The White and the Gold (10 page)

It was to Aymar de Chastes, governor of Dieppe, that Champlain turned when the determination formed in his mind to follow destiny to the New World. It was a fortunate thing for him that he had earned the regard of this resolute old soldier, a veteran of the religious wars and a close friend of Henry IV, although a moderate, if staunch, Catholic. On the death of Chauvin after two more abortive efforts, the governor of Dieppe went to the King and begged of him letters patent to make one more attempt at carrying the flag of France and the cross of Mother Church to Canada. The King loved every gray hair which rimed the head of the old soldier and was happy to grant the necessary permission. No money was forthcoming, however, and De Chastes was not a rich man by any standard; and so it was necessary to form a new company, admitting all the leading merchants of the seaports, including Pontgravé of St. Malo.

In 1603 the new company sent out two small ships to begin operations. One was commanded by Pontgravé himself and the other by a captain Prevert, also of St. Malo. Champlain went along in the capacity of official observer and historian. While the two ships remained at Tadoussac, he ascended the great river by canoe with a small company, getting as far as the Lachine Rapids. The country had changed much since the days of Cartier. Gone were the tribes which had extended such tempered receptions to the first Frenchmen.
Gone was the palisaded city that Cartier had found at Hochelaga. The tall natives who had occupied Mount Royal and its vicinity had been replaced by a few wandering bands of Algonquins. But everywhere he heard tales of the great rivers and the gigantic lakes and of the wonder of the country drained by these waters, and he returned to France in the fall more convinced than ever that his life-work was here. At home he wrote a book called
Des Sauvages
which attracted wide attention and focused interest on him as a man who would play an important part in future developments.

When the two tiny vessels, sufficiently loaded with valuable pelts to satisfy the investors, had reached France the old soldier of Dieppe was dead. A new man, Pierre du Guast, who held a court post as gentleman in ordinary of the King’s chamber, was besieging Henry to be allowed to carry on the work.

The Sieur de Monts had a new idea which appealed very much to the King and equally to the hardheaded men of the shipping trade. Along the St. Lawrence the country was inhospitable with its cold winters and its unfriendly Indians. Farther east there was the country of La Cadie (a name which stemmed from the Indian word
aquoddie
, meaning the pollock fish), the seaboard section of the continent which took in, to use the names which later came into universal acceptance, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, and parts of Maine and Gaspé. For some reason which no one understood, La Cadie was blessed with a more gentle climate. The summers were balmy, the soil fertile, the Indians less antagonistic. Why not settle first in La Cadie and sink French roots down into its rewarding soil?

This was a shrewd notion, and the King was easily persuaded to grant a charter to Monts in 1603 by which the latter and his associates were to have a monopoly of the fur trade and in return were to send out settlers at the rate of fifty a year, with all the necessary supplies, and to “represent our person in the countries, territories, coasts and confines of La Cadie from the 40th to the 46th degree.”

The holder of the new charter went to work in a thoroughly businesslike way, which showed that he had a level head under his handsome beaver hat and gay plume. He capitalized his company at 90,000 livres and divided the right to participate among the merchants of Rouen, St. Malo, La Rochelle, and St. Jean de Luz. Monts himself took up most of the St. Malo allotment and so held
about one tenth of the stock. It may have been that he overreached himself in assuming such a large share, not being a man of great wealth.

The King discovered almost immediately, however, that the religious views of Monts were a serious obstacle. Sully, his chief minister and adviser, was against the charter from every standpoint and had said publicly, “Far-off possessions are not suited to the temperament or to the genius of Frenchmen,” which shows how mistaken great men can sometimes be. Administrative France was not willing to deal with a Huguenot, and Normandy refused to register the charter. An even greater difficulty was the opposition of independent traders, who raised a great clamor of protest at being shut out. This was not a matter concerning a few rascally shipowners who operated as mavericks on the edge of things. As early as 1578 it had been reported that there were a hundred and fifty French ships in the waters around and about Newfoundland and in the gulf, and that the number flying other flags totaled two hundred. Most of these independent traders were engaged in the fisheries, but an ever-increasing number followed the Cartier trail and sought the greater profits of the fur trade. They had established bases at Anticosti and Tadoussac, and the natives had fallen into the habit of taking their furs to these two points. It can easily be understood that the tough veterans who made a living by such means were not prepared to be barred summarily from the profitable rivers of Canada; not when they could raise the religious issue and shout “Calvinist” at the man heading the new company.

It was found that concessions would have to be made. Although Huguenot settlers would be allowed to go out if they desired, and might take their ministers with them, the latter were forbidden to have any hand in the instruction of the natives. The number of annual settlers, moreover, was raised from fifty to one hundred. Monts and his associates accepted the new conditions.

Monts knew something of Canada, having made one voyage to Tadoussac. He fitted out two ships, the exact tonnage of which has not been recorded but which obviously were of good size. They were, at any rate, much better suited to the work in hand than any of the ships which had crossed the Atlantic previously. The science of shipbuilding had been progressing with the years. The towering superstructures were being eliminated, thereby giving an increased seaworthiness and decidedly improved maneuverability. Even the
convenient galleries around the stern had been abandoned. The new vessels were three-masters with the lateen mizzen thrown in; the importance of sails, in fact, was growing to such an extent that the first test of a sailor—a “yonker” as he was called in England—was his ability to handle himself in the shrouds. There were now two decks, but the conditions below were undoubtedly as bad as ever, so much of the space being given over to the guns and the elaborate cabins of the officers and the gentry. The crews subsisted in the general region of the orlop deck, where the bilge water stagnated in the ballast and the stench was indescribable.

The two ships which set sail from Le Havre in March of the year 1604 carried a distinguished company. The Sieur de Monts himself was aboard, optimistic and aggressive and, no doubt, very decorative, with his commanding height and leonine head. Pontgravé, because of his previous experience, was in charge of navigation. Jean de Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt, a nobleman of Picardy and a substantial investor, had decided to participate personally in the first venture. There were two priests and two Calvinist ministers, and there were the hundred settlers required under the charter, some of whom, alas, had been recruited in the usual way from the prisons and from among the vagabonds on the highways.

Most important of all, as things turned out, was a man in the middle thirties who was quiet and sober in manner but carried about him nevertheless an air of distinction. This member of the company had a broad forehead, a long nose, and the liberal mustache and small goatee which would be fixed later in the memories of men by the great Cardinal Richelieu. This was the official recorder and geographer of the expedition, Samuel de Champlain.

It is not strange that everyone, even the scientists and geographers who served kings in their snug little offices and the captains and master pilots who took out ships to buffet the waves and the ocean currents, was mystified by the difference in climate between the part of Canada called Quebec and the provinces which would be called Acadia. The existence of the Gulf Stream was still a secret. On his first voyage to America, Columbus had noted the curious and swift body of warm, light blue water with seaweed in great quantities along its edges, through which he had tossed and Struggled
before reaching the islands of the West Indies. Ponce de León in his explorations around Florida had been caught in the fast-moving waters between the southern tip of the great peninsula and the island of Cuba. It was clear to all early navigators that the ocean thereabouts behaved in strange ways, but none of them guessed at the truth, that the warm water from the Gulf of Mexico poured out into the Atlantic and then flowed swiftly up the eastern coast of North America before making a broad circular swing and riding down past the British Isles and the Bay of Biscay and washing the shores of the Madeiras and the Azores and the Canaries, ameliorating the atmosphere in a most pronounced way wherever it went.

This strange antic current of the North Atlantic would mystify navigators for another century and a half. One explanation of the discovery of the truth is that in the year 1771 a shrewd American named Benjamin Franklin was in London and decided to investigate the reason for the unconscionable time the Falmouth packets took in making the New York run. He found that the Falmouth captains had not learned how to cope with a current in which they invariably found themselves involved and held up for many days. Whether or not this suggested to the canny Franklin (he is given credit for so many things, so why not concede him this as well?) that the current was the same one which played such tricks around Florida and Cuba, the fact remains that this was the beginning of a long period of investigation in which scientists played a part. A favorite device was to drop bottles in the clear water of the Gulf Stream and to watch for them on the other side of the ocean. They turned up in Norway, along the Irish coast, on the tip of Cornwall, and on the shores of Biscay; proving thereby that the Stream made a circuit of the Atlantic and favored the British Isles most particularly in tempering what normally would be a cold climate. Bottle charts were kept and times were checked, and vessels were sent out to take soundings and to study the behavior of the monster current; and so in course of time the truth about the Gulf Stream came to be understood.

But back in the first years of the seventeenth century all that men like Samuel de Champlain and the Sieur de Monts knew about it was that for some strange reason Acadia had a much milder climate than the rest of Canada and that they were going to take advantage of it. They were taking their two well-equipped ships and their hundred sea-weary settlers to this favored land where the settlers would
stay in comfort while the crews went on up to the mighty river to get such profits as they could out of the trade in furs.

The importance of the colonies established by the Sieur de Monts was that, after one warlike interruption, they became permanent. The less rigorous conditions had something to do with the success thus achieved, but the credit must be given chiefly to the resolute men who directed the effort. They encountered all the familiar difficulties—and sometimes it seemed that fate was determined to defeat them—but they held on and in the end they won, and around Port Royal the little French farms began to produce and thrive, and the settlers themselves, who became known as Acadians, found happiness there and some degree of peace.

The first crossing proved difficult and tumultuous. The convicts on board were sulky and intractable. The priests and Calvinists were so bitterly antagonistic that on one occasion they came to blows. It was a long voyage, but finally the ships reached the entrance to the Bay of Fundy, which Monts proceeded to name the Baye Françoise. They explored its waters and coasts and were awed by the tidal performances in this tight arm of the sea; the fury with which the in-rolling sea raged about some of the islands and the blood-chilling bore which came in sixty feet high before breaking on the quicksands of Chignecto Bay, while at the same time proving its variability by never achieving more than a height of eight feet in Bay Verte on the northern shore. They sailed into Annapolis Basin and were delighted with its harbor facilities and the beauty of the shores but decided, nevertheless, to establish themselves on an island in the mouth of the St. Croix River on the other side of the bay. Military reasons dictated this decision, for on the island selected the guns of the little colony would maintain some command over the entrance to Fundy.

It proved, however, an unfortunate choice. During the first winter the conditions were so harsh and the winds blew so relentlessly across the water from the northwest that the unhappy people lived in the most bitter discomfort. It seemed impossible to keep warm, and the food supplies proved inadequate. Although they had gone to great efforts in planning their settlement, building a broad and high-roofed house for Monts and his servants and lieutenants on one
side of a square and another house on the opposite side where Champlain and the Sieur d’Orville took up their quarters, while the balance of the space was devoted to barracks and workshops and magazines, they had overlooked the need for cellars under the buildings. As a result the food froze in the ill-heated houses and then rotted and became unusable. Scurvy made its appearance early under these conditions, and of the seventy-nine people who made up the St. Croix colony thirty-five died of this loathsome disease.