The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  This was the apotheosis of the venerable leader, the supreme moment of his career. He seemed to slough off the years, his gray mustaches seemed to bristle with energy, and his eyes burned with fighting spirit.

  The land attack was bravely carried out under the command of Major Walley, but a defending force under Ste. Hélène, the second of the Le Moyne brothers, waged a successful delaying action and it inflicted losses on the invaders. When it became certain that the attack was going to bog down in the mud and the underbrush, Ste. Hélène was transferred to Lower Town to command the batteries there. Phips had opened fire prematurely, as Frontenac had expected, with all his guns. The batteries of the town replied in kind. Much damage was done on both sides, but the supplies of ammunition on the ships ran out quickly and their fire diminished and finally ceased.

  In the meantime the land forces had not yet crossed the St. Charles and were now making an effort to get over the ford. Ste. Hélène, who moved from one point of need to another, had taken charge of the fighting along the river again and was mortally wounded at the same moment that his elder brother Charles was hit by a spent bullet. The death of the gallant Ste. Hélène was the worst loss the French cause sustained, for the English effort was suspended the next day and the spent troops taken back to the ships.

  The fleet, badly riddled by the fire from the batteries on the rock, withdrew behind the Island of Orleans to refit for the return voyage. The effort to capture Quebec had failed.

  Frontenac had gambled and won. Convinced that only audacity would restore French prestige, he had risked the consequences of a direct attack on the New England colonies and had now successfully countered the angry reprisals. He had accomplished what he had been sent out to do. The white and gold standard still floated above the Château of St. Louis.

  3

  October 22, 1692

  The particular section of Canada which was most open to Indian attack lay along the banks of the St. Lawrence from Three Rivers to Montreal and beyond. In this vulnerable area stood a fort which was called Castle Dangerous because of the excessive peril in which its inhabitants existed. This was Fort Verchères, which was on the south bank of the river, about twenty miles below Montreal. It was therefore only a short distance from the Richelieu River, the route taken by Iroquois war parties. The mouth of the Richelieu was always under watch and guard, and the wily redskins had fallen into the habit of leaving the water before reaching the junction point with the St. Lawrence and striking inland. After a few miles they would find themselves in sight of the fort and blockhouse (connected by a covered passage) of Verchères. It had suffered so many attacks and alarms that the inhabitants thereabouts lived in constant dread.

  Castle Dangerous belonged to the Sieur de Verchères, who had been an officer in the Carignan regiment. He had settled down with more good will and determination than most of his fellow officers and had been reasonably successful over the years.

  A curious spell of overconfidence seems to have invested the Verchères domain on this morning of October 22. The seigneur was on duty at Quebec and Madame de Verchères was in Montreal. It had been a good season in spite of the constant alarms which had kept men as well as women indoors. The fields were high with waving corn, the pumpkins were ripe and yellow, the last of the melons remained to be gathered, and the trees were laden with fruit. The sun had been so bright and cheerful this fine October morning that the settlers had decided to risk gathering this bountiful harvest. They were out in the fields, and the cheerful sound of their voices could be heard from all parts of the cultivated area as they labored with sickle and hoe.

  The fourteen-year-old daughter of the family, Madeleine, was at the wharf on the riverbank, which was close to the main entrance of the fort. The settlers had a name of their own for wharves, calling them mouille-pieds, which meant “wet feet”; but this did not concern small Madeleine (from the descriptions available she seems to have been petite and rather pretty) because she was probably expecting her mother from Montreal and so would not have dared put on her best kid-topped shoes with tasseled drawstrings. A hired man whose name was Laviolette was with her.

  A sound of musket fire reached them from the direction of the fields where the settlers were at work. Laviolette, with his greater height, could see more of what was happening than the girl. In a voice of great panic he cried: “Run, mademoiselle, run! The Iroquois!” She saw then that the fields had filled almost in the winking of an eye with naked top-knotted warriors screeching their triumphant battlecries and killing the unarmed workers as fast as they could run them down.

  She turned and made for the fort, followed by the man Laviolette. Her mind was filled with supplications to God and the Holy Virgin but at the same time busy with thoughts of what might be done. There were only two soldiers in the fort, she knew, in addition to her two brothers, aged twelve and ten, a very old man of eighty or thereabouts, and a number of women with infant children. They reached the fort uninjured in the face of a heavy spatter of Iroquois bullets.

  “To arms! To arms!” cried the girl.

  Outside the gate were two weeping women who had seen their husbands cut down and killed by the fierce marauders, and it required a firm hand and a display of confidence, both of which the child managed to achieve, to get them inside. Madeleine closed the gate herself and drove the crossbeams into place.

  She found the two soldiers in the blockhouse, which was safer than the somewhat dilapidated fort. One had hidden himself and the other was standing over a budge barrel of powder with a lighted fuse in his hand.

  “What are you going to do?” she cried.

  The man answered in a quavering voice, “Light the powder and blow us all up.”

  “You are a miserable coward!” said the girl, driving him away from the ammunition supply.

  She proceeded then to instill courage into the huddled group about her. They must fight as though they were all soldiers and numerous enough to hold the Indians off, she said, and perhaps God, Who was watching them as she spoke, would send them help in time. The rest were encouraged by her words. First her two young brothers and then the soldiers in a shamefaced silence took guns to the loopholes and began to fire on the Indians in the fields. By running from one loophole to another, while the women loaded the guns for them, they were able to create the impression that a sizable garrison held the fort.

  Neither time nor space is available to tell in full detail the story of what followed. For a week the little band of defenders kept up their brave pretense. The four men, counting the octogenarian, the two boys, and the petticoated commander slept at intervals only and never at night. They stood guard in the bastion of the fort and at the loopholes in the blockhouse in the daytime, firing briskly when the bronze skin of a hostile warrior showed in the fields or in the cover of the trees. At night they paced the platforms to keep awake and kept up encouraging cries of “All’s well!” at regular intervals. The gallant little band was so successful in its pretense of being an adequate and alert garrison that the Iroquois, still lurking in the woods, did not risk an attack. It became known later that the redskins held a council of war and decided that the chance of carrying a fort so well defended was slight.

  During this week of effort and strain the meager garrison took their orders without question and drew their inspiration from the girl of fourteen. In the desperate moment of time when she had first seen the war party issuing from the trees she had ceased to be a child. An adult resolution had taken possession of her. Knowing the full weakness of her tiny band—the soldiers had displayed their clay feet in the first moments of the attack, her brothers were still children, the old man could do no more than dodder about the loopholes—she drove them with a fierce energy and never allowed them a moment’s ease. She slept little herself and consumed the cold scraps of food which the women prepared with an eye on the fields and the line of trees. She preached at them and prayed with them when their will to go on wavered. She sometimes swayed unsteadily with the weigh
t of the musket which she always carried (and used also to good effect), her face became pale and wan, her eyes were shadowed and deep-sunken. But never for a moment did she give way to her fears.

  On the night of the seventh day a party of forty men arrived from Montreal under the command of Monsieur de la Monnerie, a lieutenant in the French army. They stopped at the landing place and hailed the fort, not knowing whether the defense still held out but fearing very much that they would find the Iroquois in possession. Madeleine had been dozing with her head on a table, her gun still in her arms. She roused herself and mounted the bastion.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  The answer came back in an unmistakably French voice, “It is La Monnerie, who comes to bring you help.”

  In a voice which seemed for the first time to show emotion, Madeleine ordered the gate to be opened. Leaving one of the soldiers there to keep guard, she ventured out alone into the darkness. When she met the lieutenant on the path, she stopped and saluted him.

  “Monsieur,” she said in a voice high-pitched with the first hint of hysteria, “I surrender my arms to you.”

  She was ready to drop with fatigue but she remained a good commander to the end. Her first thought was for those who had shared with her the long vigil. “Monsieur,” she said to La Monnerie in a tone of great earnestness, “it is time to relieve them. We have not been off our guard for a week.”

  When she told the story later of these remarkable seven days, she made no mention of what followed immediately after the arrival of the rescuing party or of the emotions she felt. It may be assumed, however, that she did not allow herself to break down and that her tears were held back until she reached the privacy of her room. It may also be taken for granted that she slept the clock around and that the effects of her seemingly unending vigil were not easily shaken off. Did the maturity of character and mind which she had summoned so resolutely continue to govern her thereafter, or did she slip back into the fancies and humors of girlhood? One thing may be accepted, perhaps, that she began to insist on some grown-up privileges. It would be pleasant to think, for instance, that she was allowed to wear her kid-topped shoes whenever she chose and that she was allowed the right to have considerations on her skirts, the panniers which were deemed proper only when girlhood had been put behind.

  Her full name was Marie Madeleine Jarret de Verchères and she was fourteen and a half years old when she thus earned for herself a place in Canadian annals with Adam Dollard and the heroes whose shades are in his train. She was summoned by the Marquis de Beauharnois, who held the post of governor when she was a young married woman, and told her story at his request, with proper dignity and simplicity. She was treated with the consideration she had earned and given a pension, a small one. Her husband was Thomas Tardieu de la Naudière, and she brought a number of children into the world. They lived in rather less parlous times and had no opportunity to emulate the deed of this remarkable girl who had become their mother.

  4

  March 2, 1699

  Iberville knew that he had solved the mystery as soon as he saw the waters of the Gulf turning color. The brilliant blue in which they had been sailing had become grayish and the surface was distinctly agitated. He had no doubts that these were signs of a heavy inflow. Somewhere ahead, then, he would find the mouth of a great river; the Mississippi, he was sure—the Hid River, as the Spanish had begun to call it since La Salle’s failure.

  Later in the day the great French Canadian—for by this time Iberville had acquired a reputation which put him first in the esteem of his own people—saw a break in the banks ahead, marked by two tall rocks. Between these natural sentries a great body of water was rolling down with inexorable majesty. No Frenchman ever set eyes on the Mississippi without recognizing it; nor, in all probability, did anyone else. It could not be mistaken now, this turgid and magnificent stream, carrying to the Gulf the surplus water of the prairies and so much of the mud from the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Arkansas.

  The small company, staring with fascinated eyes at the goal of their long voyage, crossed themselves in thanksgiving. Iberville, who had brought Bienville with him, the younger brother who was destined for great things also, found himself in a conflict of emotions. He was triumphant, of course, for he had come almost straight to the mouth of the river. At the same time he must also have been sad, thinking of the three brothers, Jacques, François, and Louis, who had died in battle and would never know that it had fallen to the lot of the Le Moynes to complete the work of La Salle.

  Iberville’s reputation as a military leader had grown out of a series of unusual exploits. He had led another land expedition to Hudson’s Bay, which had been successful but had resulted in the death of the seventh brother, Louis, known as the Sieur de Châteauguay. Louis had been distinguished for bravery, even in this family of brave men. His was a young and heroic form of courage, reminiscent of that great figure of the preceding century, the Chevalier Bayard. It had led him to advance gaily and audaciously across open ground in an attack on the English fort, and a bullet had cut him down.

  The exploits of Iberville were on the sea after this last land invasion. In charge of two small ships of war, the Envieux and the Profond, he won a naval battle off the St. John River and immediately after captured Pemaquid. Leaving these waters, he sailed to Newfoundland, taking possession of the island and sacking the towns and villages with realistic thoroughness. This unpleasant task over, he led a fleet of four ships of war into Hudson’s Bay to take Fort Nelson and so made the French sweep complete. His lasting reputation is largely based on his brilliant success in this undertaking.

  His flagship, the Pelican, carrying forty-four guns, became separated from the rest of the small fleet and found itself confronted on the somber waters off Fort Nelson with three English vessels, the Hampshire, the Daring, and the Hudson Bay, carrying 120 guns between them. Great naval commanders have always had two qualities, audacity and initiative. Iberville had these assets in a superlative degree and, because of the daring strategy he employed, he scored what is probably the most noteworthy victory in French maritime history; which, it must be added, is a rather barren page.

  Keeping to windward of his opponents by the boldest of tactics, he sank the Hampshire, captured the Hudson Bay, and sent the Daring into hasty flight. The capitulation of Fort Nelson followed, and so the French, for the time being, had all of the great bay in their possession.

  It was after this that Louis XIV, perceiving he had in Iberville an iron leader who always carried out his orders and always won, decided to make one more effort to seize the mouth of the Mississippi. His preference was to send some court favorite with a lofty title in nominal command, with Iberville to do the work, but he was finally persuaded that this habit of divided command always led to trouble. He gave in, and the brilliant young French Canadian was appointed to an undivided leadership.

  After a week’s slow progress up the Mississippi in small boats, the little party saw a wide curve in the river ahead of them. Standing in the prow of the leading chaloupe, Iberville had been keeping an observant eye on this exotic land in its spring stage of extravagant blossoming, realizing perhaps that someday a miracle would happen hereabouts. Now he looked closely ahead, and it came to him that the land above the bend was exactly what he had been seeking. It was low at the water’s edge but rose slowly and steadily back from the shore. His hand shot out triumphantly to show where the remains of Indian huts marked the southern end of a portage. It was apparent to Iberville that this was the site for the great city he proposed to establish, a view in which his keenly observant younger brother fully concurred. It is perhaps superfluous to add that on the land they studied from the deck of the chaloupe there now stands a much larger and finer city than anything their imaginations had conceived, New Orleans.

  Great military leaders have confidence in themselves or they would not dare the improvisations and risks by which battles are won. Iberville was no exception. It was onl
y because he had a belief in his star that he had adopted such bold offensive tactics and had attacked the three ships which came against him on Hudson’s Bay. It is not unlikely, however, that his assurance had been dampened somewhat by his reception at court before the command of the Mississippi venture was entrusted to him.

  Louis XIV had kept such close personal supervision of Canadian affairs that he had come to regard the men and women of the colony as puppets moving in response to his tugging on the strings. The most colorful and effective of the puppets, the most rambunctious in its response to the pressure of the royal fingers, had been Iberville, but the King still seemed to consider him no more than a rather astonishing automaton. There had been no thought, apparently, of making use of his spectacular talents in any task which did not have to do with America.

  Knowing the King’s attitude, Iberville was still unwilling to accept the minor role in which he was being cast. To sit in a fever-ridden jungle and wait for a tiny post to grow into a flourishing colony was not a part that the hero of New France was prepared to play; he was too pre-eminently a man of action for that. Leaving Bienville in charge of the land operations, the bold Pierre sailed off to keep watch and ward on the sea. For seven years thereafter the eighth son remained in command of small forts, first at Biloxi, then at Mobile. He grew sallow from malarial infections in his veins and many times his patience wore thin, for nothing seemed to happen and his resources were so slight that he could do no more than hold his ground against the activities of Indians under such tribe names as the Bayougoulas and the Quinupissas who were as hostile as the Iroquois.

  In the meantime the legend of French invincibility on land had been rudely jolted by the appearance on the European scene of English armies under the command of a great general named Marlborough. This unusual soldier defeated the French and almost annihilated one of the Sun King’s armies at the battle of Blenheim, thereby breaking the power of Louis in Germany. Two years later he won another tremendous battle at Ramillies, which resulted in freeing the Low Countries from French invasion. The Sun King, as stubborn as ever and still unshaken in his confidence, recruited new armies and continued to entrust them to the command of generals who shared his reactionary ideas. It did not occur to him, apparently, to make use of the French Canadian who had never lost a battle on land or sea. Too many Frenchmen of high degree clamored for the command of regiments and brigades, and even armies, for a place to be made for Iberville.