The Last Empty Places (6 page)

Sometimes I wonder, if only those five bakers had returned to the longboat when ordered, whether France would have managed to establish its New World colony farther south—in the warmer climate and better growing season of present-day coastal New England instead of Canada. Boston, and maybe much of North America, would be French-speaking today. But, as the sweep of history sometimes turns on the flukes of personality, the five cocky bakers stayed on shore that night on Cape Cod. At dawn, a thick volley of arrows awakened the young Frenchmen, killing two of them instantly. The others leaped into the shallows, where the longboat rescued them, although two more of the bakers would soon die of their wounds. The French kept up a volley at the Indians on shore. Young Robert Gravé, in his enthusiasm to shoot at the Indians from the longboat, overloaded his musket and its barrel exploded, accidentally blowing off three of his fingers. On the beach, the Indians mocked the French by standing with their backs toward the boat and throwing handfuls of sand between their buttocks while howling like wolves, then quickly ducking out of the way whenever they saw the French lighting another cannon fuse.

For the two aristocratic young Charleses this was surely far more interesting than sitting in a musty library back in France and reciting their Latin declensions to some disapproving tutor.

Those who remained back in Port-Royal, meanwhile, had begun to wonder what had happened to the longboat group that had gone south. September turned to October. Lescarbot, who had stayed behind to oversee the contingent of men at Port-Royal, began to hear grumbling as winter approached without word from the expedition’s leaders, who’d sailed south. The tension built as the weather chilled. A mutiny
appeared to be in the making. What to do to stave it off? The lawyer-poet had an idea:
Let’s put on a show!
Maybe some slapstick, farcical playacting would occupy their mutinous minds.

In mid-November, the longboat under Pourtincourt and Champlain finally sailed into Port-Royal’s beautiful but chilly harbor, after the two leaders, due to the hostilities between bakers and Indians on Cape Cod, had abandoned the idea of a more southern colony. The returning expedition was greeted by a humorous play written by Lescarbot, titled
Neptune’s Theater
. This reunion was yet another excuse for a wild celebration. At Port-Royal,
every
day was an excuse for a party. It was Champlain who first proposed L’Ordre de Bon Temps—“The Order of Good Times”—on the observation that it was
melancholy
that caused scurvy, and the saddest and loneliest of men died first. The best preventative to the disease, he reasoned, was to make merry. Under his scheme, each day a different member of the fifteen who made up the order was designated to assemble a feast for the others. The day’s “Ruler of the Feast” actually started preparing two days in advance by going off and, with the help of the local Micmac Indians under Membertou, fishing and hunting for the choicest game. The feast’s ruler oversaw the preparation of the meats by the cook, and delivery of the dishes to the table in a grand parade of the members, each bearing a dish, which the ruler headed with a napkin draped over his shoulder, a staff in his hand, and a chain or medallion draped around his neck that “was worth more than four crowns.”

Wine flowed abundantly during this winter of 1606–07 and the fare rivaled the restaurants in the Rue aux Ours back in Paris—especially the tender moose meat, the delicate beaver tail, and the sturgeon that the Micmac caught. While twenty or thirty other Micmac looked on, Membertou and other chiefs, when they weren’t away on their frequent hunting expeditions, ate and drank at table with the order.

“And we were glad to see them,” writes Lescarbot, “while, on the contrary, their absence saddened us.”

W
E HAD OUR OWN FEAST
that second night on the St. John River around the campfire Skyler and I had ignited with birch bark. The rain
had stopped, for now. Over the glowing embers we grilled steaks, and the children made s’mores, and afterward, in the calm evening, with the backdrop chorus of the soft ululating rush of the Southwest Branch whispering in the darkness from the opposite bank, where it spilled into our main river, Amy, Molly, and Skyler played their recorder flutes together, to the lilting shush of the water. Then we climbed into our bags inside the big tent, read a story aloud, and fell asleep.

It was raining again in the morning—our third day on the river. With the addition of the Southwest Branch swishing out of the dripping forest on the left bank and swirling its dark waters into the St. John, the river had swelled to fifty or sixty yards in width. The morning’s rain blew in hard gusts up the river’s straight sections, spraying across the ruffled gray surface, plastering our faces. It seemed pointless to stop. For what? Along the right bank, we spotted a pair of geese with a line of fuzzy goslings trailing behind. As we paddled, they chased downstream ahead of us, the goslings falling farther back.

“Hurry up! Hurry up!” Molly called out to them.

A bald eagle perched in a treetop, scanning the river for fish to pluck in its talons. A pair of loons bobbed lightly on the current midstream, the fine white speckles on their black backs looking like flurries of snow against dark firs. Loons, with their haunting cry, were the emblematic bird of the north.

We’d seen no other people since waving goodbye to David two days before, nor any other signs of human activity except for the old trapper’s cabin where we’d spent the first night and a few small campground openings in the forested shore.

Amy and Molly sang rounds in their canoe. In ours, paddling forward into the spraying gusts of rain, Skyler wanted to hear stories. I told about canoeing as a child.

“One time my father—your grandfather Poppy—was paddling in the canoe ahead of my cousin and me on a little twisty river and he disappeared around a bend. We came around the bend and he ambushed us by suddenly swinging out over the river on a rope, like Tarzan, and giving a war whoop, but all of a sudden the rope broke and he crashed down into the middle of the river with a huge splash.”

Skyler laughed heartily at that one, to think of his grandfather plunging into the middle of the river.

I told him about the time my uncle attempted a backflip off a cliff above the Wisconsin River and bellyflopped, almost knocking himself unconscious.

On another trip, also on the Wisconsin with my father, we were setting up camp deep in the woody bottomlands along the shore, and two boys wandered into our camp, true Huck Finn characters—ragged, barefoot, grubby, smiling with gap teeth, and each toting a big bowie knife strapped to his waist, foraging for river clams.

“Those were river rats,” my father told me after they’d left, with a kind of wonder and admiration, as if this were a rare, throwback breed of human to two hundred years ago, like fur-trapping mountain men and French-Canadian voyageurs.

“Poppy really liked fireworks,” I told Skyler, “and on these canoe trips he always brought along a few huge ones. He’d light them off at night on the end of a big sandbar where we were camping, and they went way up and exploded in big flower shapes. Then my friend Stephen and I would take glowing sticks from the fire and throw them up into the air, and watch them spin into the black sky against the stars, and come crashing back down on the sandbar in a shower of sparks. Those were our own fireworks. That was really fun.”

“Tell me another story,” Skyler said, dragging his paddle blade aimlessly through the water.

“Let’s paddle to warm up,” I replied.

I was getting chilled. The headwind drove the rain up the surface of my rain pants and under my rain jacket. I felt my chest soaked underneath.

“I think we should stop for lunch and get out and walk around,” I called out to Amy.

Dense forest lined the banks. A rocky bar in mid-river offered the only open spot. We beached our canoes, opened the lunch cooler, and took out crackers, cheese, apples, chocolate. Wind swept the rain through the willow bushes, making them twitch and sway, across the rock bar. I stumbled around over the glistening stones, but I couldn’t get warm. The children and Amy sat on the gunnel of a beached canoe, quite happily nibbling chocolate and cookies in the blowing rain. I began to shiver.

It felt bleak enough here in midsummer, on the Upper St. John. What would it be like, say, during a cold sleet storm in autumn? I
thought of young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour, paddling on this river in the early 1600s, dressed in furs. The two fascinated me. I wanted to understand them, know what motivated them to take to the life of the woods rather than, when the chance arose, return to France. What was it they saw in these blank spots? To them, these regions were not really blank. They lived in them and learned them well. What we call “blank spots” are only blank insofar as there is little or no recorded history—written memories—in these places. But for thousands of years they served as hunting grounds and waterways to the Indians. Their landforms, their lakes, their streams all had names, legends, memories, and knowledge attached—weather and currents, animal migration patterns, medicinal plants. Part of this region along the St. John was called Madawaska by the Indians—“Land of the Porcupine”
¹⁹
—while the Maliseet Indians knew the St. John itself as Wolastoq—“the Beautiful River”
²⁰
—and themselves as Wolastoqiyik, “People of the Beautiful River.”

These “blank spots,” in other words, were very much “known” centuries before the Europeans arrived. What the Europeans brought to these places, initially, was ignorance.

I could imagine the excitement for the young Charleses in simply learning—learning the secrets of these places that were utter mysteries for the European arrivals. Privy to the esoteric knowledge of the woods, the boys resembled, in a fashion, those two Huck Finn characters whom we met along the Wisconsin River when I was a boy canoeing with my father. They suddenly appeared in our camp, carrying the secrets of the thick, tangled bottomlands—the animal paths through the forest, the clamming spots, the fishing holes, the fox dens, the sloughs to swim across to reach an island. I’d felt that same excitement myself. As a boy, I knew the few hundred acres of forest, meadow, and swamp surrounding our log cabin better than anyone alive. A special power comes with that knowledge, a sense of privilege. You are the possessor of secrets. The young Charleses felt it in Acadia in the early 1600s. I’m certain Thoreau did also, two centuries later in his woods and fields of Concord, and so did John Muir, in the 1870s, in his beloved High Sierra.

In this New World, the two French boys learned to survive from the Micmac, under the careful paternal guidance of Membertou. During that first winter of the boys’ residence at Port-Royal, l’Ordre de Bon
Temps signified much more than an ongoing party that saved a few dozen Frenchmen’s lives from scurvy. Their continual hunting and feasting together bonded the French and the Indians. To keep the feast supplied, the French learned the Indian methods of hunting and the Indian ways of understanding the rivers and forests. One man spent six weeks that winter hunting in the forest with the Micmac,
²¹
reports Lescarbot, “in their fashion, without salt, bread, or wine, sleeping on the ground on skins, and that too in time of snow. Moreover they took greater care of him, as also of others who often went with them, than of themselves, saying that if any of these died, his death would be laid at their door…for this tribe loves the French.”

And the affection was mutual. The French admired the Micmac—a handsome people bearing themselves with pride, as the French saw them. Poutrincourt insisted to his men that the Micmac be treated with equality and fairness. Membertou himself—to the surprise of the French—considered himself to be an equal of King Henri IV. This closeness of Indian and French from the start was captured by Champlain, who in one of his early speeches to the Indians remarked, “Our sons will marry your daughters
²²
and we will be a single people.”

“No Puritan,” as the historian John Mack Faragher notes, “ever said anything vaguely similar.”

A
FTER OUR WINDBLOWN, RAINY LUNCH
on the rock bar, we passed the Northwest Branch, another obscure stream emptying in from the forest on the river’s left. It occurred to me that this very confluence was far better known four hundred years ago than it is now. Hardly a blank spot, it served as a major thoroughfare—a huge shortcut—between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian settlements on the St. Lawrence. They paddled their birch-bark canoes up the main stem of the St. John and, using long wood poles to gain traction against the rocky bottoms, poled them upstream through these St. John tributaries such as the Northwest Branch. Reaching the tiny headwater streams, they portaged their canoes overland a few miles to the headwaters of the streams that drained northward into the St. Lawrence River. This saved the Indians a detour of hundred of miles and many days far to the north to reach the St. Lawrence mouth before having to paddle hundreds of miles up that river to the same settlements.

The Micmac could make the shortcut journey in ten or twelve days. I imagined the satisfaction a young Micmac felt on paddling his canoe into the Indian villages on the St. Lawrence after this rapid journey, bearing news and goods from the coast. Maybe, today, in this era of instant communication, we’ve utterly lost a sense of what that meant—news of relatives just born or just dying. News of war, or news of peace. News of strange craft off the coast. News of mysterious diseases, powerful new weapons, trade goods. There was heroism in the act itself—and a celebration with the arrival of a messenger from far away. In a nomadic society, it occurred to me, a high value was placed on simple movement itself.

W
E CAME TO A BROAD
, shallow, rocky stretch of river—all swirls of water, shiny dark rocks, and little cresting waves, a kind of mosaic of movement. We had to jam our paddles against the river bottom and lean on them hard, like the poles the Micmac used, to slide the canoes over the shallow rocks. Even after three days of rain, the water remained low. Skyler and I, winding through the maze of rocks toward the left bank, inadvertently jammed our canoe into a semisubmerged rock bar. Across the river, I could see Amy and Molly easily gliding down a narrow channel against the right bank. I had to get out and push, tripping on a rocky hole in the bottom and falling down into the shallow water.