Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1607 to 1635, part 2

The Laurentian Hills now roll from the river in purpling folds like fields of heather.

The Gatineau is passed, winding in on the right through dense forests.

On the left, flowing through the rolling sand hills, and joining the main river just where the waters fall over a precipice in a cataract of spray, is the Rideau River with its famous falls resembling the white folds of a wind-blown curtain.

Then the voyageurs have swept round that wooded cliff known as Parliament Hill, jutting out in the river, and there breaks on view a wall of water hurtling down in shimmering floods at the Chaudière Falls.

The high cliff to the left and countercurrent from the falls swirl the canoes over on the right side to the sandy flats where the lumber piles to-day defile the river.

Here boats are once more hauled up for portage--a long portage, nine miles, all the way to the modern town of Aylmer, where the river becomes wide as a lake, Lake Du Chêne of the oak forests.

Here camp for the night was made, and leaks in the canoes mended with resin, round fires gleaming red as an angry eye across the {51} darkening waters, while the prowling wild cats and lynx, which later gave such good hunting in these forests that the adjoining rapids became known as the Chats, sent their unearthly screams shivering through the darkness.

Somewhere near Allumette Isle, Champlain came to an Indian settlement of the Ottawa tribe.

He camped to ask for guides to go on.

Old Chief Tessouat holds solemn powwow, passing the peace pipe round from hand to hand in silence, before the warriors rise to answer Champlain.

Then with the pompous gravity of Abraham dickering with the desert tribes, they warn Champlain it is unsafe to go farther.

Beyond the Ottawa is the Nipissing, where dwell the Sorcerer Indians--a treacherous people.

Beyond the Nipissing is the great Fresh Water Sea of the Hurons.

They will grant Champlain canoes, but warn him against the trip.

Later the interpreter comes with word they have changed their minds.

Champlain must _not_ go on.

It is too dangerous.

Attack would involve war.

"What," demanded Champlain, rushing into the midst of the council tent, "not go?

Why, my young man, here"--pointing to Vignau--"has gone to that country and found no danger."

What Vignau thought at that stage is not told.

The Indians turned on him in fury.

"Nicholas, did _you_ say _you_ had visited the Nipissings?"

Vignau hems and haws, and stammers, "Yes."

"Liar," roars the chief.

"You slept here every night, and if you went to the Nipissings, you went in a dream."

Then to Champlain, "Let him be tortured."

Champlain took the fellow to his own tent.

Vignau reiterated his story.

Champlain took him back to the council.

The Indians jeered his answers and tore the story he told to tatters, showing Champlain how utterly wrong Vignau's descriptions were.

That night, on promise of forgiveness, Vignau fell on his knees and confessed the imposture to Champlain.

When the fur canoes came down the Ottawa to trade at Montreal, Champlain accompanied them to the St. Lawrence, and sailed for France.

His exploration had been an ignominious failure.

{52} Champlain was ever Knight of the Cross as well as explorer.

He longed with the zeal of a missionary to reclaim the Indians from savagery, and at last raised funds in France to pay the expense of bringing four or five Recollets--a branch of the Franciscan Friars--to Quebec in May of 1615. With the peaked hood thrown back, the gray garb roped in at the waist, the bare feet protected only by heavy sandals, the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages.

Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea.

Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen, the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the land of the Hurons.

Nine days later Champlain followed with two canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brulé, his interpreter.

In order to hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada, Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south.

It was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like wolves raiding a sheep pen.

No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from a chance war party.

Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage.

Where the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries.

This is the Mattawa.

Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the pebble bottom.

Then the gravel grated keels.

The shallows became weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening {53} on a low-lying, clay-colored lake--the country of the Nipissings, with whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.

In a few sleeps--they tell him--he will reach the Sweet Water Sea.

The news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake--French River.

This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the bodies of countless French voyageurs.

It is more dangerous going _with_ rapids than _against_ them; for the hastening current is sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before the roar of the waterfall has given warning.

And the country is barren of game.

As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is dependent on chance fishing.

Indian hunters are met,--three hundred of them,--the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their headdress tipped by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is very near the Inland Sea.

It comes as discoveries nearly always come--his finding of the Great Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the region.

You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters--long lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels.

Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes.

Instead of the earthy smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose itself at the horizon.

There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your view.

The river begins to coil in and out among islands.

The amber waters have become sheeted silver.

You wind from island to island, islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted pine, islands that are in themselves forests.

There is no end to these islands.

They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands.

Then you see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line.

You are not on a river at all.

You are on an inland sea.

You have been on the lake for hours.

One {54} can guess how Champlain's men scrambled from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.

But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea.

With the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang.

Where these little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.

Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron tribe.

How numerous were they?

Records differ.

Certainly at no time more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children.

Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century before.

Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail to the Huron villages.

Here he found the missionary.

One can guess how the souls of these two heroes burned as the deep solemn chant of the _Te Deum_ for the first time rolled through the forests of Lake Huron.

But now Champlain must to business; and his business is war.

Brulé and twelve Indians are sent like the carriers of the fiery cross in the Highlands of Scotland to rally tribes of the Susquehanna to join the Hurons against the Iroquois.

A wild war dance is held with mystic rites in the lodges of the Hurons; and the braves set out with Champlain from Lake Simcoe for Lake Ontario by way of Trent River.

As they near what is now New York state, buckskin is flung aside, the naked bodies painted and greased, and the trail shunned for the pathless woods off the beaten track where the Indians glide like beasts of prey through the frost-tinted forest.

{55} [Illustration: THE ONONDAGA FORT (From Champlain's diagram)] October 9 they suddenly come on some Onondagas fishing, and they begin torturing their captives by cutting off a girl's finger, when Champlain commands them to desist.

Presently the forest opens to a farm clearing where the Iroquois are harvesting their corn.

Spite of all Champlain could do, the wild Hurons uttered their war cry and rushed the field, but the Iroquois turned on the rabble and drove them back to the woods.

Champlain was furious.

They should have waited for Brulé to come with their allies; and the foolish attack had only served to forewarn the enemy.

He frankly told the Hurons if they were going to fight under _his_ command, they must fight as white men fight; and he set them to building a platform from which marksmen could shoot over the walls of the Iroquois town.

But the admonitions {56} fell on frenzied ears.

No sooner was the command to advance given than the Hurons broke from cover like maniacs, easy marks for the javelin throwers inside the walls, and hurled themselves against the Iroquois palisades in blind fury, making more din with yelling than woe with shots.

Boiling water poured from the galleries inside drove the braves back from the walls, and the poisoned barb of the Iroquois arrows pursued their flight.

A

score fell wounded, among them Champlain with an arrow in his knee-cap.

The flight became panic fast and furious, with the wounded carried on wicker stretchers whose every jolt added agony to pain.

[Illustration: VIEW OF QUEBEC (From Champlain's plan)] As for Brulé, he arrived with the allies only to find that the Hurons had fled, and here was he, alone in a hostile land, with Iroquois warriors rampant as molested wasps.

In the swift retreat off the trail Brulé lost his way.

He was without food {57} or powder, and had to choose between starvation or surrender to the Iroquois.

Throwing down his weapons, he gave himself up to what he knew would be certain torture.

Had he winced or whined as they tore the nails from his fingers and the hair from his head, the Iroquois would probably have brained him on the spot for a poltroon; but the young man, bound to a stake, pointed to a gathering storm as sign of Heaven's displeasure.

The high spirit pleased the Iroquois.

They unbound him and took him with them in their wanderings for three years.

The Hurons had promised to convey Champlain back down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, but the defeat had caused loss of prestige.

The man "with the stick that thundered" was no more invulnerable to wounds than they.

They forgot their promises and invented excuses for not proceeding to Quebec.

Champlain wintered with the hunters somewhere north of Lake Ontario, and came down the Ottawa with the fur canoes the next summer.

He was received at Quebec as one risen from the dead.

While Champlain had been exploring, New France had not prospered as a colony.

Royal patron after royal patron sold the monopoly to fresh hands, and each new master appointed Champlain viceroy.

The fur trade merchants could pay forty per cent dividends, but could do nothing to advance settlement.

Less than one hundred people made up the population of New France; and these were torn asunder by jealousies.

Huguenot and Catholic were opposed; and when three Jesuits came to Quebec, Jesuits and Recollets distrusted each other.

Madam Champlain joined her husband at Quebec, in 1620, to stay for four years, and that same year Champlain built himself a new habitation--the famous Castle of St. Louis on the cliff above the first dwelling.

Louis Hebert, the apothecary of Port Royal, is now a farmer close to the Castle of Quebec; and the wife of Abraham Martin has given birth to the first white child born in New France.

Now came a revolutionary change.

Cardinal Richelieu was virtual ruler of France.

He quickly realized that the monopolists {58} were sucking the lifeblood of the colony in furs and were giving nothing in return to the country.

In 1627, under the great cardinal's patronage, the Company of One Hundred Associates was formed.

In this company any of the seaport traders could buy shares.

Indeed, they were promised patent of nobility if they did buy shares.

Exclusive monopoly of furs was given to the company from Florida to Labrador.

In return the Associates were to send two ships yearly to Canada.

Before 1643 they were to bring out four thousand colonists, support them for three years, and give them land.

In each settlement were to be supported three priests; and, to prevent discord, Huguenots were to be banished from New France.

To Champlain it must have seemed as if the ambition of his life were to be realized.

Just when the sky seemed clearest the bolt fell.

Early in April, 1628, the Associates had dispatched colonists and stores for Quebec; but war had broken out between France and England.

Gervais Kirke, an English Huguenot of Dieppe, France, who had been put under the ban by Cardinal Richelieu, had rallied the merchants of London to fit out privateers to wage war on New France.

The vessels were commanded by the three sons, Thomas, Louis, and David; and to the Kirkes rallied many Huguenots banished from France.

Quebec was hourly looking for the annual ships, when one morning in July two men rushed breathless through the woods and up the steep rock to Castle St. Louis with word that an English fleet of six frigates lay in hiding at Tadoussac, ready to pounce on the French!

Later came other messengers--Indians, fishermen, traders--confirming the terrible news.

Then a Basque fisherman arrives with a demand, from Kirke for the keys to the fort.

Though there is no food inside the walls, less than fifty pounds of ammunition in the storehouse, and not enough men to man the guns, Champlain hopes against hope, and sends the Basque fisherman back with suave regrets that he cannot comply with Monsieur Kirke's polite request.

Quebec's one chance lay in the hope that the French vessels might {59} slip past the English frigates by night.

Days wore on to weeks, weeks to months, and a thousand rumors filled the air; but no ships came.

The people of Quebec were now reduced to diet of nuts and corn.

Then came Indian runners with word that the French ships had been waylaid, boarded, scuttled, and sunk.

Loaded to the water line with booty, the English privateers had gone home.

[Illustration: QUEBEC (From Champlain's map)] For that winter Quebec lived on such food as the Indians brought in from the woods.

By the summer of 1629 men, women, and children were grubbing for roots, fishing for food, ranging the rocks for berries.

There are times when the only thing to do is--do nothing; and it is probably the hardest task a brave man ever has.

When the English fleet came back in July Champlain had a ragamuffin, half-starved retinue of precisely sixteen men.

Yet he haggled for such terms that the English promised to convey the prisoners to France.

On July 20, for the first time in history, the red flag of England blew to the winds above the heights of Quebec.

But New France was only a pawn to the gamesters of French and English diplomacy.

Peace was proclaimed; and for the {60} sake of receiving ,000 as dowry due his French wife, Charles of England restored to France the half continent which the Kirkes had captured, David Kirke receiving the paltry honor of a title as compensation for the loss.

Champlain was back in Quebec by 1633; but his course had run.

Between Christmas eve and Christmas morning, in 1635, the brave Soldier of the Cross, the first knight of the Canadian wildwoods, passed from the sphere of earthly life--a life without a stain, whether among the intriguing courtiers of Paris or in the midst of naked license in the Indian camp.

{61} CHAPTER IV FROM 1635 TO 1666