IF CHAMPLAIN HAD TARRIED IN PLYMOUTH BAY
On the 18th of July, in the year 1605, Samuel de Champlain, in command
of a ship of the King of France, and engaged in the search for an
eligible site for a great settlement, anchored in the harbor which was
afterward to be known as the harbor of Plymouth, in New England. Two
days before, he had been in Boston Bay. He mapped both these havens, and
expressed his approval of the physical resources, and also the native
Indian peoples, of the region.
At that time the coast of New England was really unappropriated, though
soon after it was claimed by both France and England. It was merely a
question which power should first seriously undertake the settlement of
the country. If France planted her colony here, the land was destined to
be French. If England hers, it would be English.
Champlain carefully studied the advantages of Boston and Plymouth. That
he thought favorably of the latter place is proved by the very decent
map, still extant, which he made of Plymouth and Duxbury waters. "Port
St. Louis," he called the place, after the patron saint of France, and
after his royal master. It looked very much as if he hoped that the spot
he so honored would be made the seat of the French empire in the western
world.
But Champlain sailed away, bearing with him the blessing of the thickly
settled and sedentary native people. He passed around Cape Cod, and
went westward as far as Nauset harbor, near New Bedford. And then, in
due time, he sailed for France. When, in 1608, he finally laid the
foundations of the city which was to be the capital of France in the new
world, he did not lay them at Plymouth or Boston, but at Quebec, on the
St. Lawrence.
Why was his choice thus made? Largely, no doubt, because Champlain,
whose accurate information and seemingly always wise observation were
greatly trusted by the King of France, was infatuated with the noble
aspect and vast proportions of the gulf and river of St. Lawrence. He
was first of all a sailor, and he had seen nothing to compare with the
magnificence of this great _embouchure_. Here were scope and refuge for
the greatest of navies! Here, it seemed, was a place designed by the
Almighty to be the seat of an empire!
Champlain had an excellent eye for harbors, but not so good an eye of
prophecy for the grand constructive events that were to be. He left the
Massachusetts coast unappropriated. First its native inhabitants, so
numerous, so gentle, so industrious, were decimated by a plague that
came to them from the white men. Only a remnant survived. And when, in
1620, their sachem, Samoset, shouted "Welcome, Englishmen!" to the men
of the Mayflower, the Indian king hailed, unconsciously, the advent of
an empire which was to cast the domain of New France into a cold and
waning shadow. For Quebec was too far north, and its hinterland too poor
and restricted, ever to nurse an imperial race.
What if Champlain had been more sagacious, and had made his stand on the
coast of Massachusetts? In all probability the settlement would have
been definitive. The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Boston,
finding no place for their settlement in the north, would, in 1620,
have gone to Virginia or Georgia. The steely Yankee wedge which, on one
side, was to force the Dutch out of New Amsterdam, and on the other the
French out of Port Royal and Acadia, would never have been driven. New
England would have been French forever, and New York Dutch.
The principle of the hinterland was asserted so successfully in our
early history that Massachusetts and Connecticut were able to claim
territory as far west as the Mississippi River. It was by means of this
hinterland claim that the young American republic succeeded in rounding
out its northwestern possessions, after the War of the Revolution, and
obtaining Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. All these
would have been French if Champlain had made New England French; and the
English colonies, if they had ever become strong enough to throw off the
British yoke, would have consisted of a restricted section in the
Southeast.
Indeed, without Sam Adams, Otis, Warren, and Israel Putnam, without the
revolt against the Stamp Act, and without Lexington, Concord and Bunker
Hill, it is impossible to conceive of the American republic at all.
Supposing it to have been constituted notwithstanding, it would have had
to do without the influence of the New England town meeting, the New
England common free school, the New England college, and the
congregational system of church organization. It would have been
deprived of the work of Franklin, Hancock, the Adamses, Webster, Sumner,
Garrison, Phillips, Grant and the Shermans, in its affairs, and of
Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne and Parkman in
its intellectual life.
What would the New England country and the people have been like, if
Champlain had never turned back from Plymouth Bay? We know from
Benjamin Franklin's account what the progeny of the English settlers had
become even as long ago as 1772. "I thought often," he wrote in that
year, "of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder,
has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of
good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the
manufacture perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this
situation!" What the Canadian habitant is to-day, we know. Very often he
is unable to read or write, and his material and moral condition very
low. Even as late as 1837 the Canadian provinces were still arbitrarily
ruled by royal governors, with appointed councils or upper houses which
had a veto on all legislation. There was no self-rule, and the mass of
the French people were illiterate and miserably poor.
Sieur Samuel de Champlain did a good day's work for English-speaking
America, and the great free republic that was to be, when he pointed his
prow northward and sailed away, out of sight of Cape Cod, in the summer
of 1605.