The Last Empty Places (13 page)

The forty-six-year-old La Tour, whether in retaliation or out of a yearning for companionship after three decades in the woods of the New World, sent an agent to France to arrange a marriage contract of his own. The document still exists, signed on New Year’s Eve 1639 in the fashionable Paris district around Rue de Honoré, signed by La Tour’s agent and by the family of Françoise Jacquelin, daughter of a well-respected doctor in the town of Nogent, some seventy miles from Paris. It is not clear whether Charles de La Tour had met Françoise Jacquelin during a society function on an earlier trip to Paris, or if they first met in person when she stepped off the ship in Acadia.

Nor is her background entirely clear. Some stories—without any factual basis—place her in Paris as an aspiring actress. Some historians speculate that, based on her fluent writing, she was well educated, and thus presumably versed in property laws, as in her era, property management was considered a proper part of a young woman’s education. An old Celtic tradition then codified in parts of France—but later to disappear—stipulated equal property rights for married women. Whatever her exact background, Françoise Jacquelin was no “modest little servant of God,”
as d’Aulnay had condescendingly described his own French bride. She would soon cut a dashing and formidable figure in the New World.

Awaiting the arrival of his bride-to-be, Charles de La Tour spruced up his fort at the mouth of the St. John River by enlarging and strengthening it. Surrounded by a log stockade on a grassy promontory over the St. John’s harbor, the quadrangle of buildings measured about 120 feet in length and could house ninety people. La Tour ordered his men to build a courtyard paved in stone, and two massive stone fireplaces, each eleven feet long, which heated the living quarters, one for the men’s dormitory and the other for the officers’ living and dining areas. For himself and his bride, La Tour had the men construct in the same wing a private sitting room, fireplace, and bedroom.

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’s
⁵⁶
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 died
⁵⁷
—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 stolen 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.

T
HE 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.