But there were difficult rapids and the French captain couldn’t make it. He was already a thousand miles inland. Winter was coming on. In the end he returned downstream to the safety of his ships and the fort his men had built on the river in Canada.
Plagued by scurvy and freezing with cold that winter, Jacques Cartier had another failure on his hands. It was going to be difficult to explain things at home. He treated with Donnacona for food and medicine, for furs with which to protect his men from the cold, and for information about the country to the west. The “Lord of Canada” was anxious to please the white men, that is, in return for their skillets and axes and their bright colored clothes. He provided the things they wanted—and he talked too much.
Donnacona boasted that he had been to Saguenay. Truly, he swore, he had seen there many of the things the Frenchmen valued so much—red rubies, gold, silver—and the people were white men who went about clothed in woolen cloths. Cartier brightened in the face of his troubles. Here, he perceived, was eye-witness testimony on a royal level to the existence of Saguenay and its treasures. When spring came he captured Donnacona by a stratagem and “persuaded” the Indian king to go with him to France for a visit.
Whether or not Donnacona really believed his own story about Saguenay, he played the game effectively all the way for Jacques Cartier when he was presented to the French monarch. No doubt he wanted to make sure that he created the means of getting back to his native land. In any event, he had been canny enough to bring along with him several bundles of his best trade goods, consisting mostly of “Beavers, and Sea Woolves skinnes.” Maybe, among other things, he had French squaws in mind for his holiday abroad, as one old scribbler has suggested.
It was some time before King Francis was able to get around to doing much about the Indian king’s stories. In the meantime Donnacona died. But Francis wanted to make the imagined treasures secure for the French. The only way to do that was to colonize and fortify the approaches through New France, to take possession of the land by occupying it.
Realistic French merchants, like Jean Ango, were more interested in the furs that had been finding their way back across the sea. However colonization was an end they sought, too, if it provided a base for their traders. It was a long way, across a dangerous ocean, to New France.
With the support of both the king and the merchants, therefore, Jacques Cartier went back to New France in 1541. The Sieur de Roberval followed him in 1542. In their well-supplied fleets they transported several hundred colonists, including many farmers, also soldiers, miners and traders. Roberval’s expedition included some women. They planted near Quebec, building forts there; both tried desperately to reach mythical Saguenay. Each remained through only one Canadian winter among the now hostile Indians.
Both leaders were more interested in finding quick treasure than in any such prosaic business as fur trading. Cartier took back fool’s gold and false diamonds found on the river’s bank near the forts. Rescue ships had to be sent over from France with enough supplies to evacuate the scurvy-ridden remnant of Roberval’s contingent.
It would be another sixty years before a permanent colony was planted in these parts. But New France was held, nevertheless, for France. And, curiously enough, by the very fur trade that had been so much ignored.