by Peter Stark
In late March 1640, Françoise Jacquelin traveled aboard the Amity and arrived a few weeks later at Cape Sable. The elegant Françoise-Marie stepped off the ship from France—one thinks of her in petticoats and a velvet cape—to a crude fortress in the wilderness and a husband who had spent his entire adolescence and manhood engaged in “a savage kind of life, traveling, trucking, and marrying with the savages.” One hopes he shed his buckskins and beaver pelts for something more Parisian. It is not clear what happened to La Tour’s Micmac wife. She may have died some years earlier, because on his journey to Paris in 1632 he’d brought the youngest two of his three métis daughters to be educated in France. The third and eldest daughter, Jeanne, stayed behind in Acadia. She would have been fourteen when her new French stepmother stepped off the Amity, along with the two maids La Tour provided for her in the marriage contract.
After the formal marriage ceremony,55 the newlywed couple sailed on the Amity to La Tour’s remodeled fortress on the St. John with its honeymoon quarters. They spent only a few weeks in residence before La Tour and Françoise Jacquelin sailed north to d’Aulnay’s settlement at Port Royal. One theory holds that La Tour wanted his bride to meet d’Aulnay’s young French wife, “the modest little” Jeanne Motin, while another says that he went solely for the purpose of examining d’Aulnay’s warehouse, convinced d’Aulnay was cheating him in furs. There had also been disputes between the two over control of fur-trading territory along the St. John.
D’Aulnay wasn’t in his fort, away resupplying his fur outposts along the Penoboscot River, and his men, on instruction, refused La Tour permission to land. The insult clearly stung La Tour in front of his bride. He brooded all night in the harbor, and in the morning, with his two small ships, began to sail back to the St. John. Leaving the entrance of Port Royal’s large sheltered basin, La Tour’s men spotted the two approaching sails of d’Aulnay’s returning ships. No one knows for certain who fired the first shot, but La Tour’s cannons unleashed a broadside that toppled one of d’Aulnay’s mainmasts and killed several men.
D’Aulnay, an experienced mariner, returned heavy fire, killing several, and managed to force La Tour’s ships into the shallows, where they foundered. He then captured the survivors, among them La Tour and Françoise Jacquelin, and imprisoned them all in his fort, which contained a heavy dungeon. With two Capuchin friars (part of the Franciscan order) working as intermediaries, it was finally agreed to let the king of France decide the matter, whereupon d’Aulnay released the captives. Surely, it was an incident that did not endear d’Aulnay to Françoise. D’Aulnay dismissed her as not worthy of his respect, describing her in his accounts as the daughter of un barbier—a barber. She was not a woman, it turned out, to take such insults lightly.
With d’Aulnay using his powerful influence at the royal court, the king’s and Richelieu’s judgment went against La Tour. That winter, 1641, they stripped him of his Acadian governorship, which was granted to d’Aulnay instead, and ordered La Tour back to France. Letters arriving late that spring of 1641 via ship from his allies in Paris, however, warned La Tour that he should not return to France or he would be “doomed.” Instead, his allies said they would covertly try their best to resupply him in Acadia.
La Tour and Françoise withdrew to their fortress on the St. John, abandoning his Fort Saint-Louis at Cape Sable to d’Aulnay, who, defying the king’s orders, promptly torched it along with its Récollet monastery and church, to the deep dismay of its vow-of-poverty Récollet monks. In response to d’Aulnay’s aggressions, La Tour looked to the most powerful source of help he could find nearby—the British colonies down in New England. Having grown tremendously in the twenty years since the Mayflower landings, they now numbered some thirteen thousand colonists in their dense agricultural villages, compared to a paltry four hundred or so in New France’s56 far-flung fur-trading outposts. They possessed their own manufactories, water mills, and a thriving transatlantic commerce, due to few trade restrictions on the part of the mother country, which was distracted with its internal wars.
There followed a wooing of Governor John Winthrop and the English colonists down in Boston by both La Tour, his wife, Françoise Jacquelin, their archenemy, d’Aulnay, and envoys for all parties, to which the Bostonians extended cordial hospitality. Madame La Tour, according to the early New England chronicles, was a favorite in Boston, her status helped by her Protestant leanings. She was called “a wise and valiant woman and a discreet manager” and “justly esteemed for her sound Protestant sentiments and excellent virtues.” By contrast, d’Aulnay’s envoys portrayed Françoise to the Bostonians as a kind of dragon lady—“known to be the cause of [La Tour’s] contempt and rebellion.”
She sailed back to France twice to enlist aid for her husband, as letters of arrest had been issued there for him, due to d’Aulnay’s influence at court, and it was too dangerous for him to go himself. In one instance she had to slip past d’Aulnay’s ship blockade around the St. John harbor and the La Tour fort. Back in France, she, too, was ordered to be detained. She managed to slip the authorities again, by making her way from a French port to England, where she located a British ship bound for Acadian waters. D’Aulnay himself, on patrol with one of his ships, intercepted her British ship as it approached Acadia but Françoise and her maidservants managed to escape detection by hiding deep in the hold.
The winter of 1644–45 found Charles de La Tour back in Boston trying to convince the Council of Magistrates not to side with d’Aulnay—an homme d’artifice. The Bostonians now regretted that they ever got involved in this infighting among the French that so distracted them from establishing Winthrop’s vision of a “City upon a Hill” in the wilderness. While he pleaded his case in Boston, La Tour left Françoise Jacquelin and their young son at the fort on the St. John River. She and the Récollet friars attached to the fort apparently quarreled because the friars were convinced that she’d become possessed by the devil’s ideas down in Boston. The friars fled in a small boat to the more Catholic shelter of d’Aulnay’s fortress at Port Royal. Upon learning that Madame La Tour was in charge of the fort, d’Aulnay seized the moment, sailed into the St. John’s mouth with his three-hundred-ton, sixteen-cannon warship Grand Cardinal, along with many scores of men, and demanded immediate surrender.
They were greeted from the ramparts by jeers, insults, and the red flag of defiance. The roar of battle began. Fierce bombardments from both sides—from the fort, the ship, and from the cannons d’Aulnay had moved into place behind the fort under the cover of night—echoed throughout Easter Day 1645. With the fort’s wooden palisades shattered, d’Aulnay started a final foot charge. The few remaining defenders rallied behind Françoise Jacquelin, who had led throughout the battle. It was then, realizing the hopelessness of the situation, that she finally surrendered on the condition that her men be granted amnesty. D’Aulnay agreed to the terms. He then went back on his word and hanged all the survivors but two collaborating men plus Françoise, her young son, her maidservant, and the one other woman in the fort. D’Aulnay forced Françoise to stand with a rope around her neck and watch as each of her men was in his turn strung up and strangled by the tightening noose.
She remained d’Aulnay’s captive for three weeks, at first granted a measure of freedom to move. When she tried to send a message via the Micmac to her husband down in Boston, d’Aulnay either locked her up or put her in irons or both. As a captive of the La Tour archenemy, Françoise Jacquelin fell ill and died57—either from sadness and resentment (according to her servants) or from rage (according to d’Aulnay’s people) or from poisoning (so the Acadians believed).
D’Aulnay had finally wrested from Charles de La Tour the whole of Acadia and its rich fur trade—but only briefly. La Tour, his fort lost and wife dead and now fifty-two years old, seized a ship of the Bostonians, who had hosted and helped him. (Governor Winthrop, stung by La Tour’s betrayal, quoted the Bible, “there is no confidence in an unfaithful or carnal man.”) With his sto
len ship, La Tour repaired to the safety of Quebec, where he was out of reach of both d’Aulnay and the Bostonians, and remained there for the next several years, a respected and solid citizen of the settlement.
D’Aulnay sat atop his Acadian fur empire for five years, although it apparently never made enough of a profit, and it came to a sudden and ignoble end. In May 1650, a season when the water was still frigid from winter’s cold, d’Aulnay and one of his staff members were paddling a canoe in the Dauphin River near Port Royal. Somehow the canoe capsized. The servant was able to swim to shore but the forty-five-year-old d’Aulnay became hypothermic and weakened in the icy water, and was later found dead, sprawled over the hull of the overturned canoe. In the aftermath, a Capuchin father at the colony testified that, in the six months before his death, a new d’Aulnay had emerged—one who had repented to the church for his aggressive behavior of the past and in his will, begging forgiveness, asked to be buried underneath the Port Royal church steps, pleading “for all who pass by to have pity for a person who merits only the thunderbolts and chastisement of a justly angry God.”
Neither La Tour nor d’Aulnay’s creditors respected his last wish, showing him as little pity in his death as he showed them in life. D’Aulnay left behind his widow, Jeanne Motin—the “very humble and modest little servant of God,” then aged thirty-five or so—their four daughters and four sons, as well as a staggering debt to creditors back in France who had funded the prolonged war he had waged against the La Tours. Soon after d’Aulnay’s death, his major creditor, Leborgne, showed up at Port Royal, threw Jeanne Motin and her children out of the governor’s quarters, and proclaimed himself the ruler of Acadia.
Charles de La Tour now saw his opportunity, too. From his refuge in Quebec, he hurried back to France and persuaded the royal court to give him back the governorship of Acadia. He then sailed back across the Atlantic to Port Royal and convinced creditor-hounded Jeanne Motin to marry him, as a way to secure Acadia for both of them and to deal with their debts. On his third wife, Charles de La Tour became stepfather to Jeanne’s eight young children, and, starting at age sixty, fathered another five children with her.
By now, however, two decades of strife among the French had so torn Acadia that the New Englanders jumped at the chance to exploit its weakness. In 1654, four years after d’Aulnay perished on an overturned canoe, a fleet commanded by Boston’s Major Robert Sedgwick attacked the Acadian ports held by La Tour and Leborgne. After short but bloody battles he took them. Down in Boston, the citizens, by court order, celebrated “a publick and solemn Thanksgiving to the Lord for his gracious working.”
La Tour, no doubt drawing on the adaptability he had learned while living so many decades in the forests, still didn’t give up his dreams of a fur empire in Acadia. Sedgwick hauled La Tour as a prisoner back to England. Like his old man, Claude, Charles de La Tour charmed his way back into his father’s old title of baronet of Nova Scotia. He then sold off all his claims to Acadia, or Nova Scotia, to wealthy English investors in order to pay off his debts. Charles de La Tour reserved Acadian estates for his wife and their many children at Port Royal and Cape Sable. He died, probably at Port Royal,58 in 1663, presumably happy and certainly after a very full life, at seventy years of age.
THE NEXT MORNING, our seventh day on the St. John, we couldn’t flee our campsite at Boom Chain fast enough. As the sun rose higher, the blackflies, mosquitoes, and no-see-ums ferociously descended on us. Molly and Skyler took refuge in their headnets. Amy rolled the tent and I tried to pack the canoes. We just wanted out of there. Molly’s eyes were rimmed with little scabs of dried blood, and the glands of her neck had swollen. Skyler had counted seventy-three welts on his soft skin, and he seemed hot and listless. We shoved off from the bank, pushed out into the river. Already the day shone warm and sunny, with a slight breeze blowing, and no bugs on the water.
A giddy sense of relief overcame us at simply escaping the bugs. I’d read that in June, the height of the season for bugs, an average of 450 moose are killed per month by cars on Maine’s roads. The moose emerge from the forest to escape the insects and to lounge on the relatively bug-free road openings. That statistic now made perfect sense. Likewise, it made perfect sense that the Micmac set up their camps along the bug-free coasts during the summer, and, when the bugs had died off, returned to the forests to hunt in fall and winter.
As we paddled along, Skyler made up a song:
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear
I fear I have a fly in my ear
We laughed and sang, steering easily through a few sets of small but lively rapids. We heard motors in the distance on the sunny, still air. We now could see clear-cuts on the hills back from the river where logging companies had sawed whole tracts from the forest’s thick nap. I sensed that the end of the trip drew near. Soon we were pushing each other out of the canoes into the warm river, splashing wildly, laughing. Simply to have warm sun, and no rain, and no bugs, and a beautiful river with the bluish-green hills, even logged-off ones, rising around—suddenly it all seemed so plentiful.
We’d planned to camp that night, our seventh, on the river, but by mid-afternoon, we had covered far more miles on the swift current than we’d anticipated. We were in striking distance of Allagash. Molly asked again if it had nice motels. I tried to quiet her expectations, but I was ready for a nice motel myself.
“Let’s see how it goes,” I said.
“Please, let’s not camp out again,” Skyler pleaded from within his galaxy of bug bites.
I sensed our family beginning to lose its determination, exhausted from paddling for a week straight, battered by bugs. The four or five days of rain hadn’t bothered them; but they couldn’t take the bugs much longer.
We saw a house on the left bank—a strange occurrence, after so many days without spotting any dwellings except a few cabins. So square and solid-looking, a neat piece of geometry and bright paint in a land of tall, dark trees and twisting, dark water. Past the house we approached the largest rapid on the river, Big Rapid, a long fallaway that swept around a broad bend to the right. The canoeing guidebook recommended unloading your gear, running it in empty canoes, and portaging the gear around on a road that now came close to the river.
But Big Rapid tumbled at least a mile in length and, without a vehicle of some sort to carry the gear, portaging it presented a major problem. Instead, we stopped, scouted it as best we could from the top—it looked straightforward enough—and battened down our canoes. We then ran the rapids in our loaded canoes, our bows splashing through the big waves without mishap, though shipping water.
Spinning out into the sunlit eddies at the bottom, we gave a whoop. I was proud of our little family.
Now the St. John opened wide, the hills pulling back. It felt as if we were exiting the North Woods into a broader agricultural valley. A hamlet of a few houses appeared on the left bank. Then a bridge suddenly spanned the river, and we paddled beneath it.
The river had become almost a lake now. Cottages lined the high right bank—vacation cabins and small homes of local residents. The Allagash River—designated one of America’s Wild and Scenic Rivers—flowed in from the right. We steered our canoes up the Allagash, paddling and pushing for several hundred yards, until we reached a bridge at Allagash village, which was really just a few houses.
TO MOLLY’S DISMAY—to all of ours—there were no nice motels in Allagash. There were a few cabins, and a kind of bunkhouse where we ended up staying, after being recruited by eighty-eight-year-old Evelyn McBrearity, who, moments after our canoes crunched to a stop in the gravel of the landing, showed up with a cane in her hand and a small cloud of flies swarming around her head (“After a while you get used to them.”). She pointed out her big old frame house, just up the hill from the landing. She was a Pelletier, she told us proudly, who married a McBrearity. Her father had run the ferry across the river—she owned the landing itself where our canoes sat—for thirty-six years before the highway bridge was built
in the 1940s. He was also a boatbuilder and crafted the towboats that horses hauled up the Allagash and St. John to supply the logging camps.
“Do you speak French?” Amy asked.
“Oh yes, of course. That’s what I miss, is the French.”
“Is your father’s family Acadian?” I asked.
“No, not Acadian,” she replied, saying her father’s family had come from other parts of Canada.
After a burger at a roadside café and a night in the bunkhouse, we were met the next morning by David Skipper, sent by our outfitters, Galen and Betsy Hale, who arrived with the big van and hauled us and our gear back down to Medway. I succumbed to the pressure from within our family to escape for a few days down to the Maine coast, like the Indians making their summer camps, away from the insects. And so we decamped for a couple nights to the chic little port of Camden on beautiful Penobscot Bay, once heavily contested by British and French. After this interlude of lobster and seascapes, I delivered Amy, Molly, and Skyler to the airport at Bangor and they flew back to the West while I took our little rental car and headed back to the Maine Woods for a few more days.
I spent a Sunday morning riding beside Galen Hale in his big pickup truck, bouncing deep into the woods until we reached the cellar hole of Old Thomas Fowler’s first cabin. We saw the family graveyard, with Old Thomas’s grave, and nearby the grave of Aurora, daughter of Uncle George McCauslin, head boatman to Thoreau. She married Young Tom Fowler, explained Galen. Apparently Aurora died young and Tom remarried, because nearby, among this section of Fowlers, lay the grave of the infant Anna, who was the daughter of Young Tom Fowler and his second wife, Olive. In another row rested Galen’s immediate ancestors, the Hales—Albert, Tily, and Elmer. The latter was a famous guide, explained Galen. And so the wheel slowly turns through the generations in northern Maine.