1542-1604.
LA ROCHE.--CHAMPLAIN.--DE MONTS.
Years rolled on. France, long tossed among the surges of civil
commotion, plunged at last into a gulf of fratricidal war. Blazing
hamlets, sacked cities, fields steaming with slaughter, profaned altars,
and ravished maidens, marked the track of the tornado. There was little
room for schemes of foreign enterprise. Yet, far aloof from siege and
battle, the fishermen of the western ports still plied their craft
on the Banks of Newfoundland. Humanity, morality, decency, might be
forgotten, but codfish must still be had for the use of the faithful in
Lent and on fast days. Still the wandering Esquimaux saw the Norman and
Breton sails hovering around some lonely headland, or anchored in fleets
in the harbor of St. John; and still, through salt spray and driving
mist, the fishermen dragged up the riches of the sea.
In January and February, 1545, about two vessels a day sailed from
French ports for Newfoundland. In 1565, Pedro Menendez complains that
the French "rule despotically" in those parts. In 1578, there were a
hundred and fifty French fishing-vessels there, besides two hundred of
other nations, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Added to these were
twenty or thirty Biscayan whalers. In 1607, there was an old French
fisherman at Canseau who had voyaged to these seas for forty-two
successive years.
But if the wilderness of ocean had its treasures, so too had the
wilderness of woods. It needed but a few knives, beads, and trinkets,
and the Indians would throng to the shore burdened with the spoils of
their winter hunting. Fishermen threw up their old vocation for the more
lucrative trade in bear-skins and beaver-skins. They built rude huts
along the shores of Anticosti, where, at that day, the bison, it is
said, could be seen wallowing in the sands. They outraged the Indians;
they quarrelled with each other; and this infancy of the Canadian
fur-trade showed rich promise of the disorders which marked its riper
growth. Others, meanwhile, were ranging the gulf in search of walrus
tusks; and, the year after the battle of Ivry, St. Malo sent out a fleet
of small craft in quest of this new prize.
In all the western seaports, merchants and adventurers turned their eyes
towards America; not, like the Spaniards, seeking treasures of
silver and gold, but the more modest gains of codfish and train-oil,
beaver-skins and marine ivory. St. Malo was conspicuous above them all.
The rugged Bretons loved the perils of the sea, and saw with a jealous
eye every attempt to shackle their activity on this its favorite field.
When in 1588 Jacques Noel and Estienue Chaton--the former a nephew of
Cartier and the latter pretending to be so--gained a monopoly of the
American fur-trade for twelve year's, such a clamor arose within the
walls of St. Malo that the obnoxious grant was promptly revoked.
But soon a power was in the field against which all St. Malo might
clamor in vain. A Catholic nobleman of Brittany, the Marquis de la
Roche, bargained with the King to colonize New France. On his part, he
was to receive a monopoly of the trade, and a profusion of worthless
titles and empty privileges. He was declared Lieutenant-General of
Canada, Hochelaga, Newfoundland, Labrador, and the countries adjacent,
with sovereign power within his vast and ill-defined domain. He could
levy troops, declare war and peace, make laws, punish or pardon at
will, build cities, forts, and castles, and grant out lands in fiefs,
seigniories, counties, viscounties, and baronies. Thus was effete and
cumbrous feudalism to make a lodgment in the New World. It was a scheme
of high-sounding promise, but in performance less than contemptible. La
Roche ransacked the prisons, and, gathering thence a gang of thieves
and desperadoes, embarked them in a small vessel, and set sail to plant
Christianity and civilization in the West. Suns rose and set, and the
wretched bark, deep freighted with brutality and vice, held on her
course. She was so small that the convicts, leaning over her side,
could wash their hands in the water. At length, on the gray horizon they
descried a long, gray line of ridgy sand. It was Sable Island, off the
coast of Nova Scotia. A wreck lay stranded on the beach, and the surf
broke ominously over the long, submerged arms of sand, stretched far out
into the sea on the right hand and on the left.
Here La Roche landed the convicts, forty in number, while, with his
more trusty followers, he sailed to explore the neighboring coasts,
and choose a site for the capital of his new dominion, to which, in due
time, he proposed to remove the prisoners. But suddenly a tempest from
the west assailed him. The frail vessel was forced to run before the
gale, which, howling on her track, drove her off the coast, and chased
her back towards France.
Meanwhile the convicts watched in suspense for the returning sail. Days
passed, weeks passed, and still they strained their eyes in vain across
the waste of ocean. La Roche had left them to their fate. Rueful and
desperate, they wandered among the sand-hills, through the stunted
whortleberry bushes, the rank sand-grass, and the tangled cranberry
vines which filled the hollows. Not a tree was to be seen; but they
built huts of the fragments of the wreck. For food they caught fish
in the surrounding sea, and hunted the cattle which ran wild about the
island, sprung, perhaps, from those left here eighty years before by
the Baron de Lery. They killed seals, trapped black foxes, and clothed
themselves in their skins. Their native instincts clung to them in their
exile. As if not content with inevitable miseries, they quarrelled
and murdered one another. Season after season dragged on. Five years
elapsed, and, of the forty, only twelve were left alive. Sand, sea,
and sky,--there was little else around them; though, to break the
dead monotony, the walrus would sometimes rear his half-human face and
glistening sides on the reefs and sand-bars. At length, on the far verge
of the watery desert, they descried a sail. She stood on towards the
island; a boat's crew landed on the beach, and the exiles were once more
among their countrymen.
When La Roche returned to France, the fate of his followers sat heavy on
his mind. But the day of his prosperity was gone. A host of enemies rose
against him and his privileges, and it is said that the Due de Mercaeur
seized him and threw him into prison. In time, however, he gained a
hearing of the King; and the Norman pilot, Chefdhotel, was despatched to
bring the outcasts home.
He reached Sable Island in September, 1603, and brought back to France
eleven survivors, whose names are still preserved. When they arrived,
Henry the Fourth summoned them into his presence. They stood before him,
says an old writer, like river-gods of yore; for from head to foot they
were clothed in shaggy skins, and beards of prodigious length hung from
their swarthy faces. They had accumulated, on their island, a quantity
of valuable furs. Of these Chefdhotel had robbed them; but the pilot
was forced to disgorge his prey, and, with the aid of a bounty from the
King, they were enabled to embark on their own account in the Canadian
trade. To their leader, fortune was less kind. Broken by disaster and
imprisonment, La Roche died miserably.
In the mean time, on the ruin of his enterprise, a new one had been
begun. Pontgrave, a merchant of St. Malo, leagued himself with Chauvin,
a captain of the navy, who had influence at court. A patent was granted
to them, with the condition that they should colonize the country. But
their only thought was to enrich themselves.
At Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, under the shadow of savage
and inaccessible rocks, feathered with pines, firs, and birch-trees,
they built a cluster of wooden huts and store-houses. Here they left
sixteen men to gather the expected harvest of furs. Before the winter
was over, several of them were dead, and the rest scattered through the
woods, living on the charity of the Indians.
But a new era had dawned on France. Exhausted with thirty years of
conflict, she had sunk at last to a repose, uneasy and disturbed, yet
the harbinger of recovery. The rugged soldier whom, for the weal of
France and of mankind, Providence had cast to the troubled surface of
affairs, was throned in the Louvre, composing the strife of factions and
the quarrels of his mistresses. The bear-hunting prince of the Pyrenees
wore the crown of France; and to this day, as one gazes on the time-worn
front of the Tuileries, above all other memories rises the small, strong
finger, the brow wrinkled with cares of love and war, the bristling
moustache, the grizzled beard, the bold, vigorous, and withal somewhat
odd features of the mountaineer of Warn. To few has human liberty owed
so deep a gratitude or so deep a grudge. He cared little for creeds or
dogmas. Impressible, quick in sympathy, his grim lip lighted often with
a smile, and his war-worn cheek was no stranger to a tear. He forgave
his enemies and forgot his friends. Many loved him; none but fools
trusted him. Mingled of mortal good and ill, frailty and force, of all
the kings who for two centuries and more sat on the throne of France
Henry the Fourth alone was a man.
Art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were
stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured
in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless
energies in fields of peaceful enterprise.
Two small, quaint vessels, not larger than the fishing-craft of
Gloucester and Marblehead,--one was of twelve, the other of fifteen
tons,--held their way across the Atlantic, passed the tempestuous
headlands of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence, and, with adventurous
knight-errantry, glided deep into the heart of the Canadian wilderness.
On board of one of them was the Breton merchant, Pontgrave, and with him
a man of spirit widely different, a Catholic of good family,--Samuel de
Champlain, born in 1567 at the small seaport of Bronage on the Bay of
Biscay. His father was a captain in the royal navy, where he himself
seems also to have served, though during the war he had fought for the
King in Brittany, under the banners of D'Aumont, St. Luc, and Brissac.
His purse was small, his merit great; and Henry the Fourth out of his
own slender revenues had given him a pension to maintain him near his
person. But rest was penance to him. The war in Brittany was over. The
rebellious Duc de Mercaeur was reduced to obedience, and the royal army
disbanded. Champlain, his occupation gone, conceived a design consonant
with his adventurous nature. He would visit the West Indies, and bring
back to the King a report of those regions of mystery whence Spanish
jealousy excluded foreigners, and where every intruding Frenchman was
threatened with death. Here much knowledge was to be won and much peril
to be met. The joint attraction was resistless.
The Spaniards, allies of the vanquished Leaguers, were about to evacuate
Blavet, their last stronghold in Brittany. Thither Champlain repaired;
and here he found an uncle, who had charge of the French fleet destined
to take on board the Spanish garrison. Champlain embarked with them,
and, reaching Cadiz, succeeded, with the aid of his relative, who
had just accepted the post of Pilot-General of the Spanish marine, in
gaining command of one of the ships about to sail for the West Indies
under Don Francisco Colombo.
At Dieppe there is a curious old manuscript, in clear, decisive, and
somewhat formal handwriting of the sixteenth century, garnished with
sixty-one colored pictures, in a style of art which a child of ten might
emulate. Here one may see ports, harbors, islands, and rivers, adorned
with portraitures of birds, beasts, and fishes thereto pertaining. Here
are Indian feasts and dances; Indians flogged by priests for not going
to mass; Indians burned alive for heresy, six in one fire; Indians
working the silver mines. Here, too, are descriptions of natural
objects, each with its illustrative sketch, some drawn from life and
some from memory,--as, for example, a chameleon with two legs; others
from hearsay, among which is the portrait of the griffin said to haunt
certain districts of Mexico,--a monster with the wings of a bat, the
head of an eagle, and the tail of an alligator.
This is Champlain's journal, written and illustrated by his own hand, in
that defiance of perspective and absolute independence of the canons of
art which mark the earliest efforts of the pencil.
A true hero, after the chivalrous mediaeval type, his character was
dashed largely with the spirit of romance. Though earnest, sagacious,
and penetrating, he leaned to the marvellous; and the faith which was
the life of his hard career was somewhat prone to overstep the bounds
of reason and invade the domain of fancy. Hence the erratic character of
some of his exploits, and hence his simple faith in the Mexican griffin.
His West-Indian adventure occupied him more than two years. He visited
the principal ports of the islands, made plans and sketches of them all,
after his fashion, and then, landing at Vera Cruz, journeyed inland to
the city of Mexico. On his return he made his way to Panama. Here, more
than two centuries and a half ago, his bold and active mind conceived
the plan of a ship-canal across the isthmus, "by which," lie says, "the
voyage to the South Sea would be shortened by more than fifteen hundred
leagues."
On reaching France he repaired to court, and it may have been at
this time that a royal patent raised him to the rank of the untitled
nobility. He soon wearied of the antechambers of the Louvre. It was
here, however, that his destiny awaited him, and the work of his life
was unfolded. Aymar de Chastes, Commander of the Order of St. John and
Governor of Dieppe, a gray-haired veteran of the civil wars, wished to
mark his closing days with some notable achievement for France and the
Church. To no man was the King more deeply indebted. In his darkest
hour, when the hosts of the League were gathering round him, when
friends were falling off, and the Parisians, exulting in his certain
ruin, were hiring the windows of the Rue St. Antoine to see him led to
the Bastille, De Chastes, without condition or reserve, gave up to him
the town and castle of Dieppe. Thus he was enabled to fight beneath its
walls the battle of Arques, the first in the series of successes which
secured his triumph; and he had been heard to say that to this friend in
his adversity he owed his own salvation and that of France.
De Chastes was one of those men who, amid the strife of factions and
rage of rival fanaticisms, make reason and patriotism their watchwords,
and stand on the firm ground of a strong and resolute moderation. He had
resisted the madness of Leaguer and Huguenot alike; yet, though a foe of
the League, the old soldier was a devout Catholic, and it seemed in
his eyes a noble consummation of his life to plant the cross and the
fleur-de-lis in the wilderness of New France. Chauvin had just died,
after wasting the lives of a score or more of men in a second and a
third attempt to establish the fur-trade at Tadoussac. De Chastes came
to court to beg a patent of henry the Fourth; "and," says his friend
Champlain, "though his head was crowned with gray hairs as with years,
he resolved to proceed to New France in person, and dedicate the rest of
his days to the service of God and his King."
The patent, costing nothing, was readily granted; and De Chastes, to
meet the expenses of the enterprise, and forestall the jealousies which
his monopoly would awaken among the keen merchants of the western ports,
formed a company with the more prominent of them. Pontgrave, who
had some knowledge of the country, was chosen to make a preliminary
exploration.
This was the time when Champlain, fresh from the West Indies, appeared
at court. De Chastes knew him well. Young, ardent, yet ripe in
experience, a skilful seaman and a practised soldier, he above all
others was a man for the enterprise. He had many conferences with the
veteran, under whom he had served in the royal fleet off the coast of
Brittany. De Chastes urged him to accept a post in his new company; and
Champlain, nothing loath, consented, provided always that permission
should be had from the King, "to whom," he says, "I was bound no less
by birth than by the pension with which his Majesty honored me." To the
King, therefore, De Chastes repaired. The needful consent was gained,
and, armed with a letter to Pontgrave, Champlain set out for Honfleur.
Here he found his destined companion, and embarking with him, as we have
seen, they spread their sails for the west.
Like specks on the broad bosom of the waters, the two pygmy vessels
held their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned
Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, and the gleaming cataract of
Montmorenci; the tenantless rock of Quebec, the wide Lake of St. Peter
and its crowded archipelago, till now the mountain reared before
them its rounded shoulder above the forest-plain of Montreal. All was
solitude. Hochelaga had vanished; and of the savage population that
Cartier had found here, sixty-eight years before, no trace remained.
In its place were a few wandering Algonquins, of different tongue and
lineage. In a skiff, with a few Indians, Champlain essayed to pass the
rapids of St. Louis. Oars, paddles, and poles alike proved vain against
the foaming surges, and he was forced to return. On the deck of his
vessel, the Indians drew rude plans of the river above, with its chain
of rapids, its lakes and cataracts; and the baffled explorer turned
his prow homeward, the objects of his mission accomplished, but his own
adventurous curiosity unsated. When the voyagers reached Havre de Grace,
a grievous blow awaited them. The Commander de Chastes was dead.
His mantle fell upon Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, gentleman in
ordinary of the King's chamber, and Governor of Polls. Undaunted by
the fate of La Roche, this nobleman petitioned the king for leave to
colonize La Cadie, or Acadie, a region defined as extending from
the fortieth to the forty-Sixth degree of north latitude, or from
Philadelphia to beyond Montreal. The King's minister, Sully, as he
himself tells us, opposed the plan, on the ground that the colonization
of this northern wilderness would never repay the outlay; but De
Monts gained his point. He was made Lieutenant-General in Acadia, with
viceregal powers; and withered Feudalism, with her antique forms and
tinselled follies, was again to seek a new home among the rocks and
pine-trees of Nova Scotia. The foundation of the enterprise was a
monopoly of the fur-trade, and in its favor all past grants were
unceremoniously annulled. St. Malo, Rouen, Dieppe, and Rochelle greeted
the announcement with unavailing outcries. Patents granted and revoked,
monopolies decreed and extinguished, had involved the unhappy traders in
ceaseless embarrassment. De Monts, however, preserved De Chastes's old
company, and enlarged it, thus making the chief malcontents sharers in
his exclusive rights, and converting them from enemies into partners.
A clause in his commission empowered him to impress idlers and vagabonds
as material for his colony,--an ominous provision of which he largely
availed himself. His company was strangely incongruous. The best and
the meanest of France were crowded together in his two ships. Here
were thieves and ruffians dragged on board by force; and here were many
volunteers of condition and character, with Baron de Poutrincourt
and the indefatigable Champlain. Here, too, were Catholic priests and
Huguenot ministers; for, though De Monts was a Calvinist, the Church,
as usual, displayed her banner in the van of the enterprise, and he was
forced to promise that he would cause the Indians to be instructed in
the dogmas of Rome.