by Conrad Black
The voyage was judged a complete success, as it opened good relations with the natives and generated a very accurate series of maps and accounts, published by Champlain in the book The Savages, which in the early seventeenth century meant something like “In the Wild” and did not connote anything sinister, or even primitive, but rather a state that was natural and promising. Champlain and his party had seen what F. Scott Fitzgerald imagined, a third of a millennium later, the first Dutch sailors had seen: “A fresh green breast of the new world … [that] had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.”4 This was, from all accounts, especially Champlain’s own, a fine expression of the exhilaration and suspense Champlain felt at the prospects for New France and his possible role in the development of it. Champlain and the other humanists of that contemporary French school led by Descartes and Montaigne “transformed the purpose of the Renaissance into the program of the Enlightenment.” Champlain “planted the seed of New France, and bent the sapling to the pattern of its growth. Their history bears witness to the importance of small beginnings in the history of great nations.”5
Champlain was distressed to find on his return to France that Vice Admiral de Chaste had died. He recruited to replace him the Sieur de Mons, a wealthy Protestant nobleman (with a Catholic wife), who was also a loyalist of the king and influential with the merchants in the Norman and Breton ports who were looked to for financing. De Mons had survived the Chauvin debacle in New France of 1601 to 1602. The two men attended upon the king and revived the notion of a passable route to China through the Great Lakes. Henry was unconvinced of that but wished to continue the project and encouraged them. De Mons, after the disaster of wintering in Tadoussac, wanted to settle in Acadia, in what is now Nova Scotia. Champlain was intoxicated by the scale and might of the St. Lawrence and wished to anchor New France there. De Mons sold the king the idea that a colony could be successfully established in Acadia at no cost if the colonizers were granted a monopoly on the fur trade of New France. The king agreed and issued the commission, commanding the colonizers also to propagate the Roman religion, while, as in France, permitting freedom of religion. De Mons raised the necessary capital from merchants in Rouen, Saint-Malo, La Rochelle, and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and as the treasury was not paying anything, Sully could raise no objection.
These policies raised two of the main problems of the French, compared with the British, in colonization efforts. The king of France gave away commercial rights in exchange for private sector support of missions to settle and colonize, which resulted in a conflict of motive inherent to each colonial operation. Those representing the commercial backers resented anything spent on colonization and were at odds with the settlers themselves. But only a growing and ever more self-sufficient settlement would make the colonial presence secure. Second, the presence of Catholics and Protestants diluted the evangelizing mission of the colonial settlements, confused the Indians, and made the purposes of the effort relatively ambiguous. A third comparative problem was that the French did not like to emigrate at all; France was, as it remains, a rich and temperate country, and inducing the French permanently to leave has always been much more difficult than it has been to persuade the British or most other European nationalities to emigrate. The final problem in this series was about to emerge: the sale of alcoholic beverages to the Indians. The French soon discovered the Indian love of and weakness for brandy. The fur traders and other commercial interests were strenuously in favour of this traffic, because it conferred great comparative advantage in negotiating with the Indians when brandy could become part of the consideration. But the Roman Catholic clergy objected, as it was held to be unchristian to exploit that weakness and to promote drunkenness generally.
De Mons and Champlain rounded up 120 “workers,” who were a higher sociological cut of settler than the derelicts and convicts who had generally been thrown into the breach up to then, and there were also a number of noblemen, a few surgeons, three priests (including one Protestant), and the apothecary Louis Hébert, who went on to immortality in the history of what became Quebec. Three vessels sailed on April 7, 1604, and anchored in an Acadian cove on May 8. They explored what is now the Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine coast and eventually decided upon Saint Croix Island, about fifty miles west of the present Saint John, New Brunswick, as the place to establish themselves, and settled in for the winter. It was a disaster. About thirty-five of their party died of scurvy and related ailments, and many others were desperately ill. For many years afterward, the Indians called it “the island of bones.” Only eleven of seventy-nine settlers were in good physical condition in the spring of 1605. De Mons and Champlain had jointly chosen the site and jointly accepted responsibility for the mistake. Champlain had taken the opportunity to explore the Maine coast in the summer of 1604, and again in 1605, and made very accurate maps of it.
The beleaguered settlement moved from Saint Croix Island to Port-Royal, now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1605, and there was a further mapping expedition along the Maine and Massachusetts coast in 1606. De Mons returned to France in 1605 to find the king impatient and contemplating a project to carve territory out of Portuguese Brazil. De Mons had brought with him a thirty-foot Indian canoe, which put on an impressive passage down the Seine under the king’s appreciative gaze, as well as a moose, a caribou, a muskrat, a hummingbird, antlers, and collections of bows and arrows, dead birds, and Indian portraits. A fort was commissioned at Port-Royal, measuring sixty feet by forty-eight feet, whose construction Champlain supervised, having passed on the opportunity to return to France with de Mons.
There had until recently been no women among the French settlers, and Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt brought fifty more settlers, all male, to Port-Royal in July of 1606. Champlain had encountered some violent hostility from Cape Cod Indians that autumn, but he and Poutrincourt, bringing three wounded men with them, were welcomed back to Port-Royal with an elaborate theatrical entertainment on the beach in November. For the 1606–1607 winter, Champlain instituted the “Order of Good Times,” a weekly feast that raised morale with an abundance of wine and game. When the winter ended, the first vessel to arrive from France, on May 24, brought letters from de Mons that advised that the enterprise had failed. Some of the merchants had been taking graft, and some also claimed that the colonists had failed to honour their obligations to amplify the fur trade. A subsequent vessel arrived with orders for the return of the colonists, and reluctantly, given that the colony was somewhat successful and the crops that had been planted were being harvested, the entire settlement left in August for the return to France. This mission was a success also in the excellent relations that had been fostered with the local Indians, but it had been betrayed at home. Champlain and others were determined to try again, and to make sure that the enabling authority from France was not subject to such capricious revocation. It would be on to Quebec.
Champlain and Poutrincourt returned to France in August and September of 1607 in a crowded old ship with what Champlain’s biographer called “a fragrant cargo of 100,000 codfish.”6 Poutrincourt presented the young Indian they had brought with them to the king, who also received the five Canada geese his subjects had brought back, which found a comfortable home in the fountains of Fontainebleau. But “once again, after so much effort, no French settlement survived in North America … [and] the honk of Canada geese made a mocking chorus on the fate of New France.”7 Sully, acting on behalf of, and well paid by, some of Paris’s leading hatters, persuaded the king to revoke the ten-year monopoly he had granted four years earlier to de Mons. Champlain reckoned that there were already eighty ships, many French, operating out of the St. Lawrence and ignoring the royal grant of the trade, but no co
lonization could be undertaken without either that revenue or direct assistance from the French government, so Sully was deliberately strangling an effort that he did not believe was in France’s interest, and when doing so substantially profited him. The British had set up a colony in Virginia in 1607 (named after the late queen, Elizabeth, whose claims to virginity were not above dispute). The crowns of Britain and Scotland had been united in a distant Stuart cousin of the Tudors, James I of England and VI of Scotland, when Elizabeth died after a brilliant reign, much and justly glorified by Shakespeare, in 1603.
The British were also putting settlers in Maine, which France, as the name implies, claimed. If the French colonization effort, which since Cartier’s arrival had been stillborn for more than seventy years, did not get going soon, Britain, with its superior navy, would take over everything north of the Rio Grande, including the entire fur trade. The short-sightedness of the Paris hatters, and even the otherwise gifted Sully, dismayed Champlain, who commented acerbically on the narrow greed of these grasping businessmen. (“These envious folk were clamouring not for their own advantage, but for their own ruin.”8 The self-destructive greed of businessmen was already and would remain a recurring theme, and would include such lapidary formulations of it as Lenin’s comment that the “capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.”) De Mons and Champlain succeeded in persuading Henry to overrule Sully and the monopoly was reinstated for one year. De Mons bustled from port to port along the entire Atlantic littoral of France and raised the money needed to mount another expedition. It was agreed after vigorous but learned debate between Champlain and de Mons that they would found a colony at Quebec – which Champlain championed as easier to defend than Acadia, closer to the fur trade, and in the midst of already friendly Indians – and that a smaller party would re-establish the settlement in Acadia. The colonists recruited were a more promising group than the mixed bag of Acadia and the riffraff of previous missions. There were skilled carpenters, masons, and other artisans, a surgeon, but no clergy. Two young men who would become historic figures in Canada, Étienne Brûlé and Nicolas Marsolet, came along.
Champlain arrived at Tadoussac on June 3, 1608, and after facing down trespassers installed at Tadoussac who were buying furs from the Indians without a licence, by reminding them of the likely response of the king if his commission was ignored, Champlain proceeded on to Quebec, assiduously mapping and sounding as he went. He chose the height of land as the place for a fort and the present lower town beneath it as the location of a trading settlement. This was the founding of Quebec. Racing the inexorable approach of winter, he drove the artisans to build an ample storehouse to be sure of food for the season, and what was called the habitation to assure more commodious shelter from the elements than previous settlements had had. Champlain pushed his party so vigorously, though without the sadistic flourishes of the Spanish, that a minor mutiny occurred. Champlain had an objective tribunal at Tadoussac adjudicate, then pardoned the lesser conspirators but hanged and beheaded the ringleader and had his severed head mounted on a pike on the ramparts in Quebec.
Despite Champlain’s best efforts, twenty Frenchmen died over the winter, seven of scurvy, including the surgeon, and thirteen of dysentery. In June 1609, new and ample supplies arrived from France, but the monopoly (which Champlain did not have the means to enforce), had again lapsed, and the investors had provided funds for only sixteen settlers, a corporal’s guard with which to enter the second year of what grandiloquently styled itself “La Nouvelle France.” A few soldiers were also sent to assist in maintaining order. De Mons, who had not come to Quebec, also ordered Champlain to return to France for the winter. Before doing so, Champlain executed his plan to strengthen Indian alliances by emboldening the Algonquin of the St. Lawrence valley opposite the more ferocious Mohawk Iroquois to the south, who threatened and intimidated them. Champlain could muster only twenty men, but they were backed by some hundreds of Montagnais and armed with the arquebus, an early firearm that discharged up to four metal balls fairly accurately for a greater range than that of an arrow. Champlain proceeded upriver and had a very convivial meeting with two of the leading Algonquin chiefs, whom he invited, with a large contingent of their braves, to come to Quebec and enjoy the hospitality of the king of France. A week of dancing and festivities ensued, and then Champlain gathered twelve of his countrymen and sixty of the more courageous Montagnais and executed his plan to enter the territory of the Iroquois, proceeding up what is now the Richelieu River. (Richelieu was now twenty-four and edging forward in the royal entourage, but it would be another fifteen years before the future cardinal disposed such power as to cause Champlain to rename Canadian geography after him. Champlain did not scruple, however, and nor should he have, as the first European to see it, to name Lake Champlain.)
On July 30, 1609, at what in the following two centuries would become fabled in the history of both Canada and the United States as Ticonderoga, Champlain’s formations encountered a larger Mohawk war party, which was amazed at the impudence of the intruders, whose confidence was shored up exclusively by the presence of the twelve Frenchmen with three arquebuses. The Algonquin had warned the Iroquois that the French had weapons such as the Iroquois had not seen, and when the two formations were only fifty yards apart, Champlain stepped forward resplendent in gleaming armour and a cuirass, as well as his arquebus. The Mohawk looked upon him in some amazement, and at a range of thirty yards, as the elite braves beside the Mohawk chiefs drew their bows at him, Champlain discharged his arquebus, killing the two chiefs and the lead bowman. His arquebusier colleagues, whom he had ordered to enfilade the Mohawks on his right, then fired their weapons, killing the last of the chiefs and a number of other senior warriors as the Montagnais raised a mighty ululation of triumph. The Mohawk formation “shuddered in a strange way and then came apart.”9 The Mohawk broke and fled. Champlain and his allies withdrew, and the French were horrified at the vicious torture the Montagnais perpetrated on their prisoners, scorching their fingers and penises, tearing out their nails and entrails, and forcing some to eat the sliced-up heart of another. Champlain remonstrated, to no effect, that this was evil and subhuman behaviour.
Champlain had changed the balance of power among the Indians and earned the goodwill of the northeastern tribes in a manner the French and French Canadians have never lost. He departed almost at once for France and went at once to Fontainebleau, where he was cordially received by the king, who was naturally delighted at this bizarre triumph of French arms in the wilderness. The king was entirely favourable but declined to restore the fur monopoly. The financial backing was still in place, however, and Champlain returned to New France, arriving at Tadoussac on May 26, 1610, and going quickly on to Quebec. The winter had been mild and the extensive stores had seen the garrison through with minimal illness. Champlain was successfully implored by the Montagnais to lead them again against the Iroquois, who were assumed to be contemplating revenge. On the journey, he was severely assaulted by mosquitoes “so thick that we could hardly draw breath,” and then, when he and his party came upon an improvised Mohawk fort about three miles inland from the St. Lawrence, near the mouth of the Iroquois (Richelieu) River, he was almost killed by an arrow that struck him in the neck close to the carotid artery. The Mohawk made a better fist of it this time, and the arrows were “flying on all sides as thick as hail.”10 Champlain ordered the Montagnais to provide a shield for axmen to fell trees onto the improvised Mohawk stockade, opening up a space for his arquebusiers to pepper the enemy inside. Again, the Mohawk tried to flee, but most were massacred or captured and taken home for ritualistic torture. Champlain was given one prisoner, whom he did not mistreat and tried to turn into a peace agent, but the prisoner escaped and fled at the first opportunity. For the rest of his life, Champlain bore the scar of the Mohawk arrow on his neck and ear, and Indians would touch it fetishistically, as a “talisman.”11 These great French victories created a peace of respect with the Iroquois
that lasted for about twenty-five years.
Tragedy struck France and New France when Henry IV was assassinated on May 14, 1610, while Champlain was at sea, which news overtook him when he returned victorious to Quebec. The king was murdered by a Catholic fanatic, François Ravaillac, who stabbed him in his carriage because he disapproved his policy of religious toleration. Champlain returned at once to a capital where all had changed. The new king was Henry’s nine-year-old son, Louis XIII, and power would be exercised by the much-wronged widow of Henry and mother of Louis, Marie de’ Medici. Marie was an intelligent woman, had the confidence and culture of her family, and was also very beautiful, as a series of paintings she commissioned from the Belgian artist Peter Paul Rubens attests. She had an Austrian mother and, of course, an Italian father, and did not grasp the virtue or maintain the popularity of her late husband’s nationalist policy, in Europe or overseas. She dispensed with Sully (a continuing Protestant) in 1611 and replaced him with Concino Concini, the husband of her foster sister, Leonora. Concini was a devious Italian manoeuvrer of high cunning in narrow circles but inaccessible to the affections or even respect of the French. The court became a teeming infestation of claimants, faction heads, and courtiers, and Champlain could make no headway in such an intense and fetid political atmosphere, where all that counted was what was immediate, tangible, and opportunistic, and there was no time or constituency for the long-term strategic interest of France.