Robert Cavelier De La Salle. Concluded.
On the 6th of April La Salle discovered that the river was running through three channels. The following day he divided his company into three parties, of which he led the one that followed the western channel; the Sieur de Tonty, accompanied by Father Membré, took the middle channel, and the Sieur Dautray took the eastern channel. Father Membré relates that these channels appeared to them “beautiful and deep.” The water began to get brackish; then two leagues further down it became perfectly salt; and now, O glorious sight!
“The sea! the sea! the open sea,
The blue, the fresh, the ever free,”
was spread out before the eager and enchanted eyes of those brave and noble voyagers. Their first impulse was to return thanks to the King of kings for the protecting arm of his providence, that had thus guided them safely to this glorious consummation of their hopes; their second was to honor the King of France for his favor and protection. For these purposes, on the 9th of April, a cross and a column were erected with appropriate ceremonies. The entire company, under arms, joined with the minister of religion in chanting the hymn of the church, Vexilla Regis, and the Te Deum, and then followed a discharge of their muskets and shouts of “Long live the King!” The column bore the following inscription: “Louis the Great, King of France and Navarre, reigns; the 9th of April, 1682.” At the foot of a tree La Salle caused a leaden plate to be buried, bearing the arms of France and a Latin inscription commemorative of the first navigation of the Mississippi, from the Illinois to its mouth, by La Salle, Tonty, Membré, and twenty Frenchmen. An authentic act, in the form of a procès verbal, was drawn up by La Metairie, the notary of the expedition, and signed by La Salle, Father Membré, Tonty, and the other principal members of the company. La Salle took formal possession of the country, which he was the first to call Louisiana, for the King of France; also of the natives and people residing therein, the seas, harbors, and all the streams flowing into the Mississippi. The great river itself he called the St. Louis.
In the midst of their rejoicings they were suffering for food. They found some dried meat prepared by the Indians, of which they partook with relish, and, as the good missionary says, “It was very good and delicate.” What must have been their feelings when they discovered that they had partaken of human flesh! Scarcity of food compelled them to turn their canoes up-stream. La Salle paid a visit to the hostile Quinipissas, with whom he resorted to his usual address to propitiate their friendship, and, though invited to a banquet, his men partook of it with their guns at their sides. A treacherous treaty of peace was entered into, but was used as a cover for an attack next morning upon the Europeans. But the ever-watchful La Salle was prepared for [pg 834] them. The two parties were engaged in a contest of two hours, in which the Quinipissas were worsted, and sustained a loss of ten men killed and many wounded. This is the only occasion in which the hostile dispositions of the natives did not yield to skill and diplomacy. His men, exasperated at the conduct of the treacherous natives, urged him to allow them to burn their village; but he adopted the wiser and more humane policy of refraining from alienating still more by unnecessary cruelty those whom he wished to make devout worshippers of the King of heaven and loyal subjects of the King of France. During the remainder of the return voyage, with the exception of the Koroas, who had now become allies of the Quinipissas, he met with the same hospitable treatment from the tribes on the banks of the river as he had received while going down. They were now regaled on the fresh green corn of the fields. La Salle with two canoes pushed forward from the Arkansas, in advance of his party, as far as Fort Prudhomme. Here he became dangerously ill, and could advance no further, and on the 2d of June was joined by the entire company. His malady became so violent that he was compelled to send Tonty forward to convey early information to the Comte de Frontenac of the great discovery. Father Membré remained with La Salle, doing all in his power to alleviate the sufferings of his cherished leader, whose illness continued forty days. The expedition by slow advances reached the Miami late in September, where they learned of several of Tonty's military expeditions undertaken after he left the main body. Intending to make the voyage of the Mississippi again in the spring, and plant colonies along its shores, La Salle appointed Father Membré his messenger to the king; and this zealous man, accepting the commission with promptness, proceeded to Quebec, and on the 2d of October sailed for France, to lay before the French court accurate information of La Salle's discoveries. During the next ten or twelve months La Salle remained in the Illinois country, cementing his friendly alliances with the Indians, and pushing forward his trading interests. Having seen Fort St. Louis completed, he left Tonty in command of it, and for his plan of colonization he substituted the project of applying to the French government for co-operation in a much more extensive one. He reached Quebec early in November, and sailed for France to render an account of his fulfilment of the royal orders, and to enlist the good offices of the government in his future plans, and landed at Rochelle on the 23d of December, 1683.
The following allusion to La Salle's services to France in extending the province of New France by the exploration of the Mississippi, by Gov. Dongan, of the rival English province of New York, is interesting. Alluding to a map of the country which he was sending home to his superiors, Gov. Dongan writes: “Also, it points out where there's a great river discovered by one Lassal, a Frenchman from Canada, who thereupon went into France, and, as it's reported, brought two or three vessels with people to settle there, which (if true) will prove very inconvenient to us, but to the Spanish also (the river running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina into the Bay of Mexico); and it's believed Nova Mexico cannot be far from the mountains adjoining it, that [pg 835] place being in 36° North Latitude. If your lordships thought it fit, I could send a sloop or two from this place to discover that river.”[205]
La Salle now conceived the plan of approaching the mouth of the Mississippi by sea, exploring the country, and founding powerful colonies therein. The evil reports of his enemies had preceded him to France, and these were strengthened by the disparaging representations which De La Barre, Frontenac's successor as Governor of Canada, had been sending home. But the Marquis de Seignelay, the son of the deceased minister Colbert, again favored La Salle's enterprises, and secured for them the favor of the king. The government provided a fleet of four vessels for the expedition: the Joly, a royal ship, a frigate of thirty-six tons, commanded by Capt. de Beaujeu, a Norman gentleman, who was also commander of the squadron; the Belle, of six tons, a present from the king to La Salle; the Aimable, a store-ship of three hundred tons burden, on board of which were the goods, implements, and effects of the expedition; and the St. Francis, a ketch containing munitions and merchandise for San Domingo. M. de Chevalier d'Aire was lieutenant to Capt. de Beaujeu, and the Sieur de Hamel, a young gentleman full of fire and courage, his ensign. Father Le Clercq, the narrator of the expedition, exclaims: “Would to God the troops and rest of the crew had been as well chosen!”
A new commission was issued to La Salle, by which he was authorized to found colonies in Louisiana, and to govern the vast country and its inhabitants from Lake Michigan to the borders of Mexico. The commander of the squadron was to be subject to his orders, except in navigating the ships at sea—an arrangement which the jealous and sensitive mind of Beaujeu permitted to embitter him against La Salle, and which led to difficulties between them. Besides marines and one hundred soldiers, the company to embark in the expedition amounted to about two hundred and eighty persons, amongst whom were several persons of consideration. The Sieur Moranget, and the Sieur Cavelier, nephews of La Salle, the latter only fourteen years old; Planterose, Thibault, Ory, Joutel, Talon, a Canadian gentleman with his family, and some other families, consisting of men and young women, also joined the expedition as volunteers. One of La Salle's first cares was to provide for the spiritual wants of his followers and colonists and the conversion of the heathen nations he expected to visit. For ten years the zealous Recollect Fathers had seconded and promoted the efforts of La Salle to Christianize the natives of the New World, and he now made it an essential point to obtain some of these holy men to accompany his great expedition. His application to their superior, the Rev. Father Hyacinth le Febvre, was cordially complied with, and accordingly Fathers Zenobe Membré, Anastace Donay, and Maxime Le Clercq were selected from this order for the task. M. Tronçon, superior of the Sulpitians, was not behind the Recollects in zeal for the good work, and accordingly three secular priests, Cavelier, the brother of La Salle, Chefdeville his relative, and Majulle, were chosen. These constituted the ecclesiastical corps of the expedition. Nothing was left undone, either by the superiors of the Recollects or [pg 836] of the Sulpitians, nor by the Holy See, for carrying the faith of Christ to those remote and benighted regions. Ample powers and privileges were conferred upon the good missionaries, so as to relieve them from the necessity in emergencies of resorting to the distant ordinary of Quebec.
But in selecting soldiers, artisans, and laborers, the most culpable disregard of duty was chargeable to the agents of La Salle, who, while he was engaged at Paris, filled up the ranks by receiving from the streets of Rochelle worthless vagabonds and beggars, who were wholly ignorant of the trades for which they were chosen. La Salle was only partially able to remedy this evil before sailing. Bancroft thus describes the composition of this part of the expedition: “But the mechanics were poor workmen, ill-versed in their art; the soldiers, though they had for commander Joutel, a man of courage and truth, and afterwards the historian of the grand enterprise, were themselves spiritless vagabonds, without discipline and without experience; the volunteers were restless with indefinite expectations; and, worst of all, the naval commander, Beaujeu, was deficient in judgment, incapable of sympathy with the magnanimous heroism of La Salle, envious, self-willed, and foolishly proud.” La Salle arrived at Rochelle on the 28th of May, 1684, and during his stay of some weeks the unhappy misunderstanding between him and the commander of the squadron, which proved so great a drawback on the enterprise, began to manifest itself. The four vessels sailed from Rochelle on the 24th of July, but the breaking of one of the masts of the Joly in a storm caused them to put in at Chef-de-Bois, and finally, on the 1st of August, they set sail again, steering for San Domingo. During the voyage to San Domingo, La Salle and Beaujeu could not proceed together with cordiality or harmony, and the former was unfortunate in gaining the ill-will of the subordinate officers and sailors by interfering to protect his own men from what he regarded as an absurd and unnecessary procedure. It was the custom among sailors to require all who had not before crossed the tropic to submit to the penalty of being plunged into a tub of water by their veteran companions for the amusement of others, or pay liberally for a commutation of the penalty. La Salle peremptorily forbade his men being subjected to this alternative; hence the hostility of those who failed to realize the usual fun or fine at their expense. After a prosperous voyage a storm overtook the squadron as they approached San Domingo. It was agreed that the Joly should put in at Port de Paix in the north of the island; but Beaujeu changed his course of his own will, and carried her to Petit Gonave, far to the south. In four days the Belle and Aimable, which had been separated from her by the storm, joined her there. The St. Francis was surprised and captured by two Spanish pirogues, which was a serious loss to the expedition and a sore affliction to La Salle.