Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 743
But to pass St. Marys current had, in any case, no further meaning than to attain the sheltered water of the natural harbor under the projecting bank and a little island beside it, the original harbor of Montreal. The passage up the St. Lawrence beyond Montreal Island was barred by the vast rapids variously called the Great Sault, the Sault St. Louis, and finally the Lachine Rapids. In spite of the terrifying aspects and the awful roar of the waters of the Great Sault, of which even Champlain was not ashamed to record his fears, canoes and boats under proper guidance could come down in safety. Champlain himself is the first white man on record to have “shot the rapids.” Presently it was found that even large steamers could shoot Lachine in safety. The terror of the explorer became the mock terror of the tourist.
Canoes and boats could come down. But nothing could go up except with laborious portaging and trekking. This was the end of real navigation till the nine-mile canal of 1825 left Lachine on one side.
The upward voyage past Montreal, behind the island by the Rivière des Prairies and the Rivière des Milles Isles, is similarly blocked. There are heavy rapids near the bottom end of the Rivière des Prairies, and halfway up its course is the famous and tumultuous Sault au Recollet. It is so called in memory of the tragic drowning of a Recollet friar in 1625, drowned in sight of his Indian flock, with or without their assistance. The Rivière des Milles Isles is blocked by great rapids beside the Isle St. Jean and Terrebonne.
At the upper end of the island system, where the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence connect, are the famous Rapids of St. Anne. Montreal is thus a full stop.
But it is a full stop, then as now, only for a new start. Even the liveliest imagination cannot readily realize what a concourse of waters, what a multitude of inland waterways are represented by these colossal converging streams. Here was to the acute eye of a Champlain the key to the continent. Nor is it a bygone key to a rusted lock. For the course of North American history has turned a full cycle, and the whole question of the St. Lawrence is up again with the discussion of the continental seaway. This magnificent project, to turn a dream to a reality, is already a matter of international agreement, postponed only by the present war. In the hope of many of us it will stand as one of the huge enterprises of constructive peace that will help to obliterate the ravages of war. Hence the facts behind it are as much front-page matter to us as they were to Cartier, Champlain, and La Salle.
The St. Lawrence River when it reaches Montreal has already drained all the Great Lakes. One of the strangest physical features of our continent is that the Great Lakes, an area of nearly 100,000 square miles, are fed almost entirely by rainfall and snow. The rivers that come into them are so short, the watersheds so relatively narrow, that only six miles from Lake Erie there are streams that start to flow to the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Ohio. The Des Plaines River, bound the same way via the Mississippi, rises only four miles west of Lake Michigan. Even on the north side, where Lake Nipigon drains to Lake Superior, it is only ten miles from Lake Nipigon to where the rivers start for James Bay. Apart from the minor tribute of rivers in western Ontario, the Great Lakes, as said, are fed only by precipitation. Yet their depth is so great, all but Lake Erie reaching far below the bottom of the sea, that this vast unaided reservoir keeps Niagara falling. Strangely enough, modern engineering now sets its hand to correct this unfair competition of the watersheds and to turn the waters from the wasted tumult of the empty North to the broad bosom of the Great Lakes, mother of man’s industry. That is a far cry from the Montreal of Champlain but a vital concern to the seaport of today.
Nor does the glory of the volume of the St. Lawrence end with the island of Montreal. Passing down, it receives at Sorel, forty-three miles below, the flood of the Richelieu, the Rivière des Algonquins, which has drained Lake Champlain and all the country south to where the headwaters of the Hudson and the Mohawk dispute to carry it down the Hudson to the Atlantic. All these rivers and lakes, trails and portages connect in the retrospect of history with over two centuries of the dark shadows of conflict and war and with one in the bright daylight of peace and good will.
On the south side below the Richelieu are the lesser rivers, the St. Francis, Yamaska, Nicolet, and Ste. Croix.
The north side pays an even fuller tribute. The St. Maurice, whose sources rise beside the sources of the Ottawa but avoid its western aberration, comes into the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers, thus making with the course of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence a sort of huge circle, and with it an inner chain of communication, known and used by the Indians, especially when the ravages of the Iroquois endangered the main river sources. Another great river joining the St. Lawrence from the north is the Batiscan. But all that they add to the St. Lawrence is eclipsed by the great flood of the Saguenay. This vast river, whose very name is mystery, has come down 112 miles from Lake St. John that lies north and a little west of Quebec. This lake is fed by streams from the north and the northwest that have come down hundreds of miles from where the watershed turns to Hudson Bay and Ungava. Here, straight from the north, is the Peribonka (a river of some 400 miles in length), now a part of the world’s literature as the home of Maria Chapdelaine. Westward the huge river Ashuapmuchuan still offers its majestic name to a newer heroine. Some distance below the Saguenay begins the desolate territory and the north shore, Jacques Cartier’s land of Cain.
All this vast vision of the waters of the past, the present, and the future — legend, history, and dreams — is spread out before us as we stand on Mount Royal. And now, equipped as Cartier never was, we may come down from the mountain.
A man now comes on the scene of American history in the person of Samuel de Champlain, who did more than any other single person toward opening up these inland waterways of the continent. Exploration and discovery had fallen virtually asleep since Cartier’s time, but private interest had kept awake. The fisheries of the Newfoundland coast had greatly increased, with not only Breton and Norman sailors, but with a large English fleet out of Bristol and with Spaniards and Basques from the little port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a place older in its people and language than all record, a fishing port for centuries, a theater of war from the days of Henry of Navarre to those of the Duke of Wellington, yesterday a drowsy little watering place, and now again caught up in the fate of Europe.
The fishermen pushed farther and farther into the Gulf and adjacent waters. The furs brought down by the Indians opened a new trade. Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, became each summer the gathering place of canoes and ships. But each attempt to make winter settlement as yet meant death in that bleak region. All this trade in fish and furs was carried on as a “free trade” by the private ventures of the merchants and pilots of the ports or by associated groups of them. Many persons of rank and court influence were interested. The fisheries remained an open trade, but monopolies were obtained from the Crown for the trade in furs and merchandise in the “River of Canada” and successively broke down. Such a commission of exclusive trade, on condition of settlement, was given to François Gravé Sieur du Pont, written also as Dupont-Gravé. He made a voyage to Tadoussac in 1600, planned greater things to follow, and in 1603 sent out Samuel de Champlain to search for a better site than Tadoussac.
Samuel de Champlain was of Brouage, a Bay of Biscay port, a sailor from his childhood, a sea pilot of exceptional knowledge for his day. He had made a two-year West Indian voyage, had written an account of it, and enjoyed a rising reputation. He was a devout Christian but a practical man too. There is a passage in his Narrative of the Third Voyage (1611), evidently meant for the eye of King Louis XIII, since it argues the need of funds, expressing the hope of “bringing many poor tribes to the knowledge of our faith in order that later on they may enjoy the heavenly kingdom.” Meantime he helped some of the Iroquois on their way there with a harquebus.
With this voyage of 1603 begin the comings and goings of Champlain to Canada that extend over thirty years, that took him from the Bay of Fundy to the Georgian Bay, from the Richelieu to Lake Champlain, from New York State to Lakes Ontario and Simcoe. He made in all thirteen voyages out and twelve voyages back, ending his life at Quebec where his remains now lie.
Champlain first landed at Tadoussac where he met a great assemblage of savages, a war party making ready to attack the Iroquois. To these he promised the help of France.
It has been said that Champlain was not the first to offer such an alliance. Yet in this initial error of Indian policy there lay for French Canada the source of as many woes as those which brought down Troy. There is here the key to our North American history, the fate of a continent. For the future settlements, as at Montreal, it meant a half century of ever-present danger and the hideous massacre of the summer of 1689, the “Indian Summer” of Lachine. All of this, of course, was veiled from Champlain, but the historical background is plain enough to us.
But at any rate here at Tadoussac, at the very opening of Champlain’s career, we have the first illustration of that extraordinary instinct for geography which made him able, as it were, to divine the secrets of the unseen waterways of America. From his conversation with the savages he was able to plot our the region north and west of the Saguenay. It is strange to realize that the region of the Mistassini country remains almost unknown to the geography of ordinary people even now; or at least it was so till the day of the gold mines and the airplane in Canada. Much of it is shown on the new hydrographic maps to be an inconceivable tangle of thousands of small lakes and islands. Yet Champlain reconstructed its broad features; the course of the Saguenay; Lake St. John, its great tributaries leading to a farther watershed; the distances all estimated: so many portages, so many days . . . “a lake two days to cross” . . . “they can easily make 11 to 15 leagues in a day” (thirty to thirty-seven miles). . . . At the divide, so he was told, they met other Indians. . . . “These said savages from the north say that they are in sight of a sea which is salt. I hold that if this be so, it is some gulf of this our sea which overflows from the north into the midst of the continent; and indeed it can be nothing else.”
Thus did Champlain “discover” the Hudson Bay some nine years before he read in a printed book the story of Henry Hudson’s final and fatal voyage of 1611.
From Tadoussac, Champlain, accompanied by Dupont, passed on to inland discovery. “On the eighteenth of June,” he writes, “we set out from Tadoussac to go to the Sault.” This — the Rapid, or the Great Rapid — was the name widely current since Cartier’s time for the Lachine Rapids, the great central point of inland intercourse. Champlain passed through and specially noted “the narrows,” which the Indians called, as they still can any narrows, Kebek. The French spelling of the word long obscured for French people its Indian origin and for English people its Indian pronunciation. Champlain speaks of a waterfall from the top of a mountain (Montmorency) and of the beautiful trees, but of Stadacona not a word, either of name or settlement. It seems to have vanished.
As Champlain went up the river above Quebec he came to a place which he said was the farthest limit of Jacques Cartier’s ascent. In reality he was only at the river now called Jacques Cartier, thirty-five miles above Quebec. Cartier had said that at that point there was a place called Hochelay. The name had appeared with various spellings, Ochelay, Achelay, or Hochelay, in several maps before Champlain’s voyage. Champlain at this time knew of Cartier’s voyage only by hearsay, and it seems likely that he confused Hochelay with Hochelaga, though he mentions neither. If so this would help to explain why he never looked for the real Hochelaga up above.
All about him in this untroubled summer voyage was the beauty of the St. Lawrence. The farther he went, so he reports, “the finer was the country” . . . “trees like walnut trees” . . . “islands pleasant and fertile.” Then came the broad stretch of Lake Peter; at the head of it “thirty small islands . . . with many vines on them.” Above the lake Champlain found the incoming of the Richelieu River, called by his guides the River of the Iroquois, since it comes down out of their country. He tried to ascend it but was blocked by the rapids of St. Ours fourteen miles up, now flooded over by a dam. Champlain turned back to the main river, ascended another forty-three miles, noting the beauty of the south shore, the islands, and the beautiful open woods in the lowlands, the clustered fruits, “good and pleasant with many meadows,” and thus to the island of Montreal at St. Marys current, where Cartier had made his landing sixty-eight years before. With a fair wind astern, Champlain’s boats (a shallop and skiff) passed this current and made their way along the shore to the shelter of a little island close to shore and offering protection against the current out in the river. This little island was later to be called the Ilot Normandin and then Market Gate Island, and the sheltered water between it and the shore was, as already said, the original Montreal Harbour. Later the island disappeared under the quays and the docks of the port. Here they came to anchor and went ashore. Then Champlain and Dupont, with Indian guides, made their way some distance farther up in their skiff and, when that failed, went on foot to the Great Sault (Lachine) and beyond.
From what he thus saw and from what the Indians told him Champlain not only gives an accurate description of the vicinity of Montreal but a marvelous reconstruction of what was beyond and above, all the way to Lake Huron. He writes with no reference to Cartier’s voyage, to his “Mount Royal” and his “Hochelaga.” He explains it all from the beginning. “There are two large islands, one on the north side some fifteen leagues long and almost as many broad which extends beyond the rapid.” This is the island of Montreal. Jacques Cartier had not recognized it as such. It is thirty-six miles at the longest, nine at the widest; Champlain makes it thirty-six miles long, a close estimate; for the breadth, no doubt, he perhaps took the doubled islands (Montreal and Jesus), thickly wooded, for one. Champlain’s island to the south is Isle Perrot. Montrealers think of it as west of them, but it lies due south of the upper end of Montreal Island.
Champlain describes, without names, the La Prairie Basin, St. Pauls (otherwise Nuns) Island, and Isle Ronde lower down. He speaks of a mountain (of course Mount Royal) “visible from very far in the interior.” He describes the Lachine Rapids with something of a mixture of wonder and awe. Indeed in a later visit, when his companion Louis was drowned there, he says that the sight of them “made his hair stand on end.” Beyond the rapids he could not go. He took the latitude as forty-five degrees and some minutes north. “We saw we could do no more,” he said; “we returned to our shallop,” at the harbor. Here he questioned the Indians and “made them draw by hand.” He gathered that beyond this first rapid (Lachine) they go ten or fifteen leagues to a river in the country of the Algonquins (the Ottawa). Farther up the St. Lawrence, beyond where the Ottawa comes in, Champlain traces, with an extraordinary approach to truth, all the difficult succession of rapids, portages, and open lakes which lie between Montreal and Lake Ontario. For example, he indicates Lake St. Francis, the great expansion of the river between Valleyfield and Cornwall; makes it thirty-six miles long (actually twenty-six), and gives the length of the principal rapids and whether or not canoes must be portaged or can be paddled. Beyond all this stretch of river and rapid, he writes, is a lake that is eighty leagues (192 miles) long; at the upper end of it the water is far less cold and the winter mild. This, of course, is Lake Ontario (197 miles long), which Champlain himself was later to discover. At the upper end is Burlington Bay with water far less cold than in Lower Canada. Beyond this is a somewhat high waterfall, continues Champlain, where but little water flows. This is evidently a confusion of what the Indians said. Niagara at times runs dry, and in any case the crest of the falls looks flat beside Lachine. Beyond this is another lake — Lake Erie — sixty leagues long (144 miles; actually 250), then a strait — our Detroit. Beyond that, the Indians said, was a great lake, but they had never seen the other side of it, a lake “so vast that they will not venture to put out into it.”
This was, surely, Lake Huron, where the knowledge of the Canadian Indians ended. They said that the sun in summer sets north of it and that “the water there is very salt like that of our own sea.” This “salt” no doubt was a mistake, arising from the salt of Hudson or James Bay connected by river and portage with Lake Huron. But Champlain naturally says, “This makes me believe that this is the South Sea. Nevertheless,” he adds, “we must not give too much credence to this view.”
It is a strange thing, as already indicated, that in none of these discussions does Champlain mention Hochelaga. He doesn’t say that it had gone. He just ignores it.
Champlain’s first voyage thus ended with information that made him eager to pursue inland discovery. But for a time other tasks absorbed him. His next journey (in 1604) was taken up with the exploration of the Bay of Fundy and the adjacent coasts and with his foundation of Port Royal, near by the present Annapolis, a lost paradise of peace and plenty, embowered in orchards and gardens, enlivened in winter by the food and merriment of the “Order of Good Cheer” — too bright to last. Then came his foundation of Quebec, 1608, and with it the first permanent settlers in French Canada and a strategic center on which turned the fate of North America. Yet Champlain’s famous “habitation of Quebec” remained for years rather a fort with a winter garrison than a real colony. Not till 1617 appears the record of Louis Hébert, the first settler to bring out a family. Even at that the number of French wintering in New France, down till Champlain’s death in 1635, was only about a hundred. New France for its first century was little more than a vast project which, to the very end, its limited population rendered futile.
