile war had been declared between England and France. The
Stuarts had been dethroned. France was supporting the exiled monarch,
and William of Orange had become king of England. Iberville and Duluth
and La Motte Cadillac, the famous fighters of Canada's wildwood, were
laying plans before the French Governor for the invasion and conquest
of New York; and New York was preparing to defend itself by pouring
ammunition and firearms free of cost into the hands of the Iroquois.
Then the Iroquois vengeance fell.

Between the night and morning of August 4 and 5, in 1689, a terrific
thunderstorm had broken over Montreal. Amidst the crack of hail and
crash of falling trees, with the thunder reverberating from the
mountain like cannonading, whilst the frightened people stood gazing at
the play of lightning across their windows, fourteen hundred Iroquois
warriors landed behind Montreal, beached their canoes, and stole upon
the settlement. What next followed beggars description. Nothing else
like it occurs in the history of Canada. For years this summer was to
be known as "the Year of the Massacre."

Before the storm subsided, the Iroquois had stationed themselves in
circles round every house outside the walls of Montreal. At the signal
of a whistle, the warriors fell on the settlement {166} like beasts of
prey. Neither doors nor windows were fastened in that age, and the
people, deep in sleep after the vigil of the storm, were dragged from
their beds before they were well awake. Men, women, and children fell
victims to such ingenuity of cruelty as only savage vengeance could
conceive. Children were dashed to pieces before their parents' eyes;
aged parents tomahawked before struggling sons and daughters; fathers
held powerless that they might witness the tortures wreaked on wives
and daughters. Homes which had heard some alarm and were on guard were
set on fire, and those who perished in the flames {167} died a merciful
death compared to those who fell in the hands of the victors. By
daybreak two hundred people had been wantonly butchered. A hundred and
fifty more had been taken captives. As if their vengeance could not be
glutted, the Iroquois crossed the river opposite Montreal, and, in full
sight of the fort, weakly garrisoned and paralyzed with fright, spent
the rest of the week, day and night, torturing the white captives. By
night victims could be seen tied to the torture stake amid the
wreathing flames, with the tormentors dancing round the camp fire in
maniacal ferocity. Denonville was simply powerless. He lost his head,
and seemed so panic-stricken that he forbade even volunteer bands from
rallying to the rescue. For two months the Iroquois overran Canada
unchecked. Indeed, it was years before the boldness engendered by this
foray became reduced to respect for French authority. Settlement after
settlement, the marauders raided. From Montreal to Three Rivers crops
went up in flame, and the terrified habitants came cowering with their
families to the shelter of the palisades.

[Illustration: WILLIAM OF ORANGE]

In the midst of this universal terror came the country's savior.
Frontenac had been recalled because he quarreled with the intendant and
he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders;
but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of
the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois' heart.
Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his
fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and
he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting
good of the country. Homage he demanded as to a king, once going so
far as to drive the Sovereign Councilors from his presence with the
flat of a sword; but he firmly believed and he had publicly proved that
he was worthy of homage, and that the men who are forever shouting
"liberty--liberty and the people's rights," are frequently wolves in
sheep's clothing, eating out the vitals of a nation's prosperity.

Here, then, was the haughty, hot-headed, aggressive Frontenac, sent
back in his old age to restore the prestige of New France, {168} where
both La Barre the grafter, and Denonville the courteous Christian
gentleman, had failed.

To this period of Iroquois raids belongs one of the most heroic
episodes in Canadian life. The only settlers who had not fled to the
protection of the palisaded forts were the grand old seigniors, the new
nobility of New France, whose mansions were like forts in themselves,
palisaded, with stone bastions and water supply and yards for stock and
mills inside the walls. Here the seigniors, wildwood knights of a
wilderness age, held little courts that were imitations of the
Governor's pomp at Quebec. Sometimes during war the seignior's wife
and daughters were reduced to plowing in the fields and laboring with
the women servants at the harvest; but ordinarily the life at the
seigniory was a life of petty grandeur, with such style as the
backwoods afforded. In the hall or great room of the manor house was
usually an enormous table used both as court of justice by the seignior
and festive board. On one side was a huge fireplace with its homemade
benches, on the other a clumsily carved chiffonier loaded with solid
silver. In the early days the seignior's bedstead might be in the same
room,--an enormous affair with panoplies of curtains and counterpanes
of fur rugs and feather mattresses, so high that it almost necessitated
a ladder. But in the matter of dress the rude life made up in style
what it lacked in the equipments of a grand mansion.

The bishop's description of the women's dresses I have already given,
though at this period the women had added to the "sins" of bows and
furbelows and frills, which the bishop deplored, the yet more heinous
error of such enormous hoops that it required fine maneuvering on the
part of a grand dame to negotiate the door of the family coach; and
however pompous the seignior's air, it must have suffered temporary
eclipse in that coach from the hoops of his spouse and his spouse's
daughters. As for the seignior, when he was not dressed in buckskin,
leading bushrovers on raids, he appeared magnificent in all the
grandeur that a 20 pounds wig and Spanish laces and French ruffles
{169} and imported satins could lend his portly person; and if the
figure were not portly, one may venture to guess, from the pictures of
stout gentlemen in the quilted brocades of the period, that padding
made up what nature lacked.

Such a seigniory was Vercheres, some twenty miles from Montreal, on the
south side of the St. Lawrence. M. de Vercheres was an officer in one
of the regiments, and chanced to be absent from home during October of
1696, doing duty at Quebec. Madame de Vercheres was visiting in
Montreal. Strange as it may seem, the fort and the family had been
left in charge of the daughter, Madeline, at this time only fourteen
years of age. At eight o'clock on the morning of October 22 she had
gone four hundred paces outside the fort gates when she heard the
report of musket firing. The rest of the story may be told in her own
words:

I at once saw that the Iroquois were firing at our settlers, who lived
near the fort. One of our servants call out: "Fly, Mademoiselle, fly!
The Iroquois are upon us!"

Instantly I saw some forty-five Iroquois running towards me, already
within pistol shot. Determined to die rather than fall in their hands,
I ran for the fort, praying to the Blessed Virgin, "Holy Mother, save
me! Let me perish rather than fall in their hands!" Meanwhile my
pursuers paused to fire their guns. Bullets whistled past my ears.
Once within hearing of the fort, I shouted, "To arms! To arms!"

There were but two soldiers in the fort, and they were so overcome by
fear that they ran to hide in the bastion. At the gates I found two
women wailing for the loss of their husbands. Then I saw several
stakes had fallen from the palisades where enemies could gain entrance;
so I seized the fallen planks and urged the women to give a hand
putting them back in their places. Then I ran to the bastion, where I
found two of the soldiers lighting a fuse.

"What are you going to do?" I demanded.

"Blow up the fort," answered one cowardly wretch.

"Begone, you rascals," I commanded, putting on a soldier's helmet and
seizing a musket. Then to my little brothers: "Let us fight to the
death! Remember what father has always said,--that gentlemen are born
to shed their blood in the service of God and their King."

My brothers and the two soldiers kept up a steady fire from the
loopholes. I ordered the cannon fired to call in our soldiers, who
were hunting; {170} but the grief-stricken women inside kept wailing so
loud that I had to warn them their shrieks would betray our weakness to
the enemy. While I was speaking I caught sight of a canoe on the
river. It was Sieur Pierre Fontaine, with his family, coming to visit
us. I asked the soldiers to go out and protect their landing, but they
refused. Then ordering Laviolette, our servant, to stand sentry at the
gate, I went out myself, wearing a soldier's helmet and carrying a
musket. I left orders if I were killed the gates were to be kept shut
and the fort defended. I hoped the Iroquois would think this a ruse on
my part to draw them within gunshot of our walls. That was just what
happened, and I got Pierre Fontaine and his family safely inside by
putting a bold face on. Our whole garrison consisted of my two little
brothers aged about twelve, one servant, two soldiers, one old habitant
aged eighty, and a few women servants. Strengthened by the Fontaines,
we began firing. When the sun went down the night set in with a
fearful storm of northeast wind and snow. I expected the Iroquois
under cover of the storm. Gathering our people together, I said: "God
has saved us during the day. Now we must be careful for the night. To
show you I am not afraid to take my part, I undertake to defend the
fort with the old man and a soldier, who has never fired a gun. You,
Pierre Fontaine and La Bonte and Galet (the two soldiers), go to the
bastion with the women and children. If I am taken, never surrender
though I am burnt and cut to pieces before your eyes! You have nothing
to fear if you will make some show of fight!"

I posted two of my young brothers on one of the bastions, the old man
of eighty on the third, and myself took the fourth. Despite the
whistling of the wind we kept the cry "All's well," "All's well"
echoing and reechoing from corner to corner. One would have imagined
the fort was crowded with soldiers, and the Iroquois afterwards
confessed they had been completely deceived; that the vigilance of the
guard kept them from attempting to scale the walls. About midnight the
sentinel at the gate bastion called out, "Mademoiselle! I hear
something!"

I saw it was our cattle.

"Let me open the gates," urged the sentry.

"God forbid," said I; "the savages are likely behind, driving the
animals in."

Nevertheless I _did_ open the gates and let the cattle in, my brothers
standing on each side, ready to shoot if an Indian appeared.

At last came daylight; and we were hopeful for aid from Montreal; but
Marguerite Fontaine, being timorous as all Parisian women are, begged
her husband to try and escape. The poor husband was almost distracted
as she insisted, and he told her he would set her out in the canoe with
her two sons, who could paddle it, but he would not abandon
Mademoiselle in Vercheres. I had been twenty-four hours without rest
or food, and had not {171} once gone from the bastion. On the eighth
day of the siege Lieutenant de La Monnerie reached the fort during the
night with forty men.

One of our sentries had called out, "Who goes?"

I was dozing with my head on a table and a musket across my arm. The
sentry said there were voices on the water. I called, "Who are you?"

They answered, "French--come to your aid!"

I went down to the bank, saying: "Sir, but you are welcome! I
surrender my arms to you!"

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