Canada: the Empire of the North

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

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It had turned bitterly cold. The blood on the decks became ice, and
each roll of the sea sent wounded and dead weltering {186} from rail to
rail. Such holes had been torn in the hulls of both English and French
ships that the gunners below decks were literally looking into each
other's smoke-grimmed faces. Suddenly all hands paused. A frantic
scream cleft the air. The vessels were careening in a tempestuous sea,
for the great ship _Hampshire_ had refused to answer to the wheel, had
lurched, had sunk,--sunk swift as lead amid hiss of flames into the
roaring sea! Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men escaped. The
frigate _Hudson's Bay_ surrendered and the _Deering_ fled. Iberville
was victor.

[Illustration: LANDING OF IBERVILLE'S MEN AT PORT NELSON (After La
Potherie)]

But a storm now broke in hurricane gusts over the sea. Iberville
steered for land, but waves drenched the wheel at every wash, and,
driving before the storm, the _Pelican_ floundered in the sands a few
miles from Nelson. All lifeboats had been shot away. In such a sea
the Canadian canoes were useless. The shattered masts were tied in
four-sided racks. To these {187} Iberville had the wounded bound, and
the crew plunged for the shore. Eighteen men perished going ashore in
the darkness. On land were two feet of snow. No sooner did the French
castaways build fires to warm their benumbed limbs than bullets
whistled into camp. Governor Bayly of Port Nelson had sent out his
sharpshooters. Luckily Iberville's other ships now joined him, and,
mustering his forces, the dauntless French leader marched against the
fort. Storm had permitted the French to land their cannon undetected.
Trenches were cast up, and three times Serigny Le Moyne was sent to
demand surrender.

[Illustration: CAPTURE OF FORT NELSON BY THE FRENCH (After La
Potherie)]

"The French are desperate," he urged. "They must take the fort or
perish of want, and if you continue the fight there will be no mercy
given."

The Hudson's Bay people capitulated and were permitted to march out
with arms, bag and baggage. An English ship carried the refugees home
to the Thames.

The rest of Iberville's career is the story of colonizing the
Mississippi. He was granted a vast seigniory on the Bay of {188}
Chaleur, and in 1699 given a title. On his way from the Louisiana
colony to France his ship had paused at Havana. Here Iberville
contracted yellow fever and died while yet in the prime of his manhood,
July 9, 1706.

After the victory on Hudson Bay the French were supreme in America and
Frontenac supreme in New France. The old white-haired veteran of a
hundred wars became the idol of Quebec. Friends and enemies, Jesuits
and Recollets, paid tribute to his worth. In November of 1698 the
Governor passed from this life in Castle St. Louis at the good old age
of seventy-eight. He had demonstrated--demonstrated in action so that
his enemies acknowledged the fact--that the sterner virtues of the
military chieftain go farther towards the making of great nationhood
than soft sentiments and religious emotionalism.

{189}

CHAPTER X

FROM 1698 TO 1713

Petty regulations and blue laws--Massacre of Deerfield--Madame
Freneuse, the painter lady--"Old Wooden Sword"--Subercase at Port
Royal--Paul Mascarene's plight--Court dandies cause naval disaster

While Frontenac was striking terror into the heart of New England with
his French Canadian bushrovers, the life of the people went on in the
same grooves. Spite of a dozen raids on the Iroquois cantons, there
was still danger from the warriors of the Mohawk, but the Iroquois
braves had found a new stamping ground. Instead of attacking Canada
they now crossed westward to war on the allies of the French, the
tribes of the Illinois and the Mississippi; and with them traveled
their liege friends, English traders from New York and Pennsylvania and
Virginia.

The government of Canada continued to be a despotism, pure and simple.
The Supreme Council, consisting of the governor, the intendant, the
bishop, and at different times from three to twelve councilors, stood
between the people and the King of France, transmitting the King's will
to the people, the people's wants to the King; and the laws enacted by
the council ranged all the way from criminal decrees to such petty
regulations as a modern city wardman might pass. Laws enacted to meet
local needs, but subject to the veto of an absent ruler, who knew
absolutely nothing of local needs, exhibited all the absurdities to be
expected. The King of France desires the Sovereign Council to
discourage the people from using horses, which are supposed to cause
laziness, as "it is needful the inhabitants keep up their snowshoe
travel so necessary in their wars." "If in two years the numbers of
horses do not decrease, they are to be killed for meat." Then comes a
law that reflects the presence of the bishop at the governing board.
Horses have become the pride of the country beaux, and the gay
be-ribboned carrioles are the distraction of the village cure. "Men
are forbidden to gallop their horses within a third of a mile from the
church on {190} Sundays." New laws, regulations, arrests, are
promulgated by the public crier, "crying up and down the highway to
sound of trumpet and drum," chest puffed out with self-importance, gold
braid enough on the red-coated regalia to overawe the simple habitants.
Though the companies holding monopoly over trade yearly change,
monopoly is still all-powerful in New France,--so all pervasive that in
1741, in order to prevent smuggling to defraud the Company of the
Indies, it is enacted that "people using chintz-covered furniture" must
upholster their chairs so that the stamp "La Cie des Indes" will be
visible to the inspector. The matter of money is a great trouble to
New France. Beaver is coin of the realm on the St. Lawrence, and
though this beaver is paid for in French gold, the precious metal
almost at once finds its way back to France for goods; so that the
colony is without coin. Government cards are issued as coin, but as
Europe will not accept card money, the result is that gold still flows
from New France, and the colony is flooded with paper money worthless
away from Quebec.

As of old, the people may still plead their own cases in lawsuits
before the Sovereign Council, but now the privileges of caste and class
and feudalism begin to be felt, and it is enacted that gentlemen may
plead their own cases before the council only "when wearing their
swords." Young men are urged to qualify as notaries. In addition to
the title of "Sieur," baronies are created in Canada, foremost among
them that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. The feudal seignior now has
his coat of arms emblazoned on the church pew where he worships, on his
coach door, and on the stone entrance to his mansion. The habitants
are compelled to grind their wheat at his mill, to use his great bake
oven, to patronize his tannery. The seigniorial mansion itself is
taking on more of pomp. Cherry and mahogany furniture have replaced
homemade, and the rough-cast walls are now covered with imported
tapestries.

Not gently does the Sovereign Council deal with delinquents. In 1735
it is enacted of a man who suicided, "that the corpse be tied to a
cart, dragged on a hurdle, head down, face to ground, {191} through the
streets of the town, to be hung up by the feet, an object of derision,
then cast into the river in default of a cesspool." Criminals who
evade punishment by flight are to be hanged in effigy. Montreal
citizens are ordered to have their chimneys cleaned every month and
their houses provided with ladders. Also "the inhabitants of Montreal
must not allow their pigs to run in the street," and they "are
forbidden to throw snowballs at each other," and--a regulation which
people who know Montreal winters will appreciate--"they are ordered to
make paths through the snow before their houses,"--to all of which
petty regulations did royalty subscribe sign manual.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY MAP (after La Hontan, 1689) (The line shows
the French idea of the territory under English control)]

The Treaty of Ryswick closed the war between France and England the
year before Frontenac died, but it was not known in Canada till 1698.
As far as Canada was concerned it was no peace, barely a truce. Each
side was to remain in possession of what it held at the time of the
treaty, which meant that France retained all Hudson Bay but one small
fort. Though the English of Boston had captured Port Royal, they had
left {192} no sign of possession but their flag flying over the
tenantless barracks. The French returned from the woods, tore the flag
down, and again took possession; so that, by the Treaty of Ryswick,
Acadia too went back under French rule.

Indeed, matters were worse than before the treaty, for there could be
no open war; but when English settlers spreading up from Maine met
French traders wandering down from Acadia, there was the inevitable
collision, and it was an easy trick for the rivals to stir up the
Indians to raid and massacre and indiscriminate butchery. For Indian
raids neither country would be responsible to the other. The story
belongs to the history of the New England frontier rather than to the
record of Canada. It is a part of Canada's past which few French
writers tell and all Canadians would fain blot out, but which the
government records prove beyond dispute. Indian warfare is not a thing
of grandeur at its best, but when it degenerates into the braining of
children, the bayoneting of women, the mutilation of old men, it is a
horror without parallel; and the amazing thing is that the white men,
who painted themselves as Indians and helped to wage this war, were so
sure they were doing God's work that they used to kneel and pray before
beginning the butchery. To understand it one has to go back to the
Middle Ages in imagination. New France was violently Catholic, New
England violently Protestant. Bigotry ever looks out through eyes of
jaundiced hatred, and in destroying what they thought was a false
faith, each side thought itself instrument of God. As for the French
governors behind the scenes, who pulled the strings that let loose the
helldogs of Indian war, they were but obeying the kingcraft of a royal
master, who would use Indian warfare to add to his domain.

"The English have sent us presents to drive the Black Gowns away,"
declared the Iroquois in 1702 regarding the French Jesuits. "You did
well," writes the King of France to his Viceroy in Quebec, "to urge the
Abenakis of Acadia to raid the English of Boston." The Treaty of
Ryswick became {193} known at Quebec towards the end of 1698. The
border warfare of ravage and butchery had begun by 1701, the English
giving presents to the Iroquois to attack the French of the Illinois,
the French giving presents to the Abenakis to raid the New England
borders. Quebec offers a reward of twenty crowns for the scalp of
every white man brought from the English settlements. New England
retaliates by offering 20 pounds for every Indian prisoner under ten
years of age, 40 pounds for every scalp of full-grown Indian.
Presently the young _noblesse_ of New France are off to the woods,
painted like Indians, leading crews of wild bushrovers on ambuscade and
midnight raid and border foray.

[Illustration: HERTEL DE ROUVILLE]

"We must keep things stirring towards Boston," declared Vaudreuil, the
French governor. Midwinter of 1704 Hertel de Rouville and his four
brothers set out on snowshoes with fifty-one bushrovers and two hundred
Indians for Massachusetts. Dressed in buckskin, with musket over
shoulder and dagger in belt, the forest rangers course up the frozen
river beds southward of the St. Lawrence, and on over the height of
land towards the Hudson, two hundred and fifty miles through pine woods
snow padded and silent as death. Two miles from Deerfield the marchers
run short of food. It is the last day of February, and the sun goes
down over rolling snowdrifts high as the slab stockades of the little
frontier town whose hearth-fire smoke hangs low in the frosty air,
curling and clouding and lighting to rainbow colors as the ambushed
{194} raiders watch from their forest lairs. Snowshoes are laid aside,
packs unstrapped, muskets uncased and primed, belts reefed tighter.
Twilight gives place to starlight. Candles on the supper tables of the
settlement send long gleams across the snow. Then the villagers hold
their family prayers, all unconscious that out there in the woods are
the bushrovers on bended knees, uttering prayers of another sort.
Lights are put out. The village lies wrapped in sleep. Still
Rouville's raiders lie waiting, shivering in the snow, till starlight
fades to the gray darkness that precedes dawn. Then the bushrovers
rise, and at moccasin pace, noiseless as tigers, skim across the snow,
over the drifts, over the tops of the palisades, and have dropped into
the town before a soul has awakened. There is no need to tell the
rest. It was not war. It was butchery. Children were torn from their
mother's breast to be brained on the hearthstone. Women were hacked to
pieces. Houses were set on fire, and before the sun had risen
thirty-eight persons had been slaughtered, and the French rovers were
back on the forest trail, homeward bound with one hundred and six
prisoners. Old and young, women of frail health and children barely
able to toddle, were hurried along the trail at bayonet point. Those
whose strength was unequal to the pace were summarily knocked on the
head as they fagged, or failed to ford the ice streams. Twenty-four
perished by the way. Of the one hundred and six prisoners scattered as
captives among the Indians, not half were ever heard of again. The
others were either bought from the Indians by Quebec people, whose pity
was touched, or placed round in the convents to be converted to the
Catholic faith. These were ultimately redeemed by the government of
Massachusetts.

New England's fury over such a raid in time of peace knew no bounds.
Yet how were the English to retaliate? To pursue an ambushed Indian
along a forest trail was to follow a vanishing phantom.

From earliest times Boston had kept up trade with Port Royal, and of
late years Port Royal had been infested with French pirates, who raided
Boston shipping. Colonel Ben {195} Church of Long Island, a noted
bushfighter, of gunpowder temper and form so stout that his men had
always to hoist him over logs in their forest marches, went storming
from New York to Boston with a plan to be revenged by raiding Acadia.

Rouville's bushrovers had burned Deerfield the first of March. By May,
Church had sailed from Boston with six hundred men on two frigates and
half a hundred whaleboats, on vengeance bent. First he stopped at
Baron St. Castin's fort in Maine. St. Castin it was who led the
Indians against the English of Maine. The baron was absent, but his
daughter was captured, with all the servants, and the fort was burned
to the ground. Then up Fundy Bay sailed Church, pausing at
Passamaquoddy to knock four Frenchmen on the head; pausing at Port
Royal to take eight men prisoners, kill cattle, ravage fields; pausing
at Basin of Mines to capture forty habitants, burn the church, and cut
the dikes, letting the sea in on the crops; pausing at Beaubassin, the
head of Fundy Bay, in August, to set the yellow wheat fields in flames!
Then he sailed back to Boston with French prisoners enough to insure an
exchange for the English held at Quebec.

No sooner had English sails disappeared over the sea than the French
came out of the woods. St. Castin rebuilt his fort in Maine. The
local Governor, who had held on with his gates shut and cannon pointed
while Church ravaged Port Royal village, now strengthened his walls.
Acadia took a breath and went on as before,--a little world in itself,
with the pirate ships slipping in and out, loaded to the water line
with Boston booty; with the buccaneer Basset throwing his gold round
like dust; with the brave soldier Bonaventure losing his head and
losing his heart to the painted lady, Widow Freneuse, who came from
nobody knew where and lived nobody knew how, and plied her mischief of
winning the hearts of other women's husbands. "She must be sent away,"
thundered the priest from the pulpit, straight at the garrison officer
whose heart she dangled as her trophy. "She must be sent away,"
thundered the King's mandate; but the King was in France, and Madame
Freneuse {196} wound her charms the tighter round the hearts of the
garrison officers, and bided her time, to the scandal of the parish and
impotent rage of the priest. Was she vixen or fool, this fair snake
woman with the beautiful face, for whose smile the officers risked
death and disgrace? Was she spy or adventuress? She signed herself as
"Widow Freneuse," and had applied to the King for a pension as having
grown sons fighting in the Indian wars. She will come into this story
again, snakelike and soft-spoken, and appealing for pity, and fair to
look upon, but leaving a trail of blood and treachery and disgrace
where she goes.

The fur trade of Port Royal at this time was controlled by a family
ring of La Tours and Charnisays, descendants of the ancient foes; and
they lived a life of reckless gayety, spiced with all the excitement of
war and privateering and matrimonial intrigue. Such was life _inside_
Port Royal. _Outside_ was the quiet peace of a home-loving,
home-staying peasantry. Few of the farmers could read or write. The
houses were little square Norman cottages,--"wooden boxes" the
commandant called them,--with the inevitable porch shaded by the fruit
trees now grown into splendid orchards. By diking out the sea the
peasants farmed the marsh lands and saved themselves the trouble of
clearing the forests. Trade was carried on with Boston and the West
Indies. No card money here! The farmers of Acadia demanded coin in
gold from the privateers who called for cargo, and it is said that in
time of such raids as Colonel Church's, great quantities of this gold
were carried out by night and buried in huge pots,--as much as 5000
louis d'ors (pounds) in one pot,--to be dug up after the raiders had
departed. Naturally, as raids grew frequent, men sometimes made the
mistake of digging up other men's pots, and one officer lost his
reputation over it. All his knowledge of the outside world, of
politics, of religion, the Acadian farmer obtained from his parish
priest; and the word of the cure was law.

Encouraged by Church's success and stung by the raids of French
corsairs from Port Royal, New England set herself seriously to the task
of conquering Acadia. Colonel March sailed {197} from Boston with one
thousand men and twenty-three transports, and on June 6, 1707, came
into Port Royal. Misfortunes began from the first. March's men were
the rawest of recruits,--fishermen, farmers, carpenters, turned into
soldiers. Unused to military discipline, they resisted command. A
French guardhouse stood at the entrance to Port Royal Basin, and
fifteen men at once fled to the fort with warning of the English
invasion. Consequently, when Colonel March and Colonel Appleton
attempted to land their men, they were serenaded by the shots of an
ambushed foe. Also French soldiers deserted to the English camp with
fabulous stories about the strength of the French under Subercase.
These yarns ought to have discredited themselves, but they struck
terror to the hearts of March's green fighters. Then came St. Castin
from St. John River with bushrovers to help Subercase. To the
amazement of the French the English hoisted sail and returned, on June
16, without having fired more than a round of shot. The truth is,
March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though
reenforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt
on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his
name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets
with shouts of "Old Wooden Sword!"

While Boston was attempting to wreak vengeance on Acadia for the
raiders of Quebec, the bushrovers from the St. Lawrence continued to
scourge the outlying settlements of New England. To post soldiers on
the frontier was useless. Wherever there were guards the raiders
simply passed on to some unprotected village, and to have kept soldiers
along the line of the whole frontier would have required a standing
army. Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New
York,--on the frontier of each reigned perpetual terror. And the
fiendish work was a paying business to the pagan Indian; for the
Christian white men paid well for all scalps, and ransom money could
always be extorted for captives. Barely had the Boston raid on Port
Royal failed, when Governor de Vaudreuil of Quebec {198} retaliated by
turning his raiders loose on Haverhill. The English fleet failed at
Port Royal in June. By dawn of Sunday, August 29, Hertel de Rouville
had swooped on the English village of Haverhill with one hundred
Canadian bushrovers and one hundred and fifty Indians. The story of
one raid is the story of all; so this one need not be told. As the
raiders were discovered at daylight, the people had a chance to defend
themselves, and some of the villagers escaped, the family of one being
hidden by a negro nurse under tubs in the cellar. Alarm had been
carried to the surrounding settlements, and men rode hot haste in
pursuit of the forty prisoners. Hertel de Rouville coolly sent back
word, if the pursuers did not desist, all the prisoners would be
scalped and left on the roadside. Some fifty English had fallen in the
fight, but the French lost fifteen, among them young Jared of
Vercheres, brother of the heroine.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF PORT ROYAL BASIN]

The only peace for Massachusetts was the peace that would be a victory,
and again New England girded herself to the task of capturing Acadia.
It was open war now, for the crowns of England and France were at odds.
The troops were commanded by General Francis Nicholson, an English
officer who brought out four war ships and four hundred trained
marines. There were, besides, thirty-six transports and three thousand
provincial troops, clothed and outfitted by Queen Anne of England.
Sunday, September 24, 1710, the fleet glides majestically into Port
Royal Basin. That night the wind blew a hurricane and the transport
_Caesar_ went aground with a crash that smashed her timbers to kindling
wood and sent twenty-four men to a watery grave; but General Nicholson
gave the raw provincials no time for panic fright. Day dawn, Monday,
drums rolling a martial tread, trumpets blowing, bugles setting the
echoes flying, flags blowing to the wind in the morning sun, he
commanded Colonel Vetch to lead the men ashore. Inside Port Royal's
palisades Subercase, the French commander, had less than three hundred
men, half that number absolutely naked of clothing, and all short of
powder. There were not provisions to last a month; but, game to his
soul's marrow, as all the warriors of {199} those early days, Subercase
put up a brave fight, sending his bombs singing over the heads of the
English troops in a vain attempt to baffle the landing. Nicholson
retaliated by moving his bomb ship, light of draught, close to the
French fort and pouring a shower of bombs through the roofs of the
French fort. Spite of the wreck the night before, by four o'clock
Monday afternoon all the English had landed in perfect order and high
spirits. Slowly the English forces swung in a circle completely round
the fort. Again and again, by daylight and dark, Subercase's naked
soldiers rushed, screeching the war whoop, to ambush and stampede the
English line; but Nicholson's regulars stood the fire like rocks, and
the desperate sortie of the French ended in fifty of Subercase's
soldiers deserting en masse to the English. By Friday Nicholson's guns
were all mounted in place to bombard the little wooden fort. Subercase
was desperate. Women and children from the settlement had crowded into
the fort for protection, and were now crazed with fear by the bursting
bombs, while the naked soldiers could be kept on the walls only at the
sword point of their commanding officers. {200} For two hundred French
to have held out longer against three thousand five hundred English
would have been madness. Subercase made the presence of the women in
Port Royal an excuse to send a messenger with flag of truce across to
Nicholson, asking the English to take the women under their protection.
Nicholson might well have asked what protection the French raiders had
accorded the women of the New England frontiers; but he sent back
polite answer that "as he was not warring on women and children" he
would receive them in the English camp, meanwhile holding Subercase's
messenger prisoner, as he had entered the English camp without warning,
eyes unbound. Sunday, October 1, the English bombs again began singing
overhead. Subercase sends word he will capitulate if given honorable
terms. For a month the parleying continues. Then November 13 the
terms are signed on both sides, the English promising to furnish ships
to carry the garrison to some French port and pledging protection to
the people of the settlement. November 14 the French officers and
their ladies come across to the English camp and breakfast in pomp with
the English commanders. Seventeen New England captives are hailed
forth from Port Royal dungeons, "all in rags, without shirts, shoes, or
stockings." On the 16th Nicholson draws his men up in two lines, one
on each side of Port Royal gates, and the two hundred French soldiers
marched out, saluting Nicholson as they passed to the transports. On
the bridge, halfway out, French officers meet the English officers,
doff helmets, and present the keys to the fort. For the last time Port
Royal changes hands. Henceforth it is English, and in gratitude for
the Queen's help Nicholson renamed the place as it is known
to-day,--Annapolis. Among the raiders capitulating is the famous
bushrover Baron St. Castin of Maine.

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