Canada: the Empire of the North

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

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[Illustration: HUDSON COAT OF ARMS]

Not less disastrous were English efforts than French to colonize the New
World. Up to 1610 Canada's story is, in the main, a record of blind
heroism, dogged courage, death that refused to acknowledge defeat.

Four hundred French vessels now yearly come to reap the harvest of the
sea; in and out among the fantastic rocks of Gaspe, pierced and pillared
and scooped into caves by the wave wash, where fisher boats reap other
kind of harvest, richer than the silver harvest of the sea,--harvest of
beaver, and otter, and marten; up the dim amber waters of the Saguenay,
within the shadow of the somber gorge, trafficking baubles of bead and
red print for furs, precious furs. Pontgrave, merchant prince, comes out
with fifty men in 1600, and leaves sixteen at Tadoussac, ostensibly as
colonists, really as wood lopers to scatter through the forests and learn
the haunts of the Indians. Pontgrave comes back for men and furs in
1601, and comes again in 1603 with two vessels, accompanied by a soldier
of fortune from the French court, who acts as geographer,--Samuel
Champlain, now in his thirty-sixth year, with service in war to his
credit and a journey across Spanish America.

{33} The two vessels are barely as large as coastal schooners; but
shallow draft enables them to essay the Upper St. Lawrence far as Mount
Royal, where Cartier had voyaged. Of the palisaded Indian fort not a
vestige remains. War or plague has driven the tribe westward, but it is
plain to the court geographer that, in spite of former failures, this
land of rivers like lakes, and valleys large as European kingdoms, is fit
for French colonists.

[Illustration: THE FANTASTIC ROCKS OF GASPE]

When Champlain returns to France the King readily grants to Sieur de
Monts a region roughly defined as anywhere between Pennsylvania and
Labrador, designated Acadia. This region Sieur de Monts is to colonize
in return for a monopoly of the fur trade. When other traders complain,
De Monts quiets them by letting them all buy shares in the venture. With
him are associated as motley a throng of treasure seekers as ever
stampeded for gold. There is Samuel Champlain, the court geographer;
there is Pontgrave, the merchant prince, on a separate {34} vessel with
stores for the colonists. Pontgrave is to attend especially to the fur
trading. There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son,
Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New
World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons.
Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers
to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with
tongues and fists that the sailors threaten to bury them in the same
grave to see if they can lie at peace in death.

[Illustration: SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN]

Before the boats sight Acadia, it is early summer of 1604. Pontgrave
leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac. De Monts
enters the little bay of St. Mary's, off the northwest corner of Nova
Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.

Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful
as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June
undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company
scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than
to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill.
Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that
he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the
sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that
he is hopelessly lost. The last shafts of {35} sunlight disappear. The
chill of night settles on the darkening woods. The priest shouts till he
is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but
the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl. Aubry
wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by
the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless
ages, . . . on and on, . . . till gray dawn steals through the forest and
midday wears to a second night.

Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions. Could the
Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him?
De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite
of fiercest denials. All night cannon were fired from the vessel and
bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the
priest did not come.

De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay,
and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet
wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of
Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line
of wooded meadows like home-land parks. Poutrincourt is so delighted, he
at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.

On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks,
making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early
voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St.
John's Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking
vainly for more minerals. Westward is another river, known to-day as the
Ste. Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. Dochet Island
at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site. A fort
here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians
say leads back to the St. Lawrence. Thinking more of fort than farms, De
Monts plants his colony on Ste. Croix River, on an island composed mainly
of sand and rock.

While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent
back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals. As {36} the vessel coasts
near St. Mary's Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the
shore. Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement. A hat on the end of a pole
is waved weakly from the beach. The men can scarcely believe their
senses. It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he
disappeared. For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and
roots, before he found his way back to the sea.

[Illustration: PORT ROYAL OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN, 1609 (From Lescarbot's
map)]

Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little
palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of
the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgrave has taken one vessel up the
St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the
other for supplies. A worse beginning could hardly have been made. The
island was little better than a sand heap. No hills shut out the cold
winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried
in ice jam from the south. As the snow began to fall, padding the
stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce
trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness
of winter in a forest chill their hearts. {37} Cooped up on the island
by the ice, they did little hunting. Idleness gives time for repinings.
Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little
cemetery outside the palisades. De Monts has had enough of Ste. Croix.
When Pontgrave comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares
to move. Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a
better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod,
looking for a place to plant the capital of New France. It is amusing to
speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they
had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with
Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with
shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste. Croix in August,
to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia.
While Champlain and Pontgrave volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De
Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.

What had De Monts to show for his two years' labor? His company had
spent what would be $20,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur
trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony. While Champlain
hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgrave bartered furs
during the winter of 1605-1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay
lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and
point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire
in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits. De Monts
remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt
and Lescarbot sail on the _Jonas_ with more colonists and supplies for
Port Royal.

Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis. To
Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland--the silver flood of
the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the
air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and
against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs
and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness.
{38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul
appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The _Jonas_ runs up
the French ensign. Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled
by the old chief Membertou. He signals back to the watchers behind the
gates. Musketry shots ring out welcome. The ship's cannon answer,
setting the waters churning. Trumpets blare. The gates fly wide and out
marches the garrison--two lone Frenchmen. The rest, despairing of a ship
that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from
French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgrave and Champlain,
overjoyed to find the ship from France. Poutrincourt has a hogshead of
wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.

[Illustration: BUILDINGS ON STE. CROIX ISLAND, 1613 (From Champlain's
diagram)]

When Pontgrave carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer
poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the
colonists in Acadia. Poutrincourt and his son {39} attend to trade.
Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand
pranks of the Paris advocate. First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening,
and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his _noblesse_ long enough to wield the
hoe. Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond. The weather
is almost mild as summer until January. The woods ring to many a merry
picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay
Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of
nobility--the Order of Good Times. Each day one of the number must cater
to the messroom table of the fort. This means keen hunting, keen rivalry
for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts. And all is
done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet. When the chapel bell
rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the
Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck,
truncheon in his hand. The gavel strikes, and there enter the
Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand,--moose hump,
beaver tail, bears' paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only
to out-of-doors men. Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites.
Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the
children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.

At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the
shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of
command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master. It is all
child's play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.

Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper,--a handwritten sheet giving
the doings of the day,--perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing.
At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance. As all
the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy,
Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful
excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green. The lawyer's
good spirits proved contagious. The French songs that rang through the
woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper's {40} labors, were the best
antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last.
While L'Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell
from the blue. Instead of De Monts' vessel there came in spring a
fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded. No
more money would be advanced. Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt,
resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the
present all took sad leave of the little settlement--Poutrincourt,
Champlain, L'Escarbot--and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for
France, where they landed in October, 1607.

Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts--all had failed to establish France
in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey's colonists lay bleaching
skeletons at the bottom of the sea.

{41}

CHAPTER III

FROM 1607 TO 1635

Argall of Virginia attacks the French--Champlain on the St.
Lawrence--Champlain and the Iroquois--Champlain explores the
Ottawa--Champlain with the Indians--Discovery of the Great Lakes--War
with the Iroquois--Conflicting interests in New France--The English
take Quebec

Though the monopoly had been rescinded, Poutrincourt set himself to
interesting merchants in the fur trade of Acadia, and the French king
confirmed to him the grant of Port Royal. Yet it was 1610 before Baron
Poutrincourt had gathered supplies to reestablish the colony, and an
ominous cloud rose on the horizon, threatening his supremacy in the New
World. Nearly all the merchants supporting him were either Huguenots
or moderate Catholics. The Jesuits were all powerful at court, and
were pressing for a part in his scheme. The Jesuit, Father Biard, was
waiting at Bordeaux to join the ship. Poutrincourt evaded issues with
such powerful opponents. He took on board Father La Fleche, a
moderate, and gave the Jesuit the slip by sailing from Dieppe in
February.

To this quarrel there are two sides, as to all quarrels. The colony
must now be supported by the fur trade; and fur traders, world over,
easily add to their profits by deeds which will not bear the censure of
missionaries. On the other hand, to Poutrincourt, the Jesuits meant
divided authority; and the most lawless scoundrel that ever perpetrated
crimes in the fur trade could win over the favor of the priests by a
hypocritical semblance of contrition at the confessional. Contrition
never yet undid a crime; and civil courts can take no cognizance of
repentance.

When the ships sailed in to Port Royal the little fort was found
precisely as it had been left. Not even the furniture had been
disturbed, and old Membertou, the Indian chief, welcomed the white men
back with taciturn joy. Pere La Fleche assembles the savages, tells
them the story of the Christian faith, then to the beat of drum and
chant of "Te Deum" receives, one {42} afternoon, twenty naked converts
into the folds of the church. Membertou is baptized Henry, after the
King, and all his frowsy squaws renamed after ladies of the most
dissolute court in Christendom.

Young Biencourt is to convey the ship back to France. He finds that
the Queen Dowager has taken the Jesuits under her especial protection.
Money enough to buy out the interests of the Huguenot merchants for the
Jesuits has been advanced. Fathers Biard and Masse embark on _The
Grace of God_ with young Biencourt in January, 1611, for Port Royal.
Almost at once the divided authority results in trouble. Coasting the
Bay of Fundy, Biencourt discovers that Pontgrave's son has roused the
hostility of the Indians by some shameless act. Young Biencourt is for
hanging the miscreant to the yardarm, but the sinner gains the ear of
the saints by woeful tale of penitence, and Father Biard sides with
young Pontgrave. Instead of the gayety that reigned at Port Royal in
L'Escarbot's day, now is sullen mistrust.

The Jesuits threaten young Biencourt with excommunication. Biencourt
retaliates by threatening _them_ with expulsion. For three months no
religious services are held. The boat of 1612 brings out another
Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet; and the _Jonas_, which comes in 1613 with
fifty more men,--La Saussaye, commander, Fleury, captain,--has been
entirely outfitted by friends of the Jesuits. By this time Baron de
Poutrincourt, in France, was involved in debt beyond hope; but his
right to Port Royal was unshaken, and the Jesuits decided to steer
south to seek a new site for their colony.

[Illustration: PORT ROYAL (From Champlain's diagram)]

Zigzagging along the coast of Maine, Captain Fleury cast anchor off
Mount Desert at Frenchman's Bay. A cross was erected, mass celebrated,
and four white tents pitched to house the people; but the clash between
civil and religious authority broke out again. The sailors would not
obey the priests. Fleury feared mutiny. Saussaye, the commander, lost
his head, and disorder was ripening to disaster when there appeared
over the sea the peak of a sail,--a sail topped by a little red ensign,
the {43} flag of the English, who claimed all this coast. And the sail
was succeeded by decks with sixty mariners, and hulls through whose
ports bristled fourteen cannon. The newcomer was Samuel Argall of
Virginia, whom the Indians had told of the French, now bearing down
full sail, cannon leveled, to expel these aliens from the domain of
England's King. Drums were beating, trumpets blowing, fifes
shrieking--there was no mistaking the purpose of the English ship.
Saussaye, the French commander, dashed for hiding in the woods.
Captain Fleury screamed for some one, every one, any one, "to
fire--fire"; but the French sailors had imitated their commander and
fled to the woods, while the poor Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet, fell
weltering in blood from an English cannonade that swept the French
decks bare and set all sails in flame. In the twinkling of an eye,
Argall had captured men and craft. Fifteen of the French prisoners he
set adrift in open boat, on the chance of their joining the French
fishing fleet off Cape Breton. They were ultimately carried to St.
Malo. {44} The rest of the prisoners, including Father Biard, he took
back to Virginia, where the commission held from the French King
assured them honorable treatment in time of peace; but Argall was
promptly sent north again with his prisoners, and three frigates to lay
waste every vestige of French settlement from Maine to St. John. Mount
Desert, the ruins of Ste. Croix, the fortress beloved by Poutrincourt
at Port Royal, the ripening wheat of Annapolis Basin--all fed the
flames of Argall's zeal; and young Biencourt's wood runners, watching
from the forests the destruction of all their hopes, the ruin of all
their plans, ardently begged their young commander to parley with
Argall that they might obtain the Jesuit Biard and hang him to the
highest tree. To _his_ coming they attributed all the woes. It was as
easy for them to believe that the Jesuit had piloted the English
destroyer to Port Royal, as it had been ten years before for the
Catholics to accuse the Huguenots of murdering the lost priest Aubry;
and there was probably as much truth in one charge as the other.

So fell Port Royal; but out round the ruins of Port Royal, where the
little river runs down to the sea past Goat Island, young Biencourt and
his followers took to the woods--the first of that race of bush lopers,
half savages, half noblemen, to render France such glorious service in
the New World.

When De Monts lost the monopoly of furs in Acadia, Champlain, the court
geographer, had gone home from Port Royal to France. De Monts now
succeeds in obtaining a fresh monopoly for one year on the St.
Lawrence, and sends out two ships in 1608 under his old friends,
Pontgrave, who is to attend to the bartering, Champlain, who is to
explore. With them come some of the colonists from Port Royal, among
others Louis Hebert, the chemist, first colonist to become farmer at
Quebec, and Abraham Martin, whose name was given to the famous plains
where Wolfe and Montcalm later fought.

Pontgrave arrived at the rendezvous of Tadoussac early in June. Here
he found Basque fishermen engaged in the peltry {45} traffic with
Indians from Labrador. When Pontgrave read his commission interdicting
all ships but those of De Monts from trade, the Basques poured a
fusillade of musketry across his decks, killed one man, wounded two,
then boarded his vessel and trundled his cannon ashore. So much for
royal commissions and monopoly!

[Illustration: TADOUSSAC (From Champlain's map)]

At this stage came Champlain on the second boat. Two vessels were
overstrong for the Basques. They quickly came to terms and decamped.
Champlain steered his tiny craft on up the silver flood of the St.
Lawrence to that Cape Diamond where Cartier's men had gathered
worthless stones. Between the high cliff and the river front, not far
from the market place of Quebec City to-day, workmen began clearing the
woods for the site of the French habitation. The little fort was
palisaded, of course, with a moat outside and cannon commanding the
river. The walls were loopholed for musketry; and inside ran a gallery
to serve as lookout and defense. Houses, barracks, garden, and
fresh-water supply completed the fort. One day, as Champlain {46}
worked in his garden, a colonist begged to speak with him. Champlain
stepped into the woods. The man then blurted out how a conspiracy was
on foot, instigated by the Basques, to assassinate Champlain, seize the
fort, and stab any man who dared to resist. One of Pontgrave's small
boats lay at anchor. Champlain sent for the pilot, told him the story
of the plot, gave him two bottles of wine, and bade him invite the
ringleaders on board that night to drink. The ruse worked. The
ringleaders were handcuffed, the other colonists awakened in the fort
and told that the plot had been crushed. The body of Duval, the chief
plotter, in pay of the Basques, swung as warning from a gibbet; and his
head was exposed on a pike to the birds of the air. Though Pontgrave
left a garrison of twenty-eight when he sailed for France, less than a
dozen men had survived the plague of scurvy when the ships came back to
Champlain in 1609.

Champlain's part had been to explore. Now that his fort was built, he
planned to do this by allying himself with the Indians, who came down
to trade at Quebec. These were the Hurons and Montaignais, the former
from the Ottawa, the latter from Labrador. Both waged ceaseless war on
the Iroquois south of the St. Lawrence. After bartering their furs for
weapons from the traders, the allied tribes would set out on the
warpath against the Iroquois. In June, Champlain and eleven white men
accompanied the roving warriors.

The way led from the St. Lawrence south, up the River Richelieu.
Champlain's boat was a ponderous craft; and when the shiver of the
sparkling rapids came with a roar through the dank forest, the heavy
boat had to be sent back to Quebec. Adopting the light birch canoe of
the Indian, Champlain went on, accompanied by only two white men. Of
Indians, there were twenty-four canoes with sixty warriors. For the
first part of the voyage night was made hideous by the grotesque war
dances of the braves lashing themselves to fury by scalp raids in
pantomime, or by the medicine men holding solemn converse with the
demons of earth; the tent poles of the medicine lodge rocked as if by
wind, while eldritch howls predicted victory. {47} Then the long line
of silent canoes had spread out on that upland lake named after
Champlain, the heavily forested Adirondacks breaking the sky line on
one side, the Green Mountains rolling away on the other. Caution now
marked all advance. The Indians paddled only at night, withdrawing to
the wooded shore through the morning mist to hide in the undergrowth
for the day. This was the land of the Iroquois.

[Illustration: DEFEAT OF THE IROQUOIS (From Champlain's drawing)]

On July 29, as the invaders were stealing silently along the west shore
near Crown Point at night about ten o'clock, there were seen by the
starlight, coming over the water with that peculiar galloping motion of
paddlers dipping together, the Iroquois war canoes. Each side
recognized the other, and the woods rang with shouts; but gathering
clouds and the mist rising from the river screened the foes from mutual
attack, though the night echoed to shout and countershout and challenge
and abuse. Through the half light Champlain could see that the
Iroquois were working like beavers erecting a barricade of logs. The
assailants kept to their canoes under cover of bull-hide shields till
daylight, when Champlain buckled on his armor--breastplate, helmet,
thigh pieces--and landing, advanced. There were not less than two
hundred Iroquois. Outnumbering the Hurons three times over, they
uttered a jubilant whoop and {48} came on at a rush. Champlain and his
two white men took aim. The foremost chiefs dropped in their tracks.
Terrified by "the sticks that thundered and spat fire," the Iroquois
fell back in amaze, halted, then fled. The victory was complete; but
it left as a legacy to New France the undying enmity of the Iroquois.

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