The Last Empty Places (10 page)

I understood why the Indians moved to the breezier coastline for their summer camps, and why Thoreau wrote that during the summer months, the Maine Woods, or so he must have been told, were nearly uninhabitable due to insects. He visited in the fall.

Waking the next morning, Molly sat bolt upright and studied the outside of the tent door’s netting for danger signs.

“There are
tons
of mosquitoes on the door!” she exclaimed to her younger brother. “You better hide in your sleeping bag when we open it.”

Amy was rubbing my lower back, sore from paddling and hauling gear and shoving canoes over rocks. Suddenly she started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“What we got ourselves into.”

Molly picked up the map, studying it as she did every morning to mark our progress. We’d paddled nearly two thirds of the way from Baker Lake to the tiny dot that marked the village of Allagash, sitting where the Allagash River joins the St. John.

“Is there a five-star hotel in Allagash?” she asked, peering at it intently. “Do you think it will have room service?”

I laughed.

“I don’t think so.”

I
N
1627, C
HARLES DE
L
A
T
OUR
sent a desperate plea for help to King Louis XIII of France. For nearly twenty years, he and his band had wandered in the wilderness of Acadia, developing the fur trade and using the St. John River as one of its main arteries. Little written history remains from this period. Lescarbot, the Parisian lawyer who had documented the early doings of Acadia, had returned to France, and, after the English torched the manor at Port-Royal in 1613, the handful of remaining French lived mostly with the Micmac.

De La Tour had become the de facto head of French Acadia in 1623 after Charles Biencourt, then in his early thirties, died. (The cause of his death is not clear.) There is no record of whether Biencourt had married, but La Tour had taken a Micmac wife, with whom he had several daughters; his men likewise intermarried with the Micmac and lived easily among them. La Tour’s band faced a constant battle, however, to stave off European poachers—the British, the Dutch—and rival French outfits on the St. Lawrence, or “Great River,” who would pull into the hundreds of remote, hidden coves of the Acadian coastline and trade with the Indians for furs.

Acadia was a “beautiful and good country,” he wrote to King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but one that France was in danger of losing. “In the four years since [Biencourt’s] death I have had no help or relief
⁴⁴
from anyone. On the contrary, I have been, and am now pursued to death by the French who come from the Great River…” What was worse, he’d learned from his intelligence sources that the British would
soon push north from their New England outposts and seize New France, this after hostilities in Europe had recently erupted between the two countries over the ongoing Protestant-Catholic divide.

He was prepared to defend New France from the English, La Tour wrote, having at his disposal his “little band of resolute Frenchmen,” as well as one hundred Micmac families whom he had trained with firearms, plus the three small ships he possessed. He also could, if necessary, muster a potent guerrilla force of Indians—“a large number of people who do not like [the British] and can take them by surprise.” But better than taking to the woods and harassing the British with guerrilla attacks would be for His Majesty to send adequate supplies and men to Acadia so La Tour could deal with the British in “another way.”

La Tour also wrote to his father, Claude, for help, and asked him to deliver the letters to the king and Cardinal Richelieu. The senior La Tour had returned from Acadia to France years earlier, after accompanying Poutrincourt—and both their sons—on the original expeditions of the Order of Good Times. Known for his irresistibly charming manners, thirst for adventure, and dire financial straits, Claude had risen from modest beginnings
⁴⁵
as one of seven children of a master mason, and charmed his way into marriage to a landed noblewoman. Her estates near Saint-Just had conferred on him the aristocratic title “de La Tour” and she had given birth to their son, Charles, before dying at a young age.

As Charles dispatched his plea for help from the Acadian wilds, the senior La Tour was enjoying a brief stay in the ancient confines of St. Eloi prison for his unpaid debts, having already sold off most of his late wife’s properties to fund various grand schemes, including the Acadian colonization. Sprung from prison by a friend in close contact with Cardinal Richelieu, Claude de La Tour heeded his son’s plea and helped muster a flotilla that launched from France the next spring to rescue his son and New France. Unfortunately for Claude de La Tour, however, Britain and France were back in a state of war. Lying in wait for the flotilla was an ambitious Scottish poet by the name of Sir William Alexander who sought a convenient means to fund
his
attempts to settle what the French called Acadia.

Alexander had served as one of the favorite tutors to the young,
poetry-loving James VI, king of Scotland, who became James I, king of England, after Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. At that time, England’s Puritans were clamoring for changes in the Church of England. While King James ignored most of them, he did grant one demand—appointing a group of scholars, among them his ex-tutor William Alexander,
⁴⁶
to translate a new version of the Bible. This, of course, is what’s known as the “King James Version,” first published in 1611.

A new Bible translation didn’t placate the radical Puritan Separatists, and they fled England, eventually—as we well know—wading ashore at Plymouth in 1620. Back in Britain, King James, generous to a fault, wanted to recompense the poet Alexander for his loyalties and labor. So he awarded him exclusive trading rights to a huge, and very controversial, chunk of the New World—everything between New England and Newfoundland, which he called “Nova Scotia,” or New Scotland. Of course, this same swath had also been long claimed by the French, who called it Acadia.

It turned out that Sir William, like the French, couldn’t come up with enough money to actually colonize his enormous grant called Nova Scotia. So, as the Acadia historian John Mack Faragher aptly explained, this Scottish poet and Bible translator reverted to “more tried and true methods of accumulation—plunder and conquest.”

Alexander got wind of the large French flotilla heading to the New World to succor Charles de La Tour in Acadia and resupply Champlain’s fledgling French outpost at Quebec. He hired the three notorious Kirke brothers, privateers, whose preferred tools of the trade ran to heavily manned frigates bristling with cannons. Lying in wait off the Acadian coast, the Kirke brothers managed to ensnare the entire French flotilla, including Claude de La Tour.

It also happened that the never-saw-an-opportunity-he-didn’t-like Claude de La Tour was quietly a French Huguenot—a Protestant, like the British. Taken as captive back to London, the senior La Tour very quickly charmed his way into the Royal Court, married an English noblewoman—a maid of honor to the queen of England, this after having been married to a French noblewoman—renounced his loyalty to the king of France, and swore allegiance to the king of Britain. A year after his capture during his would-be rescue mission for son Charles, Claude de La Tour sailed triumphantly back to Acadia as a newly
knighted baronet of Nova Scotia, sworn vassal of Britain, and part of a Scottish colonization expedition headed by the son of the poet and Bible translator Sir William Alexander.

They landed at the site of Port-Royal. They found it abandoned. Charles de La Tour and his roving band of French had left some years earlier, and established a fort at the very lower tip of the Acadian Peninsula in the vicinity of Cape Sable.

The Scottish settlers disembarked and started a small colony at the ruins of old Port-Royal. Claude de La Tour then sailed with two Scottish ships to the stronghold at Cape Sable to have a face-to-face meeting with his son.

It must have come as quite a surprise to Charles. Or perhaps he knew his cagey, charming father all too well. Three years had passed since Charles had written to his father and the king of France with pleas for help in the Acadian venture. Now, instead of French ships offering help, two Scottish ships suddenly anchored in the cove near his Cape Sable fort. From one of them his father, Claude, was rowed ashore while Claude’s highborn English bride waited aboard ship.

Meeting face-to-face with Charles on shore, father offered son a deal. He could have help, and plenty of it. He could have settlers. He could have a royal title and a barony (father would have one, too) that took in much of the southern Acadian Peninsula. To receive all this the son had only to switch sides and pledge loyalty to Britain instead of France.

The son, very politely, the accounts say, declined. He thanked the king of Britain for the high honor he had shown him. But his allegiance remained to the king of France.

“This answer,” writes Nicolas Denys,
⁴⁷
who personally knew both father and son La Tour, “obliged his father and all the commanders of the vessels to use the very finest language on earth to persuade him. But it was in vain, for he remained firm in his resolution, and boldly told his father that neither he nor his wife should ever enter the fort.”

Claude returned to his ship in the cove and his British bride and the British commanders. The next day he sent a letter ashore, telling Charles that if he wasn’t going to switch sides by good words of persuasion, Claude would make him switch by force.

Charles sent the messenger back to the ships with his verbal reply to this threat.

“[T]he commanders and his father could act as they thought best,” writes Denys. “He and his garrison were entirely ready to receive them.”

The two ships landed an attacking force. During a two-day battle, Charles and his garrison staved them off, killing and wounding several, until the British sailors who had been recruited to attack the fort simply gave up the fight, having been promised by Claude that Charles would flip loyalties easily—without all this fighting—once offered a barony. The British withdrawal put the senior La Tour and his bride in desperate straits. If he returned to Britain, he feared he’d be beheaded, and fare not much better in his native France. Homeless, he and his wife retreated to the struggling new British colony at Port Royal. It was not an easy life. Scurvy had wiped out thirty of seventy during the first winter, and the Micmac, their loyalties with Charles and the French, refused to help.

Soon after Charles repelled his father’s and the British attack, two French supply ships finally arrived heavily loaded with building materials and workmen to help Charles de La Tour. After France had neglected Acadia for nearly two decades, the ships bore a letter from the Company of New France promising Charles, for reasons that would become clear in letters to follow, all the support he needed to start a colony at any place of his choosing.

Of all possible places, he choose the mouth of the St. John River. By now Charles had traveled by birch-bark canoe into the wilderness of Acadia long enough to know that the St. John and its tributaries—the Upper St. John, the Northwest Branch, the Allagash—were by far the richest source of furs in this entire region
⁴⁸
of eastern Canada, except for the vast St. Lawrence itself, where Champlain had his own outpost and fur territory. As the small fort on the St. John—Fort Sainte-Marie, he named it—was being built in the spring of 1631, another ship sailed across the Atlantic bearing more good news for Charles, after his years of isolation in the wilderness. This came in the form of a letter from none other than Louis, the king of France, and Cardinal Richelieu. It anointed Charles de La Tour as lieutenant-general for Acadia due, as Louis himself wrote in the commission, to his “good sense, discretion, fidelity, experience and great industry.”
⁴⁹

The French court had suddenly started to pay attention to Acadia, in great part due to its concerns that the British colonies to the south
were developing so quickly since the
Mayflower
landing in 1620. Their remarkable growth was powered by the many new arrivals coming from England, their own well-organized governments, and their densely clustered agricultural settlements, unlike the fur-trading livelihood of the French, which sprawled over vast expanses of wilderness. Cardinal Richelieu, thinking strategically, believed that a strong French Acadia would serve as a kind of blockade to stop any further spread of the British to the north.

La Tour ecstatically accepted the commission with a bold, flourishing signature and pledge of loyalty to the king of France. He was now, in essence, the official ruler of all Acadia. Britain—at least for a while—gave up its formal claims on Acadia after the two countries made a peace pact in their religious wars back in Europe. Sir William Alexander, his failed colony now booted from the New World, died in poverty. La Tour soon forgave his father—for the most part. Charles invited his father to live at Cape Sable, although he still refused to admit Claude inside the fort. Instead, he built a nice house near the fort for his father and his father’s noblewoman wife, who had remained at Claude’s side through his multiple changes of loyalty. There the couple took to a life of ease, tended to by four French servants, thoughtfully provided by Charles before he went off to his new fortress on the St. John.

“They were very amply provided,” Denys remarked after dining with Claude and his wife, who delighted in having a visitor to dinner.

For Charles, however, the real fight for Acadia had only begun. It would be a battle against the most unexpected kind of rival—not against the wilderness, nor against the Indians, nor against the British. Rather, his bitterest enemy would be a fellow Frenchman.

A
S WE PACKED UP
on the sixth morning on the St. John—hauling coolers and dry bags on another sunny day down the steep, rocky bank to the canoes—I hoped Skyler’s swimming skills would be enough for the rapids ahead. The river map placed Big Black Rapids only a few bends downstream from our camp, rating it a Class III—substantial waves and rocks, strong currents, and requiring deft maneuvering. I hoped Skyler had the strength, and our canoe the maneuverability, to make quick turns. If we broadsided a rock and tipped, I would probably be wrestling the canoe to shore and he’d have to swim by himself
through the rapids to a quiet eddy. He had a strong dog paddle, and, in calm water, could perform a freestyle stroke, but, at age eight, weighed only sixty pounds.