Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1600 to 1607, part 2

[Illustration: HUDSON COAT OF ARMS] Not less disastrous were English efforts than French to colonize the New World.

Up to 1610 Canada's story is, in the main, a record of blind heroism, dogged courage, death that refused to acknowledge defeat.

Four hundred French vessels now yearly come to reap the harvest of the sea; in and out among the fantastic rocks of Gaspé, pierced and pillared and scooped into caves by the wave wash, where fisher boats reap other kind of harvest, richer than the silver harvest of the sea,--harvest of beaver, and otter, and marten; up the dim amber waters of the Saguenay, within the shadow of the somber gorge, trafficking baubles of bead and red print for furs, precious furs.

Pontgravé, merchant prince, comes out with fifty men in 1600, and leaves sixteen at Tadoussac, ostensibly as colonists, really as wood lopers to scatter through the forests and learn the haunts of the Indians.

Pontgravé comes back for men and furs in 1601, and comes again in 1603 with two vessels, accompanied by a soldier of fortune from the French court, who acts as geographer,--Samuel Champlain, now in his thirty-sixth year, with service in war to his credit and a journey across Spanish America.

{33} The two vessels are barely as large as coastal schooners; but shallow draft enables them to essay the Upper St. Lawrence far as Mount Royal, where Cartier had voyaged.

Of the palisaded Indian fort not a vestige remains.

War or plague has driven the tribe westward, but it is plain to the court geographer that, in spite of former failures, this land of rivers like lakes, and valleys large as European kingdoms, is fit for French colonists.

[Illustration: THE FANTASTIC ROCKS OF GASPÉ] When Champlain returns to France the King readily grants to Sieur de Monts a region roughly defined as anywhere between Pennsylvania and Labrador, designated Acadia.

This region Sieur de Monts is to colonize in return for a monopoly of the fur trade.

When other traders complain, De Monts quiets them by letting them all buy shares in the venture.

With him are associated as motley a throng of treasure seekers as ever stampeded for gold.

There is Samuel Champlain, the court geographer;

there is Pontgravé, the merchant prince, on a separate {34} vessel with stores for the colonists.

Pontgravé is to attend especially to the fur trading.

There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son, Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons.

Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with tongues and fists that the sailors threaten to bury them in the same grave to see if they can lie at peace in death.

[Illustration: SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN] Before the boats sight Acadia, it is early summer of 1604. Pontgravé leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac.

De Monts enters the little bay of St. Mary's, off the northwest corner of Nova Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.

Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful as boys out of school.

The forest is pathless and dense with June undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction.

The company scatters.

Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill.

Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that he has left his sword at the spring.

The priest hurries back for the sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that he is hopelessly lost.

The last shafts of {35} sunlight disappear.

The chill of night settles on the darkening woods.

The priest shouts till he is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl.

Aubry wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless ages, .

.

.

on and on, .

.

.

till gray dawn steals through the forest and midday wears to a second night.

Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions.

Could the Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him?

De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite of fiercest denials.

All night cannon were fired from the vessel and bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the priest did not come.

De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay, and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line of wooded meadows like home-land parks.

Poutrincourt is so delighted, he at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.

On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks, making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early voyage.

The tides carry to a broad river on the north side.

It is St. John's Day.

They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking vainly for more minerals.

Westward is another river, known to-day as the Ste.

Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.

Dochet Island at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site.

A fort here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians say leads back to the St. Lawrence.

Thinking more of fort than farms, De Monts plants his colony on Ste.

Croix River, on an island composed mainly of sand and rock.

While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals.

As {36} the vessel coasts near St. Mary's Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the shore.

Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement.

A hat on the end of a pole is waved weakly from the beach.

The men can scarcely believe their senses.

It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he disappeared.

For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and roots, before he found his way back to the sea.

[Illustration: PORT ROYAL OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN, 1609 (From Lescarbot's map)] Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgravé has taken one vessel up the St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the other for supplies.

A worse beginning could hardly have been made.

The island was little better than a sand heap.

No hills shut out the cold winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried in ice jam from the south.

As the snow began to fall, padding the stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness of winter in a forest chill their hearts.

{37} Cooped up on the island by the ice, they did little hunting.

Idleness gives time for repinings.

Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little cemetery outside the palisades.

De Monts has had enough of Ste.

Croix.

When Pontgravé comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares to move.

Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod, looking for a place to plant the capital of New France.

It is amusing to speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste.

Croix in August, to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia.

While Champlain and Pontgravé volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.

What had De Monts to show for his two years' labor?

His company had spent what would be ,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony.

While Champlain hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgravé bartered furs during the winter of 1605-1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits.

De Monts remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt and Lescarbot sail on the _Jonas_ with more colonists and supplies for Port Royal.

Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis.

To Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland--the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness.

{38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort.

The gates were bolted fast.

The _Jonas_ runs up the French ensign.

Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled by the old chief Membertou.

He signals back to the watchers behind the gates.

Musketry shots ring out welcome.

The ship's cannon answer, setting the waters churning.

Trumpets blare.

The gates fly wide and out marches the garrison--two lone Frenchmen.

The rest, despairing of a ship that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgravé and Champlain, overjoyed to find the ship from France.

Poutrincourt has a hogshead of wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.

[Illustration: BUILDINGS ON STE.

CROIX ISLAND, 1613 (From Champlain's diagram)] When Pontgravé carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the colonists in Acadia.

Poutrincourt and his son {39} attend to trade.

Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand pranks of the Paris advocate.

First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening, and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his _noblesse_ long enough to wield the hoe.

Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond.

The weather is almost mild as summer until January.

The woods ring to many a merry picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of nobility--the Order of Good Times.

Each day one of the number must cater to the messroom table of the fort.

This means keen hunting, keen rivalry for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts.

And all is done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet.

When the chapel bell rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck, truncheon in his hand.

The gavel strikes, and there enter the Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand,--moose hump, beaver tail, bears' paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only to out-of-doors men.

Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites.

Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.

At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master.

It is all child's play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.

Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper,--a handwritten sheet giving the doings of the day,--perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing.

At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance.

As all the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy, Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green.

The lawyer's good spirits proved contagious.

The French songs that rang through the woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper's {40} labors, were the best antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last.

While L'Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell from the blue.

Instead of De Monts' vessel there came in spring a fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded.

No more money would be advanced.

Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt, resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the present all took sad leave of the little settlement--Poutrincourt, Champlain, L'Escarbot--and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for France, where they landed in October, 1607. Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts--all had failed to establish France in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey's colonists lay bleaching skeletons at the bottom of the sea.

{41} CHAPTER III FROM 1607 TO 1635