The title of the initial volume, The Pioneers of France in the New World, exactly describes it. The ‘Pioneers’ are the Basque, the Norman, and the Breton sailors who, from an almost unrecorded past, crossed the sea yearly to fish on the banks of Newfoundland. They are Jacques Cartier of St. Malo, who first explored the St. Lawrence, Roberval, La Roche, and De Monts. Men of their time, they were both devout and unscrupulous. Among them and their followers were grim humorists. When, after the arrival of De Monts’s company in Acadia, a priest and a Huguenot minister died at the same time, the crew buried them in one grave ‘to see if they would lie peaceably together.’
Chief among the great names of this period is that of Samuel Champlain, the ‘life’ of New France, who united in himself ‘the crusader, the romance-loving explorer, the curious, knowledge-seeking traveller, the practical navigator.’ Such a man has a breadth of vision and strength of purpose in comparison with which the sight of common men is blindness and their strength infirmity.
The second narrative in the series, The Jesuits in North America, is an amazing record of courage, fanaticism, indomitable will, perseverance, and martyrdom. The book contains the gist of the famous Jesuit Relations. A man may be forgiven for not wearying himself with the tediousness of those good fathers who were often as long-winded as they were brave. But he is inexcusable if he has not learned to admire them through Parkman’s thrilling account of their physical sufferings and spiritual triumphs. Those giants of devotion, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, and Jogues, seem both human and superhuman as they move across the stage of history.
In La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West we have a story of zeal of another sort. La Salle is a pathetic figure. Yet to pity him were to offer insult. He stood apart from his fellows, misunderstood and maligned, but self-centred and self-sufficient. His contemporaries thought him crack-brained; suffering had turned his head. They mocked his schemes and denied the truth of the discoveries to which he laid claim. His history is one of pure disaster. But no one of Parkman’s heroes awakens greater sympathy than this silent man who found in the pursuit of honor compensation enough for incredible fatigues and sacrifices.
The Old Régime in Canada treats of the contest between the feudal chiefs of Acadia, La Tour and D’Aunay, of the mission among the Iroquois, of the career of that imperious churchman Laval, and then, in a hundred and fifty brilliant pages, of Canadian civilization in the Seventeenth Century. This section is a model of instructive and stimulating writing, grateful alike to the student of manners and to the amateur of literary delights.
The last volume shows the construction of the ‘political and social machine.’ The next, Count Frontenac and New France, shows the ‘machine in action.’ The period covered is from 1672 to 1698. Frontenac’s collision with the order which controlled the spiritual destinies of New France led to his recall in 1682. La Barre, who succeeded Frontenac, was a failure. Denonville, the next governor, could live amicably with the Jesuits, but religious fervor proved no substitute for tact in dealing with the savages. There was need of a man who could handle both Jesuits and Indians. At seventy years of age Frontenac returned to prop the tottering fortunes of New France. One learns to like the irascible old governor who was vastly jealous of his dignity, but who, when the need was, could take a tomahawk and dance a war-dance to the great admiration of the Indians and to the political benefit of New France.
The story of the struggle for supremacy is continued in A Half-Century of Conflict.[56] That phase of the record relating to the border forays is almost monotonous in its unvarying details of ambuscade, murder, the torture-stake, and captivity. The French and their Indian allies descended on the outlying settlements of New England with fire, sword, and tomahawk. Deerfield was sacked, and the country harried far and wide.
In the mean time French explorers were advancing west and south. Some, in their eagerness to anticipate the English, established posts in Louisiana. Others, with a courage peculiar to the time rather than to any one race, pushed beyond the Missouri to Colorado and New Mexico, to Dakota and Montana, led on by mixed motives such as personal ambition, love of gain, patriotism.
A spectacular event of the period was the siege and capture of Louisbourg by a force largely composed of New England farmers and fishermen. The project was conceived in audacity and carried out with astonishing dash and good humor. That was singular military enterprise which in the mind of an eye-witness bore some resemblance to a ‘Cambridge Commencement.’ ‘While the cannon bellowed in the front,’ says Parkman, ‘frolic and confusion reigned at the camp, where the men raced, wrestled, pitched quoits, and ... ran after French cannon balls, which were carried to the batteries to be returned to those who sent them.’
The volumes entitled Montcalm and Wolfe crown the work. With stores of erudition, a finely tempered judgment, a practised pen, and taste refined by thirty years’ search for the manliest and most becoming forms of expression, Parkman gave himself to the writing of this his masterpiece. The work is the longest as well as the best of the seven parts. Every page, from the account of Céloron de Bienville’s journey to the Ohio to the story of the fall of Quebec, is crowded with fact, suggestion, eloquence. The texture of the narrative is close knit. The early volumes are often disjointed. They resemble groups of essays. Chapters are so completely a unit that they might be read by themselves with little regard to what preceded or what was to follow. Not so the Montcalm and Wolfe, which is a perfectly homogeneous piece of work.