Brief biographies from American history, for the fifth and sixth grades

by Edna Henry Lee Turpin

Years passed. Civil and religious wars laid France waste, and many earnest men began to look to the New World for an asylum from the Old. A band of French Protestants led by John Ribaut left their native shores to make their home in America. Instead of sailing northward, they landed in 1562 on the shores of Florida, which was the territory of Catholic Spain. The colony was attacked by the Spaniards under Menendez, and men, women, and children were killed. This terrible slaughter was avenged by the French under De Gourges, but the tide of French colonization was turned from the southern coast.

Five years after this massacre, there was born Samuel de Champlain, who won the title of the “Father of New France.” His father was a French ship captain; he himself was trained in the art of navigation and became a captain in the royal navy. “Navigation is the art which has powerfully attracted me ever since my boyhood and has led me to expose myself almost all my life to the impetuous bufferings of the sea,” he said.

Chaplain served awhile in the army; when peace came his adventurous spirit led him to the West Indies. This was Spanish territory and the Frenchman went thither at the risk of his life. He spent two years in America. To him it seemed, as it had seemed to some Spanish and Portuguese officials, that it would be a good plan to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. Champlain wrote, “If the four leagues of land which there are from Panama to the (Chagres) river were cut through, one might pass from the south sea to the ocean on the other side and thus shorten the route by more than fifteen hundred leagues; and from Panama to the Strait of Magellan would be an island and from Panama to the New-found lands would be another island, so that the whole of America would be in two islands.”

Always on his voyages Champlain kept a diary and made maps of the lands he visited. When he returned to France, he gave the king a minute account of the colonies and treasure of Spain. It was shame to France, he thought, that on the New World, discovered more than a century before, only their enemies had a foothold.

A French nobleman who was planning to found a colony in America decided that this enterprising young sailor-soldier would be the man to lead the undertaking. Champlain entered into the plan with enthusiasm. In 1603 he set out to reconnoiter the new land, following the route of Cartier. He sailed up the St. Lawrence River, to the present site of Montreal. During the next four years he made five voyages to the New World, exploring the coast from New England northward. He led a band of colonists who after a winter of hardship and sickness returned in 1607 to France. But Champlain was not discouraged. He was resolved to extend the power of France and of the Catholic religion in the new land, to penetrate the unknown wilds, and to seek a route to the East. He was appointed Lieutenant-governor of the French colony, an office which he held until his death, and came to America in 1608 to establish a settlement on the St. Lawrence River. In July the colonists landed and erected a store-house, the beginning of the city of Quebec.

Five discontented men in the party formed a plot to kill Champlain and turn the fortress over to the Spaniards. One of the men, however, betrayed the plot; the conspirators were arrested, the ringleader was hanged, and the others were sent prisoners to France. The winter of 1609 found the French colony one of three in the New World. At Jamestown, in Virginia, were the English; at St. Augustine, in Florida, were the Spaniards; and far to the north at Quebec in Canada, were the French. No one could then guess which nation would finally become supreme, though the chances seemed in favor of the Spaniards.

The first winter at Quebec was one of hardship and sickness, and when spring opened only eight of the twenty-eight Frenchmen were alive. In 1609 Champlain, ever ready for adventure, accompanied some Algonquins and other Indians on an expedition against their enemies the Iroquois, the Five Nations. He wished to see “a large lake, filled with beautiful islands, and with a fine country surrounding it” of which he had been told. He reached the beautiful lake, which now bears his name; on its banks his firearms turned the battle against the Iroquois and begun the long warfare in which the French were opposed to this great confederation of tribes. The very day that Champlain brought on his nation the enmity of this deadly foe, a little Dutch vessel, the Half Moon, was anchored on the New England coast. A few weeks later it entered the Hudson River,—bearing a crew of English and Dutch—the two peoples who were to be allies of the foe which the Frenchmen made that day and to turn the tide of battle against France.

From 1609 till his death, the time of Champlain was divided between New and Old France. Exploring, fighting, establishing trading-posts, he was busy building up the young colony and developing its resources. In 1620 his young wife, whom he had married ten years before when she was a mere child, came for the first time to Quebec. After four years of hardship, she returned to France and did not again revisit the New World.

The French colony grew and prospered. It was on friendly terms with its Indian neighbors with whom it carried on a flourishing fur trade. Furs were the currency and wealth of the French colony, as of the Dutch colony on Manhattan. The French exported every year to France from fifteen to twenty thousand skins; the Dutch at Manhattan thought business good when they shipped four thousand.

In 1628 the French colony was reduced to sore straits from scarcity of food. This was increased by the English capture of the ships bringing supplies. Winter passed and with spring the suffering increased. “We ate our peas by count,” says Champlain. His heart was wrung by the sufferings of the people, especially of the women and children. “Nevertheless,” he says, “I was patient, having always good courage,—and can say with truth that I aided every one to the utmost that was in my power.” In this extremity in 1629 Quebec was attacked by English war-ships and was forced to surrender.