SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN AND THE FOUNDING OF QUEBEC
The history of Canada has been so often and so well told, that an
attempt simply to reproduce the narrative would be worse than
superfluous. The scheme of the present series is, in the field of
colonization and within the present limits of the British Empire, to
trace the connexion between history and geography; and from this
point of view more especially the story of New France will be
recorded.
[Sidenote: _New France._]
Various parts of the world, now British possessions, were once owned
by other European nations, notably by the Dutch or French. The last
volume of the series dealt with what was in past times a dependency
of the Netherlands, the Cape Colony, the mother colony of South
Africa. The present volume deals with a land which the French made
peculiarly their own; where, as hardly anywhere else, they settled,
though not in large numbers; not merely conquering or ruling the
conquered, not only leaving a permanent impress of manners, law, and
religion, but slowly and partially colonizing a country and forming a
nation.
Lower Canada, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was rightly included
under the wider name of New France, for here France and the French
were reproduced in weakness and in strength. It was a land well
suited to the French character and physique. Much depended on tactful
dealings with the North American Indians, a species of diplomacy in
which Frenchmen excelled. The commercial value of Canada consisted
mainly in the fur trade, an adventurous kind of traffic more
attractive to the {36} Frenchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries than plodding agriculture or the life of a counting-house.
On the rivers and lakes, coming and going was comparatively easy; the
short bright summers and the long winters made the country one of
strong contrasts. To a bold, imaginative, somewhat restless people
there was much to charm in Canada.
But Canada meant far less in earlier days than now it means. It meant
the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and of the lakes
from which it flows. The Maritime Provinces of the present Dominion,
or at any rate Nova Scotia, were not in Canada properly so called,
but bore the name of La Cadie or Acadia,[1] and the great North-West
was an unknown land.
[Footnote 1: For the derivation of the name 'Acadia,' see Parkman's
_Pioneers of France in the New World_, p. 243, note. _Cadie_ is an
Indian word meaning place or region. 'It is obviously a Micmac or
Souriquois affix used in connexion with other words to describe the
natural characteristics of a place or locality' (Bourinot's monograph
on 'Cape Breton,' _Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society
of Canada_, vol. ix, sec. 2, p. 185). For the name 'Canada,' see
above, p. 24. note 37.]
By the end of the seventeenth century the French had three spheres of
influence and colonization in North America--the country of the St.
Lawrence, the seaboard between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the
New England colonies, and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi.
To join them and encircle the English colonies was the aim of French
statesmanship. It was an impossible aim, inevitably frustrated by
geographical conditions and by want of colonists; but the conception
was a great one, large as the new continent in which it was framed,
and able men tried to work it out, but tried in vain.
[Sidenote: _The French as colonizers._]
Much has been written of French methods of colonization; writers have
been at pains to enumerate the shortcomings of the French, and have
carefully explained whence those mistakes arose. But there is less to
wonder at in the failures than in the great successes to be credited
to France. Being {37} part of the continent of Europe, and ever
embroiled in continental politics, when she competed with England as
a colonizing power, she competed with one hand tied.[2] Changeable,
it is said, were the French and their policy; their kings and
courtiers may have been changeable, but the charge does not lie
against the French nation.
[Footnote 2: This is pointed out in Professor Seeley's _Expansion of
England_, course i, lecture 5.]
They were trading up the Senegal early in the seventeenth century,
and there they are at the present day. From the dawn of their
colonial enterprise they tried to obtain possession of Madagascar;
they have their object now. Nearly four centuries ago they fished off
the coasts of Newfoundland, and England has good cause to know that
they fish there still. To the St. Lawrence went Cartier from St.
Malo, and by the same route generations of Frenchmen entered steadily
into America, until Quebec had fallen and the St. Lawrence was theirs
no more. The French were versatile in their colonial dealings; they
were quickly moving and constantly moving; but they saw clearly and
they followed tenaciously; they were strong and staunch, and they
proved themselves to be a wonderful people.
Yet there must have been some element of weakness in the French
character, in that they bred and obeyed bad rulers who did not live
for France, but for whom France was sacrificed; who crushed liberty,
political and religious, who drove out industry with the Huguenots,
and squandered the heritage of the nation. Englishmen, comparatively
early in their history, reckoned with priests first and with kings
afterwards. They did most of their work at home before they made
their colonial empire; they colonized new worlds as a reformed
people; the French tried to colonize under absolutism and
priestcraft. It might not have been so, it probably would not have
been so, if the religious policy of the French Government had been
other than it was. {38} The Huguenots, if not persecuted and
eventually in great measure driven out, would have given France the
one thing wanting to make her colonization successful, the spirit of
private enterprise independent of court favour, the child and the
parent of freedom, the determined foe of a deadening religious
despotism.
[Sidenote: _Attempts at French colonization in Brazil and Florida._]
In the sixteenth century, after Cartier's voyages to the St.
Lawrence, we hear little of the French in North America. The Breton
fishermen followed their calling, crossed the Atlantic year after
year, and came back with cargoes of fish and with furs procured by
barter with the Indians; but no French settlement was founded either
in Canada or in Acadia. In France itself the last half of the century
was a time of civil war; the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place,
the house of Valois came to an end, and in 1589 Henry of Navarre
became King of France. Before his accession to the Crown, two
attempts at French colonization were made, in Brazil and in Florida.
The colonists were mainly Huguenots, and their enterprise was backed
by the great Protestant leader Coligny. The earlier attempt, designed
to plant a settlement on the harbour of Rio Janeiro, was short-lived,
because ill led by a violent tyrannical man, Villegagnon. The first
settlers arrived in 1555; by the end of 1558 they had all
disappeared. Still more tragical was the outcome of the venture in
Florida. In 1562 a band of would-be colonists sailed from Dieppe,
under the command of Jean Ribault. They reached Florida in safety,
and built a small fort towards the northern end of the peninsula, in
which thirty men were left behind while Ribault returned to France.
In the following year, the survivors of the thirty came back to
Europe, having abandoned the fort and experienced every extremity of
thirst and hunger while crossing the Atlantic in a ship of their own
making. Again in 1564, a Huguenot expedition, under Rene de
Laudonniere, sailed for Florida, and the settlers planted themselves
on the {39} St. John's river, then known as the river of May. In 1565
Ribault joined them with reinforcements and supplies. Well known from
its surpassing horror is the story of the French settlement. A
Spanish force under Menendez, a fanatic as treacherous and as savage
as Philip II himself, took up a position to the south where the town
of St. Augustine now stands, and overpowering the Frenchmen in
detachments, butchered them with every accompaniment of cruelty and
guile. The French fort passed into Spanish hands, but within three
years time an avenging freebooter came from France, Domenic de
Gourgues; the Spaniards in their turn were shot and hung, and the
banks of the St. John's river were left desolate.
Ill managed, badly supported were these French ventures to Brazil and
Florida. Had they been well led and given some little encouragement
and assistance, the result might have been far different. Protestants
might have gained a firm foothold in Central and Southern America.
France might have won from Spain and Portugal a great domain. As it
was, the attempts resulted in utter failure, and great opportunities
were lost never to be regained.
[Sidenote: _La Roche's patent._]
As the sixteenth century drew to a close, a patent was issued by the
French King to a Breton nobleman, the Marquis de la Roche, to
colonize in North America. The terms of the patent were
preposterously wide, conferring sovereignty over Canada, together
with a monopoly of trade. The results were proportionately small. La
Roche set sail in 1598, in a single ship with a cargo of convicts. He
landed them at Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and sailed
back to France, leaving them to their fate. Five years later, in
1603, eleven of the number, who had survived, were rescued and
brought home again.
[Sidenote: _Chauvin and Pontgrave._]
[Sidenote: _De Chastes._]
About a year after La Roche's fruitless voyage, in 1599 or 1600, two
other Frenchmen, Chauvin, a sea captain, and Pontgrave, a St. Malo
merchant, also obtained a patent to {40} colonize in Canada. Their
object was to monopolize the fur trade, and they attempted a
settlement at Tadoussac, where the Saguenay river flows into the St.
Lawrence. During a whole winter a small party was left at the
station, but no permanent colony was formed; and a second and third
voyage had no lasting results. Chauvin died, and in 1602 or 1603 a
new patent was granted to De Chastes, a man of rank and station, who
associated with himself Pontgrave, and secured the services of Samuel
Champlain.
[Sidenote: _Samuel Champlain._]
In order of time, Champlain's name stands second in the list of the
men to whom New France in America was due. It stands second in time
to the name of Cartier; in order of merit it heads the list. Cartier
was a great explorer, but his work ended with discovery; Champlain
founded a colony. The history of Canada as a French possession has
gained in attractiveness, in that it began and ended with a
high-minded, chivalrous leader. It began with Champlain, it ended
with Montcalm. Born on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, the
adventurous son of a seafaring father, Champlain fought for the King
in Brittany, and was given by him a retainer in the shape of a small
pension. The war over, he travelled for two years in the Spanish
Indies, and, visiting Panama, conceived the idea of a ship canal
across the isthmus. After his return home, he took service under De
Chastes' company, and in 1603 sailed with Pontgrave for the St.
Lawrence. The voyage was one of exploration only. Champlain ascended
the river as far as Montreal, gathering geographical information from
the Indians, but attempting no settlement; and when he returned to
France in a few months' time, he found that his employer, De Chastes,
was dead.
[Sidenote: _De Monts' patent._]
[Sidenote: _The first French settlement in Acadia._]
[Sidenote: _Port Royal._]
Yet another royal patent was granted, in 1603, to De Monts, a
Huguenot gentleman of the French court, its object being the
colonization of Acadia, and Acadia being defined as extending from
the fortieth degree of north latitude, which runs {41} through[3]
Philadelphia, to the forty-sixth degree, which is north of Montreal.
De Monts took into partnership the members of De Chastes' company,
and in 1604 two vessels sailed for America. They carried a mixed
freight, Huguenots and Roman Catholics, gentlemen of fortune, and
vagrants impressed under the King's commission. De Monts and
Champlain were on board the first ship, Pontgrave followed in the
second, with supplies for the future colony. They steered not for the
St. Lawrence, but for the coast of Nova Scotia; and entering the Bay
of Fundy they discovered Annapolis harbour, which was given the name
of Port Royal. The first settlement, however, was made on an islet
off the mouth of the St. Croix river, which now forms the boundary
between New Brunswick and the state of Maine; and there through the
winter De Monts and Champlain stayed with a scurvy-stricken company,
numbering seventy-nine in all, of whom nearly half died. On the
return of spring and the advent of relief from France, the leaders
coasted south along the shores of Maine, and of what were in after
years the New England states; and coming back to their station in
August, they moved the settlement across the Bay of Fundy, and
established themselves on the inlet of Annapolis harbour. De Monts
then returned to France, leaving Pontgrave and Champlain to hold the
post through the winter of 1605.
[Footnote 3: For De Monts' patent see the _Calendar of State Papers_,
Colonial, 1574-1660, p. 4, entry 10, Nov. 8, 1603. It was a patent
'for inhabiting Acadia, Canada, and other places in New France,' and
De Monts was appointed the French King's Lieutenant-General 'for to
represent our person in the countries, territories, coasts, and
confines of La Cadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degree.']
[Sidenote: _Lescarbot._]
In the following summer, ships came back from France just in time to
prevent the settlement at Port Royal from being broken up in despair.
They brought with them the advocate Lescarbot, the historian of New
France. Again there was exploring down the American coast, and again
Champlain and his associates held their own through the winter. The
{42} outlook of the little colony was promising. The season was mild,
the natives were friendly, supplies were plentiful, gardens were laid
out and corn was sown. But in the late spring of 1607 news came from
home that the patent had been cancelled, and before the summer ended
Port Royal was abandoned.
[Sidenote: _De Poutrincourt._]
[Sidenote: _Jesuit influence._]
For nearly three years the place was left desolate, and then, in
1610, one of De Monts' associates came back again. It was the Baron
de Poutrincourt, to whom the harbour, when first discovered, had been
granted by De Monts. The Jesuits were at the time strong at the
French court, stronger still after the assassination of King Henry IV
in this same year. They, or the ladies of the court, who were their
tools, bought shares in the venture, and Jesuit priests went out to
Acadia, thwarting and quarrelling with Poutrincourt and his son. Both
the two great dangers which always threatened and finally ruined the
French power in North America came into being at this date, the
exclusive influence of the Jesuits and English competition.
[Sidenote: _Argall's raid from Virginia._]
[Sidenote: _Destruction of Port Royal._]
In 1606 the Virginia company was incorporated, and in the following
year British colonization on the mainland of North America began with
the founding of Jamestown. There are many miles of coast between
Acadia and Virginia, between the Bay of Fundy and Chesapeake Bay, but
French and English soon crossed each other's paths. In 1613 a ship
sailed from France, sent out under Jesuit influence, with a view to
founding a settlement on the North American coast. After touching at
Port Royal, the party sailed southwards to the coast of Maine, and
landed in the region of the Penobscot river. Hardly had their tents
been set up on the shore, when an English ship came in sight,
captured the French vessel, which was lying at anchor, uprooted the
would-be colony, and took all the Frenchmen prisoners. The invaders
hailed from Jamestown; they were commanded by Samuel Argall, an
unscrupulous freebooter. {43} His pretext was that the Frenchmen were
taking up ground within the limits of the patents granted by the
English King to his subjects, but his act was little more than
piracy. Some of the Frenchmen were set adrift in an open boat, and
eventually reached France in safety; the rest were carried prisoners
to Jamestown, whence Argall set sail again, commissioned by the
governor of Virginia to attack Port Royal. He reached, plundered, and
burnt the fort, its commander, Biencourt, with the rest of the
settlers, being absent in the fields, for it was harvest time; but
the colony was not finally blotted out, and the French still kept a
foothold in Acadia.
[Sidenote: _Champlain on the St. Lawrence._]
Champlain's first voyage to North America in 1603 had taken him to
the St. Lawrence. From 1604-7 Acadia had been the scene of his
labours, until De Monts' patent had been revoked. In 1608 he returned
to the river of Canada. On the line of the St. Lawrence he carried
out the work of his life, and by its banks he died. In the course
which French colonization in America and its first great leader took,
may be traced the influence on history of geography and race.
[Sidenote: _Comparison of English and French colonization in North
America._]
[Sidenote: _English colonial enterprise in the seventeenth century
the result of private co-operation._]
In English colonial history, as writers on the subject have pointed
out,[4] the age of adventure was distinct from the age of settlement.
Ralegh was the latest product of the times of romance, an his
attempts at colonization were premature and unsuccessful. To some
extent a similar distinction may be made in French colonial history:
Cartier may be taken as a representative of the earlier age,
Champlain of the later; but the line of demarcation is much fainter,
much less real, in the case of the French than in that of the
English. To English and French alike adventure had meant private
enterprise, usually but not always countenanced by kings, generally
carried out under cover of royal licences or patents, so vague as to
be almost meaningless, granted one day, liable to be {44} cancelled
the next. When the age of romance passed away in England with the
passing of the sixteenth century, adventurers in the ordinary sense
in great measure disappeared, with the exception of the Arctic
explorers, who, like Hudson and Baffin, still sailed to the desolate
North. Private enterprise, on the other hand, not only survived, but
it grew stronger, more business-like, more independent of court
favour. It was private enterprise still, but under new forms, the
enterprise not of individual freebooters, or of knights errant, but
of associations of citizens, some of the associations being chartered
commercial companies, while others were bands of colonizers and
colonists united by a common antagonism and a common creed. Their
objects were not in the air, they did not live in dreamland, they
went out or sent out others, not so much to discover new lands, as to
occupy and appropriate lands which had already been found, to make
new English homes on the other side of the Atlantic.
[Footnote 4: See e.g. Doyle's _History of the English in America_,
vol. i, chap. vi.]
[Sidenote: _The new patents of English colonization._]
[Sidenote: _Motives of English colonization in the seventeenth
century._]
[Sidenote: _The English kept near to the sea._]
In theory the commercial companies were, like the individual
patentees of the former generation, working under the authority of
the Crown. Indeed that authority was far more strongly proclaimed
than before, and for vague generalities were substituted very
definite restrictions; but this was only a sign of a new time. It
indicated that a stage had been reached when more was known, when
practical business was being taken in hand, and when, therefore, the
slipshod patents, which had hitherto sufficed, would no longer avail.
Because private enterprise really meant more, therefore the
Government said more, and the very defining of the work and
circumscribing of its sphere made the results sounder, more lasting,
and more substantial. It was not the lust of conquest, it was not the
glamour of adventure, it was not a wish to proselytize in religion or
to add new provinces to the domain of a European kingdom which made
the English colonize North America. There were two {45} main motives
at work. One was the desire to find or to do something which would
pay, the other was a longing to live under more independent
conditions than existed in the mother country. The settlers went to
lands where natives dwelt, and, therefore, dealings with the North
American Indians in war and peace ensued; but the English did not go
to the New World in the main to conquer or to convert the Indians,
they went to live and to make their living pay. Instinct was at work
in English colonization, the instinct of self-preservation, of
extension, of always moving a little further and winning a little
more; but there was no high scheme of universal dominion for the
English King or the English creed. Against any such views the New
England colonies were a living protest, and in Virginia, Maryland, or
Carolina they found no place. All of these colonies were prosaic,
unromantic communities: they were groups of Englishmen, living,
grumbling, working and squabbling, with varieties of opinions and
differences of outward forms, half protected, half worried by the
home Government, building up unconsciously, illogically, amid much
that was mean and small, what was to be in the end a mighty nation.
Instinct, too, kept the colonists for the most part near to the sea.
They fringed the Atlantic over which they had come, and ever renewed
their strength as more emigrants came in; they strayed no doubt to
some extent as years went on, taking up farms inland and clearing the
backwoods; but, on the whole, there was continuity of colonization, a
gradual widening of the belt of settlement, expansion on the part of
the settlers themselves, as opposed to planting in the heart of the
continent military outposts, or isolated mission stations.
[Sidenote: _The French colonized inland._]
[Sidenote: _Comparison of French colonization in Canada and Dutch
colonization in South Africa._]
With the French in Canada the case was different. Except in Acadia
and Cape Breton Island, and to a limited extent in Newfoundland, they
had no hold on the sea coast: and Acadia had for many years little
connexion with the {46} land of the St. Lawrence. Canada, as a sphere
of colonization, began when the open sea had been left far behind. It
was an inland territory with a great river and great lakes. No two
parts of the world are more unlike than Canada and South Africa.
Canada has a river highway into it, excellent water communication by
lake and stream, and, until the Rocky mountains are reached, no
mountain barriers are interposed to cut off the interior from the
coast regions or one district from another. South Africa is almost
devoid of natural harbours, its rivers are valueless for purposes of
navigation. Its ranges of hills or mountains rise one behind the
other, barring the way from the coast to the interior, severing one
section of the territory from another. Yet, curiously enough,
somewhat similar results followed from diametrically opposite
geographical conditions. No two races in the world were and are more
unlike each other than the Dutch and the French, unlike in character,
in tradition, in political and religious training. But the Dutch in
South Africa and the French in Canada resembled each other in this,
that they were and remained very few in number, planted in an
unlimited area, and that men lived in either case under a rigid
system. The restrictive rule of the Netherlands East India Company in
South Africa led to trekking, to wandering in the wilderness, and the
difficulties of communication increased the wandering tendency,
because the wanderers, who wished no longer to be controlled by the
government at Cape Town, could not easily be followed up. The French
rule in Canada was restrictive too, restrictive in matters of
politics, of commerce, and of religion. It was a despotism which
allowed no vestige of freedom or self-government; but it was a far
stronger and more active despotism than that of the Netherlands
Company. The Dutch sought a trade monopoly, the French a territorial
dominion. The Dutch were at pains to minimize their responsibilities.
The French policy was {47} one of conquest and conversion; they
looked to holding in subjection the lands and the peoples of the New
World. They worked under a government which was absolute, but whose
absolutism, in the main, encouraged perpetual moving forward, and
they worked in a land where moving forward was comparatively easy.
Thus dispersion ensued on a greater scale than in South Africa. The
negative force which promoted trekking in the Cape Colony was present
also in Canada--antipathy to a rigid system, to hard and fast rules;
and the counterpart of the Dutch voortrekkers, though under very
different conditions, was to be found in the Canadian fur-traders and
_coureurs de bois_. But in South Africa the positive force was
wanting which shaped Canadian history, the forward policy of an
ambitious state. The agents of the French Government in Canada,
military and religious, went far afield--adventurous and
enterprising, intriguing with savage races, establishing outposts in
the interior, strong to carry out a preconceived plan of a great
French dominion. The malcontent Dutchmen in South Africa moved slowly
and sleepily away in their wagons to be out of reach; the country
aided their intent by being difficult of access. Along the rivers and
the lakes of Canada the Frenchmen lightly passed, those who worked
the will of the Government as well as those who were impatient of
control.
[Sidenote: _Contrast between English and French in North America._]
The rivalry then between the two European nations who colonized North
America, the English and the French, was rivalry at every point. It
was a conflict of race, of religion, of geographical conditions, of
new and old, of European government and American colonists. On the
one side were seaboard settlements, comparatively continuous, in
which there was much instinct and little policy, much freedom and
little system; where the population steadily grew by natural causes
and by immigration, democratic communities in which the real work was
done from below, the products of {48} a wholly different era from
that which preceded it, and in which picturesque adventurers had
failed to colonize. On the other side were the beginnings of
continental colonization along the natural lines of communication.
The dispersion was great, the settlers were few, the settlements were
weak. All was done from above, except where unlicensed adventurers
roamed the woods. The elements of an older day were preserved and
stereotyped, attractive but unprogressive. Old forms transplanted to
a New World did not lose their life, but renewed it. Feudal customs
took root in the soil. Despotism, supported by the Roman Catholic
Church, did not survive merely, but grew stronger. The adventurer
remained an adventurer, and did not turn into a businesslike
colonist. There was much that was great, there was more that was
uniform, but there was little or no growth.
[Sidenote: _Elements of strength on the French side._]
The ultimate outcome of such a contest must necessarily have been, in
the course of generations, the triumph of the side on which were the
forces and the views of the coming time. But, while the struggle
lasted, the French gained not a little from being less vulnerable
than the English, as being more dispersed; from being better situated
for purposes of attack; from being organized, so far as there was
organization, under one government and one system instead of many;
from the extraordinary energy and quickness of some of the French
leaders in Canada; from the strong military element in the
population; from the fanatical devotion of the French missionaries;
and last, but not least, from the Frenchmen's better handling of the
natives.
[Sidenote: _The waterways of North America._]
The sources of the Mississippi are close to the western end of Lake
Superior, and the eastern half of North America is therefore nearly
an island, created by the Mississippi, the great lakes, the St.
Lawrence, and the sea. An inner circle is formed by the Mississippi,
the Ohio, Lakes Erie, Ontario, and the St. Lawrence, the head waters
of the Ohio river being within easy distance of Lake Erie. The course
of the Ohio {49} is from north-east to north-west. It flows, very
roughly, parallel to the Alleghany mountains, and drains their
western sides. The Alleghanies in their turn are parallel to the
Atlantic, and between them and the sea is a coast belt from north to
south. Here was the scene of the English settlements. Here, cut off
by mountain ranges from the Mississippi valley and from the inland
plains, the Virginians and the New Englanders made their home. 'The
New England man,' writes Parkman, 'had very little forest experience.
His geographical position cut him off completely from the great
wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action.'[5]
[Footnote 5: _The Old Regime in Canada_, chap. xxi, p. 399 (14th ed.,
1885).]
[Sidenote: _The Hudson river and Lake Champlain._]
But there is one direct route, with nearly continuous waterways, from
the Atlantic seaboard to the St. Lawrence. It runs due north up the
Hudson river, is continued by Lakes George and Champlain between the
Adirondack mountains on the west, and on the east the Green mountains
of Vermont; and from the northern end of Lake Champlain it follows
the outlet of that lake, the Richelieu river, for seventy to eighty
miles into the St. Lawrence. The head waters of the Hudson are hard
by Lake George, but at the present day navigation ceases at Troy, 151
miles from the sea, where is the confluence of the Mohawk river, and
from whence the Champlain canal runs direct to Lake Champlain. The
distance from Troy to Lake George is in straight line about fifty
miles. This route was all-important for attack and defence in the
wars between England and France, and it was well for Great Britain
that, at a comparatively early stage in the colonization of America,
she took over the Dutch settlements in the valley of the Hudson,
gaining control of that river and linking New England to the southern
colonies.
[Sidenote: _The St. Lawrence._]
From the mouth of the Hudson at New York to where the Richelieu joins
the St. Lawrence, a straight line drawn on {50} the map from south to
north measures rather under 400 miles. It is much the same distance,
on a very rough estimate, from the confluence of the Richelieu and
the St. Lawrence to the point where the St. Lawrence opens into the
sea. This point is generally taken to be the Point de Monts, which is
on the northern bank of the river, in north latitude 49 degrees 15
minutes, and west longitude 67 degrees 30 minutes, though the Gaspe
peninsula, on the southern side of the estuary, extends much further
to the east. Thus the centre of the St. Lawrence basin is equidistant
from the mouth of that river and from the mouth of the Hudson,[6] and
between these two points, before the days of railways, there was no
easily accessible route from the sea to Montreal.
[Footnote 6: Hennepin in _A New Discovery of a vast Country in
America_ (English ed., London, 1698, pt. 2, p. 129), speaking of the
St. Lawrence, says: 'The middle of the river is nearer to New York
than to Quebec, the capital town of Canada.' This is of course
incorrect, but it shows appreciation of the directness of the route
to the St. Lawrence by the Hudson river.]
Following up the St. Lawrence from the Point de Monts, at about a
distance of 140 miles, the mouth of the Saguenay is reached on the
northern side. There stood and stands Tadoussac, in old days a great
centre of the fur trade, and the earliest foothold of the French in
Canada. From the mouth of the Saguenay to Quebec is about 120 miles,
and from Quebec to Montreal is rather over 160. Nearly halfway
between Quebec and Montreal, over seventy miles from the former and
over ninety from the latter, is the town of Three Rivers, situated on
the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, at its confluence with the St.
Maurice river, one of the oldest and one of the most important French
settlements in Canada. Here is the limit of the tideway, and above
this point the St. Lawrence expands for some thirty miles into Lake
St. Peter. At the upper end of this lake or expanse of river, on the
southern side, the Richelieu joins the St. Lawrence, with the town of
Sorel at {51} its mouth, and forty-five miles higher up is Montreal.
From Montreal to Kingston, where the St. Lawrence issues from Lake
Ontario, is a distance of 180 to 190 miles by river, past rapids well
known to readers and to tourists, and past the Thousand islands. Thus
the total length of the St. Lawrence, from the lakes to the opening
into the gulf, is rather over 600 miles.
[Sidenote: _The great lakes._]
The great lakes of the St. Lawrence basin cover a surface of nearly
100,000 square miles--an area larger than that of Great Britain.
Lakes Ontario and Erie, connected by the Niagara river, continue the
direct line of the St. Lawrence, Lake Erie more especially lying due
south-west and north-east; but from the extreme end of this
last-named lake the channel of communication takes a sharp curve to
the north in the Detroit river, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair
river, which link together Lakes Erie and Huron. Lake Huron, the
centre of the whole group, stretches back towards the east and
south-east in Georgian Bay, while on the north-west it is connected
with Lake Michigan by the straits of Michillimackinac or Mackinac,
and with Lake Superior by St. Mary's straits and rapids, the Sault
St. Marie. The rivers which feed Lake Superior are the head waters of
the St. Lawrence, and one of them, the St. Louis, which enters the
lake at its extreme western end, has its source hard by the source of
the Mississippi. The total length of lake and river on the line of
the St. Lawrence is over 2,000 miles.
[Sidenote: _The route of the Ottawa river._]
It has been said that Lakes Ontario and Erie continue the main course
of the St. Lawrence in its south-westerly and north-easterly
direction, that the channel which feeds Lake Erie at its western end
comes down from the north, and that the central lake which is then
reached--Lake Huron--breaks back towards the east. Thus the direct
line from Montreal to the centre of the lake system is not up the St.
Lawrence, but along one of its largest tributaries, which enters the
main river at Montreal. This tributary is the Ottawa, flowing {52}
from the north-west in a course broken by falls and rapids. One
hundred and thirty miles from its confluence with the St. Lawrence,
just below the Chaudiere falls, now stands the city of Ottawa, the
capital of the Canadian Dominion, connected with Lake Ontario by the
Rideau canal; and rather under 200 miles above Ottawa, where the
Mattawa river enters from the west, there is nearly continuous water
communication in a due westerly direction with Lake Nipissing, which
lake is in turn connected by the French river with the great inlet of
Lake Huron known as Georgian Bay. Champlain early explored this
route--the direct route to the west, and along it as far as Lake
Nipissing now runs the Canadian Pacific Railway. French river flows
into the northern end of Georgian Bay. At its south-easternmost end,
that bay runs into the land in the direction of Lake Ontario; and in
the middle of the broad isthmus between the two lakes lies Lake
Simcoe.
[Sidenote: _Canada a geographical federation._]
Such in rough outline is the basin of the St. Lawrence. It is a
network of lakes and rivers which finds no parallel, unless it be in
Central Africa. The present Dominion of Canada is not merely a
political federation; it is a federation of regions which are
geographically separate from each other. There is the eastern
seaboard, the old Acadia; there is the basin of the St. Lawrence;
there are the plains of the North-West and the regions of the Hudson
Bay; and there are the lands of the Pacific coast. Only one of these
four regions, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was the main scene of
early Canadian history. Acadia comes into the story, it is true, but
until the eighteenth century only indirectly, in connexion with the
English colonies on the Atlantic coast rather than with the French in
Canada. English and French collided on the shores of Hudson Bay; they
collided also in Newfoundland; but Hudson Bay and Newfoundland alike
were outside the sphere of Canada. The great prairies of the
North-West were a possibility of the distant future; but not {53}
till the days of railways did the western half of the present
Dominion come within the range of practical politics. Along the St.
Lawrence and its tributaries the drama of Canadian history was
played; the furthest horizon was the Mississippi and the whole line
of the lakes; a nearer view was bounded by the Ohio valley; while the
immediate foreground was formed by the St. Lawrence from Quebec to
Lake Ontario, the centremost point being the confluence of the
Richelieu with the main river.
Movement, constant movement, these waterways suggested; exploration,
adventure, and ultimately conquest; pressing onward by strength or
skill through a boundless area, with something unknown always beyond;
making portages round impossible rapids, forcing paths through
interminable forests, dealing with half-hidden foes. The land was one
for the traveller, the explorer, the missionary, the soldier, the
hunter, the fur-trader, but not so much for the settler and the
agriculturist. Thus it was that the age of adventurers was
perpetuated along the St. Lawrence, while the English colonists
between the Alleghanies and the sea were living steady lives attached
to the soil.
[Sidenote: _The main object of North American exploration was a route
to the East._]
The great motive force of modern adventure was, as has been seen, the
search for a direct route to the East. Engaged in this search Henry
Hudson, in 1609, piloted the Dutch into the Hudson river.[7]
Champlain's first expedition up the Ottawa was due to a lying tale
that along that river had been found a way to the sea. La Salle, the
explorer of the Mississippi, had his mind ever set on the East, and
his Seigniory above Montreal was named La Chine; for, 'like {54}
Champlain and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the
south sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and
Japan.'[8] Many long years passed before the geography of North
America was known with any accuracy, and in the meantime the recesses
of the continent, from which the rivers flowed, seemed to hide the
secret of a thoroughfare by the West to the East. Similarly, from the
time when Columbus sought for and thought he had found the Indies in
the New World, down to our own day, the natives of America have been
known as Indians.
[Footnote 7: Hudson in 1609 sought for a North-West Passage about the
fortieth degree of latitude. 'This idea had been suggested to Hudson
by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him
from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea
leading into the western ocean by the north of Virginia.' See _A
Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets
relating to New Netherland_, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam,
Frederick Mueller, 1868), Introd. pp. xxv, xxvi.]
[Footnote 8: Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_
(1885 ed.), p. 8.]
[Sidenote: _The Indians of North America._]
[Sidenote: _The Algonquins._]
The two native races, with which the history of Canada is mainly
concerned, are the Algonquins and the Huron Iroquois. The former were
far the more numerous of the two, and were spread over a much larger
area. They included under different names the Indians of the lower
St. Lawrence, of Acadia, New England, and the Atlantic states as far
as the Carolinas--the Montagnais, the Abenakis, the Micmacs, the
Narragansetts, the Pequods, and others. The Delawares, too, were
members of the race, and Algonquin tribes were to be found on the
Ottawa, at Lake Nipissing, on the further shores of the great lakes,
in Michigan and Illinois. From the day when Champlain joined forces
with them against their hereditary foes the Iroquois, they ranged
themselves for the most part on the side of the French.
[Sidenote: _The Huron Iroquois._]
The Hurons or Wyandots and the Iroquois were distinct from the
Algonquins and akin to each other. When Cartier visited the St.
Lawrence, the native towns which he found on the sites of Quebec and
Montreal seem to have been inhabited by Indians of this race; but by
Champlain's time the towns had disappeared, and those who dwelt in
them had sought other strongholds. Though related in blood and
speech, these two groups of tribes were deadly foes of each other.
The Hurons, like the Algonquins, were allied to the {55} French; the
Iroquois, guided partly by policy and partly by antipathy to the
European intruders into Canada and their Indian friends, were as a
rule to be found in amity with the English. The region of the upper
St. Lawrence and of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, was the home of
the Huron Iroquois race. The Huron country lay between Georgian Bay
of Lake Huron and Lake Simcoe. South of the Hurons, the northern
shore of Lake Erie and both sides of the Niagara river were held by
the Neutral Nation, neutral as between the Iroquois and the Hurons,
and akin to both. The Eries on the southern side of Lake Erie, and
the Andastes on the lower Susquehanna, were also of Huron Iroquois
stock; but the foremost group of the race, the strongest by far,
though not the most numerous, of all the North American Indians, were
the Iroquois themselves, the celebrated Five Nations of Canadian
story.
[Sidenote: _The country of the Five Nations._]
The Erie canal, which, in its 352 miles of length, connects Lake Erie
at Buffalo with the Hudson river at West Troy and Albany, runs
through the country of the Five Nations. That country extended along
the southern side of Lake Ontario from the Genesee river on the west
to the Hudson on the east, while due north of the Hudson, the outlet
of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, the Richelieu river, was in
old days known as the river of the Iroquois. The Mohawk river, along
which the Erie canal is now carried, was, on the Atlantic side, the
highway to the land of the Iroquois, and it bore the name of the best
known of the Five Nations, the whole confederacy being sometimes
spoken or written of as Mohawks.[9] The route up the river provided
nearly continuous communication by water between the Hudson and Lake
Ontario. From its confluence with the Hudson the Mohawk was followed
to the head of its navigation, whence there was a short portage of
about four miles {56} to Wood Creek, a stream running into the Oneida
lake, and the Oneida lake was linked to Lake Ontario by the Oswego
river. All this line was under Iroquois control; and the westernmost
of the Five Nations, the Senecas, commanded also the trade route to
Lake Erie.
[Footnote 9: The Mohawks, however, were not the strongest of the five
in number. They were outnumbered by the Senecas.]
[Sidenote: _The Five Nations._]
The name 'Iroquois' is said to be of French origin: the true title of
the Five Nations was an Indian word,[10] signifying 'people of the
long house.' Their dwellings were oblong in form, often of great
length; and, as were their dwellings, so also was their
dwelling-place. Side by side the Five Nations stretched in line from
west to east, as may be told by lakes and rivers in New York State,
which to this day bear their names. Farthest to the west were the
Senecas; next came the Cayugas, the people of the marsh. The third in
line, the central people of the league, within whose borders was the
federal Council house, were the Onondagas, the mountaineers; the
Oneidas followed; and easternmost of all were the Mohawks.[11]
[Footnote 10: Hodenosaunee.]
[Footnote 11: In a report of a committee of the Council held at New
York, Nov. 6, 1724, on the subject of a petition of the London
merchants against the Act of 1720, given in Colden's _History of the
Five Indian Nations of Canada_ (3rd ed., London, 1755), p. 226, the
Five Nations are placed as follows: the Mohawks but 40 miles due west
of Albany, and within the English settlements; the Oneidas about 100
miles west of Albany, and near the head of the Mohawk river; the
Onondagas about 130 miles west of Albany; the Cayugas 160; and the
Senecas 240.]
[Sidenote: _Small numbers of the Iroquois._]
[Sidenote: _Their geographical position. They held the border line
between French and English._]
In all the history of European colonization no group of savages,
perhaps, ever played so prominent a part as the Iroquois; none were
so courted and feared; none made themselves felt so heavily for a
long period of years together. This fact was not due to their
numbers, for they were comparatively few, and Parkman estimates that
'In the days of their greatest triumphs their united cantons could
not have mustered four thousand warriors.'[12] Yet they attacked and
{57} blotted out other Indian races equal to or outnumbering
themselves. They nearly destroyed the French settlements in Canada;
and all through the contest between Great Britain and France in
America, they were a force to be reckoned with by either side. Their
alliance was sought, their enmity was dreaded. Their strength was due
to the geographical position which they held, and to their national
characteristics; while their policy was influenced by the differing
conditions of the white people with whom they had to deal. Their home
has been described. It was the southern frontier of central Canada,
the borderland between the French and English spheres of trade and
settlement. Here they lived, in a position where a weak race would
have been ground in pieces between opposing forces, but where a
strong race, conscious of its advantages and able to use them, could
more than hold its own. 'Nothing,' wrote Charlevoix, 'has contributed
more to render them formidable than the advantage of their situation,
which they soon discovered, and know very well how to take advantage
of it. Placed between us and the English, they soon conceived that
both nations would be obliged to court them; and it is certain that
the principal attention of both colonies, since their settlement, has
been to gain them or at least to engage them to remain neuter.'[13]
[Footnote 12: _Conspiracy of Pontiac_ (1885 ed.), vol. i, chap. i, p.
21. Charlevoix says: 'All their forces joined together have never
amounted to more than 5,000 or 6,000 fighting men' (_Letters to the
Duchess of Lesdiguieres_, Engl. tr., London, 1763, p. 185). On the
other hand, in _A Concise Account of North America_, by Major Robert
Rogers (London, 1765), p. 206, it is stated that 'when the English
first settled in America they (the Iroquois) could raise 15,000
fighting men.']
[Footnote 13: Charlevoix, as above, pp. 184-5.]
[Sidenote: _Their strength of character and policy._]
A strong race the Iroquois were. In cruelty and endurance, in bold
conception and swift execution, they had few, if any, rivals among
the natives of North America, and in their grasp of something like
state policy they had no equals. As savages, pure and simple, they
reached the highest level; they might indeed have had a greater and
more lasting future, if their level had not been so high. The Kaffir
races of South Africa in our own time have produced good {58}
fighting material; some of their leaders have shown skilful
generalship and no small statecraft; but they have been loosely knit
together, little bound as a whole by the ties of country or of kin;
and from this very weakness has come their salvation, in that they
could and can be recast in a new mould. It was not so with the North
American Indians, least of all with the Iroquois. They were
stereotyped in savagery, and, when the white men came among them, it
was too late for them to change; but, as savages of the most
ferocious type, as ruthless murdering hunters of men, they developed
an organization which was evidence at once of intellectual and
physical strength, and of a wild kind of moral discipline.
[Sidenote: _Their political organization._]
It is rare to find among savages a confederacy which will outlive a
single expedition or one season's war. When there is cohesion, it is
usually under savage despots like the Zulu Kings, who habituate their
followers to military discipline, and keep them attached partly by
fear and partly by the memory or hope of successful bloodshed; but
among the Five Nations the rule of one man had no place, and, though
warring was their normal condition, the federation lasted in peace as
well. They were doubly federated. Not only were there five nations or
tribes, but there were also eight clans which included the whole of
the Five Nations, members of each clan being found in each nation.
The five nations had in fact originally been one, composed of eight
clans. Each clan was named after some beast or bird, which formed its
totem or coat of arms, the three leading clans bearing those of the
tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.[14] The {59} clan tie was a family
tie; the members of each clan, to whichever nation they belonged,
were as brothers and sisters, and there was no intermarrying between
them. Inheritance ran in the female line, and the children belonged
to the mother's clan. The clans gave the chieftains to the separate
nations and to the confederacy. The highest chiefs were known as
_sachems_, a civil rather than a military title, and the Council of
fifty sachems formed the principal governing body of the league, the
place of honour being given to the head sachem of the Onondagas.
There was also a Council of subordinate chiefs, and a wider body, a
Senate--in whose deliberations men of age and experience took part,
irrespective of hereditary rank. The form of government was the same
for each of the five nations as for the whole confederacy. There was
no law but much custom, despotism was unknown, and so was anarchy.
There was something Homeric about the Iroquois. Like the Greeks of
the legendary age, they were perpetually fighting in spasmodic
fashion, with great cruelty, with every form of guile as well as
force; and when not fighting they held innumerable councils, making
many and long-winded speeches. Apart from personal bravery, the one
sound element in their system and character was, strange as it may
appear, some measure of what the early Greeks valued under the term
[Greek: aidos] or reverence. The Iroquois reverenced long-standing
customs, social position, and the voice of age. War was their trade,
but the highest dignities attached to the civil chieftain more than
to the successful warrior. They dealt out shameless violence to all
beyond their pale, but within the ranks of their own people they
recognized much more than mere physical strength or skill in
butchery.
[Footnote 14: These three leading clans so put into the shade all the
others that in some old writers these alone are recognized. Thus
Colden says (vol. i, p. 1): 'Each of these nations is again divided
into three tribes or families, who distinguish themselves by three
different arms or ensigns, the tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.' A
full account of the Iroquois organization is given by Parkman in the
first chapter of the _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, and in the introduction
to _The Jesuits in North America_. See also the chapter on Canadian
and Iroquois Indians in Sir J. G. Bourinot's _Canada_, in the 'Story
of the Nations' series. It will be seen from the note to the
Introduction, p. lv, of _The Jesuits in North America_ (1885 ed.),
that the number of the clans as given above, and their presence in
each tribe, is not absolutely certain.]
[Sidenote: _The Iroquois in some respects resembled the Spartans._]
In their organization they had advanced beyond the stage {60} which
is outlined in the Iliad. They were far more democratic than the
Greeks of Homeric time. In savage sort they framed and kept a polity
of the kind which Aristotle tells us is the most perfect type of
constitution, being a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. The
hereditary principle was strong, but chieftainship did not pass from
father to son owing to the rule of female succession. The councils of
the nation found place for all whose qualifications were for the
public good. High standing, age, experience, eloquence, strength of
arm, all were recognized in this strange community. To Sparta Colden
likens the confederacy of the Five Nations, in that, in either case,
the national customs trained the minds and the bodies of the people
for war;[15] but the likeness extends to other points as well. As far
as a Greek state and a band of North American savages can be
compared, in their social and political training, in their inflexible
rules, in their recognition of merit combined with unswerving
adherence to the principle of priority of families and clans, no less
than in their heartless indifference to pain whether inflicted on
themselves or others, the Iroquois Indians resembled the citizens of
the famous Greek state. But whatever comparison may be made with
either ancient or modern communities, the story of the Five Nations
presents the curious problem of a group of savages of the very worst
type, who yet in some sort solved the difficulties which the most
civilized peoples find so great--those of reconciling democracy with
hereditary privileges, and federal union with local independence.
[Footnote 15: P. 14., 'On these occasions the state of Lacedaemon
ever occurs to my mind, which that of the Five Nations in many
respects resembles, their laws and customs being in both framed to
render the minds and bodies of the people fit for war.' Parkman, too,
says of them, 'Never since the days of Sparta were individual life
and national life more completely fused into one'; see _The Jesuits
in North America_ (1885 ed.), Introduction, p. lx.]
[Sidenote: _Principle of adoption among the Iroquois._]
Constantly weakened by the strain of war, to some extent {61} they
renewed their strength by the principle of adoption.[16] Of the
prisoners whom they took, most were put to death with nameless
tortures, but many were admitted to their tribes; and in one instance
they incorporated a whole people. This was the Tuscaroras, a kindred
tribe from the Carolinas, driven north by war with the colonists
early in the eighteenth century. About 1715, they were admitted into
the league as a sixth nation, though not on equal terms, and were
assigned a dwelling-place among the Oneidas and Onondagas.
[Footnote 16: 'They strictly follow one maxim, formerly used by the
Romans to increase their strength, that they encourage the people of
other nations to incorporate with them' (Colden, p. 5).]
[Sidenote: _Their sphere of influence._]
[Sidenote: _Their feud with the French._]
The tribes of the Huron Iroquois stock were agriculturists to a
greater extent than the Algonquins. In other words, they had passed
out of the nomad stage and made permanent homes. Still, they lived in
great measure by the chase; they were born hunters as they were born
warriors, and furs and beaver skins were the products which they
bartered for the white man's goods. The Five Nations hunted and
raided far beyond the limits of their cantons. In 1687, Dongan,
Governor of New York, wrote of them: 'The Five Nations are the most
warlike people in America, and are a bulwark between us and other
tribes. They go as far as the South Sea, the North-West Passage, and
Florida to war.'[17] Their interests as well as their pride demanded
that on the upper St. Lawrence, as well as on Lakes Erie and Ontario,
their power should be paramount. As far as other groups of Indians
were concerned, they ensured their object, conquering and in great
measure exterminating the Hurons, the Neutral Nation, and the Eries;
but they knew well that the few Frenchmen in Canada were more
dangerous to their ascendency, and possibly to their existence, than
any native tribe or race, however numerous. The French began by
making the Iroquois their foes. Champlain had hardly {62} settled at
Quebec, when he joined the Hurons and Algonquins in an expedition
against them. Thenceforward the Five Nations were the enemies of
France. This result would probably have followed in any case, and it
is difficult to suppose that one early action determined all
succeeding history. It was rather the beginning of an inevitable
struggle for the control of the upper St. Lawrence and of the
Canadian fur trade. On all sides of their own country the Iroquois,
like other masterful peoples, extended their sphere of influence; but
their real outlet was to the north, towards the lakes and the great
river. On this side the white men were most active and restless, ever
sending their emissaries a little further on, ever putting themselves
in evidence in some new tribe or village.[18] The French were not
content to live outside the Indians; nor were they content, having
found a resting-place, to stay there. To be in and among the natives,
to control and to convert them, to be the recognized protectors of
the land and its peoples, to be the ultimate recipients of the
produce of the country, and the guardians of the channels by which
the produce was conveyed--no smaller aims sufficed for the French in
Canada. In the pursuit of these objects they directly competed with
the Iroquois Indians. Great was the territory, few in number were the
Frenchmen and Iroquois alike; but they were rivals for ascendency on
the same river, and there was not room for both.
[Footnote 17: _Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1685-8, No. 1160,
pp. 328-9, Dongan to the Lords of Trade, March, 1687.]
[Footnote 18: 'But this justice must be done to the French, that they
far exceeded the English in the daring attempts of some of their
inhabitants, in travelling very far among unknown Indians,
discovering new countries, and everywhere spreading the fame of the
French name and grandeur' (Colden, p. 35).]
Because they were enemies of the French, the Iroquois naturally
became the allies of the English; but before they had much, if any
experience of the latter, they had come into contact with a third
European people, the Dutch on the Hudson river.
[Sidenote: _The Dutch on the Hudson river._]
[Sidenote: _New Netherland._]
In 1609, the year after the founding of Quebec, Henry {63} Hudson, an
Englishman in the Netherlands service, sailed at the beginning of
September into the river which still bears his name, seeking, as he
sought till his death, a North-West Passage to Asia. The name of New
Netherland was formally given to the scene of his discovery in 1614,
and in 1615 a small fort was built on Manhattan Island--the first
little seed of the city of New York. In 1621, the Netherlands West
India Company came into being; and in the following year New
Netherland, with the beaver trade, which was its chief attraction,
was placed in the hands of the company. In settling on the Hudson the
Dutch conflicted with English claims, and the Government of the
Netherlands seem to have recognized that there was a flaw in their
title. However, the existence of New Netherland as a Dutch possession
continued till the year 1664, when it was surrendered to an English
force sent out by the Duke of York, who had obtained from his
brother, Charles II, a grant of the territory. The English occupation
was confirmed by the Peace of Breda in 1667; and though a Dutch fleet
recovered the colony in 1673, in the following year, by the Treaty of
Westminster, it was finally given up to the English.
New Amsterdam, afterwards New York, was the chief settlement of New
Netherland; but Dutch trade and colonization extended up the valley
of the Hudson, where tracts of land were obtained by _patroons_ or
large landowners, who were granted exclusive privileges by the
company on condition of planting families of settlers upon their
holdings. The chief inland colony was Rensselaerswyck, called after
an Amsterdam merchant of the name of Rensselaer, and its centre was
Fort Orange, now Albany; while on the Mohawk river, about twenty
miles above its confluence with the Hudson, and rather less in a
direct line from Albany, was the settlement of Schenectady.[19]
[Footnote 19: For an account of the Dutch on the Hudson see _A
Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets
relating to {64} New Netherland_, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam,
Frederick Mueller, 1868), referred to above. See also Justin Winsor's
_Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. iv, chap. viii.]
[Sidenote: _Friendship between the Dutch and the Iroquois._]
Traders wherever they went, all the world over, the Dutchmen were at
pains to keep peace with the Iroquois. Their dealings with them were
on the same lines as the dealings of their countrymen with the
Hottentots in the early days of the Cape Colony.[20] They bought and
sold, and got good value for their money, paying, for instance, no
more than forty florins for Manhattan Island. But the mere fact of
paying for what they took was in their favour, for it was a
recognition that the natives were the rightful owners of the land. In
course of time they came into conflict with the Mohican Indians along
the banks of the Hudson; but with the Five Nations, the nearest of
whom were the Mohawks, they were ever in friendship. They were not
actually in the Mohawk country, but on its borders; they were
neighbours, not intruders; they took the furs which the Indians had
to barter, giving in exchange European goods, and notably firearms.
Thus Albany became a friendly meeting-place between the Iroquois
Indians and the white men of the Hudson colony. The two peoples did
not clash with one another in any way, but met as friends and equals,
and supplied each others' wants.
[Footnote 20: See vol. iv of this series, chap. ii, p. 43.]
The one object of the Dutch being to trade, and the whole people
being traders, a twofold result followed, promoting friendly
relations between them and the Mohawks. Not only did the Indians
realize that they had nothing to fear, and much to gain, from having
for their neighbours Europeans who had no views of war or conquest,
and through whose agency they could arm themselves against the more
aggressive Europeans on the Canadian side; but also, as we may well
suppose, the Dutch traders included the best of the Dutchmen, which
was not the case with either the French or the English. At any rate,
we read that the Dutch in the Hudson valley 'gained the hearts of the
Five Nations by {65} their kind usage',[21] and in memory of a
Dutchman named Cuyler, whom the Indians held in special honour, the
Iroquois in after years always gave to the British Governor of New
York the title of 'Corlaer'.[22]
[Footnote 21: Colden, vol. i, p. 34.]
[Footnote 22: Parkman's _Count Frontenac_ (1885 ed.), p. 93, note.]
[Sidenote: _The English inherited the Iroquois alliance._]
Into this kindly heritage the English entered;[23] and, though their
treatment of the Indians left much to be desired, the alliance, if
often strained, was, in the case of the Mohawks at any rate, never
sundered; and finally, at the close of the War of Independence, many
of the Five Nation Indians, after fighting for England, migrated into
Canada, and were assigned lands in the province of Ontario, where
their descendants are still to be found. In the words of the Indian
orators, a chain of friendship held together the English and the
Iroquois. 'Our chain,' they said, 'is a strong chain, it is a silver
chain, it can neither rust nor be broken';[24] and it would be
difficult to overrate the advantage which accrued to the English
colonies from their traditional alliance with the strongest natives
of North America.
[Footnote 23: Colden, as above, 'In 1664, New York being taken by the
English, they likewise entered into a friendship with the Five
Nations.']
[Footnote 24: Colden, p. 125.]
[Sidenote: _The founding of Quebec._]
In the summer of 1608, Champlain founded the first French settlement
at Quebec. A year before, the English had settled at Jamestown in
Virginia. A year later, the Dutch found their way to the Hudson. Till
his death, at the end of 1635, the story of Champlain is the story of
Canada. His colleagues in the new enterprise were men with whom he
had already worked in Acadia--De Monts and Pontgrave. De Monts had
obtained from the King one year's monopoly of the Canadian fur trade,
and two ships which he sent to the St. Lawrence were in charge of
Pontgrave and Champlain respectively. Pontgrave, the merchant, stayed
at Tadoussac through the summer, bartering with the Indians and
coming to blows with Basque traders, who held {66} the French King's
patent of little account. Champlain, the explorer, went higher up the
river, and erected wooden buildings by the water-side, on the site of
the lower town of Quebec. There he stayed through the winter, while
his friend went home, and, when Pontgrave returned in the following
summer, travels and adventures began which made Champlain's name
great among the Indian tribes of Canada.
[Sidenote: _Champlain's explorations and collision with the
Iroquois._]
His first expedition, in 1609, was to the lake which is still called
after him. He went as an ally of the Huron and the Algonquin Indians
against their enemies the Iroquois. Up the St. Lawrence, up the
Richelieu, and on to Lake Champlain he took his way, and at the head
of the lake, somewhere near the site where Fort Ticonderoga
afterwards stood, the white men's firearms dispersed the warriors of
the Five Nations and won a victory. The summer of 1609 ended, and
Champlain went back to France, returning to Canada in the following
spring.[25]
[Footnote 25: Canada was first known as New France after Champlain's
return to Europe, in 1609 (Charlevoix's _Histoire Generale de la
Nouvelle France_, 1744 ed., vol. i, bk. iv, p. 149).]
[Sidenote: _His difficulties in France._]
De Monts' monopoly had expired and had not been renewed, but none the
less he and his associates persevered in their enterprise, opening up
the trade of the St. Lawrence, while others shared the profits. Again
Champlain joined forces with the friendly Indians against the
Iroquois, and a second victory was the result. Before the summer of
1610 ended, he was back in Europe, having learnt in the meantime that
his friend and patron, King Henry IV, had been stabbed to death in
the streets of Paris. On his next visit to Canada, in 1611, he
cleared the ground for a future settlement at Montreal, having noted
its advantages as a meeting-place for the Indian tribes from the
Ottawa and the great lakes. The late months of that year and the
whole of 1612 he spent in France, trying to devise some organization
under which the work of building up the French power in Canada {67}
might be successfully carried on. There was now no company in
existence, there was no royal mandate; personal favour and protection
had passed away with the death of Henry of Navarre. The French court
was a scene of growing priestly influence and of numberless
intrigues; while New France on the St. Lawrence was a 'no man's
land,' infested in summer time by crowds of fur-traders, who owned no
rule and knew no law, in winter deserted by white men, except the few
struggling settlers at Quebec. To form some kind of trade's union
under an acknowledged authority was the one thing needful, and with a
view to this end Champlain sought for and obtained the patronage of a
member of the royal house. The Count de Soissons, a Bourbon prince,
was appointed Lieutenant-General of the King for New France, and when
he died, shortly after his appointment, the place was taken by
another Bourbon, the Prince of Conde. The deputy of these princes was
Champlain himself; he was given control over the Canadian fur trade,
and he endeavoured to reconcile the rival interests of the western
ports of France by forming a combination of traders, to which all
could be admitted who had an interest in Canada. The scheme was
partially carried out, but unfortunately jealousies, commercial and
religious, precluded the establishment of a single united company.
[Sidenote: _The imposture of Nicolas de Vignau._]
To make money by trade for himself or others was not the first object
of Champlain's life. Exploration, with the Indies as its final goal,
was in his mind, and the formation of a colony which should indeed be
New France. While he still sojourned in Europe, a Frenchman, Nicolas
de Vignau, came back from Canada, telling a tale that up the Ottawa
river and beyond its sources he had found an outlet to the sea. Early
in 1613 Champlain recrossed the Atlantic, went up the St. Lawrence to
Montreal Island, and thence, taking De Vignau with him, followed the
course of the Ottawa as far as the Ile des Allumettes. He went no
further. The {68} story of a way to the sea was exposed, as a
cunningly devised fable, by the Indians of the upper Ottawa, among
whom the impostor had sojourned when he concocted his lies; and, but
for Champlain's interposition, he would then and there have paid for
his falsehood with his life. Champlain, however, spared him, retraced
his steps, and went back again to France, where he spent a year and
more before he again visited Canada.
[Sidenote: _The Recollet friars._]
[Sidenote: _Le Caron._]
[Sidenote: _The first mission to the Hurons._]
Towards the end of May, 1615, he reached Quebec. He brought with him
this time a small band of missionaries, four friars of the Recollet
branch of the Franciscan order; and now mission work began in Canada.
One of the friars, Le Caron, with twelve other Frenchmen in the
company, visited for the first time the Huron country, and Champlain
followed close upon his steps. Ascending the Ottawa for the second
time, he passed the point which he had reached two years before, and
by the Mattawa river and Lake Nipissing came to the shores of Lake
Huron. Coasting southward along Georgian Bay, he found himself at
length among the Huron towns, where Le Caron was already busy
preaching a new faith to the heathen. An expedition against the
Iroquois had been determined on, and with the Huron warriors and
their allies, Champlain set out for the enemy's land. His route took
him across Lake Simcoe, down the series of small lakes which feed the
river Trent, and by that river to Lake Ontario, then seen by him for
the first time. Crossing the lake, he landed at the site of Oswego,
and marched into the midst of the Five Nations' cantons. From the
military point of view the expedition was a disastrous failure, for
an attack on a palisaded Iroquois town miscarried, Champlain himself
was wounded, and the invaders retreated beaten and disheartened.
Among the Hurons Champlain spent the winter; next year, returning
down the Ottawa, he came back to Quebec, in the midsummer of 1616,
and subsequently he sailed for France.
{69} [Sidenote: _Result of the first eight years of New France._]
Eight years had now passed since the founding of Quebec. Lakes Huron
and Ontario had been reached, the Ottawa route had been explored, the
friendship of the Hurons had been secured at the price of enmity with
the Iroquois, missionaries were converting or trying to convert the
Indians, and fur trading was briskly carried on; but colonization had
made as yet little or no way. There were a few permanent residents at
Quebec; but lower down at Tadoussac, and higher up at Three Rivers
and Montreal, where in the summer white men and coloured foregathered
to exchange their wares, in the winter no Frenchmen were to be found,
unless it were one or other of the much enduring Recollet
missionaries. In France it was the trade of Canada, not its
settlement, that was matter of concern. As in the case of
Newfoundland, the merchants of the western seaports of England set
themselves to keep the island from being permanently colonized,
anxious that the fishing traffic should remain in their own hands: so
in the case of Canada, the merchants of the western seaboard of
France regarded colonization as at best a useless expense, at worst a
measure by which they might lose command of the fur trade. The
climate of Newfoundland and of the St. Lawrence region was not such
as to induce Englishmen or Frenchmen to make these lands their homes.
Rather they seemed places for summer trips alone, to be left in
winter icebound and desolate. Trade interests and nature combined to
check the colonization of Canada; that anything was done in the way
of settlement in the early years of the seventeenth century was due
to missionary enthusiasm and to the foresight and tenacity of
Champlain.
[Sidenote: _Dispute among French traders._]
[Sidenote: _Company of the One Hundred Associates formed by
Richelieu._]
He had formed a company of merchants, chiefly connected with Rouen
and St. Malo, who nominally controlled the trade of the St. Lawrence;
but they were not at one amongst themselves, some were Catholics,
others were Huguenots, while the merchants of La Rochelle refused to
join the combination, {70} and traded in defiance of the monopoly
which the rival towns claimed to possess. Various changes followed.
About the beginning of 1620, Conde was succeeded as Viceroy of New
France by the Duc de Montmorency, and in 1625 the latter sold his
office to his nephew the Duc de Ventadour. In 1621, the privileges
enjoyed by the Rouen and St. Malo company were transferred to two
Huguenot merchants, the brothers De Caen: the result was ill feeling,
and on the St. Lawrence open feuds between the old and the new
monopolists, until in 1623 some kind of union was formed. Eventually,
in 1627, all former privileges were annulled, and the control of
Canada passed into the hands of a new strong company, known as the
One Hundred Associates, at the head of which was Richelieu.
[Sidenote: _Building of the fort at Quebec._]
During these troubled years, amid the squabbles of conflicting
interests, the one source of strength and steadfastness for the
Frenchmen on the St. Lawrence was Champlain's own personality, while
the two principal events were the building of the fort at Quebec, and
the coming of the Jesuit missionaries. As Lieutenant of the King and
representative of the Viceroys of New France, Champlain's difficult
task was to hold the balance even between the rival traders and to
maintain some semblance of law and order along the water highway of
Canada. In former years, as an explorer he had obtained unrivalled
influence among the Indians; now, as Governor, he brought the same
qualities of tact and firmness into play in keeping the peace among
his turbulent countrymen. From 1620 to 1624, he was continuously in
Canada, and on the rock of Quebec he built a fort stronger and more
substantial than the wooden buildings which abutted on the river
below. Well situated, able to withstand ten thousand men,[26] such
was an English account a few years later of this fort, when enlarged
and completed--the fort {71} St. Louis at Quebec. The merchants
grudged the money and the men for the work, but the building of a
substantial fortress on the St. Lawrence was a step forward towards
the French dominion of Canada.
[Footnote 26: _Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1574-1660, p.
139, under the year 1632.]
[Sidenote: _Coming of the Jesuits to Canada._]
[Sidenote: _Their policy._]
[Sidenote: _Supported by the French Government._]
The year 1625 was the year in which the first Jesuit missionaries
came into Canada. In that year the Duc de Ventadour became Viceroy of
New France: he was closely connected with the Jesuit order, and began
his regime by sending out priests at his own expense. Their coming
marked an epoch in Canadian history. The Franciscan brethren, who
were already in the field, and who welcomed the new-comers on their
arrival, were men of a different stamp. Devoted missionaries, they
kept to their work; they claimed, outwardly at least, no religious
monopoly; they had no wish to control the temporal power; and they
lived at peace with all men. The Jesuits, on the other hand, imported
religious despotism. The Jesuit emissaries were brave men, none more
so; they were self-sacrificing to an extreme, venturesome and
tenacious, indifferent to danger, and fearless of death. They were
tactful in their dealings with the Indians, and were trained in a
school of diplomacy which has never been excelled. But they were the
champions of exclusiveness, and the enemies of freedom. Their coming
meant that one form of religion was to supplant all others--that the
spiritual power was, as far as in them lay, to dominate all things
and all men; and that while much was to be done, it was to be done
for instead of by the colonists and the natives, from above instead
of from below, on a rigid system--strong in itself but inimical to
healthy growth, to that variety of life, of thought, and of outward
form which helps on the expansion of a young community. From their
training and their organization, the Jesuits would in any case have
had great influence on the fortunes of the land to which they came;
but their influence was greater in that their despotic views
harmonized for the time being with the policy {72} of the Bourbon
Kings and their ministers. For absolute monarchy had taken root in
France; and in the French dependencies, as in the mother country,
there was to be henceforth political and religious despotism. That
the spiritual power might grow too strong was a distant danger, and
in France hardly a practical possibility. In the meantime Kings and
priests went hand in hand, co-operating against liberty in church and
state alike. Protestantism meant liberty. The Jesuits abhorred the
Huguenots because they deemed them heretics: the French Kings and
their ministers oppressed them rather on political than on religious
grounds, but were glad to use the religious argument in support of
political aims.
[Sidenote: _Oppression of the Huguenots in France._]
[Sidenote: _Its effects in Canada._]
[Sidenote: _The Huguenots excluded from New France._]
On the death of Henry IV in 1610, his young son, Louis XIII, became
King of France. In 1624 Richelieu became his minister. In 1627 the
discontent of the Huguenots culminated in the open revolt of the town
of La Rochelle; and its fall, after a ten months' siege, gave the
King and the cardinal mastery over the Protestants of France. The
effect on Canada of this unsuccessful rising was twofold. It involved
the exclusion of Huguenot settlers, and it involved also the
hostility of England. The patent granted in 1627 to the company of
New France, known as the One Hundred Associates, provided that every
colonist who went out to Canada must be a Catholic, and when in the
following year Richelieu received the submission of the Rochellois,
he was well able to enforce this arbitrary provision. It is difficult
at the present day to comprehend a policy, initiated and approved by
a statesman of consummate ability, which could not but result in
blighting the infancy of the greatest French colony. The English
colonies were in the main pre-eminently homes of freedom,
dwelling-places for men whose political and religious opinions found
scant favour in the United Kingdom. For the English race the New
World redressed the balance of the Old; and though the {73} colonists
who went out from Europe to America, were in their turn prejudiced
and narrow-minded, their want of tolerance was not forced upon them
from without, and members of one or other unpopular sect, when
persecuted in one province, could find refuge in another. Maryland
was a British colony, founded under Roman Catholic auspices; its
neighbour, Pennsylvania, was founded and dominated by Quaker
influence; throughout British North America there were examples of
all opinions and of all creeds. The men on the spot quarrelled with
and persecuted each other; but persecution and exclusion were not
ordained from home. It would have been bad for the British Empire if
from all settlements, which the English formed and maintained, Roman
Catholics had been rigidly kept out; but it was far worse for France
when her Kings and ministers closed the French colonies to the
Huguenots.
[Sidenote: _Merits of the Huguenots as colonists._]
[Sidenote: _War between England and France._]
The Huguenots were the best of the French traders; they were men of
substance; they were capable, enterprising, and resolute. They were
beyond others of their countrymen, the pioneers of trade and
colonization, and had led the way in the New World. De Monts was a
Huguenot, the De Caens were Huguenots, Champlain himself is said to
have been of Huguenot parentage. The exclusion of the French
Protestants from Canada meant depriving Canada of the class of
Frenchmen who were most capable of colonizing the country and
developing its trade. Their fault, in the eyes of the French
Government, was their independence; that they did not conform to the
state religion, and that by not conforming they were politically an
element of danger. But what was deemed a fault in France would, in
colonizing America, have been a virtue; inasmuch as in the field of
adventure, trade, and settlement in new lands, the men who are least
bound by old-world systems and traditional views are of most value.
If fair play had been given to the French Protestants, Canada would
have been far stronger than it {74} ever was while it belonged to
France, and probably it would have continued to belong to France down
to the present day. For the closing of Canada to the Huguenots,
followed as it was afterwards by their ejection from France, not only
weakened France and her colonies, but strengthened the rival nations
and their colonies. The French citizens who had begun to build up the
French colonial empire, helped to build up instead the colonial
empires of other European nations; and the oppressions which they
suffered brought them the sympathy, at times the armed sympathy, of
the Protestant nations of Europe. The rising of the citizens of La
Rochelle was accompanied by war between England and France.
Buckingham's expedition for the relief of the city, ill planned and
ill led, was a fiasco, completing the ruin of the Rochellois instead
of bringing them relief; but on the other side of the Atlantic, where
English adventurers could take advantage of a time of war without
being hampered by court favourites, there was a different tale to
tell.
[Sidenote: _David Kirke_]
Sir William Alexander,[27] a Scotch favourite of James I, had in the
year 1621 obtained from the King a grant of Acadia, or, as it was
styled in the patent, Nova Scotia. The patent was renewed by Charles
I. When war broke out between Great Britain and France, Alexander
combined with certain London merchants, styled 'Adventurers to
Canada,' or 'Adventurers in the Company of Canada,' to strike a blow
at the French in North America. Prominent among these merchants was
George Kirke, a Derbyshire man, who had married the daughter of a
merchant of Dieppe. Three ships were fitted out under the command of
Kirke's three sons, David, Lewis, and Thomas, David Kirke being in
charge of the expedition. The Kirkes were furnished with letters of
marque from the King, authorizing {75} them to attack French ships
and French settlements in America; and, well armed and equipped, they
sailed over the Atlantic, entering the St. Lawrence at the beginning
of July, 1628.
[Footnote 27: A further account of Sir William Alexander is given
below, p. 173.]
[Sidenote: _attacks the French on the St. Lawrence_]
[Sidenote: _and destroys a French fleet._]
Below Quebec was the trading station at Tadoussac, and higher up than
Tadoussac, less than thirty miles below Quebec, there was a small
farming establishment--a 'petite ferme'--at Cape Tourmente, whence
the garrison at Quebec drew supplies. Kirke took up his position at
Tadoussac, and sent a small party up the river, who burnt and rifled
the buildings at Cape Tourmente and killed the cattle. He then
dispatched some of his prisoners to Quebec and called upon Champlain
to surrender. The summons was rejected, though the garrison was in
sore straits. The Iroquois had been of late on the warpath, and the
inroads of Indians on the one hand and of English on the other, meant
starvation to the handful of men on the rock of Quebec. Yet Richelieu
had not been unmindful of Canada. While these events were happening,
a French fleet of eighteen vessels had sailed from Dieppe, laden with
arms and supplies, and bringing also some settlers with their
families, and the inevitable accompaniment of priests. It was the
first effort made by the newly formed French company, an earnest of
their intention to give strength and permanence to New France. The
expedition reached Gaspe Point, at the entrance of the St. Lawrence;
but between them and Quebec were the Kirkes and their ships. Instead
of moving up the river to attack Quebec, the English admiral went
down the river to intercept the new-comers. The English ships were
but three to eighteen; but the three ships were fitted and manned for
war. The French vessels were transports only, freighted with stores
and non-combatants, unable either to fight or to escape. On July 18,
Kirke attacked them, and seventeen out of the eighteen ships fell
into his hands. Ten vessels he emptied and burnt, the rest of his
prizes, {76} with all the cargo and prisoners, he carried off in
triumph to Newfoundland.
[Sidenote: _First English capture of Quebec._]
There was bitterness in France when the news came of this great
disaster; there was distress and hopelessness at Quebec, where
Champlain still held out through the following winter. Kirke had gone
back to England; but when July came round again in 1629, he
reappeared in the St. Lawrence, with a stronger fleet than before.
The Frenchmen at Quebec were by this time starved out, they had no
alternative but to surrender; and on July 22, 1629, the English flag
was for the first time hoisted on the rocky citadel of Canada. There
was little booty for the conquerors, nothing but beaver skins, which
were subsequently sequestrated, and Canadian pines were cut down to
freight the English ships. Kirke's ships carried back to England
Champlain and his companions, who thence returned to their homes in
France; and Quebec was left in charge of an English garrison.
[Sidenote: _Convention of Susa and Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye._]
[Sidenote: _Canada given back to France._]
The Merchant Adventurers had done their work well. With little or no
loss, unaided by the Government, they had driven the French from
Canada and annexed New France. Had Queen Elizabeth been on the throne
of England, she would have scolded and then approved; and would have
kept for her country the fruits of English daring and English
success. The bold freebooter, Kirke, would have found favour in her
eyes; she would have honoured and rewarded him, as she honoured and
rewarded Drake. But the Stuarts were cast in a different mould, and
no English minister at the time was a match for Richelieu. Before
Quebec had fallen, Charles of England and Louis of France had
concluded the Convention of Susa, on April 24, 1629; and the Treaty
of St. Germain-en-Laye, signed nearly three years later, on March 29,
1632, definitely restored to France her possessions in North
America.[28] No consideration was {77} embodied in the treaty for the
surrender of Canada, but State Papers have made clear that the price
was the unpaid half of Queen Henrietta Maria's marriage dowry. For
this sum, already due and wrongly outstanding, Canada was sold. It
was a pitiful proceeding, unworthy of an English King, but typical of
a Stuart. It is noteworthy that early in the seventeenth century both
the Cape and Canada might have become and remained British colonies.
In 1620 two sea captains formally annexed the Cape, before any
settlement had as yet been founded at Table Bay; but their action was
never ratified by the Government at home.[29] Nine years later Kirke
took Quebec, and again the work was undone. So the Dutch in the one
case, and the French in the other, made colonies where the English
might have run their course; and generations afterwards, Great
Britain took again, with toil and trouble, what her adventurers, with
truer instinct than her rulers possessed, had claimed and would have
kept in earlier days. It is noteworthy, too, that state policy was in
great measure responsible for the earlier French loss of Canada, as
it was mainly responsible for the later. It is true that Quebec was
taken while the French Protestants were still to some extent
tolerated, and that a Protestant, De Caen, was selected to receive it
back again, when the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye was carried into
effect. But there were Huguenots on board Kirke's ships, serving
under a commander whose mother was of Huguenot blood; and the schism
which had broken out in France and {78} culminated for the time in
the siege and fall of La Rochelle, left the best of the French
traders and colonizers half-hearted servants of France. Canada was
given back, but it was given back to the French Government rather
than to the French people; and, as years went on, the St. Lawrence
saw no more of the stubborn, strong heretics who had sung their
Protestant hymns on its banks. Frenchmen, as gallant as they were,
had afterwards the keeping of Canada; but, state-ridden and
priest-ridden, they lacked initiative and commercial enterprise.
Freedom was to be found in the backwoods among the _coureurs de
bois_, but it was the freedom of lawlessness, unleavened by the
steadfast sobriety which marked the Calvinists of France.
[Footnote 28: The Convention of Susa provided that all acts of
hostility should cease, and that the articles and contracts as to the
marriage of the English Queen should be confirmed. The Treaty of St.
Germain-en-Laye, or rather one of two treaties signed on the same
day, provided for the restitution to France of all places occupied by
the English in New France, Acadia, and Canada. Instructions to make
restitution were to be given to the commanders at Port Royal, Fort
Quebec, and Cape Breton. General de Caen was named in the treaty as
the French representative to arrange for the evacuation of the
English. The places were to be restored in the same condition as they
had been in at the time of capture, all arms taken were to be made
good, and a sum was to be paid for the furs, &c., which had been
carried off.]
[Footnote 29: See vol. iv of this series, pt. 1, p. 19.]
[Sidenote: _Death of Champlain._]
In July, 1632, the French regained Quebec. In May, 1633, Champlain
came back to Canada. For two and a half years he governed it under
the French company, and on Christmas Day, 1635, he died at Quebec in
the sixty-ninth year of his age. New France owed all to him. Amid
every form of difficulty and intrigue, in Europe and in America,
among white men and among red, he had held resolutely to his purpose.
His life was pure, his aims were high, his judgment sound, and his
foresight great. He lived for the country in which he was born and
for that in which he died; but 'the whole earth is the sepulchre of
famous men',[30] and not in France or Canada alone is lasting honour
paid to his name.
[Footnote 30: Thuc., bk. ii, chap. xliii (Jowett's translation).]
NOTE.--For Canadian history down to the death of Champlain, see,
among modern books, more especially
PARKMAN'S _Pioneers of France in the New World_, and
KINGSFORD'S _History of Canada_, vol. i.
{79}