Photograph by R. H. Chapman, U. S. Geol. Survey.
Although the Spaniards opposed vigorously the coming to the New World of any other people, New Spain soon found a rival in New France, and then in New England. Cortez had barely finished the overthrow of the Aztecs before Verrazano, for the French King, cruised along the Atlantic coast from Hatteras northward to where French fishermen already had been, and where Cartier in 1534, ten years later, discovered the great island we call Newfoundland and his Gulf of St. Lawrence. The next year he sailed up the great river, to which he gave the same name, and thereby opened the real gate to our Wilderness; for it was by this route, and not by the south, that the best early entrance was offered, on account of the numerous closely connected lakes and waterways of various kinds. Travel in a new country is always easier by boat than by any other method, for, if there are plenty of waterways, a canoe and its cargo can be carried from the head of one stream, or lake, to the next nearest one, and so a practically continuous passage effected with quantities of goods, which otherwise could not be transported without a large number of pack-animals or waggons, and pack-animals frequently need a way cleared for them, while a waggon in a new land is often impossible. So by these waterways, numerously ramifying from the mouth of the St. Lawrence into the vast western Unknown, the Frenchmen, with the beautiful birch-bark canoe of the Amerind, whose skill they also speedily acquired, entered the Wilderness with a sailor's light-heartedness, singing their gay chansons as they paddled along; songs with little sense but much rhythm, like all the ditties sailors use for expediting their labours, which, like rowing or paddling, require to be accomplished in unison. As New France developed into Canada the voyageur became a familiar and distinct character; a creation of the New World. He was as competent with a canoe as was his Spanish brother, the vaquero, with the horse. We meet him constantly in the Wilderness, and all the waterways leading to it, his airy verses echoing through the forest till the sombre pine trees seemed more lightly to wave their drooping branches; or dying across limitless stretches of prairie, in conflict, perhaps, with the stranger notes of some Amerindian chant.
By these songs the voyageurs united the strokes of their oars or paddles, and they were often responsive, like the sailor-songs on shipboard, between one party and the other; the steersman and the rowers, or the forward and the stern oarsmen. One stanza of a voyageur's song will serve to give their character:
"Derrière chéz nous, il y a un etang,[50]
Ye, ye, ment.
Trois canards s'en vont baignans,
Tous du lóng de la rivière,
Legèrement ma bergère,
Legerment ye ment."