Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1000 to 1600, part 1
Early voyages to America--Voyages of the Cabots--The French fisher folk--Cartier's first voyage--Cartier's second voyage--Cartier's third voyage--Marguerite Roberval Who first found Canada?
As many legends surround the beginnings of empire in the North as cling to the story of early Rome.
When Leif, son of Earl Eric, the Red, came down from Greenland with his Viking crew, which of his bearded seamen in Arctic furs leaned over the dragon prow for sight of the lone new land, fresh as if washed by the dews of earth's first morning?
Was it Thorwald, Leif's brother, or the mother of Snorri, first white child born in America, who caught first glimpse through the flying spray of Labrador's domed hills,--"Helluland, place of slaty rocks"; and of Nova Scotia's wooded meadows,--"Markland";
and Rhode Island's broken vine-clad shore,--"Vinland"?
The question cannot be answered.
All is as misty concerning that Viking voyage as the legends of old Norse gods.
Leif, the Lucky, son of Earl Eric, the outlaw, coasts back to Greenland with his bold sea-rovers.
This was in the year 1000. For ten years they came riding southward in their rude-planked ships of the dragon prow, those Norse adventurers; and Thorwald, Leif's brother, is first of the pathfinders in America to lose his life in battle with the "Skraelings" or Indians.
Thornstein, another brother, sails south in 1005 with Gudrid, his wife; but a roaring nor'easter tears the piping {2} sails to tatters, and Thornstein dies as his frail craft scuds before the blast.
Back comes Gudrid the very next year, with a new husband and a new ship and two hundred colonists to found a kingdom in the "Land of the Vine."
At one place they come to rocky islands, where birds flock in such myriads it is impossible to land without trampling nests.
Were these the rocky islands famous for birds in the St. Lawrence?
On another coast are fields of maize and forests entangled with grapevines.
Was this part of modern New England?
On Vinland--wherever it was--Gudrid, the Norse woman, disembarks her colonists.
All goes well for three years.
Fish and fowl are in plenty.
Cattle roam knee-deep in pasturage.
Indians trade furs for scarlet cloth and the Norsemen dole out their barter in strips narrow as a little finger; but all beasts that roam the wilds are free game to Indian hunters.
The cattle begin to disappear, the Indians to lurk armed along the paths to the water springs.
The woods are full of danger.
Any bush may conceal painted foe.
Men as well as cattle lie dead with telltale arrow sticking from a wound.
The Norsemen begin to hate these shadowy, lonely, mournful forests.
They long for wild winds and trackless seas and open world.
Fur-clad, what do they care for the cold?
Greenland with its rolling drifts is safer hunting than this forest world.
What glory, doomed prisoners between the woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great fear?
The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came dank and unwholesome to these men.
Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed to sail.
And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid.
Ordering the vessels loaded with timber good for masts and with wealth of furs, she gathered up her people and led them from the "Land of the Vine" back to Greenland.
[Illustration: VIKING SHIP RECENTLY DISCOVERED.
] Where was Vinland?
Was it Canada?
The answer is unknown.
It was south of Labrador.
It is thought to have been Rhode Island; but certainly, passing north and south, the Norse were the first white men to see Canada.
Did some legend, dim as a forgotten dream, come down to Columbus in 1492 of the Norsemen's western land?
All sailors of Europe yearly fished in Iceland.
Had one of Columbus's crew heard sailor yarns of the new land?
If so, Columbus must have thought the new land part of Asia; for ever since Marco Polo had come from China, Europe had dreamed of a way to Asia by the sea.
What with Portugal and Spain dividing the New World, all the nations of Europe suddenly awakened to a passion for discovery.
[Illustration: DIVISION OF THE NEW WORLD BETWEEN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.
] There were still lands to the north, which Portugal and Spain had not found,--lands where pearls and gold might abound.
At Bristol in England dwelt with his sons John Cabot, the Genoese master mariner, well acquainted with Eastern-trade.
Henry VII commissions him on a voyage of discovery--an empty honor, the King to have one fifth of all profit, Cabot to bear all expense.
The _Matthew_ ships from Bristol with a crew of eighteen in May of 1497. North and west sails the tumbling craft two thousand miles.
Colder grows the air, stiffer the breeze in the bellying sails, till the _Matthew's_ crew are shivering on decks amid fleets of icebergs that drift from Greenland in May and June.
This is no realm of spices and gold.
Land looms through the mist the last week in June, {4} rocky, surf-beaten, lonely as earth's ends, with never a sound but the scream of the gulls and the moan of the restless water-fret along endless white reefs.
Not a living soul did the English sailors see.
Weak in numbers, disappointed in the rocky land, they did not wait to hunt for natives.
An English flag was hastily unfurled and possession taken of this Empire of the North for England.
The woods of America for the first time rang to the chopper.
Wood and water were taken on, and the _Matthew_ had anchored in Bristol by the first week of August.
Neither gold nor a way to China had Cabot found; but he had accomplished three things: he had found that the New World was not a part of Asia, as Spain thought; he had found the continent itself; and he had given England the right to claim new dominion.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL "HOLE IN THE WALL" AT "KITTY VIDDY," NEAR ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND]
England went mad over Cabot.
He was granted the title of admiral and allowed to dress in silks as a nobleman.
King Henry gave him 10 pounds, equal to of modern money, and a pension of 20 pounds, equal to to-day.
It is sometimes said that modern writers attribute an air of romance to these old pathfinders, {5} which they would have scorned; but "Zuan Cabot," as the people called him, wore the halo of glory with glee.
To his barber he presented an island kingdom; to a poor monk he gave a bishopric.
His son, Sebastian, sailed out the next year with a fleet of six ships and three hundred men, coasting north as far as Greenland, south as far as Carolina, so rendering doubly secure England's title to the North, and bringing back news of the great cod banks that were to lure French and Spanish and English fishermen to Newfoundland for hundreds of years.
[Illustration: SEBASTIAN CABOT] Where was Cabot's landfall?
I chanced to be in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, shortly after the 400th anniversary of Cabot's voyage.
King's Cove, landlocked as a hole in a wall, mountains meeting sky line, presented on one flat rock in letters the size of a house claim that it was _here_ John Cabot sent his sailors ashore to plant the flag on cairn of bowlders; but when I came back from Newfoundland by way of Cape Breton, I found the same claim there.
For generations the tradition has been handed down from father to son among Newfoundland fisher folk that as Cabot's vessel, pitching and rolling to the tidal bore, came scudding into King's Cove, rock girt as an inland lake, the sailors shouted "Bona Vista--Beautiful View"; but Cape Breton has her legend, too.
It was Cabot's report of the cod banks that brought the Breton fishermen out, whose name Cape Breton bears.
{6} As Christopher Columbus spurred England to action, so Cabot now spurred Portugal and Spain and France.
Gaspar Cortereal comes in 1500 from Portugal on Cabot's tracks to that land of "slaty rocks" which the Norse saw long ago.
The Gulf Stream beats the iron coast with a boom of thunder, and the tide swirl meets the ice drift; and it isn't a land to make a treasure hunter happy till there wander down to the shore Montaignais Indians, strapping fellows, a head taller than the tallest Portuguese.
Cortereal lands, lures fifty savages on board, carries them home as slaves for Portugal's galley ships, and names the country--"land of laborers"--Labrador.
He sailed again, the next year; but never returned to Portugal.
The seas swallowed his vessel; or the tide beat it to pieces against Labrador's rocks; of those Indians slaked their vengeance by cutting the throats of master and crew.
And Spain was not idle.
In 1513 Balboa leads his Spanish treasure seekers across the Isthmus of Panama, discovers the Pacific, and realizes what Cabot has already proved--that the New World is not a part of Asia.
Thereupon, in swelling words, he takes possession of "earth, air, and water from the Pole Arctic to the Pole Antarctic" for Spain.
A few years later Magellan finds his way to Asia round South America; but this path by sea is too long.
From France, Normans and Bretons are following Cabot's tracks to Newfoundland, to Labrador, to Cape Breton, "quhar men goeth a-fishing" in little cockleshell boats no bigger than three-masted schooner, with black-painted dories dragging in tow or roped on the rolling decks.
Absurd it is, but with no blare of trumpets or royal commissions, with no guide but the wander spirit that lured the old Vikings over the rolling seas, these grizzled peasants flock from France, cross the Atlantic, and scatter over what were then chartless waters from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Grand Banks.
Just as they may be seen to-day bounding over the waves in their little black dories, hauling in .
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hauling in the endless line, or jigging for squid, or lying at ease at the noonday hour {7} singing some old land ballad while the kettle of cod and pork boils above a chip fire kindled on the stones used as ballast in their boats--so came the French fisher folk three years after Cabot had discovered the Grand Banks.
Denys of Honfleur has led his fishing fleet all over the Gulf of St. Lawrence by 1506. So has Aubert of Dieppe.
By 1517, fifty French vessels yearly fish off the coast of New-Found-Land.
By 1518 one Baron de Lery has formed the project of colonizing this new domain; but the baron's ship unluckily came from the Grand Banks to port on that circular bank of sand known as Sable Island--from twenty to thirty miles as the tide shifts the sand, with grass waist high and a swampy lake in the middle.
The Baron de Lery unloads his stock on Sable island and roves the sea for a better port.
The King of France, meanwhile, resents the Pope dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal.
"I should like to see the clause in Father Adam's will that gives the whole earth to you," he sent word to his brother kings.
Verrazano, sea rover of Florence, is commissioned to explore the New World seas; but Verrazano goes no farther north in 1524 than Newfoundland, and when he comes on a second voyage he is lost--some say hanged as a pirate by the Spaniards for intruding on their seas.
In spite of the loss of the King's sea rover, the fisher folk of France continue coming in their crazy little schooners, continue fishing in the fogs of the Grand Banks from their rocking black-planked dories, continue scudding for shelter from storm .
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here, there, everywhere; into the south shore of Newfoundland; into the long arms of the sea at Cape Breton, dyed at sundawn and sunset by such floods of golden light, these arms of the sea become known as Bras d'Or Lakes--Lakes of Gold; into the rock-girt lagoons of Gaspé; into the holes in the wall of Labrador .
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till there presently springs up a secret trade in furs between the fishing fleet and the Indians.
The King of France is not to be balked by one failure.
"What," he asked, "are my royal brothers to have _all_ America?"
Among the Bank fishermen were many sailors of St. Malo.
Jacques Cartier, master pilot, {8} now forty years of age, must have learned strange yarns of the New World from harbor folk.
Indeed, he may have served as sailor on the Banks.
Him the King chose, with one hundred and twenty men and two vessels, in 1534, to go on a voyage of discovery to the great sea where men fished.
Cartier was to find if the sea led to China and to take possession of the countries for France.
Captain, masters, men, march to the cathedral and swear fidelity to the King.
The vessels sail on April 20, with the fishing fleet.
[Illustration: Jacques Cartier] Piping winds carry them forward at a clipper pace.
The sails scatter and disappear over the watery sky line.
In twenty days Cartier is off that bold headland with the hole in the wall called Bona Vista.
Ice is running as it always runs there in spring.
What with wind and ice, Cartier deems it prudent to look for shelter.
Sheering south among the scarps at Catalina, where the whales blow and the seals float in thousands {9} on the ice pans, Cartier anchors to take on wood and water.
For ten days he watches the white whirl driving south.
Then the water clears and his sails swing to the wind, and he is off to the north, along that steel-gray shore of rampart rock, between the white-slab islands and the reefy coast.
Birds are in such flocks off Funk Island that the men go ashore to hunt, as the fisher folk anchor for bird shooting to-day.
Higher rises the rocky sky line; barer the shore wall, with never a break to the eye till you turn some jagged peak and come on one of those snug coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle.
Reefs white as lace fret line the coast.
Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways.
Gray finback whales flounder in schools.
The lazy humpbacks lounge round and round the ships, eyeing the keels curiously.
A polar bear is seen on an ice pan.
Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of Newfoundland--Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, rock girt, treeless, always windy, desolate, with an eternal moaning of the tide over the fretful reefs.
[Illustration: WHERE THE FISHER HAMLETS NOW NESTLE, NEWFOUNDLAND] {10} To the north, off a little seaward, is Belle Isle.
Here, storm or calm, the ocean tide beats with fury unceasing and weird reëchoing of baffled waters like the scream of lost souls.
It was sunset when I was on a coastal ship once that anchored off Belle Isle, and I realized how natural it must have been for Cartier's superstitious sailors to mistake the moan of the sea for wild cries of distress, and the smoke of the spray for fires of the inferno.
To French sailors Belle Isle became Isle of Demons.
In the half light of fog or night, as the wave wash rises and falls, you can almost see white arms clutching the rock.
As usual, bad weather caught the ships in Belle Isle Straits.
Till the 9th of June brown fog held Cartier.
When it lifted the tide had borne his ships across the straits to Labrador at Castle Island, Château Bay.
Labrador was a ruder region than Newfoundland.
Far as eye could scan were only domed rocks like petrified billows, dank valleys moss-grown and scrubby, hillsides bare as slate; "This land should not be called earth," remarked Cartier.
"It is flint!
Faith, I think this is the region God gave Cain!"
If this were Cain's realm, his descendants were "men of might"; for when the Montaignais, tall and straight as mast poles, came down to the straits, Cartier's little scrub sailors thought them giants.
Promptly Cartier planted the cross and took possession of Labrador for France.
As the boats coasted westward the shore rock turned to sand,--huge banks and drifts and hillocks of white sand,--so that the place where the ships struck across for the south shore became known as Blanc Sablon (White Sand).
Squalls drove Cartier up the Bay of Islands on the west shore of Newfoundland, and he was amazed to find this arm of the sea cut the big island almost in two.
Wooded mountains flanked each shore.
A great river, amber with forest mold, came rolling down a deep gorge.
But it was not Newfoundland Cartier had come to explore; it was the great inland sea to the west, and to the west he sailed.
July found him off another kind of coast--New Brunswick--forested and rolling with fertile meadows.
Down a broad shallow stream--the Miramichi--paddled Indians waving furs {11} for trade; but wind threatened a stranding in the shallows.
Cartier turned to follow the coast north.
Denser grew the forests, broader the girths of the great oaks, heavier the vines, hotter the midsummer weather.
This was no land of Cain.
It was a new realm for France.
While Cartier lay at anchor north of the Miramichi, Indian canoes swarmed round the boats at such close quarters the whites had to discharge a musket to keep the three hundred savages from scrambling on decks.
Two seamen then landed to leave presents of knives and coats.
The Indians shrieked delight, and, following back to the ships, threw fur garments to the decks till literally naked.
On the 18th of July the heat was so intense that Cartier named the waters Bay of Chaleur.
Here were more Indians.
At first the women dashed to hiding in the woods, while the painted warriors paddled out; but when Cartier threw more presents into the canoes, women and children swarmed out singing a welcome.
The Bay of Chaleur promised no passage west, so Cartier again spread his sails to the wind and coasted northward.
The forests thinned.
Towards Gaspé the shore became rocky and fantastic.
The inland sea led westward, but the season was far advanced.
It was decided to return and report to the King.
Landing at Gaspé on July 24, Cartier erected a cross thirty feet high with the words emblazoned on a tablet, _Vive le Roi de France_.
Standing about him were the painted natives of the wilderness, one old chief dressed in black bearskin gesticulating protest against the cross till Cartier explained by signs that the whites would come again.
Two savages were invited on board.
By accident or design, as they stepped on deck, their skiff was upset and set adrift.
The astonished natives found themselves in the white men's power, but food and gay clothing allayed fear.
They willingly consented to accompany Cartier to France.
Somewhere north of Gaspé the smoke of the French fishing fleet was seen ascending from the sea, as the fishermen rocked in their dories cooking the midday meal.
August 9 prayers are held for safe return at Blanc Sablon,--port of the white, white sand,--and by September 5 Cartier is {12} home in St. Malo, a rabble of grizzled sailor folk chattering a welcome from the wharf front.
