It also led to bitter rivalries among the white men.
IV
Samuel de Champlain Lights a Blaze of Red Terror
It was the first spectacular profits of the fur trade toward the close of the sixteenth century that brought about a fresh and urgent need for the colonization of New France.
The French government saw danger from jealous foreigners, Englishmen in particular. Already the English had attempted settlements to the south at a place called Roanoke. Greatly emboldened on the sea these days they were admitting Spanish claims no more northerly than 34° and French claims no more southerly than 45°. The land in between, from Cape Fear to the Bay of Fundy, was claimed as English. All because John Cabot had sailed that coast more than a century earlier!
Now English boats, too many of them, were poking about Newfoundland, where England laid claim to certain discoveries, and even in the Gulf of St. Lawrence itself. London merchants like Charles Leigh, ostensibly on trading voyages in the great gulf, were boldly practicing piracy against French as well as Spanish vessels. And Hakluyt, the English geographer, was exhorting his countrymen to even greater competition. “While the French, Bretons, Basques and Biscayans do yearly return from these parts a manifold gain, we the English have merely stood still and been idle lookers on,” he wrote provocatively.
French merchants, however, were not showing much inclination to colonize the country; they saw no profit in underwriting such risky ventures when things were going so well. It cost money to plant colonies. Unencumbered competitive traders would probably profit as much as those who did the planting.
The king saw it differently however. Unless something was done to colonize the valley of the St. Lawrence, to fortify it, the great trade of the French and the hoped-for route to Cathay stood to be seized by foreigners. He resorted to offering monopolies.
Companies were given total rights to the fur trade in return for promising to settle specified numbers of colonists a year. But no volunteers as colonists appeared. When a company was given the fur monopoly it had to take worthless tramps or convicts furnished by the government and, as the merchants weren’t particularly interested in colonization anyway, they didn’t bother much about these derelicts and criminals once they had transported them to some desolate post in the wilderness. Furthermore, independent traders, as well as the fishermen who went ashore to barter, persisted in violating the monopolies. No one was happy. So vociferous were the conflicting protests that the king was forced to cancel the patents he granted one after another.
He didn’t begin to get the results he desired in New France until the advent of Samuel de Champlain.