Canada by Sir John George Bourinot (10 best novels of all time TXT) 📕

and precious stones were to be found somewhere in that region. His name has been given to a little village at Lake St. John, on the assumption that he actually went so far on his Saguenay expedition, while romantic tradition points to an isle in the Gulf, the Isle de la Demoiselle, where he is said to have abandoned his niece Marguerite,--who had loved not wisely but too well--her lover, and an old nurse. This rocky spot appears to have become in the story an isle of Demons who tormented the poor wretches, exposed to all the rigours of Canadian winters, and to starvation except when they could catch fish or snare wild fowl. The nurse and lover as well as the infant died, but Marguerite is said to have remained much longer on that lonely island until at last Fate brought to her rescue a passing vessel and carried her to France, where she is said to have told the story of her adventures.

After this voyage Roberval disappeared from the history of Canada. Cartier is supposed to have died about 1577 in his old manor house of Limoilou, now in ruins, in the neighbourhood of St. Malo. He was allowed by the King to bear always the name of "Captain"--an appropriate title for a hardy sailor who represented so well the heroism and enterprise of the men of St. Malo and the Breton coast. The results of the voyages of Cartier, Roberval, and the sailors and fishermen who frequented the waters of the Great Bay, as the French long called it, can be seen in the old maps that have come down to us, and show the increasing geographical knowledge. {47} To this knowledge, a famous pilot, Captain Jehan Alfonce, a native of the little village of Saintonge in the grape district of Charente, made valuable contributions. He accompanied Roberval to Canada, and afterwards made voyages to the Saguenay, and appears to have explored the Gulf and the coasts of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and even Maine as far as the Penobscot, where he believed was the city of Norumbega.

After the death of Francis there came dark days for France, whose people were torn asunder by civil war and religious strife. With the return of peace in France the Marquis de la Roche received a commission from Henry the Fourth, as lieutenant-general of the King, to colonise Canada, but his ill-fated expedition of 1597 never got beyond the dangerous sandbanks of Sable Island. French fur-traders had now found their way to Anticosti and even Tadousac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, where the Indians were wont to assemble in large numbers from the great fur-region to which that melancholy river and its tributary lakes and rivers give access, but these traders like the fishermen made no attempt to settle the country.

From a very early date in the sixteenth century bold sailors from the west country of Devon were fishing in the Gulf and eventually made the safe and commodious port of St. John's, in Newfoundland, their headquarters. Some adventurous Englishmen even made a search for the land of Norumbega, and probably reached the bay of Penobscot. Near the close of the century, Frobisher attempted to open up {48} the secrets of the Arctic seas and find that passage to the north which remained closed to venturesome explorers until Sir Robert McClure, in 1850, successfully passed the icebergs and ice-floes that barred his way from Bering Sea to Davis Strait. In the reign of the great Elizabeth, when Englishmen were at last showing that ability for maritime enterprise which was eventually to develop such remarkable results, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, the founder of Virginia, the Old Dominion, took possession of Newfoundland with much ceremony in the harbour of St. John's, and erected a pillar on which were inscribed the Queen's arms. Gilbert had none of the qualities of a coloniser, and on his voyage back to England he was lost at sea, and it was left to the men of Devon and the West coast in later times to make a permanent settlement on the great island of the Gulf.

The first years of the seventeenth century were propitious for important schemes of colonisation and trade in the western lands. The sovereign of France was Henry the Fourth, the intrepid Prince of Bearn, as brave a soldier as he was a sagacious statesman. Henry listened favourably--though his able minister, Sully, held different views--to the schemes for opening up Canada to commerce and settlement that were laid before him by an old veteran of the wars, and a staunch friend, Aymar de Chastes, governor of Dieppe. Pontgrave, a rich Breton merchant of St. Malo, had the charge of the two vessels which left France in the spring of 1603, but it is a fact that a great man, Samuel Champlain, accompanied the {49} expedition that gives the chief interest to the voyage. Champlain, who was destined to be the founder of New France, was a native of Brouage in the Bay of Biscay, and belonged to a family of fishermen. During the war of the League he served in the army of Henry the Third, but when Henry of Navarre was proclaimed King of France on the assassination of his predecessor, and abjured the Protestant faith of which he had previously been the champion, Champlain, like other Frenchmen, who had followed the Duke of Guise, became an ardent supporter of the new regime and eventually a favourite of the Bernese prince. He visited the West Indies in a Spanish ship and made himself well acquainted with Mexico and other countries bordering on the Gulf. He has described all his voyages to the Indies and Canada in quaint quarto volumes, now very rare, and valuable on account of their minute and truthful narrative--despite his lively and credulous imagination--and the drawings and maps which he made rudely of the places he saw. His accounts of the Indians of Canada are among the most valuable that have come to us from the early days of American history. He had a fair knowledge of natural history for those times, though he believed in Mexican griffins, and was versed in geography and cartography.

In 1603 Pontgrave and Champlain ascended the River St. Lawrence as far as the island of Montreal, where they found only a few wandering Algonquins of the Ottawa and its tributaries, in place of the people who had inhabited the town of Hochelaga in the days of Cartier's visits. Champlain attempted to {50} pass the Lachine rapids but was soon forced to give up the perilous and impossible venture. During this voyage he explored the Saguenay for a considerable distance, and was able to add largely to the information that Cartier had given of Canada and the country around the Gulf. When the expedition reached France, Aymar de Chastes was dead, but two months had hardly elapsed after Champlain's return when a new company was formed on the usual basis of trade and colonisation. At its head was Sieur de Monts, Pierre du Guast, the governor of Pons, a Calvinist and a friend of the King. After much deliberation it was decided to venture south of Canada and explore that ill-defined region, called "La Cadie" in the royal commission given to De Monts as the King's lieutenant in Canada and adjacent countries, the first record we have of that Acadia where French and English were to contend during a century for the supremacy. For a few moments we must leave the valley of the St. Lawrence, where France was soon to enthrone herself on the heights of Quebec, and visit a beautiful bay on the western coast of Nova Scotia, where a sleepy old town, full of historic associations, still stands to recall the efforts of gentlemen-adventurers to establish a permanent settlement on the shores of the Atlantic.


V.


THE FRENCH OCCUPATION OF ACADIA AND THE FOUNDATION OF PORT ROYAL.

(1604-1614.)

In the western valley of that part of French Acadia, now known as Nova Scotia, not only do we tread on historic ground, but we see in these days a landscape of more varied beauty than that which so delighted the gentlemen-adventurers of old France nearly three centuries ago. In this country, which the poem conceived by Longfellow amid the elms of Cambridge has made so famous, we see the rich lands reclaimed from the sea, which glistens a few miles to the north, and every day comes rushing up its estuaries. There to the north is dark, lofty Blomidon--whose name is probably a memorial of a Portuguese voyager--with its overhanging cliff under which the tumultuous tides struggle and foam. Here, in a meadow close by, is a long row of Lombardy poplars, pointing to another race and another country. There, on a slight acclivity, among the trees, is a pile of white college buildings, there a tall white spire {52} rises into the pure blue sky. We see cottages covered with honeysuckle and grapevine; with their gardens of roses and lilies, and many old-fashioned flowers. In the spring, the country is one mass of pink and white blossoms, which load the passing breeze with delicate fragrance; in autumn the trees bend beneath rosy and yellow apples.

We drive through a fertile valley, where runs a placid river amid many meadows, gardens, and orchards, until at last it empties into a picturesque basin, where the landscape shows a harmonious blending of mountain and water, of cultivated fields and ancient forest trees. Here we see a quiet old town, whose roofs are green with the moss of many years, where willows and grassy mounds tell of a historic past, where the bells of ox-teams tinkle in the streets, and commerce itself wears a look of reminiscence. For we have come to the banks of that basin where the French, in the first years of the seventeenth century, laid the foundations of a settlement which, despite all its early misfortunes, has lasted until the present time, though it is the English tongue that is now spoken and the Englishman who is now the occupant.

Early in the leafy month of June, 1604, the French under De Monts sailed into this spacious basin, and saw for the first time its grassy meadows, its numerous streams, its cascades tumbling from the hills, its forest-clad mountains. "This," said Champlain, who called it Port Royal, "was the most commodious and pleasant place that we had yet seen in this country."

It appears that the adventurers left France in the early part of April. When the King had been once won over to the project, he consented to give De Monts and his associates an entire monopoly of the fur-trade throughout the wide domain of which he was to be the viceroy. The expedition was chiefly supported by the merchants of the Protestant town of La Rochelle, and was regarded with much jealousy by other commercial cities. Protestants were to enjoy in the new colony all the advantages they were then allowed in France. The Catholics were appeased by the condition that the conversion of the natives should be reserved especially for the priests of their own church.

The man of most note, after De Monts and Champlain, was Jean de Biencourt, a rich nobleman of Picardy, better known in Acadian history as the Baron de Poutrincourt, who had distinguished himself as a soldier in the civil wars. A man of energy and enterprise, he was well fitted to assist in the establishment of a colony.

De Monts and his associates reached without accident the