De Monts' monopoly had expired and had not been renewed, but none the less he and his associates persevered in their enterprise, opening up the trade of the St. Lawrence, while others shared the profits. Again Champlain joined forces with the friendly Indians against the Iroquois, and a second victory was the result. Before the summer of 1610 ended, he was back in Europe, having learnt in the meantime that his friend and patron, King Henry IV, had been stabbed to death in the streets of Paris. On his next visit to Canada, in 1611, he cleared the ground for a future settlement at Montreal, having noted its advantages as a meeting-place for the Indian tribes from the Ottawa and the great lakes. The late months of that year and the whole of 1612 he spent in France, trying to devise some organization under which the work of building up the French power in Canada might be successfully carried on. There was now no company in existence, there was no royal mandate; personal favour and protection had passed away with the death of Henry of Navarre. The French court was a scene of growing priestly influence and of numberless intrigues; while New France on the St. Lawrence was a 'no man's land,' infested in summer time by crowds of fur-traders, who owned no rule and knew no law, in winter deserted by white men, except the few struggling settlers at Quebec. To form some kind of trade's union under an acknowledged authority was the one thing needful, and with a view to this end Champlain sought for and obtained the patronage of a member of the royal house. The Count de Soissons, a Bourbon prince, was appointed Lieutenant-General of the King for New France, and when he died, shortly after his appointment, the place was taken by another Bourbon, the Prince of Condé. The deputy of these princes was Champlain himself; he was given control over the Canadian fur trade, and he endeavoured to reconcile the rival interests of the western ports of France by forming a combination of traders, to which all could be admitted who had an interest in Canada. The scheme was partially carried out, but unfortunately jealousies, commercial and religious, precluded the establishment of a single united company.
| The imposture of Nicolas de Vignau. |
To make money by trade for himself or others was not the first object of Champlain's life. Exploration, with the Indies as its final goal, was in his mind, and the formation of a colony which should indeed be New France. While he still sojourned in Europe, a Frenchman, Nicolas de Vignau, came back from Canada, telling a tale that up the Ottawa river and beyond its sources he had found an outlet to the sea. Early in 1613 Champlain recrossed the Atlantic, went up the St. Lawrence to Montreal Island, and thence, taking De Vignau with him, followed the course of the Ottawa as far as the Île des Allumettes. He went no further. The story of a way to the sea was exposed, as a cunningly devised fable, by the Indians of the upper Ottawa, among whom the impostor had sojourned when he concocted his lies; and, but for Champlain's interposition, he would then and there have paid for his falsehood with his life. Champlain, however, spared him, retraced his steps, and went back again to France, where he spent a year and more before he again visited Canada.
| The Recollet friars. Le Caron. The first mission to the Hurons. |
Towards the end of May, 1615, he reached Quebec. He brought with him this time a small band of missionaries, four friars of the Recollet branch of the Franciscan order; and now mission work began in Canada. One of the friars, Le Caron, with twelve other Frenchmen in the company, visited for the first time the Huron country, and Champlain followed close upon his steps. Ascending the Ottawa for the second time, he passed the point which he had reached two years before, and by the Mattawa river and Lake Nipissing came to the shores of Lake Huron. Coasting southward along Georgian Bay, he found himself at length among the Huron towns, where Le Caron was already busy preaching a new faith to the heathen. An expedition against the Iroquois had been determined on, and with the Huron warriors and their allies, Champlain set out for the enemy's land. His route took him across Lake Simcoe, down the series of small lakes which feed the river Trent, and by that river to Lake Ontario, then seen by him for the first time. Crossing the lake, he landed at the site of Oswego, and marched into the midst of the Five Nations' cantons. From the military point of view the expedition was a disastrous failure, for an attack on a palisaded Iroquois town miscarried, Champlain himself was wounded, and the invaders retreated beaten and disheartened. Among the Hurons Champlain spent the winter; next year, returning down the Ottawa, he came back to Quebec, in the midsummer of 1616, and subsequently he sailed for France.
| Result of the first eight years of New France. |
Eight years had now passed since the founding of Quebec. Lakes Huron and Ontario had been reached, the Ottawa route had been explored, the friendship of the Hurons had been secured at the price of enmity with the Iroquois, missionaries were converting or trying to convert the Indians, and fur trading was briskly carried on; but colonization had made as yet little or no way. There were a few permanent residents at Quebec; but lower down at Tadoussac, and higher up at Three Rivers and Montreal, where in the summer white men and coloured foregathered to exchange their wares, in the winter no Frenchmen were to be found, unless it were one or other of the much enduring Recollet missionaries. In France it was the trade of Canada, not its settlement, that was matter of concern. As in the case of Newfoundland, the merchants of the western seaports of England set themselves to keep the island from being permanently colonized, anxious that the fishing traffic should remain in their own hands: so in the case of Canada, the merchants of the western seaboard of France regarded colonization as at best a useless expense, at worst a measure by which they might lose command of the fur trade. The climate of Newfoundland and of the St. Lawrence region was not such as to induce Englishmen or Frenchmen to make these lands their homes. Rather they seemed places for summer trips alone, to be left in winter icebound and desolate. Trade interests and nature combined to check the colonization of Canada; that anything was done in the way of settlement in the early years of the seventeenth century was due to missionary enthusiasm and to the foresight and tenacity of Champlain.
| Dispute among French traders. Company of the One Hundred Associates formed by Richelieu. |
He had formed a company of merchants, chiefly connected with Rouen and St. Malo, who nominally controlled the trade of the St. Lawrence; but they were not at one amongst themselves, some were Catholics, others were Huguenots, while the merchants of La Rochelle refused to join the combination, and traded in defiance of the monopoly which the rival towns claimed to possess. Various changes followed. About the beginning of 1620, Condé was succeeded as Viceroy of New France by the Duc de Montmorency, and in 1625 the latter sold his office to his nephew the Duc de Ventadour. In 1621, the privileges enjoyed by the Rouen and St. Malo company were transferred to two Huguenot merchants, the brothers De Caen: the result was ill feeling, and on the St. Lawrence open feuds between the old and the new monopolists, until in 1623 some kind of union was formed. Eventually, in 1627, all former privileges were annulled, and the control of Canada passed into the hands of a new strong company, known as the One Hundred Associates, at the head of which was Richelieu.