Champlain's Dream

by David Hackett Fischer

  Champlain’s second battle with the Mohawk, June 19, 1610, on the Iroquois River (now the Richelieu River), in the city of Sorel. He and his allies attacked a log fort and killed nearly all defenders. This victory brought seventeen years of peace between the French and the Mohawk. He is marked by the letter D, with five arquebusiers.

  The French lost the trail, then found two Indians and called out to them. Farther on, they met an Algonquin chief. He urged them to make haste. The Algonquin and Montagnais had tried to force the Mohawk barricade and had been repulsed. Some of the bravest Montagnais warriors had been killed and wounded. “You are our only hope,” they told Champlain.86

  The French went another quarter mile and began to hear “howls and shouts of both parties, flinging insults at one another, and continually skirmishing while waiting for us to come up.” At last they reached the battlefield in deep woods on the bank of the River of the Iroquois, about three miles from the St. Lawrence River. Champlain wrote, “As soon as the Indians saw us they began to shout.”87

  He ordered his four arquebusiers to stay with him, and they reconnoitered the Mohawk barricade, which was “made of strong trees, placed one upon the other, in a circle, which is the ordinary form of their forts.” The Montagnais and Algonquins also approached the barricade. Champlain and his men began to fire through the branches of the barricade, but “we could not see them as they could see us.” As Champlain fired his first shot, he was hit by a Mohawk arrow that split the tip of his ear and pierced the side of his neck, barely missing his carotid artery by a fraction of an inch. He was lucky it did not kill him.

  Champlain tells us that he “seized the arrow which was still in my neck and pulled it out.” Even as he did so in the heat of battle, he admired the craftsmanship of the Iroquois arrowhead. “The point was tipped with a very sharp bit of stone,” he wrote, but added, “my wound did not interfere with my duty, and our Indian allies also did theirs.” Once again he admired the courage of his Mohawk opponents. “The enemy fought well,” he observed, “so much so that one could see arrows flying on all sides as thick as hail.”88

  The French arquebusiers began to take a toll. They triple-loaded their weapons, rested them on the logs of the barricade, and fired carefully at close range. Champlain observed that the Mohawk in the fort were “astonished at the reports of our arquebuses,” and “frightened at the execution done by the bullets, having seen many of their companions fall dead and wounded, thinking these shots to be irresistible.” When they heard the report of a firearm, the Mohawk threw themselves on the ground, then rose again, and kept fighting. “We hardly missed a shot, and fired two or three balls each time,” Champlain wrote.89

  The arquebusiers began to run low on ammunition. Champlain turned to his Indian allies and told them that they must take the fort by storm—using their shields to get close enough to put ropes around the upright posts that held the barricade together. Champlain also urged the Indians to cut down several large trees near the barricade, “in order to make them fall on the enemy and crush the walls of the fort.” Others were instructed to use their shields to protect the axmen, “all of which they carried out very promptly.”90

  Just as they were about to assault the fort, more Frenchmen arrived from the barques on the river three miles away, with weapons and ammunition. They had heard the arquebusades, and some of them hurried to the sound of the battle. In the lead was a trader named Des Prairies, “a young man full of courage,” in Champlain’s words, who “said to those who had stayed behind that it was disgraceful of them to see me fighting in this way with savages without going to my aid, and as for himself he held his honor too high for anyone to reproach him with such a thing.”91

  Champlain advised the Indians to stop work on the barricade. The French reinforcements began firing into it and brought down more Mohawk. Then Champlain and the Indians moved forward with arquebusiers on their flanks, and made a breach in the barricade. Champlain shouted a command: “Ne tirez plus! Cease fire!” In a moment twenty or thirty Indians and Frenchmen leaped into the breach “without meeting much resistance.” In this way, he wrote, “by God’s grace victory was won.”92

  A few Mohawks tried to get away, but “they did not get far,” Champlain wrote, “for they were laid low by those about the barricade, and any who escaped were drowned in the river.” Nearly the entire Mohawk force of about a hundred warriors was killed, except fifteen unfortunates who were taken alive. Of the Montagnais and the Algonquin, three were dead and fifty wounded. Champlain and the French arquebusiers suffered two men wounded, including their commander. The French traders appear to have been unscathed.93 To the disgust of those who had done the fighting, more French traders arrived, “just in time to carry off the booty, which was not much.” They found “only a few beaver skins of the dead, covered with blood, which the Indians did not take the trouble to pick up, and made sport of those who did so.”94

  Champlain went aboard a shallop in the river and had his wounds dressed by a French surgeon named de Boyer. His neck and ear were severely scarred. For the next twenty-five years, the Indians of the St. Lawrence Valley recognized the scar on his ear and touched it as if it were a talisman. After the two victories over the Mohawk, Champlain became a mythic figure among them. The victorious Montagnais and Algonquin “went home singing.” With them went their captives, tightly bound. Everyone knew what was in store. Champlain intervened, and asked the Indians to give him a Mohawk prisoner, which they did. Champlain wrote, “It was no small service I did him.” By degrees, Champlain allowed his captive more liberty in hope of gaining an emissary for peace, but he “escaped out of fear and terror.”

  Two days after the battle, the Indians began to torture their captives by fire and water, burning them with birchbark torches. Champlain wrote that the victims, “feeling the fire, would utter such loud cries, that it was awful to hear.” Then the torturers would “throw water over their bodies to make them suffer more,” and went to work with the torches again, “in such a way that the skin would fall from their bodies, and the captors would continue with loud shouts and whoops, dancing about, until these poor wretches fell dead.”95

  Some of the captives were kept alive so that they could be tortured by wives and daughters. Champlain observed that the women “greatly surpass the man in cruelty, for by their cunning they invent more cruel torments, and take delight in them. Thus they cause the captives to end their lives in deepest suffering.” After these events the victors went to an island in the St. Lawrence River and feasted for three days. The Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais celebrated their victory. The French and Indians exchanged young men to learn languages, and then they parted.96

  Many historians have criticized Champlain for going to war with the Iroquois. Some have written that he started hostilities which would continue for two centuries. In the late twentieth century, ethnohistorians studied this question in a new spirit and came to a different conclusion. Most agreed that Champlain did not start these wars. The fighting had been going on between the Mohawk and their neighbors to the north long before he arrived.

  Further, Iroquois ethnologist William N. Fenton writes, “Nineteenth-century historians to the contrary, this incident did not precipitate a hundred years of Mohawk vengeance against New France.”97 It put a stop to major fighting between the Mohawk and the French for a generation. An ethnologist of the Huron agrees. Bruce Trigger writes of the two battles: “This was the last time that the Mohawks were a serious threat along the St. Lawrence River until the 1630s. Having suffered serious losses in two successive encounters, they avoided armed Frenchmen.”98

  Champlain’s two campaigns in 1609 and 1610 cost the Mohawk between 150 and 250 warriors. Their total population was between 5,000 and 8,000, of whom less than a quarter were warriors, perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 men. They probably lost between 10 and 20 percent of their fighting strength at a time when they were also waging war against Indian nations to the south and east. Small wonder that they steered clear
of another collision with the French for many years.99

  After the battles at Ticonderoga and the Rivière des Iroquois, the Mohawk made several peace overtures to the French. Champlain tried similar approaches to them, but he could not find a way to make lasting peace with the Iroquois without alienating the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron. Even so, he hoped for a modus vivendi between the French and the Mohawk, and he achieved it. A very fragile quasi-peace was won by force of arms, and it continued for a generation, until 1634. The leaders who followed Champlain in Paris and Quebec were unable to keep it going. They used too much force, or too little. Champlain’s policy was a middle way of peace through the carefully calibrated use of limited force. We are only beginning to understand how he did it.

  13.

  MARIE DE MEDICI

  Starting Over in France, 1610–11

  I was deeply afflicted to hear such evil news…. All this, I say, put new life into me.

  —Samuel de Champlain, 16101

  IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1610 in the St. Lawrence Valley. Champlain was hard at work in Quebec, and things were going well for him. As always, his top priority was to build relations with the Indian nations, especially the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron. It was an unceasing effort. Even as he extended the hand of fellowship, and they did the same to him, he and the Indian leaders were always aware that things could go wrong in a moment. A single troublemaker, French or Indian, could destroy years of patient labor. But in 1610 the alliances were strong, the Mohawk were quiet after two defeats, and peace prevailed through much of the valley.

  At the same time Champlain was working at another task—the improvement of fortifications in Quebec, against the danger of attack by European enemies. The English had recently planted settlements in Virginia and Maine. Champlain kept a close eye on their activities. Illegal traders were also multiplying on the St. Lawrence River. Some of their vessels were more heavily armed than the ships that flew the king’s standard. With all these groups in mind, Champlain put his men to work in Quebec, building a sturdy palisade, digging a deeper ditch, constructing a new drawbridge, reinforcing the batteries, and repairing the magazine. The colony was slowly gaining strength—its best protection against predators.

  Important as these projects may have been, Champlain’s most pressing task was to prepare the settlement for the winter. In the spring he had ordered his small band of colonists to plant large gardens, and by the summer they were “well provided with kitchen vegetables of all sorts.” He also asked them to work on grain fields, and noted the progress of “very fine Indian corn, with wheat, rye and barley, which had been sown with vines” planted during his winter’s stay. Champlain was hopeful that the settlement could become self-sufficient in the near future, and it was moving in that direction. Altogether the future looked bright for New France during the summer of 1610, brighter than ever before.2

  Then, in an instant, everything changed. A ship arrived from France and it brought shattering news. The king was dead! Henri IV had been murdered, cut down at the peak of his power by a religious fanatic who hated his policy of toleration. Champlain’s first response was disbelief. He absolutely refused to believe that such a thing could happen. More accounts arrived, with many rumors and alarms. Still he was in denial. “For me,” he wrote, “it was very difficult to believe them on account of the different versions that were told, and they did not have much appearance of truth.”3

  But slowly the truth came clear, and it was a heavy blow. With the thrust of an insane assassin’s knife, France had lost one of her greatest kings. Champlain had also lost his patron, protector, mentor, and friend. The king had been his strongest supporter and suddenly he was gone. “I was deeply afflicted to hear such evil news,” Champlain wrote. Many people shared his grief in France and in Quebec. He sadly recalled that “all these reports brought great sorrow to true Frenchmen who were then in those parts.”4

  Even more troubling than the event itself was uncertainty about what might follow. After so many civil wars in France, nobody knew what would come next, and many feared the worst. A letter arrived from the sieur de Mons, urging Champlain to return immediately to France and help with problems at home.5

  Champlain quickly settled his business in Quebec and once again appointed a very able successor to run the colony. Jean de Godet du Parc was the amiable young nobleman who had been tested as commander during the winter of 1609–10. His kinsmen had long been active in America, and he supported the grand design. With du Parc, sixteen habitants promised to stay the winter of 1609–10. Champlain swore them to their duty in a solemn ritual of honor that was important to these men. On August 8, 1610, he left Quebec and hurried down the river to Tadoussac. Five days later he was aboard a ship and homeward-bound for France.6

  It was a slow passage of seven weeks, with contrary winds. In midocean the ship collided with a sleeping whale. The hull suffered no serious damage, but the whale was terribly wounded. Great gouts of bright red blood stained the sea around the ship. It seemed a dark omen to these deeply troubled men. They sailed on, in a mood of grim foreboding.7 At last, on September 27, 1610, Champlain’s ship reached the coast of France, and he came ashore at Honfleur. The half year that followed was one of the darkest periods in his life. He wrote very little about it in any of his books. That long silence cloaked a time of struggle and uncertainty, with many setbacks in France and America.8

  In Paris, Henri IV had indeed been assassinated. Many attempts had been made on the king’s life and on May 4, 1610, one of them at last succeeded. The killer was a schoolmaster named Ravaillac, a religious fanatic and an academic lunatic who had been crazed with rage against the king’s edicts of toleration, and was consumed with fury in the frustration of a failed career.

  When news of the murder reached the court, Queen Marie de Medici collapsed in tears and cried out, “The king is dead!” At her side the Lord Chancellor, Nicolas Brûlart, the marquis de Sillery, gently corrected her. “Forgive me, Majesty,” he said. “The king is alive.” He gestured toward her small son, the dauphin, who in that dark moment became Louis XIII of France.9

  The heir apparent was still a child, nine years old. His foreign-born mother was proclaimed queen regent, and she became the ruler of France until her son came of age. Marie de Medici was thirty-seven years old in 1610, and a woman of surpassing beauty. In appearance she was more like her Austrian mother than her Italian father. She was very fair, with bright blond hair and perfect skin. Her refined features and Rubenesque form were much to the taste of her time. A French admirer wrote that her breasts were exceptionally “beautiful and well shaped,” and she displayed them at every opportunity, even in a set of twenty-four huge canvases that Rubens himself was ordered to paint of her life. Her face was described as bewitching, and it was said that her mouth “supplemented the devastation that was caused by her eyes.” Many observers wrote of Marie de Medici as one of the most exquisite women of her era. She used her beauty as an instrument of power and moved quickly to consolidate her position as ruler of France.10

  In 1610, Louis XIII became child-king of France at the age of nine, with his mother as Queen-Regent. In this portrait by Frans Pourbus, his eyes are watchful, distant, and deeply suspicious, as well he might have been, in a Franco-Italian court that was more dangerous than the American forest.

  Rubens, The Felicity of the Regency of Marie de Medici (1625), one of twenty-four adulatory paintings ordered by the Queen. It symbolized her regency in a scale of justice and a shower of gold, which was far from the fact. Her corrupt Italian friends provoked a revolution. Th ey were killed, and she was banished by her own son. Champlain lost his job but was quick to get it back.

  The queen regent continued many of Henri IV’s ministers in power—Brûlart and Sully in particular—and she supported most of his domestic policies. One of her first acts was to reconfirm her husband’s Edict of Nantes, with its two principles of supremacy for the Roman Catholic Church and tolerance for Protestants throughout th
e realm.11

  On foreign relations she went a different way. Marie de Medici moved closer to the papacy and strengthened ties with Spain. She surrounded herself with a circle of Italian friends and gave great weight to their counsel, especially the advice of her foster sister Leonora Galigaï Concini and her husband, Concino Concini. The Concinis were deeply resented at the French court, and the queen herself was perceived as a foreigner, in part because she never mastered French. Her letters were written in a unique language, part French and part Italian, with a bizarre orthography of her own invention.12

  Marie de Medici showed no sympathy for Henri IV’s grand dessein in Europe, and she had little interest in America. In 1610, she informed the Protestant sieur de Mons that he could no longer be “a member of our chamber” at Fontainebleau. His dismissal was a heavy blow, not so much for de Mons himself as for the cause of New France.13

  Champlain went to court, but had no access to the queen. Some people there also attempted to end Champlain’s pension of 600 livres a year, which had been granted originally by Henri IV. Later Champlain wrote that he met “all kinds of jealousies and attempts at alteration from certain ill-disposed persons.” He never named them, but we know that some were merchants in the American trade who wanted free access to Canadian furs or a monopoly for themselves. Others opposed American ventures in general, as Sully had done in the court of Henri IV. More than a few were personal enemies of the prince de Condé. Sully was still in this group, and would be so even after his fall from power in 1611. The queen’s Italian advisors had no liking for an expansive New France in North America. English and Spanish agents were everywhere. The clergy was an unstable cluster of contending groups. The court itself was a cockpit of rivalry among honor-obsessed nobles, who were rivals for the ear of the queen and for the favor of her son, the young king.14