CHAPTER XX.
THE FRENCH IN THEIR COLONIES.
We may dismiss the French in a few pages, merely because they are only so much like their neighbours. It would have been a glorious circumstance to have been able to present them as an exception; but while they have shown as little regard to the rights or feelings of the people whose lands they have invaded for the purpose of colonization, they seem to have been on the whole more commonplace in their cruelties. In Guiana they drove back the Indians as the Dutch and the Portuguese did in their adjoining settlements. In the West Indies, they exterminated or enslaved the natives very much as other Europeans did. They were as assiduous as any people in massacring the Charaibs, and they suffered perhaps more than any other nation from the Charaibs in return. Their historian, Du Tertre, describes them as returning from a slaughtering expedition in St. Christopher’s “bien joyeux;” so that it would appear as though they executed the customary murders of the time, with their accustomed gaiety. In the Mauritius they found nobody to kill. In Madagascar, they alternately massacred and were massacred themselves, and finally driven out of of the country by the exasperated natives for their cruelties. If they made themselves masters of countries of equal importance with the Spaniards, Portuguese, English, or even the Dutch, they had not the art to make them so, for if we include Louisiana, Canada, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Madagascar, Mauritius, Guiana, various West Indian islands and settlements on the Indian and African coasts, the amount of territory is vast. The value of it to them, however, at no time, was ever proportionate in the least degree to the extent; and no European nation has been so unfortunate in the loss of colonies. Their attempt to possess themselves of Florida was abortive, but it was attended by a circumstance which deserves recording.
The Spaniards hearing that some Frenchmen had made a settlement in Florida about 1566, a fleet sailed thither, and discovered them at Fort Carolina. They attacked them, massacred the majority, and hanged the rest upon a tree, with this inscription,—“Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” They were Huguenots. Dominic de Gourgues, a Gascon of the same faith, a skilful and intrepid seaman, an enemy to the Spaniards, from whom he had received personal injuries, passionately fond of his country, of hazardous expeditions, and of glory, sold his estate, built some ships, and with a select band of his own stamp, embarked for Florida. He found, attacked, and defeated the Spaniards. All that he could catch he hung upon trees, with this inscription,—“Not as Spaniards, but as assassins;”—a sentence which, had it been executed with equal justice on all who deserved it in that day, would have half depopulated Europe; for almost every man who went abroad was an assassin; and the rest who stayed at home applauded, and therefore abetted. Having thus satisfied his indignant sense of justice, de Gourgues returned home, and the French abandoned the country.
The French seemed to take the firmest hold on Canada; but their powerful neighbours, the English, took even that from them, as they had done their Acadia (Nova Scotia), Hudson’s Bay, Newfoundland, Cape Breton, and the Island of St. John.
In all these settlements, they treated the Indians just as creatures that might be spared or destroyed,—driven out or not, as it best suited themselves. Francis I. invaded the papal charter to Spain and Portugal of all the New World, with an expression very characteristic of him. “What! shall the kings of Spain and Portugal quietly divide all America between them, without suffering me to take a share as their brother? I would fain see the article of Adam’s will that bequeaths that vast inheritance to them!” But he did not seem to suspect for a moment, that if Adam’s will could be found, the most conspicuous clause in it would have been that the earth should be fairly divided amongst his children; and that one family should not covet the heritage of another, much less that Cain should be always murdering Abel. Accordingly, Samuel de Champlain, whose name has been given to Lake Champlain, had scarcely laid the foundations of Quebec, the future capital of Canada, than the subjects of Francis began to violate every clause which could possibly have been in Adam’s will. Champlain found the Indians divided amongst themselves, and he adopted the policy since employed by the English in the East with so much greater success, not exactly that recommended by the apostle, to live in peace with all men, as far as in you lies, but to set your neighbours by the ears, so that you may take the advantage of their quarrels and disasters.
One of the greatest curses which befel the North American Indians on the invasion of the Europeans, was, that several of these refined and Christian nations came and took possession of neighbouring regions. Being indeed so refined and Christian, one might naturally have supposed that this would prove a happy circumstance for the savages. One would have supposed that thus surrounded on all sides, as it were, by the light of civilization and the virtue of Christianity, nothing could possibly prevent the savages from becoming civilized and Christian too. One would have supposed that such miserable, cruel, and dishonest savages, seeing whichever way they turned, nothing but images of peace, wisdom, integrity, self-denial, generosity, and domestic happiness, would have become speedily and heartily ashamed of themselves. That they would have been fairly overwhelmed with the flood of radiance covering those nations which had been for so many ages in the possession of Christianity. That they would have been penetrated through and through with the benevolence and goodness, the sublime graces, and winning sweetness of so favoured and regenerated a race! Nothing of the sort, however, took place. The savages looked about them, and saw people more powerful, indeed, but in spirit and practice ten times more savage than themselves. What a precious crew of hypocrites must they have regarded these white invaders when they heard them begin to talk of their superior virtue, and to call them barbarians! There were the French in Canada, Nova Scotia, and other settlements; there were the Dutch in their Nova Belgia, and the English in Massachusets, all regarding each other with the most deadly hatred, and all rampant to wrest, either from the Indians, or from one another, the very ground that each other stood upon.
The people brought with them from Europe, crimes and abominations that the Indians never knew. The Indians never fought for conquest, but to defend their hunting grounds—lands which their ancestors had inhabited for generations, and which they firmly believed were given to them by the Great Spirit; but these white invaders had a boundless and quenchless thirst for every region that they could set their eyes upon. They claimed it by pretences, of which the simple Indians could neither make head nor tail—they talked of popes and kings on the other side of the water as having given them the Indians’ countries, and the Indians could not conceive what business these kings and popes had with them. But the whites had arguments which they could not withstand—gunpowder and rum! They forced a footing in the Indian countries, and then they gave them rum to take away their brains, that they might take away first their peltries, and then more land. There is nothing in history more horrible than the conduct to which the Dutch, French and English resorted in their rivalries in the north-east of America. Each party subdued the tribes of Indians in their own immediate neighbourhood, by force and fraud, and then employed them against the Indians who were in alliance with their rivals. Instead of mutually, as Christians should, inculcating upon them the beauty and the duty, and the advantages of peace, they instigated them, by every possible means, and by the most devilish arguments, to betray and exterminate one another, and not only one another, but to betray and exterminate, if possible, their white rivals. They made them furious with rum, and put fire-arms into their hands, and hounded them on one another with a demoniac glee. They took credit to themselves for inducing the Indians to scalp one another! They gave them a premium upon these horrible outrages, and we shall see that even the Puritans of New England gave at length so much as 1000l. for every Indian scalp that could be brought to them! They excited these poor Indians by the most diabolical means, and by taking advantage of their weak side, the proneness to vengeance, to acts of the most atrocious nature, and then they branded them, when it was convenient, as most fearful and bloody savages, and on that plea drove them out of their rightful possessions, or butchered them upon them.
I am not talking of imaginary horrors—I am speaking with all the soberness which the contemplation of such things will permit—of a deliberate system of policy pursued by the French, Dutch, and English, in these regions for a full century, and which eventually terminated in the destruction of the greater part of these Indian nations, and in the expulsion of the remainder. We shall see that even the English urged their allies—the Five Nations—continually to attack and murder the French and their Indian allies; and in all their wars with the French in Canada, hired, or bribed, or compelled these savages to accompany them, and commit the very devastations for which they afterwards upbraided them, and which they made a plea for their extirpation. But of that anon; my present business is with the French; and though the facts which I have now to relate regard their conduct rather in our colonies than their own, yet they cannot be properly introduced anywhere else; and they could not have been introduced impartially here without these few preliminary observations.
The French were soon stripped of their other settlements in this quarter by the English. It was from Canada that they continued to annoy their rivals of New York and New England, till finally driven thence by the victory of Wolfe at Quebec; and it was principally on the northern side of the St. Lawrence that their territory lay. On that side, the great tribe of the Adirondacks, or, as they termed them, the Algonquins, lay, and became their allies; with tribes of inferior note. On the south side lay the great nation of the Iroquois, so termed by them; or “The Five Nations of United Indians,” as they were called by the English. These were very warlike nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senekas—whose territories extended along the south-eastern side of the St. Lawrence, into the present States of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire—a country eighty leagues in length, and more than forty broad.
To drive out these nations, so as to deprive them of any share in the profitable fur trade which the Algonquins carried on for them, and to get possession of so fine a country, Champlain readily accompanied the Algonquins in an expedition of extermination against them. The Algonquins knew all the intricacies of the woods, and all the modes and stratagems of Indian warfare; and, aided by the arms and ammunition of the French, they would soon have accomplished Champlain’s desire of exterminating the Iroquois, had not the Dutch, then the possessors of New York, furnished the Iroquois also with arms and ammunition, for it was not to their interest that these five nations, who brought their furs to them, should be reduced.