Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 717
Those who condemn Cartier for kidnapping Donnacona should better understand the spirit of the age. Columbus had sent home in 1495 five shiploads of Indians to be sold as slaves in Seville. Article “Columbus,” Encyc. Brit., 1929 John Hawkins was presently to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth for opening the Guinea trade in kidnapped negroes. We may see in Donnacona and his mates not slaves, but household curiosities, gay with trinkets and vain with self-importance. All of the Indians brought over died in France, except one little girl. But, like Lady Macbeth, they would have died tomorrow. It is unfair to sully a great reputation for an imaginary wrong, or one at least devoid of cruelty.
For Cartier is one of the heroic characters of his age — courageous, patriotic, devout. There was nothing in him of the brutality of the Peruvian conquerors. Wherever he went, the Cross and divine service went with him. To him the savages were God’s children. He braved all dangers but made no attempt at conquest in arms. He faced undismayed the onslaught of the pestilence and the treachery of the savages that seemed to preclude all hope of a return to France. His followers appear to have evinced a faith in their leader worthy of his leadership.
Reflecting on Cartier’s part in the foundation of our commonwealth, we realize how deeply graven on it is the seal of France; how necessary it is that we should regard this heritage and recognize the permanence of French nationality and language as one of the corner-stones of this our British Dominion.
Cartier sailed from Stadacona on May 6, 1536, and reached the port of St. Malo on July 16, 1536. The king’s abounding favour promised new expeditions. But Cartier’s later voyages and his association with Roberval need not concern us here. The record is confused. We cannot rightly follow their coming and going. Nor was anything thereby accomplished for the further development of colonization.
After Cartier’s voyages the ‘Canada’ that he had disclosed and named fell back from the foreground of interest. There were still the fisheries and many individual voyages into coastal waters. But the energies of the nation were turned elsewhere. Canada still slept under its forests, while ‘religion’ thundered its wars over Europe.
To Newfoundland is commonly conceded the rank of Britain’s oldest colony. Modern research scholars, who can never let a good thing alone, have lately disputed this title. It is claimed that actual settlement in Bermuda began in 1610, several months before actual settlement in Newfoundland. But this is only the pleasant nonsense of research scholars, unable to understand a plain thing in a plain way. Under Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s patent, the sovereignty of Queen Elizabeth was proclaimed over Newfoundland in 1583; and the “New Found Land,” to mean the island and the mainland coast adjoining, was familiar to English sailors for nearly a hundred years before Bermuda is known to have been visited by them.
Indeed the occupation of Newfoundland, and with it, of Labrador and the Gulf coast, by English and other fishermen begins with the voyages of John Cabot. Wonderful stories came home with Cabot to England. There has been preserved a contemporary letter from an Italian in London to the Duke of Milan, in which he says that Cabot’s sailors “practically all English from H. A. Innis, “The Cod Fisheries,” 1940 Bristol, affirm that the sea is swarming with fish which can be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down with a stone.” With this begins the development of the maritime fisheries of the Gulf and the Banks which fill so large a page in Canadian history. Soon after Cabot’s second voyage the Atlantic passage was familiar to a whole fleet of fishing boats out of Bristol and the Channel ports of France, from La Rochelle and from Portugal. As early as 1522 the energetic Henry VIII sent a royal ship of war down the Channel to protect the “coming home of the New Found Island’s fleet.” Apart from seasons of tempest, the voyage was no great matter. The vessels only came and went in the summer season. At its close they drove home with the north-west wind, filled to the hatches, in a voyage often hardly more than a fortnight. They fished at first in the shallows of the Gulf, then out, and farther out, on the Grand “Banks” a hundred miles from land, where the continental shelf of North America falls steeply into the deep sea.
It is true that for the first half-century the English boats still kept chiefly to their familiar Iceland fishing grounds, the vessels sailing from the east-coast ports of England and out of London — 149 vessels in 1528. But after the middle century the Newfoundland fisheries grew apace and engaged a fleet out of the English ports which numbered by the reign of James I about 300 vessels.
The fishermen made no lodgement. They landed to dry and salt their fish, to get wood and such supplies as might be. The winter they never saw. They carried with them their wine from Portugal and it was found that by a kindly miracle of the sea the wine improved with the journey. Later — ideas came slowly in those days — they carried wine back and forward on purpose and Newfoundland port added its lesser glory to Newfoundland cod.
Thus went on these nameless voyages through the unwritten annals of nearly a century. But some men in England dreamed of wider enterprises than fishing. Among them was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother to Walter Raleigh. He had all the force and inspiration of the Elizabethan age; studied charts of the sea, dreamed of empire and wrote a Discourse of a Discovery of a New Passage to Cathay. Gilbert it was who made the first attempt at British colonization overseas. Queen Elizabeth gave him a charter (1578) “for the inhabiting and planting our people in America.” Under this he made a voyage to the Florida coast that came to nothing; then in 1583 he sailed again with five ships (Sir) C. P. Lucas, ‘New France’ (Part I of “Canada”) 1901 and a company of two hundred and sixty men bound for the Newfoundland coast. They were a varied lot, carpenters and artisans to build a settlement, “mineral men and refiners” — in case of gold — and “morris dancers” (meaning Moorish dancers) “for the solace of our people and allurement of the savages.” Thus came Vaudeville to America.
It is typical of the times, and illustrates our limited acquaintance with them, that when Gilbert sailed into the harbour of St. John’s (August, 1583) there were thirty-six ships lying in port. F. Parkman, “Pioneers of France,” Chap. I The name (St. John’s) was there long since. Like those of many capes and bays in Newfoundland, it seems to date back even before Cartier; as witness similarly our Cape Breton Island. Gilbert took formal possession, no one opposing. But his colony came to a premature end. Gilbert and part of his fleet were lost on the homeward voyage. Such men, if any, as he left behind, were merged among the fishermen. Yet the ‘sovereignty’ remained, and permanent settlers wintered after 1610. Gilbert’s best legacy to his country was his last known words, called from his doomed ship, “We are as near heaven by sea as by land.”
STANLEY ROYLE, R.B.A., R.C.A., SACKVILLE, N.B., 1941
“. . . the Newfoundland fisheries grew apace . . .” — page 45
Equally lofty in its motive and equally disastrous in its fate was the attempt of Gilbert’s half-brother Raleigh to found a colony to the south. Two vessels sent on a summer voyage of reconnaissance (1584) landed on Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina, and brought marvellous accounts of a land of delight. Raleigh was knighted and in 1587, with royal help, sent out seven ships with 108 colonists to colonize this new ‘Virginia.’ The Roanoke settlement struggled for six years against Indian treachery and the inexperience and false hopes of its own colonists. In spite of reinforcements the place was abandoned, its last occupants falling victims to the Indians.
Thus (in 1601), with the beginning of the new century, America still awaited settlement. Then came Champlain, the Pilgrim Fathers and the Virginia Company, and a new era begins.
Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) shares with Jacques Cartier N. Dionne, ‘Champlain,’ “Makers of Canada” the highest honours in the annals of French Canada. To Cartier belongs priority of discovery and of the conception of empire. Champlain, indeed, was not born until thirty years after Cartier’s discovery. But in length of service and in actual accomplishment there is no comparison. Cartier’s voyages, passed and gone in eight years (1534-1542), left no settlement. Cartier knew nothing, except from hearsay, of what was beyond Hochelaga. Champlain’s service, in and for New France, of which he became the first Governor, lasted in all thirty-three years. He made To and From America 1599 1601 1603 1603 1604 1607 1608 1609 1610 1610 1611 1611 1612 1612 1613 1614 1615 1616 1617 1618 1620 1624 1623 1629 1635 thirteen voyages from France to America and twelve from America to France. He explored North America from the Bay of Fundy to Lake Huron, from the navigation head of the Saguenay to the head of the lake which bears his name. He helped to establish Port Royal on Annapolis Basin, the first white settlement since the Norsemen, and his ‘Habitation’ of Quebec, established in 1608, with which begins New France, is the first settlement in Canada that lasted without eclipse. Where he had worked he died (1635) and found his last resting place.
The life-work of Champlain that covers these long years can be set down here only in the briefest résumé. He was born to the sea — the son of a sea captain of Brouage on the Bay of Biscay; was a soldier under Henri Quatre, and a ship’s captain on a two-years’ voyage to Mexico and the West Indies (1599-1601). He wrote a Brief Discourse of this, and proposed a Panama canal. He was selected in 1603 by a nobleman who had a royal patent as captain of a voyage to Canada. He followed in Cartier’s tracks, up the St. Lawrence and beyond Lachine. In the next year the patent passed to the Sieur de Monts, under whose authority Champlain surveyed the Atlantic coast from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Cod, and aided in founding a settlement (1604-5) at Port Royal on Annapolis Basin, an inlet from the Bay of Fundy.
This was the first establishment in Nova Scotia, sixteen years before the patent, given by James I to Sir William Alexander, altered its name from Indian-French Acadia. Port Royal was to share the vicissitudes of two centuries of peace and war, eclipse and resurrection, cession and retrocession, till its identity passed on to the ‘Annapolis’ of Queen Anne, hard-by its original site. But Champlain’s faith was set inland, not on the coast. In a new voyage of 1608 he founded and named Quebec — a landmark in the geography of history of the New World. He penetrated inland, opened up the waterway of the Richelieu to the lake S. E. Dawson, “The Saint Lawrence,” 1905 named after him; took sides, in a fatal hour, for the Hurons and Algonquins against the Iroquois, and thereby prejudiced, if he did not compromise, the ultimate destiny of New France. Still looking for a western ocean he searched the lakes and rivers of what was to be known as Upper Canada, reached as far as Lake Nipissing, descended thence to the Georgian Bay and was the first of the French, not perhaps to see, but at least to reveal to the world, the marvellous interior country of lake and river, of rolling hills and fertile valleys that lay embowered under the forests of Ontario. This, Champlain saw — the upper slopes of the Western Peninsula, the Lake Simcoe district and the long chain of intermingled lakes that lead again to the Trent River and Lake Ontario. Crossing the lake to where is now Oswego, Champlain again adventured himself in Indian war and repeated his earlier fatal error by an attack on a palisaded Onondaga (Iroquois) fort, a replica in kind of Hochelaga. He had yet to learn, as Frontenac learned later, that to destroy an Indian stockade meant no more than to knock down the nest of angry wasps. The wasps remained. The Iroquois from now on blocked the westward path of French settlement. The promised land of the Lake Simcoe district — Champlain’s own discovery — slept for two hundred years like the enchanted wood in the fairy story.
With the coming and going of the season that froze and reopened his highway, Champlain went back and forward across the sea, seeking in vain that full aid towards colonization and real settlement which he never found. His Quebec remained little more than an outpost in the wilderness. The merchants wanted trade, the priests conversion, the Crown empire. All this was but a frame without a picture. As beside the Puritan emigration ship and the cradle rocked in New England, it was nowhere.
Then came the brief war of France against Charles I, which for a moment snatched Quebec from its founder and sent him a 1629 prisoner to England. The peace of 1633 gave back to France its own, and Champlain returned to Quebec, to serve and to die in service. It remained for others to realize in part his ambitions, and for another nation to realize them to the full. Yet in his thirty-three years he had definitely set the imprint of his purpose on New France. The unknown wilderness assumed an outline. The empire of France in America had begun.
One pauses to view here and there in detail this shadowy outline of empire. There is much in it that carries down to our day, not as of antiquarian interest but as bearing upon the supreme and still unsolved problem of settlement in a new country. Here, for example, is the Port Royal of Champlain and his associates, built on the hillsides that border a beautiful inlet of the Bay of Fundy. This was indeed a lost paradise in a fertile and exuberant wilderness. Yet here was made apparent already, as the first scene in the drama of civilization in America, that problem of want in the midst of plenty, of nature’s bounty and man’s ineptitude, which remains its latest dilemma and its increasing paradox.
Here was Port Royal, a beautiful settlement in a great quadrangle of spacious houses of fragrant logs — kitchens, offices, and smoking chimneys, snug as comfort itself — embowered with gardens, Lescarbot, “Histoire de la Nouvelle France,” 1612 gorged with fruit and fish, fowl and game. Here was reproduced something of the comfort and more than the plenty of old France. Not even the chefs of the Rue aux Ours could furnish such a table. Such plenty indeed was it, that the assembled gentlemen must needs cheer their winter leisure with huge daily feasts, served to the midday appetite of open-air men, and carried in huge platters shoulder high, with ceremony and songs, under the mock rivalry of a circulating stewardship of the Order of Good Cheer (L’ordre de Bon Temps). Let the winter snow blow! To them February was as merry as May. Add to that, a wit or two among them, a touch of letters, and, in especial, a Lescarbot, “Muse de la Nouvelle France” merry fellow called Lescarbot, snatched from the law to grace the wilderness. In his clever verses and his odd conceits we salute across three hundred years our first Canadian humorist!
Here, then, one may well seem to see a Utopia, to be the first of many, a vision such as people from an old and crowded world have ever pictured in the country of a new. Here were all the easy gifts of nature and, as their supplement, the handsome profits of the trade in furs, the by-product of the fisheries rapidly becoming greater than the fisheries themselves.
Why was all this too bright to last? Why was it that the labour of associated men could not demand an easy and continuous sustenance from a nature all too willing? And if not for them, with their limited contrivances of three hundred years ago, why still not, with the inconceivable increase in our mechanical control? This, next to the destiny of the human soul, remains man’s chiefest preoccupation.
For Port Royal the explanation is not far to seek. The surface was appearance, the reality was below. This was no real gathering of free men, united for a common welfare. In this as in the other settlements of New France a worn-out feudalism, almost at the breaking point in Europe, tried to reach out its hand for the New World. Here were ‘gentlemen and simple’ where nature decreed equality. Here were, as the workers, indentured servants, wifeless in a new country, with no stake of their own, their eyes in the pauses of their toil set only on some village street in Brittany. Not thus can the roots of a nation be sunk in a new soil. And over it all hovered the favour or disfavour of a court across the ocean, that gave and withdrew charters, conferred and confiscated monopoly, and could break a settlement with a word, as Port Royal itself was broken. Add to this the intermittent ravage of disease, the plague that ignorance could not fight, and that submissive piety could only amplify. Add again that outside somewhere in the great emptiness of the woods were the savages, incomprehensible, unreconciled. As the last touch of a darkening picture, add to the end the intermittent ravages of European wars that fell upon American settlements in their infancy, reduced them to smoking ruin, or traded them to and fro as the prize of war. Not thus comes Utopia.
CHARLES W. JEFFERYS, R.C.A., TORONTO, ONT., 1941
“. . . Port Royal, a beautiful settlement in a great quadrangle of spacious houses . . .” — page 51
Even at the death of Champlain New France was little more than an outpost in the wilderness. He had replaced his earliest ‘Habitation’ by the solid Fort St. Louis, built on the rock of Quebec, and capable, so the English presently reported, of withstanding ten thousand men. Quebec was already the Gibraltar of America. David Kirke forced it to surrender (1629) only by starvation, though its garrison numbered only sixteen. Quebec at this time contained less than 100 souls in all, and beside it were only the posts at Tadoussac and Three Rivers.
Not did the situation greatly change for a whole generation after Champlain (1635-1663). The colony had been placed under the charge of a Company of One Hundred Associates — merchants of the fur trade with a sprinkling of ‘birth’ to mark ambition. Over all was the fostering care of Cardinal Richelieu, determined, as Champlain had been, to make New France a settlement, not an outpost.
But New France was misguided from the first. It was indeed so sturdy a plant that it clung somehow to the rocks of the St. Lawrence through all hardships. But it lacked settlers. The Huguenots, defeated and exiled, would gladly have come but their entry was forbidden. Their energy and industry must seek another flag. Most Frenchmen were too comfortable at home to cross the seas. The French are not a migratory race; the British, an island people, blow easily over the sea; the French remain in their vineyards.
In place of the people at large came the priests and the nuns, F. Parkman, “Pioneers of France,” 1865 the martyrs and the virgins of the Canadian wilderness. New France here profited, so to speak, by the back-wash of repentance that goes with a dissolute court. Ladies of fashion redeemed their sins by subscribing funds for the salvation of the savages. “The fair votaries of the court,” it has been cleverly said, “found it easier to win heaven for the heathen than to merit it for themselves.” Thus it came about that the little group of Recollet Friars who first accompanied Champlain were supplemented after 1625 by an increasing band of Jesuits, whose Order will be forever associated with our history.
