Verily the part which Samuel de Champlain and his little band of Frenchmen had played in giving armed assistance to the Hurons and Algonquins was to have terrible results. It threw the Iroquois into friendship with the Dutch and other enemies of the French, who supplied them with firearms. It caused them to bear a hate to Champlain and all his countrymen almost as great as the hate they bore to the dusky Hurons.
All this time Champlain, great as was his ambition, can only be regarded as the agent or manager of a company of men in France whose first wish was to make money out of the fur trade. These men in their hearts had very little sympathy for Champlain's schemes of colonisation and conversion of the savages, and, becoming dissatisfied with the profits Champlain was making for them, they tried repeatedly to procure his recall. In order to baffle the intrigues against him and explain to the King himself the importance of Canada to the kingdom of France, Champlain sailed away yet again for home, leaving sixty men, the entire French population of Canada, behind him in Quebec. By his zeal and eloquence he was able to obtain some fresh supplies for his colony, and also some more soldiers and workers. Amongst these was an apothecary named Louis Hébert, who is often spoken of as the first emigrant to Canada, because he took with him his wife and two children, intending to settle as a farmer on the land. Direct descendants of Hébert are alive in Canada to this day. Two years later Champlain managed to bring a body of eighty colonists out to New France, and the next year (1620) his own wife, Helen de Champlain, accompanied him for the first time to the colony. This time he had triumphed over those who wished to depose him, and was now confirmed in his title of Viceroy of New France, and all seemed in the general rejoicings on his return to promise well for his enterprise. Not only the French in Quebec, but the Indians were delighted at the beauty and manners of the Governor's wife, then only twenty-two years of age. They tell of her that she wore always a small mirror suspended from her neck, according to the custom of the ladies in those days. When the red-men who drew near her looked in the little mirror they saw each, to his astonishment, his own face reflected there, and went about telling one another that the beautiful wife of the white chief cherished an image of each in her heart.
Once in Quebec, Champlain lost no time in laying the foundation of a Government House, since known as the Château of St. Louis, reared on the heights of the rock. This building came to be the residence of every succeeding Governor of Canada for two hundred years, until one night it was wholly destroyed by fire and never rebuilt. In the year it was begun, too, the Recollet priests began to build their convent, and other large buildings arose.
So now you see quite a flourishing little town was fast growing up in the midst of the Canadian wilderness. But with the advancement of his schemes came many new troubles for the lion-hearted Champlain. In the first place, the Indians had acquired a passion for strong drink—"fire-water" they called it,—and although people of their fierce, reckless disposition should never have been allowed to touch a drop, yet the fur-traders were so callous and greedy as to be always ready to supply them with gallons and hogsheads of the fatal brandy. The consequences were what might have been expected, and Champlain was very angry as he looked upon the scenes of riot and bloodshed. But his efforts to keep liquor from the Indians only made the traders hate him more bitterly. To this source of anxiety was added another: the bloodthirsty feud between the Iroquois and the Algonquins and Hurons, which occasioned constant bloody massacres and made the life of the French colonists at Quebec, Three Rivers, and Tadoussac one of never-ending danger. On a certain night a band crept down the St. Lawrence silently to Quebec, having sworn an oath to wipe the city of the pale-faces from the face of the earth. But the stone buildings, the cannon and muskets in the hands of the determined Frenchmen daunted them and they beat a retreat. Not to be wholly balked of blood, they fell upon the Algonquins, who were bringing furs to Quebec, slaughtering them without mercy. Then there were plots against Quebec, even amongst the tribes which Champlain considered friendly, for savages were, and ever will be, fickle, and often the most trifling incident will tempt them to treachery.
Meantime Champlain's friends in France, the associated merchants, had lost their fur-trading monopoly because they had failed to fulfil their pledges. In consequence of this, the monopoly was handed over by the King to two Huguenot gentlemen, William and Emery de Caen, an uncle and nephew. The uncle was a merchant and the nephew was a sea captain, and, although Protestants themselves, they were charged not to settle any but Catholics in the colony. This arrangement turned out a very bad one. The Huguenots and Catholics quarrelled in New France, as they had been quarrelling in Old France, and finally, so violent grew the disputes, that the King joined the two associations into one under the title of "the Company of Montmorency," with Champlain still as Viceroy. Matters thereafter went so much more smoothly that Champlain decided to take the opportunity of paying another visit to his native country. With him he took his beautiful young wife, Helen de Champlain, who had had nearly five years amongst the Indians and the rough fur-traders, and had endured many hardships and faced many dangers. You must bear in mind that when she sailed away she left behind only fifty of her fellow-countrymen in Quebec. This is a very small number, but they were for the most part very much in earnest, very hardy and rugged, and inspired by Champlain in a strong belief in the future of the country. Before we have finished our history you will see whether that belief was justified or not.
CHAPTER IV
ROMANCE OF THE TWO DE LA TOURS
Two years did the doughty hero Champlain linger in Old France. To everybody he met, king, courtier, priest, and peasant, he had but one subject: Canada, never ceasing all this while to urge the needs of the colony across the sea and to further its interests by tongue and pen. It needed all his influence. The Duke of Montmorency, becoming disgusted by the perpetual squabbles of the merchants, sold his rights as patron of Canada to the Duke de Ventadour, a religious enthusiast, whose passion was not trade nor settlement, but saving human souls. Although bred a soldier, he had actually entered a monkish order, vowing to spend the rest of his days in religious exercises, and it was this nobleman who now sent out to Quebec the first little body of Jesuit priests, five in all, that arrived in that colony. Now these Jesuits were the very last people either Champlain or the Huguenots wanted in Canada. They belonged to a very powerful, crafty order. They could sway both king, queen, and minister to their wishes. De Caen and the Huguenot traders received the five priests when they arrived at Quebec as coldly as Poutraincourt had done in Acadia, but the Recollets generously gave them shelter in their convent until they could build one for themselves. This they soon did on the very spot where, ninety years before, Jacques Cartier had laid out his little fort. These five priests were destined to have some thrilling experiences and to meet with terrible ends, all of which you shall hear in due time.
Meanwhile Champlain at home in France saw with eagle eye that Huguenot and Catholic could never live together in peace across the wide waste of waters. They were always quarrelling. The colony did not grow as it should, in spite of the fact that in a single year 22,000 beaver skins were sent by the De Caens to France. Nor was religion attended to as devoutly as he thought the Huguenots ought to attend to it. But perhaps this was because the Huguenots did not acknowledge the authority of the Pope. So he wrote strongly to De Caen about it, and the letter fell into the hands of the most powerful, most crafty man of that era, far more powerful than King Louis the Thirteenth himself. Cardinal Richelieu was the King's Prime Minister. Having at length accomplished great things for his master in France, Richelieu now turned his attention to Canada. With a stroke of the pen he abolished the monopoly of the De Caens and founded the "Company of the Hundred Associates," with himself at the head. Thence-forward no Huguenot was to be permitted to enter the colony under any conditions. The new Company was given a perpetual monopoly of the fur trade and control of other commerce, besides being made lord of an enormous territory extending from the Arctic Ocean to Florida. Moreover, the Company was bound to send out at once a number of labourers and mechanics and 4000 other colonists. Champlain was made one of the Associates, and continued in his command of Quebec. Canada was now to be governed directly by the King, just as if it were one of the provinces of Old France, and nobles were to be created who would take their titles from their estates.