by Conrad Black
As the British approached from New York, they also encroached from Hudson Bay. All of their forts and posts in James and Hudson bays were operating vigorously, though the British usually awaited the arrival of Indians bearing and selling furs, rather than seeking them out. Between 1688 and 1721, Henry Kelsey (immortalized in the Stan Rogers song “Northwest Passage” as “brave Kelso”), William Stuart, and James Knight ventured up the Churchill, to Great Slave Lake and inside the Arctic Circle, Knight perishing from famine and illness at Rankin Inlet in 1721 at the age of eighty-one. They were still looking for the route to China, more than two hundred years after the search began, as well as the copper deposits that various Indians had described in terms that caused credulous British and French to imagine another El Dorado in the North. Kelsey also went out onto the Great Plains and was apparently the first European to see huge herds of buffalo and to encounter large numbers of grizzly bears. But the British were hereafter unchallenged in the North, and the Indians were happy to bring their wares to them. This pincers movement from the north and up from south of the Great Lakes forced the French to move west and push through Wisconsin and down the Mississippi to continue to be Europe’s main supplier of furs. This produced the Second Fox War, from 1727 to 1733, in which France won most of the engagements but the Fox only retreated before permanent insurmountable force. They defended their commercial and territorial prerogatives with what the French considered, hardly disinterestedly, to be perverse ferocity and guile.
The man for this hour, and, as it turned out, the last of the great French explorers of North America, was the Canadian Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, like d’Iberville a native of Trois-Rivières. He had gone as a youth to France to enlist in the French army and served with gallantry under Villars against Marlborough and Eugene at Malplaquet, where thirty thousand men were killed or wounded and Paris was successfully defended. He was invalided out of the army and exchanged as a prisoner of war and returned to Canada, where he married and settled down to farming and part-time fur trading for fifteen years. In 1726, when he was forty-one, his brother was made commander of the French posts and forts on the north shore of Lake Superior, and he replaced his brother as commandant when he took a command position in the Second Fox War. La Vérendrye worked out a plan with Vaudreuil’s successor, Governor Charles de Beauharnois, starting with La Vérendrye’s construction of a fort on Lake Winnipeg, which would be used to project a comprehensive exploration to the west. This project was paid for by Quebec merchants, and the division of ambitions in La Vérendrye’s conception of his mission between fur trading and profit and exploration, the making of history and the extension of the glory of France and of Canada, has never been remotely clear. In Versailles, Pontchartrain had been succeeded as navy and colonies minister by his son, the precocious (he was only twenty-six) Count of Maurepas, who was an imperial expansionist, as long as the French government didn’t have to pay for it, and he favoured La Vérendrye’s plan.
In 1731, La Vérendrye and fifty followers, including three of his sons, struck out for the west. In the ensuing three years, they built forts on Rainy Lake, Lake of the Woods, and Lake Winnipeg. In 1734, La Vérendrye returned to Quebec to refinance his business, and by 1735 he was supplying more than half the fur exported from Quebec. In 1736, one of La Vérendrye’s sons and eighteen comrades in the expedition were killed by the Sioux at what became known as Massacre Island on Lake of the Woods. La Vérendrye intervened with the Cree to prevent a general melee among the Indians that would imperil the supply of furs to the export market, so precarious, even two hundred years after the arrival of Jacques Cartier, was the economy of New France.
Choosing between the Saskatchewan River, which flowed west from Lake Winnipeg, and the Missouri River, which flowed southeast into the Mississippi, having come through what is now North Dakota, as the likeliest to be the fabled River of the West that would finally take Europeans to the Pacific Coast, La Vérendrye inexplicably chose the southeastern- rather than the western-flowing candidate, and in 1738 got to a point about seventy miles east of what is now the Montana–North Dakota border. He was again in Quebec in 1740, and in 1741 embarked on his fourth western expedition and built more forts on lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba and sent his son, Louis-Joseph de La Vérendrye, as far west as the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Maurepas, apparently oblivious to the fact that La Vérendrye had to sell furs to pay for his expeditions, criticized him for spending too much time on commerce and not enough on exploration, and La Vérendrye retired in 1743. This episode illustrated again the dangers of running a shoestring operation to try to subdue hundreds of thousands of natives, end-run the British and their colonists, who were more than thirty times as numerous as the French of New France, and maintain control of the fur industry over nearly five million square miles. Maurepas eventually realized his error and reappointed La Vérendrye, who was now a prosperous and much admired Canadien, and La Vérendrye was preparing to go west and explore the Saskatchewan (which would eventually have brought him to the Rocky Mountains), when this implacable veteran of Malplaquet, forty years on, died in Montreal in 1749, aged sixty-four.
The governor and general court of the Hudson’s Bay Company had assumed that the only competitive threat they would face would be French naval attacks on their northern forts and posts, and, in what proved a considerably whiter elephant than Louisbourg, built a formidable fortification called Prince of Wales Fort at the mouth of the Churchill River, under the supervision of the talented but obstreperous surveyor and mason Joseph Robson. After five years in Hudson Bay, Robson was sent home almost accused of mutiny, and testified before a parliamentary committee that the management of the Hudson’s Bay Company had “slept for eighty years by the frozen sea,” an excessive critique.38 But what the company management had reckoned without was the intrepid French and French-Canadian traders and explorers outpacing them on land and advancing well to the west, making workable arrangements with all the Indians except the Fox. The Fox remained very difficult, and had to be dealt with as a military challenge, until Paul Marin de La Malgue, a capable colonial soldier, took command in 1736 and managed with a conciliatory policy to achieve a peace, where suppression at musket-point had failed, based on retention of their role as middlemen by the Fox. Thus ended the Second Fox War, in 1733 (though there would be further frictions). Farther south, in Louisiana, the French had to conduct a war with the Chickasaw and Natchez, who were encouraged by the South Carolinians. These tribes did not appreciate being bypassed by the French and cut out of the commercial loop, and the second Baron de Longueuil was sent to assist his uncle Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, founder and governor of Louisiana.
New France continued to be a tenuous proposition, but the French population of what is now the Province of Quebec had grown from eighteen thousand in 1713, to thirty-four thousand in 1730, to forty-three thousand in 1739. A nationality was developing, and the cultivated agricultural area had multiplied five-fold in the first third of the eighteenth century, to 163,000 arpents, from which more than a million bushels of cereal were harvested. New France was no longer on constant life-support from France, other than in military terms opposite a sophisticated threat from the British and British Americans. Sawmills, shipbuilding, pitch, hemp, brewing, iron-making, weaving and elemental textiles were all carrying forward the modest beginnings provided by Jean Talon. By 1744, New France was a net exporter. Unfortunately, the isolation which had challenged but protected it could not be continued much longer.
In the twenty-five years after the War of the Spanish Succession, the techniques of the transatlantic fishing industry evolved, and the processing of the fish, which had been done on the ships, was largely transferred to the shore, and settlement began in earnest. There were women in the processing crews, and as these provided a number of the settlers, “their presence made the ‘residence’ over winter something more than a bachelors’ doss-house.”39 The French informally retained part of the Newfoundland s
hore, and processed fish very competitively also at Gaspé, Canso, Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), and Louisbourg. The Acadians, cut off from the shore by the northern movement of the New Englanders, and cut off also from New France, drifted into an ambiguous status, by which they took no oath of allegiance to the British Crown, and retained their language and religion and were effectively a neutral element in a small buffer zone between the British and French empires. Their status was implicitly tolerated by the British, and they “again became a people without a history,” 40 but they remained loyal to their neutrality pledge.
The War of the Austrian Succession (1739–1748), like anything having to do with Austria in its capacity as the continuator of the Holy Roman Empire, was very complicated. It was a series of conflicts overlapping in geography and time and was, even more than the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession, a world war. It was known as King George’s War in North America. The Anglo-Spanish aspect of it was known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear (so described by Thomas Carlyle, 119 years after it began, after the ear of a British merchant seaman – which was severed by the Spanish in a dispute arising from the concession of the non-Spanish slave trade to Great Britain in the War of the Spanish Succession – was produced as evidence in Parliament); the First Carnatic War in India; and the First and Second Silesian Wars in Central Europe. Apart from the imbroglio over Robert Jenkins’s ear, which started as a bilateral Anglo-Spanish dispute in 1739, the war ostensibly began because the daughter of the emperor of Austria Charles VI, Maria Theresa, was his heir, but under Salic law because women were not eligible to hold all the thrones that had been accumulated by the head of the Habsburgs, other powers professed to have an interest in defending this absurd relic of male self-exaltation that flew in the face of such great monarchs as Elizabeth I of England. In fact, every power in Europe wanted to nip away at the polyglot, ramshackle empire centred in Vienna that grouped German, Slavic, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, Romanian, and Dutch chunks and oddments of Europe. Charles VI had foreseen this problem with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 and had gained the adherence of most of Europe to that acceptance of a female heir to his titles. The Holy Roman Empire could not have a female monarch, but the plan was for Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis Stephen, to succeed as Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa would succeed to her father’s status as queen of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria, duchess of Parma, and a passel of lesser thrones, crowns, and tiaras, suzerainties and protectorates that had been accumulated in the Habsburgs’ five hundred years of military, diplomatic, and matrimonial aggrandizement.
The real start of the war and the most important result of it was the ambition of Prussia’s King Frederick II, generally known as Frederick the Great, to challenge Austria for the headship of the Germanic world and join the ranks of the great powers. To this end, seizing an obscure pretext furnished by the Treaty of Brieg of 1537, Frederick claimed the right to dissent from the previously agreed Pragmatic Sanction, and invaded Silesia in December, 1740. Because Frederick, inaugurating a long and sanguinary era in international warfare, had trained his professional Prussian army more intensively than any army since the elite legions of the late Roman Republic, he was able simply to seize Silesia almost unopposed. The stately European habit had been an elaborate quadrille of warnings and ultimata accompanied by a mobilization conducted with as much deliberateness and fanfare as possible as part of an antique ceremony of affected grandiosity and intimidation. Frederick had a standing army, not one that had to be recruited after the exchange of war messages, and Prussian infantry could reload and fire at three times the speed of Austrian infantry. As the world would learn, Prussians tended also to be more militaristic by nature than the more convivial Austrians (and most other nationalities). Frederick ruled a scattered group of non-contiguous units and splinters created by Richelieu and Mazarin’s Treaty of Westphalia almost a century before, with precisely the aim of assuring the dispersing of German Europe among many entities all of which were to be encouraged jealously to guard their autonomy. Frederick had doubled the population of Prussia in one stroke. The beginning of the unification of Germany and of an authentic German great power endowed with an exceptionally formidable army, were the principal outcomes of this war. And though very few people recognized it at the time, the combination of the rise of a militarily powerful German kingdom and the continued perfection of the British technique of assisting fluid coalitions in Europe designed to perpetuate a stalemate among rival countries while overwhelming all competitors on the high seas and in the sweepstakes for desirable colonization, were radically to alter France’s long pre-eminence among the powers of Europe.
This is not the place for the history of this intricate and far-flung war, and it is only summarized to the extent of its impact on Canada and its history. The French and Bavarians led the countries joining Prussia in trying to take chunks out of the beleaguered Holy Roman Empire, but Maria Theresa, whose reign (from 1740 to 1780) was almost coextensive with Frederick’s (from 1740 to 1786) and overlapped with that of Catherine the Great in Russia (from 1762 to 1796), soon showed her mettle and doubly made nonsense of the objection to one of her sex wielding her position. Her husband was forced out of Prague by the French in 1741 and the Bavarians and the elector of Bavaria, had himself crowned king of Bohemia, and claimed also to be the grand duke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII. Maria Theresa called for the support of the people of Hungary, and tens of thousands volunteered; she mobilized relatively quickly, and on the day of Charles VII’s trumped-up coronation occupied the Bavarian capital of Munich, and then regained Prague. Frederick, who was only seeking Silesia, made a secret truce with Maria Theresa, but with her successes she revealed the arrangement to detach some of Frederick’s allies because of his treachery, as she hoped to regain Silesia. Great Britain, in keeping with its traditional policy of supporting the underdog, came to the aid of Austria, and in an unprecedented and subsequently unattempted feat for the House of Hanover once enthroned in London, King George II defeated the French in 1743 and forced them back across the Rhine.
The French were only interested in picking up what was easily had and thereafter focused on encroaching on the part of the Netherlands that Austria had seized from the Spanish after the war for the succession in that country thirty years before. For this task, France had the services of another of its greatest military commanders, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, like Turenne and Villars a marshal general of France. (He was the illegitimate son of August the Strong, king of Poland and elector of Saxony. European rulers and nobles at this time had an astonishing number of illegitimate children.) Saxe defeated the British and Dutch at Tournai and Fontenoy in 1745. Bavaria, thoroughly chastened, made peace with Austria after the pretender Charles VII conveniently died. Maria Theresa gave them back what she had taken from Bavaria, which thus overcame its objections to a female ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, though Francis Stephen would hold the title. Frederick had become alarmed at Maria Theresa’s progress and re-entered the war in 1744, but was now the only opponent of Austria on its actual borders, as the War of the Austrian Succession, apart from a final slugging match between Frederick and Maria Theresa, was henceforth fought out in the Netherlands, Italy, and in colonial operations. Frederick won four battles with the Austrians in Silesia in 1745, and they made peace at the end of 1745 – the Prussian king confirmed the annexation of Silesia but accepted the Austrian grand duchess and her husband as emperor. Austria generally held its position against the French and Spanish in Italy, but Saxe defeated all comers in the Netherlands, and it was fortunate, even for so talented and victorious a general, that a Russian army – peace having been made between Russia and Sweden, and after Russia had chosen to assist Austria – marching from Moscow to the Rhine arrived only a few days too late to join the fray in what were now the Austrian Netherlands.
The war in India (First Carnatic War), had gone well for France under Joseph François
Dupleix, who captured Madras. The British had won the naval engagements in the Atlantic and West Indies, though not in the Mediterranean. France had not been able to lend any support to the planned Jacobite invasion of England, because its fleet was unable to find a window of superiority in the Channel. (The invasion, planned to come from Dunkirk, would have encountered a very frosty reception from the apostate English.) And in Canada, Louisbourg, touted as the Dunkirk or Gibraltar of North America, was known by the British from the observations of their fishermen and agents to be vulnerable to attack by land, and the great fort was captured easily by a contingent of Massachusetts militia transported by the Royal Navy and commanded by William Pepperrell. Cape Breton was also overrun without undue effort, in 1745. No effort was made to assault Quebec, and the war that raged in various parts of Europe and India and across many seas did not much affect events in the interior of North America. The French were stunned and humiliated by the fall of Louisbourg and mounted two expeditions to regain it, but they were prevented from being carried out by the weather, in 1746, and by a British naval interception, in 1747, in which the French commander, the Marquis de La Jonquière, was captured. Halifax harbour was surveyed for future use by the Royal Navy in 1749. The Acadians remained faithful to their collective pledge of neutrality in the indecisive fighting of that sector,41 but the British would not guaranty that they would never be required to take up arms against France. The British (Americans) did mobilize the Mohawks to attack the French, and they got close to Montreal. The French replied with a raiding party led by Rigaud de Vaudreuil, son of the former governor, which razed the town of Northfield, Massachusetts. Both sides were employing Indians and not restraining their native allies from indulging their extreme notions of the rules of war with civilians, women, and children. Again, New France held its own against a more powerful neighbour, but these tactics stoked American anger and belligerence. The strong-minded governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, took to emulating Cato about Carthage: “Delenda est Canada” (Canada must be destroyed).