Within the settlement of Quebec, Champlain worked at changing attitudes of the new habitants toward the Indians. With his example, relations between the French settlers and American Indians began to improve. Le Jeune supported Champlain, shared the same humanism, and greatly admired the style and character of the Indians. He remarked on the grace and dignity of “un sauvage de bonne façon.” Once, upon observing an Indian family passing his residence he wrote: “This family has something inexpressibly noble about it. If they were dressed à la française, they would yield nothing to our gentilhommes.” Le Jeune added: “They will feed you without asking anything of you if they think you have nothing. But if they see that you have something, and they want it, they will not stop asking you for it until you have given it.”29 The Indians were permitted to move freely in and out of buildings, “according to their custom,” Le Jeune wrote. “They enter everywhere without saying a word, or without any greeting. Their houses are not closed; all can enter who will.” Here again, Champlain had set an example. Others followed his lead, and relations improved in a reciprocal way.30
On May 24, 1633, two days after Champlain had returned to Quebec, eighteen large canoes filled with Indians led by the Montagnais leader Capitanal came to visit him. Champlain met with them and made a speech through his interpreter, Olivier le Tardif. He reminded them of the alliance that he had made with their forbears in the first tabagie on St. Matthew’s Point exactly thirty years before. He recalled how he and Capitanal’s father had fought side by side against the Iroquois in battles where Capitanal’s father had been killed and Champlain wounded.
Champlain told the Montagnais of his dream that their children might intermarry and live together as one people. Gesturing to the fort and settlement, he said, “When that great house is built, our young men will marry your daughters, and henceforth we shall be one people.”31 These words flowed from his heart, and the Indians were moved by his spirit.32 Father Le Jeune was present at this meeting and wrote an account of it. He observed that the Indians “listened very attentively” to Champlain and “appeared to be in deep thought,” as did one of their leaders, “drawing from his stomach this aspiration from time to time: Ham! Ham! Ham!, as if approving.”33
Champlain spoke of the trade that had grown between the Montagnais and the British, and warned them that freebooters were “thieves who had come to pillage the French.” He told the Indians about the treaty between the monarchs of England and France, and urged the Montagnais to “consider well what they were doing; these robbers were only birds of passage, while the French would remain in the country as it belonged to them.”
After Champlain finished, the Montagnais leader Capitanal rose. Father Le Jeune was amazed to hear him speak “with a keenness and delicacy of rhetoric that might have come from the schools of Aristotle or Cicero.” Capitanal said that Champlain spoke the truth, and for thirty years had lived the ideas that he espoused. The Indian leader said he had heard his father speak highly of Champlain, and they had learned that the French were different from the English. Capitanal promised that he would “not go to the English; I will tell my men they should not go there.” He explained that his powers were limited. “I promise you that neither I myself nor they who have any sense will do that; but if there is some young man who jumps over there without being seen, I shall not know what to do; you know well that youth can not be restrained.”34
A particular problem was trade in alcohol. “Since the English have introduced them to this drink,” Champlain wrote, “it has caused many quarrels, fighting, smashing their cabins … and trouble throughout the country.” He prohibited traders from giving wine and spirits to the Indians, on pain of severe corporal punishment and flogging. Together Champlain and Capitanal endeavored to stop trade with English interlopers, and to shut down the trade in alcohol. They both knew the limits of their power, but these men did what they could, and they did it together.35
As relations with the Montagnais began to improve, the Algonquins presented another challenge. Also in Champlain’s first busy week at Quebec, a very large delegation of Algonquin Indians came down the river in a great fleet of canoes. Champlain suspected that they might go on to the English, who had three vessels at Tadoussac and “a barque far up the river.” He went to their camp, and met with the Indian leaders, and more important, he listened as few Europeans did. Then he spoke of his vision for the Indians and New France. Unlike the conquistadors of New Spain, Champlain did not wish to make them into a force of servile workers. Unlike the founders of New England, he did not want to keep the Indians at a distance or drive them from their own lands. He urged the Indians to move closer to Quebec, and shared with them his vision of Europeans and North Americans, living side by side in peace.
After his conversations with the Montagnais and the Algonquin, Champlain also met with the Huron, and worked to restore relations with them. This was a very difficult task. Twenty years earlier, Champlain had been close to the Huron, and lived in their villages through a North American winter. But they had grown apart. Some of the Huron felt that Champlain had abandoned them. Still, in 1633 they remembered him with affection and respect. When they heard that Champlain had returned, a large party of Huron came down the river to see this man who had become a legend in their own culture. On July 28, between 500 and 600 Huron visited Quebec in hundreds of large canoes. They came ashore and built a camp on the edge of the river.36
It was an amazing sight. Le Jeune was an eyewitness, and he reported: “I could scarcely tell you how the people of this nation wear their hair. Each follows his own fancy. Some wear it long and hanging over to one side like women, and short and tied up on the other, so skillfully that one ear is concealed and the other uncovered. Some of them are shaven just where others wear a long moustache. I have seen some who have a large strip, closely shaved, extended across the head, passing from the crown to the middle of the forehead. Others wear in the same place a sort of queue which stands out because they have shaved all around it.”37
The next day the Huron held a council of sixty leaders, sitting on the ground, with each village and clan grouped together. Father Le Jeune was struck by their dignity. He wrote: “I have been told that Louis XI once held his council of war in the country, having for his throne or chair only a piece of wood, or fallen tree…. This is the picture of the Council of the Hurons.”38 Champlain was invited to join them, and the Jesuits were allowed to sit in. A Huron leader rose and said that they had come “to see their friends and brothers the French,” and offered presents to “the captain of the French, the sieur de Champlain.” They gave him three large bundles of beaver robes. Other Indians joined in expressing their support. One of their captains rose and said, “All the people rejoiced in the return of the sieur de Champlain and they all have come to warm themselves by his fire.” Then the Huron gave him more bundles of beaver robes.39
Champlain rose and said that he “wished very much to have them as his brothers, that he recognized old men with whom he had gone to war against the Iroquois.” The Huron warmed to his remarks. Then two Huron captains rose, and Father Le Jeune listened in astonishment as “they vied with each other trying to honor sieur de Champlain.” One said: “When the French were absent, the earth was no longer the earth, the river was no longer the river, the sky was no longer the sky. But on the return of the sieur de Champlain everything was as before; the earth was again the earth; the river was again the river, and the sky was again the sky.”40 The other celebrated Champlain as a warrior, and said that the sieur de Champlain was frightful (effroyable) in his looks; that when he went into battle, “a glance from his eye struck terror into the hearts of the enemies.”41
The discussion turned to the Jesuit fathers. Champlain urged the Huron to accept them in their villages, and he dictated the arrangements both to the Huron and the Jesuits. Both accepted his judgment, even though it was in some ways against their own. In 1633, Champlain was truly ruling over the St. Lawrence Valley.
; After the Huron council, the Jesuits invited Champlain and the captains of French ships on the river to visit their chapel and receive indulgences, and another side of Champlain’s character appeared. The Huron followed him to the chapel, so many that there was no room for them in the small building. One Huron put his head through a window to see what was happening. Father Le Jeune wrote that Champlain, “enjoying their wonder, gave one of them a piece of lemon peel.” The Indian tasted it and cried, “How good it is!” He asked what it was. Champlain said with a laugh, “it is the rind of a French pumpkin.” Others came for a taste “saying they would like to taste them, so they could tell about them in their country. Soon all joined Champlain in his laughter.” Le Jeune wrote, “You can judge for yourself how the room began to laugh!”42
Relationships with the Iroquois remained a problem. All the major Indian nations of the St. Lawrence Valley asked the French for help against them. On November 13, 1632, Father Le Jeune had been startled by a visit of a Montagnais leader in a state of extreme agitation. Le Jeune wrote: “Manitougache, our guest and neighbor, came to tell us that a great many Hiroquois [sic] had been seen near Kebec. All the Montagnais trembled with fear. He asked if his wife and children could not come and lodge with us. We answered him that he and his sons would be very welcome, but that girls and women were not permitted to sleep in our houses, indeed, they never entered them in France.” He “sent his whole party, all the young people, to cabins in the neighborhood of Quebec, where they were told that some arquebusiers would be sent to protect them.” The Algonquin and Huron made similar requests of Champlain. Twenty years after his campaigns against the Mohawk and the Onondaga, warfare was increasing once again between the Iroquois and the Indian nations who lived and traded on the river.43
On June 2, 1633, Mohawk warriors ambushed a party of Frenchmen near the site of Trois-Rivières. It was a brutal affair. The French were going up the river in a barque and a small shallop. The current was strong and several men went ashore to tow the shallop along the bank. As they reached a point of land, a war party of thirty or forty Iroquois sprang an ambush and attacked with great fury. Other Iroquois tried to board the shallop from their war canoes. The larger barque came to the rescue, and French arquebusiers presented their weapons. The Iroquois were driven off, but not before they had killed two or three Frenchmen, wounded three or four more, scalped their victims and retreated with cries of triumph.44
Here was Champlain’s most intractable problem: the reviving hostility of these formidable warriors. Champlain had tried many times to make peace with the Iroquois. For many years from 1609 to 1628 he had succeeded, when the Iroquois were engaged in wars to the south. An informal peace was agreed, but the English conquest had disrupted this understanding. The Mohawk turned north again, and rivalries for the fur trade were intense. Peace initiatives had failed, and Champlain lacked the military strength to deal with them. What to do?
In 1633 and again in 1634, Champlain laid out his thoughts in letters to Cardinal Richelieu. On August 15, 1633, he explained that the Iroquois had gained control of a large part of the countryside south of the St. Lawrence River, and held “more than 400 leagues in subjection.” In that area, he reported, the rivers and trails were not open to the French and their Indian allies. “It will be necessary sooner or later to prevent them from making trouble for people who wish to come and go freely on the lakes and rivers, and trade peacefully with the French.”45
Champlain told Richelieu that this goal could be achieved only by force of arms, but not by a conventional European army. He proposed to form a special sort of military unit, adapted to conditions in the new world. First it would be very small, carefully selected, trained for operations among the Indians, and highly mobile in the American forest. “To make ourselves masters of these people [the Iroquois],” he wrote, “it is necessary to have one hundred picked men of courage, well mannered, quiet, disciplined, accustomed to fatigue, and able to accommodate themselves to the customs of the Indians in the matter of food and drink.”46
Champlain designed this new force in great detail. He requested permission to recruit “eighty men armed with carbines of three or four feet [in length], and the caliber of a musket, highly skilled in their use.” Another ten men would be “trained in the use of two-handed swords and armed with pistolets;” four artificers skilled in the use of mines and petards for breaking down palisades; ten halberdiers and ten “strong and robust” pikemen trained in the use of that weapon; four carpenters and four locksmiths (skilled in the repair of gun locks); and two surgeons each armed with pistols. He proposed that all of these men would also be armed with cutlasses (“short but very sharp”). The entire force was to wear uniforms of chamois or well-cured leather of a faded color. They were to be protected by helmets and half armor of light steel that would offer protection from arrows.47
It is interesting to see the combination of qualities that Champlain had in mind for these men. They were to be highly efficient, capable of swift movement, and inured to hardship. They were also to be young men of manners, discipline, and restraint, who could adapt to the ways of the Indians and live and work with them in harmony. Champlain intended this small French force to operate in alliance with much larger numbers of 3,000 or 4,000 Indian allies, from the nations of the St. Lawrence Valley. He requested as well that the French supply the Indians with 1,000 hatchets and 4,000 iron arrowheads.48 His purpose was clear. When the Iroquois attacked the French and the Indians of the St. Lawrence Valley, he proposed to muster a combined force of French troops and Indian warriors. His intention was to strike quickly, with a large and highly mobile expedition that would advance quickly into the heart of Iroquoia, attack one or more of their major villages, withdraw in about twelve days, and raise the cost of aggression.49
Champlain was not interested in imposing French conquest on North America by brute force, or in building a sedentary empire in the British fashion. His object was to live among the Indians and work with them to create a lasting basis for peace, and to enforce it by joint effort where necessary by quick, strong and decisive measures, followed by conciliation. His letter to Richelieu laid out this strategy and an operational plan. Whether it would have worked against the Iroquois is another question. They were formidable opponents, highly skilled in the warfare that Champlain proposed to wage against them.
His plan required the active support of Cardinal Richelieu, and that support was not forthcoming. Champlain may have made a major tactical mistake in developing his thoughts not only in letters to the cardinal himself but also in a “relation” that was published in the Mercure François. Considerable skepticism may have arisen in Paris about Champlain’s proposal to take the field himself at the age of sixty-three. The cardinal had no knowledge of North America, and nothing of Champlain’s long experience of warfare in the new world. Whatever the reason, Richelieu did not act on Champlain’s advice, and may not even have replied to it. Once again it cost France dearly. After Champlain’s death, the Iroquois became more aggressive against the French, and a large force of conventional infantry would be sent to America with instructions to impose order by a more heavy-handed application of force majeure. It would be less effective than Champlain’s more adroit approach.
• • •
While governing in Quebec, Champlain made every effort to improve relations with Cardinal Richelieu and the Crown. This was not easily done. The cardinal was absorbed in European affairs. Richelieu wanted to create a world empire for France, and his attention wandered from one project to another. He acquired the West Indian islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and was interested in South Asia and the East Indies. Canada was also on the cardinal’s list, but rarely at the top. Champlain wrote a series of letters to Richelieu, which survived in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. Every year, Champlain made an annual ritual of fealty to his superior. He wrote little about himself, but much about the importance of New France. He described the magnitude of “this lan
d more than 1500 leagues in longitude, lying between the same parallels of latitude as our own France.” He celebrated the St. Lawrence River, “one of the most beautiful rivers in the world, with many tributaries, some more than 400 leagues.” He spoke warmly of the native people in their great variety, “some of them sedentary in towns and villages built of wood, like the Moscovites,” others nomadic hunters and fishermen, “all wishing to have a number of French and religious fathers for instruction in our faith.”50
He wrote of the beauty of the countryside and the bounty of its arable land, its great open spaces and immense forests, its abundance of animals and fish, its rich deposits of copper, iron, silver, and other minerals. Each letter was a promotional tract and more—a testament that came from the heart, about a country that he loved as dearly as France itself.51
These annual letters were also warnings to Richelieu not to lose sight of New France among his other projects. “I pray you will pardon my zeal,” Champlain wrote, “if I say that after your fame has spread throughout the East, you should end by compelling its recognition in the West.” Champlain warned that a great French empire could be lost to the Iroquois and the English and the Flemings (as he called the Dutch), who were enemies of New France. Already the Iroquois had gained control of many rivers, and were threatening an advance to the heart of New France. Again and again, Champlain argued that in this moment of small beginnings, an even smaller force could settle the fate of a great continent. Champlain impressed upon Richelieu that with a little effort at the right moment, they could “expel our enemies both English and Flemings,” and “force them to withdraw to the coast,” and within a year that force could encourage the spread of “order, religion, and commerce.” He reckoned that the cost was small, and the enterprise “the most noble that can be imagined.”52
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