A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. V / Canada—Part I, Historical

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

CHAPTER II

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.

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 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.

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, [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.

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 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.

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. 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.

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 René de Laudonnière, sailed for Florida, and the settlers planted themselves on the 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.

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.

Chauvin and Pontgravé. De Chastes.

About a year after La Roche's fruitless voyage, in 1599 or 1600, two other Frenchmen, Chauvin, a sea captain, and Pontgravé, a St. Malo merchant, also obtained a patent to 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 Pontgravé, and secured the services of Samuel Champlain.

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 Pontgravé 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.

De Monts' patent. The first French settlement in Acadia. 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 through³ 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, Pontgravé 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 Pontgravé and Champlain to hold the post through the winter of 1605.

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.'

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 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.

De Poutrincourt. 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.

Argall's raid from Virginia. 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. 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.

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.

Comparison of English and French colonization in North America. 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 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.

⁴ See e.g. Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. vi.

The new patents of English colonization. Motives of English colonization in the seventeenth century. 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 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.

The French colonized inland. 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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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

⁵ The Old Régime in Canada, chap. xxi, p. 399 (14th ed., 1885).

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.

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 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° 15', and west longitude 67° 30', though the Gaspé 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 Chaudière 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 Müller, 1868), Introd. pp. xxv, xxvi.

⁸ Parkman's La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1885 ed.), p. 8.

The Indians of North America. 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.

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 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.

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 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.

⁹ The Mohawks, however, were not the strongest of the five in number. They were outnumbered by the Senecas.

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

¹⁰ Hodenosaunee.

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.

Small numbers of the Iroquois. 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 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

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 Lesdiguières, 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.'

¹³ Charlevoix, as above, pp. 184-5.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

The Iroquois in some respects resembled the Spartans.

In their organization they had advanced beyond the stage 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.

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.

Principle of adoption among the Iroquois.

Constantly weakened by the strain of war, to some extent 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.

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).

Their sphere of influence. 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 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.

¹⁷ Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1685-8, No. 1160, pp. 328-9, Dongan to the Lords of Trade, March, 1687.

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.

The Dutch on the Hudson river. New Netherland.

In 1609, the year after the founding of Quebec, Henry 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

¹⁹ For an account of the Dutch on the Hudson see A Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam, Frederick Müller, 1868), referred to above. See also Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iv, chap. viii.

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.

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 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

²¹ Colden, vol. i, p. 34.

²² Parkman's Count Frontenac (1885 ed.), p. 93, note.

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.

²³ Colden, as above, 'In 1664, New York being taken by the English, they likewise entered into a friendship with the Five Nations.'

²⁴ Colden, p. 125.

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 Pontgravé. 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 Pontgravé and Champlain respectively. Pontgravé, the merchant, stayed at Tadoussac through the summer, bartering with the Indians and coming to blows with Basque traders, who held 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 Pontgravé returned in the following summer, travels and adventures began which made Champlain's name great among the Indian tribes of Canada.

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

²⁵ Canada was first known as New France after Champlain's return to Europe, in 1609 (Charlevoix's Histoire Générale de la Nouvelle France, 1744 ed., vol. i, bk. iv, p. 149).

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 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 Condé. 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.

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 Île des Allumettes. He went no further. The 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.

The Recollet friars. Le Caron. 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.

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.

Dispute among French traders. 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, and traded in defiance of the monopoly which the rival towns claimed to possess. Various changes followed. About the beginning of 1620, Condé 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.

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 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.

²⁶ Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1574-1660, p. 139, under the year 1632.

Coming of the Jesuits to Canada. Their policy. 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 régime 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 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.

Oppression of the Huguenots in France. Its effects in Canada. 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 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.

Merits of the Huguenots as colonists. 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 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.

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 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.

²⁷ A further account of Sir William Alexander is given [below].

attacks the French on the St. Lawrence 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 Gaspé 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, with all the cargo and prisoners, he carried off in triumph to Newfoundland.

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.

Convention of Susa and Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye. 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 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 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.

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.

²⁹ See vol. iv of this series, pt. 1, p. 19.

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.

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.