With the support of these men and others like them, Champlain was able to gain the ear of the king and the attention of Cardinal Richelieu. “I gave full particulars of my voyage,” he wrote, “and explained what was necessary for them to do with reference to matters in England, and also in regard to other things for the benefit and advantage of New France.”20 He urged them to has ten the restitution of New France before it was lost forever. They responded positively. “Some time after my arrival at Paris,” Champlain recalled, “they despatched the sieur [André] Daniel to London, to see the French ambassador, with letters from his Majesty calling upon the King of England to restore the fort and habitation of Quebec, and other ports and harbors which he had seized on the coasts of Acadia, after peace had been made.”21
Daniel carried five memoranda that he and Champlain had prepared together, and they had some success, particularly in regard to Quebec. Charles I and his council met, and “made an order that the fort and habitation should be given back into the hands of His Majesty [Louis XIII], or those empowered by him.” But Champlain was quick to note what others had missed: the English response “made no mention of the coasts of Acadia.” He informed the French ambassador of the omission, and the marquis asked Louis XIII if “his Majesty would be satisfied with the offer.” Acadia was added to the list.22
Champlain also met with the directors of the Company of the Hundred Associates, who had little capital left and very large debts. They petitioned Louis XIII “to let them have six of his ships with four pataches, which they would fit out to go to the great river St. Lawrence, to resume possession of the fort and habitation of Quebec.” Champlain wrote that the fleet was “equipped and fitted out with all that was necessary.” It looked very promising.23
Then suddenly everything stopped again. The king and Richelieu turned their attention to another pressing problem: a war in Italy. Completely absorbed by events in Europe and chronically short of money, they put aside the problem of New France yet again. Champlain wrote, “His Majesty, who had the wars in Italy on his hands, was unable to return an answer to the King of England, and monsieur the Ambassador was kept waiting for His Majesty’s dispatch.”24
Champlain was filled with frustration about the loss of New France and gave vent to his feelings in documents that found their way into print. They could not have made pleasant reading at court. Champlain repeated his account of the English seizures in New France and asked: “What is the explanation of their having taking possession of our places so easily? It is because the King has not, up to the present, attached importance to these matters; but the just complaints made to him are now producing a resolve on his part to recover the territory encroached upon by the English, and the thing will be done whenever, and as often as, His Majesty may desire.”25
It was dangerous to speak such words in the era of Louis XIII, and still more so to write them. Champlain was on the brink of lèse majesté, for which the penalties were severe. But he got away with it, perhaps because the king and his chief minister were too busy to notice.
Champlain also turned to another problem. The Hundred Associates were almost at the end of their resources. They had spent 270,000 livres and only 30,000 remained. The directors somehow borrowed another 40,000 livres, and in 1630 they outfitted a fleet to take colonists to New France. The king ordered the chevalier de Montigny and five captains to recover Quebec, and to return Champlain as commandant.26
According to Champlain, “the English took alarm at the armament of these vessels.” Louis XIII gave them satisfaction “by dealing with the matter in a friendly way.” he king of England again promised to restore what had been taken after the peace. The king of France countermanded his own orders. Neither the French warships nor the transports were permitted to sail for America. The voyage was canceled. It was yet another huge loss for the company, its third major failure in a row.27
Champlain renewed his appeals to Louis XIII in a powerful submission that amplified his earlier arguments. He wrote of the riches and the grandeur of the land, the opportunity for commerce and wealth, the possibility of a northern route to China. He included the old spiritual imperative of “infinite numbers of natives; nombre infiny depeuples sauvages who might be brought to Christ.” Champlain added new arguments for French colonization, and a new imperative for French settlers to cultivate the land, so that they could feed themselves without needing supplies from home. Champlain’s arguments prevailed. Louis XIII was persuaded to resume discussions with Charles I and to do something about the dowry.
Champlain’s years in France from 1629 to 1632 were in some ways the most productive of his life, despite his many troubles. He played a major role in keeping the issue of New France alive, urging the king, the cardinal, and the Royal Council to work for its recovery. He collaborated closely with the directors of the Hundred Associates and helped reorganize it into a network of subsidiary companies. He formed new and very strong alliances with the next generation of young leaders such as the Daniel family.
For Champlain himself, these years were full of achievement in other ways as well. He wrote his biggest and most important book, called Voyages de la Nouvelle France, and published it in 1632. In modern reprint editions it fills two or three volumes. It reached an expanding public with some success, and Champlain’s publisher, Claude Collet, brought out a second edition.
Champlain’s Voyages de la Nouvelle France Occidentale, dicte Canada (1632), his fourth and largest book, was dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. It was part of a successful campaign to recover New France. Early in 1633, Richelieu appointed Champlain his lieutenant for Quebec and the St. Lawrence, with the utmost reluctance.
Champlain published the book with one major purpose in mind: to promote his grand design for New France in the court of Louis XIII. The Voyages were dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. Another major goal was to establish the legitimacy of France’s claims to North America. It was also a tale of troubles, many of them caused by the lack of strong and stable support from chartered companies, and from the court. This was dangerous ground. Champlain made his case mainly by discussing particular problems in close detail, rather than by general indictments or personal attacks. The Voyages documented Champlain’s long record of his service, with detailed accounts of all his major voyages from 1603 to 1629, his labors during the reign of Henri IV, the regency of Catherine de Medici, and the reign of Louis XIII. The book was also a promotional tract for North America. It was a work of description, and an argument for the importance of discovery and colonization in New France. Champlain also described the American Indians in great detail. Most of his writing was very sympathetic to them and showed a sustained interest in their culture. He stressed the importance of converting the Indians to Christianity, celebrated their intelligence, and validated the Indians as human beings. Here again, a central part of his vision was an expansive idea of humanity that embraced the people of Europe and America. His book was a sustained appeal for that principle.
Champlain promoted his project for New France through other publications as well. Pieces on his grand design appeared in that magazine of news and opinion, Le Mercure François, especially after Richelieu intervened and chose for its editor Father Joseph, the cardinal’s éminence grise. Some of these promotional pieces were written by Champlain, and others were submitted anonymously, with his active encouragement.28
In 1632, Champlain also published a map of New France which many cartographers recognize as his best. It had a different character and purpose from the work he had done before. Most of his earlier cartography produced charts, intended as aids to navigation, with much information about coasts and harbors, rocks and shoals, depth of water, and other directions for seamen. The great map of 1632 had some of those elements. The Grand Bank and Green Bank and the Banquereaux were clearly indicated in the Atlantic Ocean, with extraordinary precision. The map includes a navigator’s scale framed by a pair of dividers, indicators of latitude and longitude, and two examples of a compas
s rose, each with thirty-two radiating rhumb lines. But in this work Champlain was not thinking primarily of navigation. Coastal features are only approximate here, and less accurate in shape and scale than in his earlier work. Examples are Cape Cod, Mount Desert Island, the Sainte-Croix River in Maine, Sable Island, and Halifax harbor.
This itinerant map seller, in a ceramic figurine by Johann Joachim Kaendler (circa 1764), suggests the reach of Champlain’s cartography to an expanding public. His map of 1632 supported French claims to North America. It had an impact in London and also in Paris, where the major obstacles lay. The map appears on the back endpapers of this volume.
This work was a map rather than a chart, centering more on the land than the sea. It carefully marked places where the French had lived in North America from 1603 to 1629. Settlements were carefully named, accurately placed and marked by the maritime ensign of France. Missions, both Jesuit and Récollet, were also marked by a cross.
The map showed the names that were put on the land by French explorers, mostly by Champlain himself. The entire region of settlement was called by the single name of La Nouvelle France. It is interesting that Champlain no longer used the words Acadie or Norumbega. Gaspé and Cape Breton referred only to points of land, not to regions. The primary object of the map was to display the integrity and unity of New France. That name appeared twice: once on the Gaspé Peninsula, and again in larger letters on the huge regions to the west as far as the Great Lakes. All of this vast territory was claimed for France, and the royal arms of Louis XIII were displayed above it with the lilies of France, the Crown, and the cross of the Order of Malta—symbols of Bourbon sovereignty, French nationality, and the Roman Catholic faith.
Another layer of detail, very dense and carefully done, gave the location of Indian nations. Champlain’s legend explained that he was showing the nations of forest-dwelling people—many of whom were unknown to the larger world before he had met them and made alliances.29 To reinforce this visual display of French claims, Champlain added a very full gazetteer that was published at the same time. This map of 1632 was probably very similar to an earlier one that he made in 1629 and gave to the French ambassador in London, for use in negotiations with British rulers.30
Finally, in 1632, Champlain’s labor achieved its intended result. After much delay, Louis XIII agreed to pay the balance of Henrietta Maria’s dowry with interest: the very large sum of 1.8 million livres. After long negotiation, Charles agreed to restore New France. Both monarchs promised to stop doing what they should not have started to do in the first place. Each also agreed to keep treaty obligations that they had already broken. These terms were ratified by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1632.
While the two kings were moving toward a diplomatic solution, the Company of the Hundred Associates had been changing its operations in a fundamental way. After three ruinous failures in 1620, 1629, and 1630, the directors tried a new approach. They decided to sponsor a web of subsidiary companies, so that subcontractors could undertake smaller ventures with limited goals. The subject was the same: to recover control of New France. This approach was different: it leveraged the company’s capital, broadened its investor base, created drivers for particular ventures, and gave them a stake in the outcome.31
One of the first of these ventures was an attempt to reinforce an unexpected success by Champlain’s friend Captain Charles Daniel. In the spring of 1629, after the Peace of Susa and before the fall of Quebec, Daniel had been sent to New France by the Company of the Hundred Associates, with dispatches and supplies for Champlain. He sailed from La Rochelle on June 26, reached the Grand Banks, and was caught in dense fog. The ships lost sight of each other and Daniel sailed on alone. He met a small ship flying an English flag at the mainmast. Daniel boarded her, reported that their nations were at peace, and allowed her to continue to her destination, which was Plymouth Colony with a cargo of English cattle and other freight.32
Captain Daniel continued to Cape Breton in August 1629, stopping at Grand Cibou (now Bras d’Or Bay) and Port-aux-Baleines (now Baleine Cove) just west of Cape Breton. There he found a ship from Bordeaux and learned that another group of British mercenaries, led by Sir James Stewart, had seized a French fishing vessel, confiscated her catch, and robbed her crew—another illegal act after the Peace of Susa. Stewart had built a fort at Port-aux-Baleines and forbade any Frenchman to trade on the coast without paying a 10 percent fee of furs for permission to trade.33
Daniel was outraged by this “usurpation of territory belonging to the King, my master,” and took it upon himself to evict the Scots. On Sept. 18, 1629, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, fifty-three Frenchmen landed at Port-aux-Baleines and advanced on the British fort with orders to “attack at different points and make plentiful use of grenades, fire-pots, and other fireworks.” Daniel himself led the assault on the main gate, and personally seized the British commander. The defenders replied with a few rounds of musketry, and were overwhelmed. After a token resistance they raised a white flag and begged for “life and quarter.” Down came the “standards of the English king, and up went the lilies of France.34
In the fort Daniel freed a French fishing captain named René Cochran from the port of Brest, who had been held as a hostage until the owner of his vessel paid a ransom. Daniel loaded all the provisions, munitions, and weapons aboard a Spanish caravel that was aground near the fort. Then he ordered the Scottish fort to be demolished. All the usable material was carried to Cibou, and Daniel put fifty British captives to work building a new fort called Fort Sainte-Anne. He raised a habitation and chapel, filled the storehouse with a plentiful supply of provisions and munitions, and set up the arms of the king and “my lord the Cardinal.” Other refugees from Quebec made their way to the settlement, including the Jesuit fathers Vimond and Vieuxpont. A garrison of forty Frenchmen prepared to spend the winter of 1629–30 there, under the command of the sieur Claude de Beauvais. Then Daniel sailed home with his captives, landed them at Falmouth in England with their personal belongings, and took their commander to France, “awaiting the instructions of my lord the Cardinal.” The liberation of New France from England had begun by force of arms well before the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.35
When Daniel returned to Paris, Champlain worked with him to send reports to the king, Richelieu, and other high officials. In 1631, the Hundred Associates created a subordinate company in Normandy to reinforce Fort Sainte-Anne and plant a settlement on Cape Breton Island.36 This small effort did not succeed. A larger company was formed in Dieppe by Captain Charles Daniel of Dieppe and merchant-hatters in Paris to revive the fur trade.37 The Hundred Associates sponsored another special voyage to Fort Sainte-Anne and Cape Breton in 1632. Its purpose was to strengthen the French presence on the fishing coast, and to prepare the way for the recovery of New France by controlling the approaches to the St. Lawrence River. Two leading historians of New France, Lucien Campeau and Marcel Trudel, believe that Champlain sailed with it and returned quickly to France in the late summer or fall.38
He strengthened the small French post at Sainte-Anne, a strategic site on the peninsula of Cape Breton with a protected harbor on the south side of the great gulf of the St. Lawrence. We are told that Champlain “worked there to put the fort in a better state,” so that this settlement could be used as an alternate site, “in case the company of the Hundred Associates would not be able to recover Quebec.”39
A second French effort developed at the same time. It began with a small success at a small French trading post at Cape Sable Island off the southeastern tip of what is now Nova Scotia. There a little band of French traders had survived the onslaught of the British mercenaries in 1628–29. They held the last remaining fort in New France, and their leader Charles de Saint-Étienne de la Tour was hanging on by his fingernails. To help him, the Hundred Associates sponsored a new subsidiary company in the southeast of France. Some of the investors were Basques, the central figure was Jean Tuffet, a merchant-adventurer
of Bordeaux and a director of the Company of the Hundred Associates. He fitted out several ships to sail from Bordeaux for Cape Sable. The commander was Captain Bernard Marot, a Basque seaman from Saint-Jean de-Luz. The ships carried three Récollet fathers, “workers and artisans,” and supplies for the beleaguered settlement at Cape Sable. They arrived in time to save the settlement with provisions, arms, and men. Champlain wrote that young La Tour was delighted with this support, which he had scarcely dared to hope for.”40
The ships landed their cargo and laborers, who began to rebuild the small colony. The French at Cape Sable were in an expansive mood, and decided to plant another trading post across the Bay of Fundy at the Saint John River, near the modern city of Saint John in New Brunswick. It is a dramatic spot, where the river curves between high headlands and joins the sea. At a spectacular bend in the river, its strong current meets the great tides of the Bay of Fundy to create the reversing falls that fascinated Champlain and still attract a flow of tourists.41 This new French settlement was also a success. It was founded primarily for a flourishing trade in moosehides, beaver pelts, and sea otter skins, which were sold through a consortium of merchants in the Cardinal’s Ring. The Hundred Associates were beginning to revive as a network of small sub-companies and small ventures.42
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