FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES
We shall not be able to enter the valley of the Mississippi in this
chapter. There is a long stretch of the nearer valley of the St. Lawrence
that must first be traversed. Just before I left America in 1910 two men
flew in a balloon from St. Louis, the very centre of the Mississippi
Valley, to the Labrador gate of the St. Lawrence, the vestibule valley, in
a few hours, but it took the French pioneers a whole century and more to
make their way out to where those aviators began their flight. We have but
a few pages for a journey over a thousand miles of stream and portage and
a hundred years of time. I must therefore leave most of the details of
suffering from the rigors of the north, starvation, and the Iroquois along
the way to your memories, or to your fresh reading of Parkman, Winsor,
Fiske, and Thwaites in English, or to Le Clercq, Lescarbot, Champlain,
Charlevoix, Sagard, and others in French.
The story of the exploration and settlement of those valleys beyond the
cod-banks of Newfoundland begins not in the ports of Spain or Portugal,
nor in England, but in a little town on the coast of France, standing on a
rocky promontory thrust out into the sea, only a few hours' ride from
Paris, in the ancient town of St. Malo, the "nursery of hardy mariners,"
the cradle of the spirit of the West. [Footnote: After reaching Paris on
my first journey, the first place to which I made a pilgrimage, even
before the tombs of kings and emperors and the galleries of art, was this
gray-bastioned town of St. Malo.]
For a son of France was the first of Europeans, so far as we certainly
know, to penetrate beyond the tidewater of those confronting coasts, the
first to step over the threshold of the unguessed continent, north, at any
rate, of Mexico. Columbus claimed at most but an Asiatic peninsula, though
he knew that he had found only islands. The Cabots, in the service of
England, sailing along its mysterious shores, had touched but the fringe
of the wondrous garment. Ponce de Leon, a Spaniard, had floundered a few
leagues from the sea in Florida searching for the fountain of youth.
Narvaez had found the wretched village of Appalache but had been refused
admission by the turbid Mississippi and was carried out to an ocean grave
by its fierce current; Verrazano, an Italian in the employ of France,
living at Rouen, had entered the harbor of New York, had enjoyed the
primitive hospitality of what is now a most fashionable seaside resort
(Newport), had seen the peaks of the White Mountains from his deck, and,
as he supposed, had looked upon the Indian Ocean, or the Sea of Verrazano,
which has shrunk to the Chesapeake Bay on our modern maps and now reaches
not a fiftieth part of the way to the other shore.
It was a true son of France who first had the persistence of courage and
the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates
close behind him--Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo,
commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of
King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf,"
which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a
century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to the
Indies.
It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay, as
he imagined, one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each.
[Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean, nearly four hundred years
later, to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of a
fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant
children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what is
thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed
under Carrier's own hand. It is no such instrument as the "Compact" which
the men of the _Mayflower_ signed as they approached the continent nearly
a century later, but it is none the less fateful.
The autumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees of Brittany when the
two ships that started out in April appeared again in the harbor of St.
Malo, carrying two dusky passengers from the New World as proofs of
Carrier's ventures. He had made reconnoissance of the gulf behind
Newfoundland and returned for fresh means of farther quest toward Cathay.
The leaves were but come again on the trees of Brittany when, with a
larger crew in three small vessels (one of only forty tons), he again went
out with the ebb-tide from St. Malo; his men, some of whom had been
gathered from the jails, having all made their confession and attended
mass, and received the benediction of the bishop. In August he entered the
great river St. Lawrence, whose volume of water was so great as to
brighten Carrier's hopes of having found the northern way to India. On he
sailed, with his two dusky captives for pilots, seeing with regret the
banks of the river gradually draw together and hearing unwelcome word of
the freshening of its waters--on past the "gorge of the gloomy Saguenay
with its towering cliffs and sullen depths, depths which no sounding-line
can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling eagle seems a
speck"; on past frowning promontory and wild vineyards, to the foot of the
scarped cliff of Quebec, now "rich with heroic memories, then but the site
of a nameless barbarism"; thence, after parley with the Indian chief
Donnacona and his people, on through walls of autumn foliage and frost-
touched meadows to where the Lachine Rapids mocked with unceasing laughter
those who dreamed of an easy way to China. There, entertained at the
Indian capital, he was led to the top of a hill, such as Montmartre, from
whose height he saw his Cathay fade into a stretch of leafy desert bounded
only by the horizon and threaded by two narrow but hopeful ribbons of
water. There, hundreds of miles from the sea, he stood, probably the only
European, save for his companions, inside the continent, between Mexico
and the Pole; for De Soto had not yet started for his burial in the
Mississippi; the fathers of the Pilgrim Fathers were still in their
cradles; Narvaez's men had come a little way in shore and vanished; Cabeça
de Vaca was making his almost incredible journey from the Texas coast to
the Pacific; Captain John Smith was not yet born; and Henry Hudson's name
was to remain obscure for three quarters of a century. Francis I had
sneeringly inquired of Charles V if he and the King of Portugal had
parcelled out the world between them, and asked to see the last will and
testament of the patriarch Adam. If King Francis had been permitted to see
it, he would have found a codicil for France written that day against the
bull of Pope Alexander VI and against the hazy English claim of the
Cabots. For the river, "the greatest without comparison," as Cartier
reported later to his king, "that is known to have ever been seen,"
carried drainage title to a realm larger many times than all the lands of
the Seine and the Rhone and the Loire, and richer many times than the land
of spices to which the falls of Lachine, "the greatest and swiftest fall
of water that any where hath beene scene," seemed now to guard the way.
"Hochelaga" the Indians called their city--the capital of the river into
which the sea had narrowed, a thousand miles inland from the coasts of
Labrador which but a few years before were the dim verge of the world and
were believed even then to be infested with griffins and fiends--a city
which vanished within the next three quarters of a century. For when
Champlain came in 1611 to this site to build his outpost, not a trace was
left of the palisades which Cartier describes and one of his men pictures,
not an Indian was left of the population that gave such cordial welcome to
Cartier. And for all Champlain's planning it was still a meadow and a
forest--the spring flowers "blooming in the young grass" and birds of
varied plumage flitting "among the boughs"--when the mystic and soldier
Maisonneuve and his associates of Montreal, forty men and four women, in
an enterprise conceived in the ancient Church of St. Germain-des-Prés and
consecrated to the Holy Family by a solemn ceremonial at Notre-Dame, knelt
upon this same ground in 1642 before the hastily reared and decorated
altar while Father Vimont, standing in rich vestments, addressed them.
"You are," he said, "a grain of mustard-seed that shall rise and grow till
its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work
of God. His smile is on you and your children shall fill the land."
[Footnote: François Dollier de Casson, "Histoire du Montreal," quoted in
Parkman's "Jesuits in North America," p. 209, a free rendering of the
original. "Voyez-vous, messieurs, dit-il, ce que vous voyez n'est qu'un
grain de moutarde, mais il est jeté par des mains si pieuses et animées de
l'esprit de la foi et de la religion que sans doute il faut que le ciele
est de grands desseins puisqu'il se sert de tels ouvriers, et je ne fais
aucun doute que ce petit grain ne produise un grand arbre, ne fasse un
jour des merveilles, ne soit multiplié et ne s'étende de toutes parts."]
Parkman (from the same French authority) finishes the picture of the
memorable day: "The afternoon waned; the sun sank behind the western
forest, and twilight came on. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened
meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into shining festoons and
hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they
pitched their tents, lighted their bivouac fires, stationed their guards
and lay down to rest. Such was the birth-night of Montreal." [Footnote:
François Dollier de Casson, "Histoire du Montreal," quoted in Parkman's
"Jesuits in North America," p. 209, a free rendering of the original. "On
avait point de lampes ardentes devant le St. Sacrement, mais on avait
certaines mouches brillantes qui y luisaient fort agréablement jour et
nuit étant suspendues par des filets d'une façon admirable et belle, et
toute propre à honorer selon la rusticité de ce pays barbare, le plus
adorable de nos mystères."]
On the both of September in 1910 two hundred thousand people knelt in that
same place before an out-of-door altar, and the incandescent lights were
the fireflies of a less romantic and a more practical age. Maisonneuve and
Mademoiselle Mance would have been enraptured by such a scene, but it
would have given even greater satisfaction to the pilot of St. Malo if he
could have seen that commercial capital of the north lying beneath the
mountain which still bears the name he gave it, and stretching far beyond
the bounds of the palisaded Hochelaga. It should please France to know
that nearly two hundred thousand French keep the place of the footprint of
the first pioneer, Jacques Cartier. When a few weeks before my coming to
France I was making my way by a trail down the side of Mount Royal through
the trees--some of which may have been there in Cartier's day--two lads,
one of as beautiful face as I have ever seen, though tear-stained, emerged
from the bushes and begged me, in a language which Jacques Cartier would
have understood better than I, to show them the way back to "rue St.
Maurice," which I did, finding that street to be only a few paces from the
place where Champlain had made a clearing for his "Place Royale" in the
midst of the forest three hundred years ago. That beautiful boy, Jacques
Jardin, brown-eyed, bare-kneed, in French soldier's cap, is to me the
living incarnation of the adventure which has made even that chill
wilderness blossom as a garden in Brittany.
But to come back to Cartier. It was too late in the season to make further
explorations where the two rivers invited to the west and northwest, so
Cartier joined the companions who had been left near Quebec to build a
fort and make ready for the winter. As if to recall that bitter weather,
the hail beat upon the windows of the museum at St. Malo on the day when I
was examining there the relics of the vessel which Cartier was obliged to
leave in the Canadian river, because so many of his men had died of scurvy
and exposure that he had not sufficient crew to man the three ships home.
And probably not a man would have been left and not even the _Grande
Hermine_ would have come back if a specific for scurvy had not been found
before the end of the winter--a decoction learned of the Indians and made
from the bark or leaves of a tree so efficacious that if all the "doctors
of Lorraine and Montpellier had been there, with all the drugs of
Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as the said tree
did in six days; for it profited us so much that all those who would use
it recovered health and soundness, thanks to God."
Cartier appears again in July, 1536, before the ramparts of St. Malo with
two of his vessels. The savages on the St. Charles were given the _Petite
Hermine_, [Footnote: James Phinney Baxter, "A Memoir of Jacques Cartier,"
p. 200, writes: "The remains of this ship, the _Petite Hermine_, were
discovered in 1843, in the river St. Charles, at the mouth of the rivulet
known as the Lairet. These precious relics were found buried under five
feet of mud, and were divided into two portions, one of which was placed
in the museum of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, and
destroyed by fire in 1854. The other portion was sent to the museum at St.
Malo, where it now remains. For a particular account _vide Le Canadien_ of
August 25, and the _Quebec Gazette_ of August 30, 1843; 'Transactions of
the Quebec Literary and Historical Society for 1862'; and 'Picturesque
Quebec,' Le Moine, Montreal, 1862, pp. 484-7."] its nails being accepted
in part requital for the temporary loss of their chief. Donnacona, whom
Cartier kidnapped.
A cross was left standing on the shores of the St. Lawrence with the
fleur-de-lis planted near it. Donnacona was presented to King Francis and
baptized, and with all his exiled companions save one was buried, where I
have not yet learned, but probably somewhere out on that headland of
France nearest Stadacone, the seat of his lost kingdom.
Cartier busied himself in St. Malo (or Limoilou) till called upon, in
1541, when peace was restored in France to take the post of captain-
general of a new expedition under Sieur de Roberval, "Lord of Norembega,
Viceroy and Lieutenant-General of Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay,
Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt, Labrador, the Great Bay and Baccalaos,"
[Footnote: Baxter, "Memoir of Jacques Cartier," note, p. 40, writes:
"These titles are given on the authority of Charlevoix, 'Histoire de la
Nouvelle France,' Paris, 1744, tome I, p. 32. Reference, however, to the
letters patent of January 15, 1540, from which he professes to quote and
which are still preserved and can be identified as the same which he says
were to be found in the Etat Ordinaire des Guerres in the Chambre des
Comptes at Paris, does not bear out his statement."] with a commission of
discovery, settlement, and conversion of the Indians, and with power to
ransack the prisons for material with which to carry out these ambitious
and pious designs, thereby, as the king said, employing "clemency in doing
a merciful and meritorious work toward some criminals and malefactors,
that by this they may recognize the Creator by rendering Him thanks, and
amending their lives." Again Cartier (Roberval having failed to arrive in
time) sets out; again he passes the gloomy Saguenay and the cliff of
Quebec; again he leaves his companions to prepare for the winter; again he
ascends the river to explore the rapids, still dreaming of the way to
Asia; again after a miserable winter he sails back to France, eluding
Roberval a year late, and carrying but a few worthless quartz diamonds and
a little sham gold. Then Roberval, the Lord of Norembega, reigns alone in
his vast and many-titled domain, for another season of snows and famine,
freely using the lash and gibbet to keep his penal colonists in
subjection; and then, according to some authorities, supported by the
absence of Carder's name from the local records of St. Malo for a few
months, Cartier was sent out to bring the Lord of Norembega home.
So Cartier's name passes from the pages of history, even if it still
appears again in the records of St. Malo, and he spends the rest of his
days on the rugged little peninsula thrust out from France toward the
west, as it were a hand. A few miles out of St. Malo the Breton tenants of
the Cartier manor, Port Cartier, to-day carry their cauliflower and
carrots to market and seemingly wonder at my curiosity in seeking
Cartier's birthplace rather than Châteaubriand's tomb. It were far fitter
that Cartier instead of Châteaubriand should have been buried out on the
"Plage" beyond the ramparts, exiled for a part of every day by the sea,
for the amphibious life of this master pilot, going in and out of the
harbor with the tide, had added to France a thousand miles of coast and
river, had opened the door of the new world, beyond the banks of the
Baccalaos, to the imaginations of Europe, and unwittingly showed the way
not to Asia, but to a valley with which Asia had nothing to compare.
For a half century after Cartier's home bringing of Roberval--the very
year that De Soto's men quitted in misery the lower valley of the
Mississippi--there is no record of a sail upon the river St. Lawrence.
Hochelaga became a waste, its tenants annihilated or scattered, and
Cartier's fort was all but obliterated. The ambitious symbols of empire
were alternately buried in snows and blistered by heat. France had too
much to think of at home. But still, as Parkman says, "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." For "codfish must still be had for Lent and fast-days."
Another authority pictures the Breton babies of this period playing with
trinkets made of walrus tusks, and the Norman maidens decked in furs
brought by their brothers from the shores of Anticosti and Labrador.
Meanwhile in Brouage on the Bay of Biscay a boy is born whose spirit,
nourished of the tales of the new world, is to make a permanent colony
where Cartier had found and left a wilderness, and is to write his name
foremost on the "bright roll of forest chivalry"--Samuel Champlain.
Once the sea, I am told, touched the massive walls of Brouage. There are
still to be seen, several feet below the surface, rings to which mariners
and fishermen moored their boats--they who used to come to Brouage for
salt with which to cure their fish, they whose stories of the Newfoundland
cod-banks stirred in the boy Champlain the desire for discovery beyond
their fogs. The boys in the school of Hiers-Brouage a mile away--in the
Mairie where I went to consult the parish records--seemed to know hardly
more of that land which the Brouage boy of three centuries before had
lifted out of the fogs by his lifelong heroic adventures than did the boy
Champlain, which makes me feel that till all French children know of, and
all American children remember Brouage, the story of France in America
needs to be retold. The St. Lawrence Valley has not forgotten, but I could
not learn that a citizen of the Mississippi Valley had made recent
pilgrimage to this spot. [Footnote: For an interesting account of Brouage
to-day, see "Acadiensis," 4:226.]
In the year of Champlain's birth the frightful colonial tragedy in Florida
was nearing its end. By the year 1603 he had, in Spanish employ, made a
voyage of two years in the West Indies, the unique illustrated journal
[Footnote: "Brief Discours des Choses plus remarquables que Sammuel
Champlain de Brouage, reconnues aux Indies Occidentalles au voiage qu'il
en a faict en icelles en l'annee V'C IIIJ'XX XIX (1599) et en l'annee VJ'C
J (1601) comme ensuite." Now in English translation by Hakluyt Society,
1859.] of which in his own hand was for two centuries and more in Dieppe,
but has recently been acquired by a library in the United States
[Footnote: The John Carter Brown Library at Providence, R. I.]--a journal
most precious especially in its prophecy of the Panama Canal: [Footnote:
Several earlier Spanish suggestions for a canal had been made. See M. F.
Johnson, "Four Centuries of the Panama Canal."] "One might judge, if the
territory four leagues in extent, lying between Panama and the river were
cut thru, he could pass from the south sea to that on the other side, and
thus shorten the route by more than fifteen hundred leagues. From Panama
to Magellan would constitute an island, and from Panama to Newfoundland
would constitute another, so that the whole of America would be in two
islands."
He had also made one expedition to the St. Lawrence, reaching the deserted
Hochelaga, seeing the Lachine Rapids, and getting vague reports of the
unknown West. He must have been back in Paris in time to see the eleven
survivors of La Roche's unsuccessful expedition of 1590, who, having lived
twelve years and more on Sable Island, were rescued and brought before
King Henry IV, "standing like river gods" in their long beards and clad in
shaggy skins. During the next three years this indefatigable, resourceful
pioneer assisted in founding Acadia and exploring the Atlantic coast
southward. Boys and girls in America are familiar with the story of the
dispersion of the Acadians, a century and more later, as preserved in our
literature by the poet Longfellow. But doubtless not one in a hundred
thousand has ever read the earlier chapters of that Aeneid.
The best and the meanest of France were of the company that set out from
Dieppe to be its colonists: men of highest condition and character, and
vagabonds, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, soldiers and artisans.
There were theological discussions which led to blows before the colonists
were far at sea. Fiske, the historian, says the "ship's atmosphere grew as
musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that of a room at the
Sorbonne." There was the incident of the wandering of Nicolas Aubry, "more
skilled in the devious windings of the [Latin Quarter] than in the
intricacies of the Acadian Forest," where he was lost for sixteen days and
subsisted on berries and wild fruits; there was the ravage of the
relentless maladie de terre, scurvy, for which Cartier's specific could
not be found though the woods were scoured; there were the explorations of
beaches and harbors and islands and rivers, including the future
Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, and the accurate mapping of all that coast
now so familiar; there were the arrivals of the ship _Jonas_ once with
temporal supplies and again, as the _Mayflower of the Jesuits_, with
spiritual teachers; there was the "Order of Good Times," which flourished
with as good cheer and as good food at Port Royal in the solitude of the
continent as the gourmands at the Rue aux Ours had in Paris and that, too,
at a cheaper rate; [Footnote: "Though the epicures of Paris often tell us
we have no Rue aux Ours over there, as a rule we made as good cheer as we
could have in this same Rue aux Ours and at less cost." Lescarbot,
"Champlain Society Publication," 7:342.] there was later the news of the
death of Henry IV heard from a fisherman of Newfoundland; and there was,
above all else except the "indomitable tenacity" of Champlain, the
unquenchable enthusiasm, lively fancy, and good sense of Lescarbot, the
verse-making advocate from Paris.
There is so much of tragic suffering and gloom in all this epic of the
forests that one is tempted to spend more time than one ought, perhaps, on
that bit of European clearing (the only spot, save one, as yet in all the
continent north of Florida and Mexico), in the jolly companionship of that
young poet-lawyer who had doubtless sat under lecturers in Paris and who
would certainly have been quite as capable and entertaining as any
lecturers on the new world brought in these later days from America to
Paris, a man "who won the good-will of all and spared himself naught,"
"who daily invented something for the public good," and who gave the
strongest proof of what advantage "a new settlement might derive from a
mind cultivated by study and induced by patriotism to use its knowledge
and reflections."
It cannot seem unworthy of the serious purpose of this book to let the
continent lie a few minutes longer in its savage slumber, or, as the
Jesuits thought it, "blasted beneath the sceptre of hell," while we
accompany Poutrincourt and Champlain, returning wounded and weather-beaten
from inspecting the coast of New England, to find the buildings of Port
Royal, under Lescarbot's care, bright with lights, and an improvised arch
bearing the arms of Poutrincourt and De Monts, to be received by Neptune,
who, accompanied by a retinue of Tritons, declaimed Alexandrine couplets
of praise and welcome, and to sit at the sumptuous table of the Order of
Good Times, of which I have just spoken, furnished by this same lawyer-
poet's agricultural industry. We may even stop a moment longer to hear his
stately appeal to France, which, heeded by her, would have made
Lescarbot's a name familiar in the homes of America instead of one known
only to those who delve in libraries:
"France, fair eye of the universe, nurse from old of letters and of arms,
resource to the afflicted, strong stay to the Christian religion, Dear
Mother ... your children, our fathers and predecessors, have of old been
masters of the sea.... They have with great power occupied Asia.... They
have carried the arms and the name of France to the east and south.... All
these are marks of your greatness, ... but you must now enter again upon
old paths, in so far as they have been abandoned, and expand the bounds of
your piety, justice and humanity, by teaching these things to the nations
of New France.... Our ancient practice of the sea must be revived, we must
ally the east with the west and convert those people to God before the end
of the world come.... You must make an alliance in imitation of the course
of the sun, for as he daily carries his light hence to New France, so let
your civilization, your light, be carried thither by your children, who
henceforth, by the frequent voyages they shall make to these western
lands, shall be called children of the sea, which is, being interpreted,
children of the west." [Footnote: Lescarbot, "Histoire de la Nouvelle
France," 1618, pp. 15-22.]
"Children of the west." His fervid appeal found as little response then as
doubtless it would find if made to-day, and the children of the sea were
interpreted as the children of the south of Africa. The sons of France
have ever loved their homes. They have, except the adventurous few,
preferred to remain children of the rivers and the sea of their fathers,
and so it is that few of Gallic blood were "spawned," to use Lescarbot's
metaphor, in that chill continent, though the venturing or missionary
spirit of such as Cartier and Champlain, Poutrincourt and De Monts gave
spawn of such heroism and unselfish sacrifice as have made millions in
America whom we now call "children of the west," geographical offspring of
Brittany and Normandy and Picardy.
The lilies of France and the escutcheons of De Monts and Poutrincourt,
painted by Lescarbot for the castle in the wilderness, faded; the sea
which Lescarbot, as Neptune, impersonated in the pageant of welcome, and
the English ships received back those who had not been gathered into the
cemetery on land; and the first agricultural colony in the northern wilds
lapsed for a time at least into a fur traders' station or a place of call
for fishermen.
It was only by locating these points on Champlain's map of Port Royal that
I was able to find in 1911 the site of the ancient fort, garden, fish-
pond, and cemetery. The men unloading a schooner a few rods away seemed
not to know of Lescarbot or Poutrincourt or even Champlain, but that was
perhaps because they were not accustomed to my tongue.
The unquiet Champlain left Acadia in the summer of 1607, the charter
having been withdrawn by the king. In the winter of 1607-8 he walked the
streets of Paris as in a dream, we are told, longing for the northern
wilderness, where he had left his heart four years before. In the spring
of 1608 the white whales are floundering around his lonely ship in the
river of his dreams. At the foot of the gray rock of Quebec he makes the
beginning of a fort, whence he plans to go forth to trace the rivers to
their sources, discover, perchance, a northern route to the Indies, and
make a path for the priests to the countless savages "in bondage of
Satan." Parkman speaks of him as the "Aeneas of a destined people," and he
is generally called the "father of Canada." But I think of him rather as a
Prometheus who, after his years of bravest defiance of elements and
Indians, is to have his heart plucked out day by day, chained to that same
gray rock--only that death instead of Herculean succor came.
There is space for only the briefest recital of the exploits and
endurances of the stout heart and hardy frame of the man of whom any
people of any time might well be proud. The founding of Quebec, the
rearing of the pile of wooden buildings where the lower town now stretches
along the river; the unsuccessful plot to kill Champlain before the fort
is finished; the death of all of the twenty-eight men save eight before
the coming of the first spring--these are the incidents of the first
chapter.
The visit to the Iroquois country; the discovery of the lake that bears
his name; the first portentous collision with the Indians of the Five
Nations, undertaken to keep the friendship of the Indian tribes along the
St. Lawrence; a winter in France; the breaking of ground for a post at
Montreal; another visit to France to find means for the rescue and
sustenance of his fading colony, make a depressing second chapter.
Then follows the journey up the Ottawa with the young De Vignau, who had
stirred Paris by claiming that he had at last found the northwest passage
to the Pacific, when he had in fact spent the winter in an Indian lodge
not two hundred miles from Montreal; the noble forgiveness of De Vignau by
Champlain; his crestfallen return and his going forth from France again in
1615 with four Récollet friars (Franciscans of the strict observance) of
the convent of his birthplace (Brouage) inflamed by him with holy zeal for
the continent of savages. For a little these "apostolic mendicants" in
their gray robes girt with the white cord, their feet naked or shod in
wooden sandals, tarried beneath the gray rock and then set forth east,
north, and west, soon (1626) to be followed and reinforced by their
brothers of stronger resources, the Jesuits, the "black gowns," upon a
mission whose story is as marvellous as a "tale of chivalry or legends of
lives of the saints."
Meanwhile Champlain, exploring the regions to the northwest, is the first
of white men to look upon the first of the Great Lakes--the "Mer Douce"
(Lake Huron) being discovered before the lakes to the south--the first
after the boy Étienne Brûlé and Friar Le Caron: the latter having gone
before him, celebrated the first mass on Champlain's arrival the 12th of
August, 1615, a day "marked with white in the friar's calendar," and
deserving to be marked with red in the calendar of the west.
There follow twenty restless years in which Champlain's efforts are
divided between discovery and strengthening the little colony, and his
occupations between holding his Indian allies who lived along the northern
pathway to the west, fighting their enemies to the south, the Iroquois,
restraining the jealousies of merchants and priests, trade and missions,
reconciling Catholics and Huguenots, going nearly every year to France in
the interests of the colony, building and repairing, yielding for a time
to the overpowering ships of the English. The grizzled soldier and
explorer, restored and commissioned anew under the fostering and firm
support of Richelieu, struggled to the very end of his life to make the
feeble colony, which eighteen years after its founding "could scarcely be
said to exist but in the founder's brain," not chiefly an agricultural
settlement but a spiritual centre from which the interior was to be
explored and the savage hordes won--at the same time to heaven and to
France--subdued not by being crushed but by being civilized, not by the
sword but by the cross. It was a far different colony that was beginning
to grow fronting the harbor of Plymouth, where men quite as intolerant of
priests as Richelieu was intolerant of Huguenots were building homes and
making firesides in enjoyment of religious and political freedom.
Champlain lay dying as the year 1635 went out, asking more help from his
patron Richelieu, but his great task had been accomplished. The St.
Lawrence had been opened, the first two of the Great Lakes had been
reached, and explorer and priest were already on the edge of that farther
valley of the "Missipi," which we are to enter in the next chapter.