ACADIE, 1663.
[In the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 147, is a fac-simile of a map, “Tabula Novæ Franciæ,” which is thus described by Mr. Poore: “A fac-simile of one in a manuscript atlas purchased by M. Estancelin at a book-stall in Paris soon after the destruction of the archbishop’s palace in 183-, the library of which contained several boxes of manuscripts labelled Canada, and probably sent from the missionaries there. The signs [church symbol] undoubtedly were used to denote Jesuit churches or missions; the [dotted lines] the English boundary; and the marks + the English settlements. The atlas is dated 1663.”—Ed.]
Acadia had been the home of civilized men for nearly a hundred years; but there was almost nothing to show as the fruits of this long occupation of a virgin soil. It had produced no men of marked character, and its history was little more than the record of feuds between petty chiefs, and of feeble resistance to the attacks of more powerful neighbors. Madame la Tour alone exhibits the courage and energy naturally to be looked for under the circumstances in which three generations of settlers were placed. At the end of a century there were only a few scattered settlements spread along the coast, passing tranquilly from allegiance to one European sovereign to allegiance to another of different speech and religion. A few hundred miles away, another colony founded sixteen years after the first venture of De Monts, and with scarcely a larger number of settlers, waged a successful war with sickness, poverty, and neglect, and made a slow and steady progress, until, with its own consent, it was united with a still more prosperous colony founded twenty-three years after the first settlement at Port Royal. There are few more suggestive contrasts than that which the history of Acadia presents when set side by side with the history of Plymouth and Massachusetts; and what is true of its early is not less true of its later history.
[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]
THE original authorities for the early history of the French settlements in Acadia[419] are the contemporaneous narratives of Samuel de Champlain and Marc Lescarbot. Though Champlain comes within our observation as a companion of De Monts, a separate chapter in this volume is given to his personal history and his writings.
Of the personal history of Marc Lescarbot we know much less than of that of Champlain. He was born at Vervins, probably between 1580 and 1590, and was a lawyer in Paris, where he had an extensive practice, and was the author of several works; only one, or rather a part of one, concerns our present inquiry.[420]