Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 742
Early on the morning after their arrival, on a bright October day, Cartier and his companions were led by the Indians up the slope from the river to Hochelaga at the foot of the mountain. The distance through the woods — from the foot of the new Harbour Bridge to the University Club on Mansfield Street, which was (and perhaps is) the central hearth of Hochelaga — was about two miles. But the way was lengthened and enlivened by a pause to light a fire and make speeches.
They came thus to the famous stockade itself, described with a perplexity of detail that is the despair of the historian in histories and school books.
Yet there is a certain mystery about Carrier’s Hochelaga which history has all too little investigated. There is no doubt that such a place as Hochelaga existed. The various remains that have been excavated from under the soil indicate that its site was somewhere near the Hochelaga Memorial Stone set up in 1925 at the foot of the grounds of McGill University. The writer of this book had the honor of making over this stone the speech of dedication. He spoke in glowing terms of the vanished Hochelaga. He pictured its fifty great wooden lodges, each a hundred and fifty feet long, the vast stockade thirty feet high that enclosed it, its galleries, its ladders, and the huge open square among its lodges in which uncounted thousands of Indians listened to Jacques Cartier read from the Gospel of St. John.
But he had at the time grave doubts, such as many others must have entertained, whether Hochelaga could have really been a place of the huge dimensions indicated and yet have left so little trace; whether Jacques Cartier could have enacted a scene of such intense devotion and interest and yet, on his subsequent journey past Montreal inland to the Grand Sault, have gone past Hochelaga without a visit, without a word, without a thought, apparently, as to how his Indians were making out with St. John.
Equally amazing seems the silence of Champlain in 1603. The history books all tell us that when Champlain came Hochelaga had vanished. But Champlain doesn’t tell us this. He never mentions the place.
The extraordinary prestige of Cartier’s discovery of the river and of the wonderful site of the island with the Royal Mountain, the peculiar reverence that attaches to his having thus first brought Christianity to the savages throw a sort of veil of sanctity over the whole episode. Doubt seems to savor of irreverence. Yet it is worth while, perhaps, to look into the facts indicated by the meager and uncertain record and to try to distinguish what is undoubted truth from what is error, or even, to some extent, deception.
We may accept the general conclusion that Hochelaga was somewhere near the spot indicated by the stone. Other localities have been assigned to it. Half a century ago the late Dr. S. Dawson, an eminent scholar and a high authority, placed Hochelaga beside the Windsor Hotel, at that time Montreal’s latest pride and more interested, perhaps, in the sheltering Hochelaga than since the royal visit of 1939. A French-Canadian scholar, also, once gave grounds for placing Hochelaga out near Ahuntsic on the other side of the mountain. But the strongest evidence indicates it as beside, indeed as in the curve of, the little Burnside Brook that once ran down from the sunken hollow in the McGill grounds. The University Club on Mansfield Street represents, as it were, the central hearth of Hochelaga.
But when we turn from the question of the site to the question of size that is quite another matter. The existence of Hochelaga, as a huge fortified stockade with vast wooden houses, rests on one document, the narrative of Cartier’s voyage of 1535 (Relation Originale). Cartier’s narrative was not printed in French for a long time; nor was his own handwritten copy ever found. But various manuscript copies were made of Cartier’s manuscript and of his similar story of his first voyage in 1534, in which he found and named the river St. Lawrence but couldn’t get up it (Bref Recit). An Italian collector of travels (Gian Battista Ramusio) had a translation of the narratives made into Italian and published in a collection (Naviazioni e Viaggi) in 1556. McGill University has in its library one of the few extant copies of this book. In it appears the famous picture of Hochelaga as a huge round wooden erection that has been in every schoolbook ever since and remains one of the crossword puzzles of history. It was evidently the product of an Italian illustrator utterly ignorant of the reality and working in a frenzy of either imagination or despair. He has his busy Indians working away with saws on board lumber. His Hochelaga is big enough to reach from the mountain to the river.
But this translated account of Cartier was all that the world had. The famous Elizabethan collector, Richard Hakluyt, had the voyages retranslated from the Italian into English and took over the picture along with them. Hakluyt also got somewhere, not from Ramusio, a part of the narrative of Cartier’s next voyage, that of 1541, in which he gives Hochelaga the go-by. Later on a French edition of the two voyages was printed from another manuscript (1598) and, much later, manuscripts, but not in Cartier’s hand, were found in the French National Library for both the Bref Recit and the Relation Originale.
The reader must reconstruct for himself the nature of the stockade that is thus described. No two authorities agree about it, and Ramusio’s picture, as Dr. W. D. Lighthall has abundantly shown in his Hochelaga monograph of 1932, is not so much a help as a hindrance. If we accept it on its face value it must have taken a powerful quantity of logs and a terrific amount of cutting. The trees available would have been elm and oak, hardwood, with perhaps soft maple, though soft maple doesn’t run enough to length. There was no spruce, pine, or tamarack. But even at that the stone tomahawk of the Indians was an instrument of argument, not of carpentering.
Champlain saw later a few Indian axes beaten flat out of bits of Lake Superior copper. But Indians couldn’t cut down trees on any real scale. Their canoes were sometimes made from birch-bark: but they only prized off the bark; they didn’t cut the tree. Most of the St. Lawrence canoes were dugouts, burned-out logs with the ends pointed by alternate charring and cutting. You could have done that with a hoe. But, as a matter of fact, even a hoe would have been far above anything an Indian had. He would have used it to shave with.
Take the number of logs in the Hochelaga lodges, each 150 feet by 30; allowing 15 feet per log, it takes 24 logs to go round once — one course: it takes 20 courses (15 feet) as a minimum of height; that means 480 logs to each house and a total of 24,000 logs. There are still the partitions and the roofs to provide for, and the big stockade itself. Give it a perimeter — or no, don’t even give it a perimeter. It’s too silly; Hochelaga is like the farmer’s giraffe. No such animal.
Now we must admit that Champlain found a pretty big stockade fort among the Onondagas. Everyone recalls how he had a platform made, higher than this Onondaga fence, and had himself (and his musket) carried on the platform for a sort of aerial attack on the Onondagas. But you can pack all this into a very small compass. Even Champlain’s own Onondaga drawing does not compare with Hochelaga. One admits, of course, that the Huron mission Indians, massacred in 1649, had hundreds of lodges and that the military expeditions of La Barre and the Marquis de Tracy (1666) destroyed hundreds of Mohawk lodges. But if instead of lodge we read “wigwam,” instead of stockade read “fence,” instead of “palisade” read “pole,” then Hochelaga shrinks back to very different dimensions.
It was evidently there, or thereabouts. Certain relics of it exist. If it had really consisted of 24,000 big logs, no fires, no rot would have wiped it out so utterly. Burned-out cities like pre-Roman London or Troy leave old charred logs for centuries. But call it all poles and sticks, a sort of bird’s nest, and you can burn it all up like yesterday’s camp. The relics that exist, pipes, stone axes, and so on, are the kinds of things that would have been found, and are found, round any annual squatting place of savages. In this case their location, as said above, points to the University Club as the center of Hochelaga. The little river, the Burnside Brook, that now gurgles itself to death in the sewers ran around the lower side. It is strange to think that it was in the lounge room of the University Club that Jacques Cartier read the Gospel of St. John to the savages. It is a thing that would stand doing again.
But why, then, did such an account come into being? It has been argued that possibly it was what we now call “propaganda.” It was made to “sell” Canada to King Francis I of France. Hence the same narrative tells of the “Kingdom of Saguenay,” full of rubies and gold and men as white as Frenchmen. But the Gospel was needed also. The ladies of the French court were all set on saving the souls of the Indians. As Francis Parkman said, it was an easy way to save their own. Hence the two motives, wealth and the kingdom of heaven, appear in the words of an old nursery rhyme, “as a pretty dish to set before the King.”
It might be objected that Cartier would not have stooped to write this. Quite so: he couldn’t and didn’t, because he didn’t write it. In any sustained writing there is always evidence not exactly as to who wrote it but as to who didn’t. No one but an actual sailor could have written the sea stories of Fenimore Cooper; no one but a person with all the phrases of the law on his finger tips could have written the plays of Shakespeare. Yet here is Cartier, if it is Cartier, muddling up the sea terms that a Breton pilot would use; here is Cartier writing a windy, fulsome dedication and urging King Francis to kill the heretics. This piece of savagery would be just right to say to Francis, who afterward killed them with great cruelty (the Vaudois), but it sounds all wrong for the humane Cartier to say it. Cartier was dead before the book was ever printed in French.
Oddly enough this lying propaganda, if it was such, like so much that is sinful, succeeded. In fact, we owe Montreal to it. One of the few things we know from the mixed account of Cartier’s third voyage (1541) is that King Francis was enthusiastic about Saguenay and determined to open it up. He authorized the Sieur de Roberval to open all the jails in France and help himself to Canadian settlers. The “wars of religion” intervened (piety always comes first), but the story of the Royal Mountain, or its flock of meek Indians, their rapt faces turned to the sky, waiting only for the Gospel, became a legend. “Montreal,” long before it was founded, came to mean vaguely a distant place in North America where the savages needed Christ.
From the Hochelaga stockade Cartier and his gentlemen and twenty sailors made the ascent of the mountain which he named Mount Royal. In the French of the day, “royal” was still writable as réal. Montreal carries its name unchallenged. Here upon the summit — not from any one spot, for the trees forbade and still forbid it, but from various points of vantage — Cartier viewed the imposing panorama “of thirty leagues in all,” as he expressed it. The Indians explained it to him — the islands, the enfolding lakes, the great rivers that here came together. One of them, pointing to the Ottawa, then touched Cartier’s silver whistle and the gilt handle of a sailor’s dagger. Cartier thought they meant that where they pointed silver and gold were found. And they did mean that. But later history, still ignorant, explained away Cartier’s error; the Indians, it said, only referred to the silver color of the Ottawa, a flight of fancy quite beyond a Huron. Since the opening of the northern mining district, richer in gold and silver than all Peru, we know better. Perhaps luckily, history remained in the dark.
Cartier came down, impressed with the idea that here was the path to Saguenay. But the season was too late to reach it now. He hastened back, picked up his Emérillon, and so came safely to Stadacona in mid-October. Here all the previous good fortune was to change to the record of the terrible winter that followed. It is no part of the present work to follow it in detail. Cartier’s men had built a solid log fort and mounted on it the cannon from the ships. It was to stand them in good stead. The winter set in early and intense with the utmost rigor of the Canadian cold. The ships froze in solid in mid-November. Indian friendship changed to Indian treachery. A terrible plague, recognizable as scurvy, struck down the French. In February only ten out of the one hundred and ten were fit for service. Twenty-five men were dead, lying under the snow, unburied. Cartier concealed his losses. His men made a brave show of manning the ramparts against the Indians now gathering for the slaughter. Then came what seemed a miracle, or at least a miraculous remedy, made from a native balsam, which cured the pestilence. The Indians waited, hesitating, as Indians always did, before an open attack. Then came the spring, the melting ice, the open river, Canada’s annual deliverance.
Cartier hastened his departure. The ships were rapidly prepared. Donnacona kept up his false friendship to the last, kept up his wonder tales of the gold and silver of Saguenay, heightening the wonder with stories of men as white as the French, of men with one leg and no stomach, and “other marvels too long to tell.” In reward for which, as a sort of poetic justice, Cartier carried him, by strategy, off to France, as too good to leave behind. With him were taken ten others — a source of later woe. Sailing on May 6, the ships reached Saint-Malo on July 16, 1536.
The First View of Montreal. Cartier’s Visit to Hochelaga in 1535. From an Old Print.
Courtesy of the New York Public Library
And with that Jacques Cartier’s career, as far as it affected Canada, practically ended. There was a third voyage, as mentioned above, of which the record is confused and uncertain. In this, if we can believe the broken fragment left of the narrative, Cartier came up the river again and rowed past his Hochelaga without troubling to look at it. There may have been a fourth voyage. But in any case nothing came of it all. The energies of France were being absorbed for half a century in what the irony of history calls the “wars of religion.” North American discovery fell asleep again. When it awoke Hochelaga had vanished.
FOOTNOTES:
Keats of Cortez in error.
S. E. Dawson, The St. Lawrence, 1905.
(Sir) William Butler, The Great Lone Land, 1872.
F. Nansen, In Northern Mists, 1911.
H. A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries, 1940.
Cartier’s Voyages (Champlain Society. H. P. Biggar).
CHAPTER II. Place Royale
The Inland Waterways. Geographical Situation of Montreal. The St. Lawrence Basin. Champlain’s Voyages of Exploration. At Montreal Island, 1603. Establishes Place Royale, 1611. Later Journeys.
HERE IT MAY be proper, for the later purposes of this book, to pause a while, as it were, with Cartier on the summit of Mount Royal and view with the aid of modern survey and topography the scene around us. The unusual physical features of this exceptional and happy environment make it one of the chief geographical centers of North America.
Its meaning lies in the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa rivers, which here come together with such a great gathering of the waters that no single channel carries it. It forces its way through the higher ground, dividing it into a complex of islands and intervening channels. Down the steeper slopes it gathers into rapids. In the wide hollows that it has itself helped to deepen, the St. Lawrence spreads out into the expansion of Lake St. Louis above the Lachine Rapids and the La Prairie Basin below. On the other side the Ottawa expands into the Lake of the Two Mountains. Of the larger islands formed by these dividing channels there lies farthest south and west, farthest upstream, Isle Perrot, a rough oblong of a length of about seven miles with a maximum breadth of about three. Immediately below it is the main island, the beautiful island of Montreal, thirty miles long from point to point, shaped in a long oval. Side by side with it and so beautifully wooded that in places the eye does not see the dividing Rivière des Prairies is Isle Jésus. On the other side of Isle Jésus runs the similar Rivière des Milles Isles in a wide concave bow from the foot of the Lake of the Two Mountains down to its junction with the Rivière des Prairies at the north end of Montreal Island.
In all this area it is difficult to indicate the direction of the rivers and the lie of the islands by simple reference to the cardinal points of the compass. The compass lies awkwardly across them. The St. Lawrence River in its passage from Lake Ontario to Lachine is moving virtually eastward. But the great rapids give it a throw to the left, and from La Prairie Basin, past the city of Montreal, the river is moving almost due north. Between Montreal and Quebec it flows about northeast, and below Quebec the river and the trend of the Gulf to which it enlarges is more and more directed toward the east. Readers will find that the north and south of Montreal are now called east and west in the perplexing nomenclature of our streets. Visitors to the city must remember that St. Catherine Street East and Sherbrooke Street East run fairly close to north, and that the south shore of the river lies east of the north shore; this is because the north shore got its name away back in Cartier’s days from the geography of its mouth at the Gulf, where it really lies north. All such references as the recurrent historical statement that “the harbor of Montreal lies on the north side of the river,” must be taken in this sense. As a matter of fact, the Victoria Bridge in crossing the river from the city to St. Lambert on the south shore runs almost northeast and the new Harbour Bridge due east.
The Ottawa where it joins the St. Lawrence has indeed run a strange course. Its sources lie in the wilderness about 160 miles north of the city of Ottawa. It starts off as if it meant to run westward to lake Superior but keeps swinging around until by the time it has reached Ottawa it has completed a vast semi-circle. Inside this enclosed sweep lie its great tributaries, the Coulanges, the Gatineau, the Rivière du Lièvre. At Ottawa it passes without deflection of its course over the roaring “caldron” of the Chaudière Falls, an imposing, almost terrifying sight as seen by Champlain and the early explorers, but now almost buried under the dams, power sites, and bridges of the capital city.
On its exit from the Lake of the Two Mountains the part of the Ottawa that does not join the St. Lawrence above Montreal Island is turned to an easterly course down the Mille Isles and Rivière des Prairies, and beyond Bout de L’Ile joins the main northeast current of the St. Lawrence.
Now the whole area thus described around the confluence of the two great rivers and the enfolded islands is blocked and guarded by rapids by which nature prevented all further navigation from the sea and gave the site its meaning and its history. Explorers coming up the St. Lawrence and reaching the bottom end of the island system (Bout de L’Ile) would naturally, and as a matter of course if guided by Indians, prefer the main channel, the one on their left hand. But some twelve miles up from Bout de L’Ile their course would be impeded — not absolutely blocked — by the broken water of St. Marys current. This is where the island named by Champlain St. Helens Island lies midway in the stream with shallow, rapid water on one side and on the other this fierce St. Marys current, varying with the season, but at times moving at six miles an hour. Boats and canoes could pass it by vigorous rowing, poling, or trekking. But it was obvious and natural to land at the foot of it, as Cartier did on his first discovery of Hochelaga.
