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NEW FRANCE AND NEW ENGLAND

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FROM CARTIER TO CHAMPLAIN

Among the seafaring people of Europe there are perhaps none more hardy and enterprising than the inhabitants of the picturesque little towns along the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. In race characteristics there is a close similarity to their neighbours of the opposite British shore. The Welsh of Armorica are own brethren of the Welsh of Cornwall, and as long ago as the reign of the Emperor Julian the regions about the mouth of the Seine were commonly known as a Litus Saxonicum, or Saxon shore. There to this day you will find the snug enclosed farmsteads so characteristic of merry England, while the map is thickly dotted with Anglo-Saxon names. Thither a thousand years ago flocked the Vikings from the fiords of Norway and settled down over the north of Gaul as over the east of Britain. The geographical position

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was favourable to the indulgence of inherited proclivities, and throughout the Middle Ages the French and English shores of the Channel were famed for their hardy mariners. Their ships thronged side by side in the Icelandic waters, in quest of codfish, and even the chase of the whale was not unknown to them. When at the beginning of the fifteenth century the Norman knight Jean de Béthencourt conquered and colonized the Canary Islands, for which in return for aid and supplies he did homage to the king of Castile,¹ his company was chiefly composed of Bretons and Normans, who have left their descendants in those islands to the present day. As early as 1364 we find merchants from Dieppe trading on the Grain Coast, between Sierra Leone and Cape Palmas; and by 1383 these bold adventurers had established themselves upon that shore, which they held until 1410.² They were thus in advance of the pioneers of Henry the Navigator, and for a moment it might have seemed as if the Guinea coast were likely to become French rather than Portuguese, when the civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians and the invasion of France by Henry V. of England put a new face upon the matter, and the hold of the French upon Africa was lost.

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A substantial monument of their early activity in that quarter is furnished by the fortified town of Elmina, upon the Gold Coast, whence in these British days runs the direct road to Kumassi. Elmina was founded in the fourteenth century by men of Dieppe, and the trade in elephants’ tusks then inaugurated gave rise to the ivory manufactures which still flourish in the little Norman seaport.¹

Under these circumstances it is not strange that the voyages of Columbus and the Cabots should have met with a quick response from the mariners of northern Gaul. Local traditions of a patriotic sort have asserted that Normandy and Brittany did not wait for the Cabot voyages to be taught the existence of the Newfoundland fisheries, but had learned the lesson for themselves even before the crossing of the Sea of Darkness by Columbus.² There is no reason why fishing voyages to the Newfoundland banks might not have been made before 1492, but on the other hand there is no respectable evidence that any such voyages had been made. The strong impression made upon John

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Cabot by the enormous numbers of codfish off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland¹ indicates that the western stretches of the ocean were by no means familiar to the fishermen of the English Channel. The first authentic record we have of Breton ships in Newfoundland waters is in the year 1504, and from that time forward we never lose a year. The place once found was too good to be neglected, and thus a presumption is raised against any date earlier than 1504.

From catching fish in these waters to visiting the neighbouring coasts the step was not a long one, and presently the name Cape Breton makes its appearance, the oldest surviving European name upon the Atlantic coast of North America. It is asserted by Dieppese writers that a chart of the Gulf of St. Lawrence was made in 1506 by Jean Denys of Honfleur, and that two years later Thomas Aubert ascended the great river for eighty leagues, and brought back to Europe seven tawny natives who were exhibited at Rouen and perhaps elsewhere in 1509. We are furthermore assured that upon this voyage Aubert was accompanied by a Florentine mariner destined to win great renown, Giovanni da Verrazano. The

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authority for these statements is not such as we could desire, being found chiefly in uncritical documents collected by the uncritical editor Desmarquets, who lets slip no opportunity for glorifying Dieppe. There is strong collateral evidence, however, of a voyage into the Gulf of St. Lawrence at about this time. Not only does the exhibition of the kidnapped Indians rest upon independent evidence, as early as 1512,¹ but in the edition of Ptolemy brought out in 1511 by Sylvanus, there is a map containing a square-looking gulf to the west of a spacious island which is unquestionably intended for Newfoundland, and the outlines of this gulf seem to have originated in actual exploration and not in fancy. There is a map preserved in the government archives at Ottawa, which purports to be a copy of that of Jean Denys, and may well be so, for, although the names upon it belong to a later period, there is some reason for believing that they are a subsequent addition. If the outlines are those of Denys of Honfleur, we have in them a satisfactory explanation of the strange map of Sylvanus. Moreover, some weight must attach to the fact that both the voyages of Denys and of Aubert are mentioned under the years 1506 and 1508 by Ramusio.² There can be little doubt

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that the attention of Frenchmen was, to an appreciable extent, drawn toward the New World during the reign of Louis XII.

Under his successor, the gay, gallant, and ambitious Francis I., attention was still further drawn to these strange shores. The jovial lawyer, Marc Lescarbot of Vervins, writing in 1612, tells us that about the year 1518 a certain Baron de Léry made an unsuccessful attempt at establishing a colony upon Sable Island, and left there a stock of cattle and pigs which multiplied apace, and proved comforting and toothsome to later adventurers.¹

The French had sturdy rivals in these Atlantic waters. That was the golden age of Portuguese enterprise, and one of the first results of the Cabot voyages was to stimulate the curiosity of Portugal. The voyage of Cabral in 1500 proved that the Brazilian coast in great part falls east of the papal line of demarcation, and therefore belonged to Portugal, and not to Spain. In that same year a voyage in the northern waters by Gaspar Cortereal raised hopes that the same might be proved true of Newfoundland, and 2d ed., Venetia, 1606, iii. 355. Ramusio speaks of Aubert as the first who brought Indians to France, “il primo che condusse qui le genti del detto paese.”

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Portuguese vessels sailed often in that direction. Their fishing craft were to be seen off the coast, in company with Norman, Breton, and Biscayan vessels, and sometimes an elaborate attempt at exploration was made. Such was the voyage of Alvarez Fagundes in 1520. In accordance with an old custom the king of Portugal promised this mariner a grant of such new lands as he might discover upon this expedition. In March, 1521, after the return of Fagundes and his report to the king, the grant was duly issued. From the descriptions in the grant, supplemented by a map made forty years later by Lazaro Luiz, we may draw conclusions, somewhat dubious, as to just what was accomplished by Fagundes; but there can be little doubt that he explored more or less thoroughly the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.¹

But the Portuguese were becoming too deeply absorbed with their work in the Indian Ocean to devote much attention to North America. And in like manner in 1517-21 the discovery of Mexico and the astonishing exploits of Cortes quite riveted the minds of their rivals, the Spaniards, in that direction. It was just at

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this moment, and through these circumstances, that French interest in America received a fresh stimulus. After the capture of the city of Mexico an immense store of gold and silver was shipped for Spain, in charge of Alonso de Avila; but Avila, with his ships and his treasure, was captured by the famous Verrazano and carried off to France, probably to Dieppe, where the Florentine navigator seems for many years to have had his headquarters. In the course of the same cruise Verrazano captured another Spanish ship on its way from San Domingo, heavily laden with gold and pearls, so that he was enabled to make gorgeous presents to King Francis and to the Admiral of France. The delightful chronicler, Bernal Diaz, who tells us these incidents, adds that the whole country was amazed at the stupendous wealth that was pouring into the treasury of Charles V. from the Indies. The first great war between Charles and Francis was raging, and the latter did not need to be told that Mexican money could be used to pay the troops that were defeating his army in Lombardy. He sent a bantering message to Charles, asking if it were really true that he and the king of Portugal had parcelled out the earth between them without leaving anything for him. Had Father Adam made those two his only heirs?

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If so, he wished they would show him that patriarch’s last will and testament. Until they could do so he should feel at liberty to seize whatever his good ships might happen to meet upon the ocean, and forthwith he concerted with Verrazano fresh raids upon the enemy’s sinews of war.

The result of these meditations was the great voyage of 1524, which first placed upon the map the continuous coast-line of the United States, from North Carolina to the mouth of the Penobscot River. The purpose of this voyage was twofold: first, to ascertain if any more countries abounding in precious metals, like Mexico, or in pearls, like Venezuela, were to be found within or near the longitudes traversed by Columbus and Cabot; secondly, to find some oceanic route north of Florida from European ports to the Indian Ocean. In other words, this voyage of Verrazano was the first one which had any reference to a northwest passage. Columbus had believed the shores on which he landed to be parts of Asia, either continental or

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insular, and his last voyage was an attempt to find the Strait of Malacca at the Isthmus of Panama. Subsequent explanations, however, had disclosed an unbroken coast-line all the way from Florida to Patagonia; and the recent return in 1522 of the wornout remnant of Magellan’s expedition brought convincing evidence that the voyage to India by his southerly route was so long and difficult as to be practically useless. Thus the New World coasts were coming to be recognized as a barrier on the route to Asia, and an important part of Verrazano’s business was to discover a northern end to this long barrier, or a passageway through it somewhere to the northward of the regions already examined.

This is not the best place for giving a detailed account of Verrazano’s voyage, inasmuch as it was confined to portions of the American coast over which France has never held sway. I have given the principal details of it in treating of the Dutch and Quaker Colonies,¹ and need not repeat them here. Let it suffice to say that besides delineating the coast of the United States from North Carolina to Maine, Verrazano entered the Hudson River and Narragansett Bay, and saw from his ship’s deck the distant peaks of the White Mountains. He found no gold mines nor beds of pearl, neither did he anywhere detect

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what seemed to him a feasible waterway into the Indian Ocean, but he did discover in this connection one of the most extraordinary mare’s nests on record. He seems to have gone ashore upon the Accomac peninsula and tramped across it until his eyes rested upon the waters of Chesapeake Bay, which he mistook for the Pacific Ocean. For soon after his return to Europe two maps were issued, one by his own brother, Girolamo Verrazano, one by Vesconte Maggiolo, which exerted a great influence upon the geographical ideas of the next three generations of Europeans. These maps show a solid continental mass connecting Florida with Mexico, and another solid mass to the northward, such as would naturally have been suggested to Verrazano by the presence of such large rivers as the Hudson and the Penobscot. But between these masses the whole central region of the United States is represented as an immense sea continuous with the Pacific Ocean; while the Virginian coast is shown as a very narrow isthmus, with an inscription by Verrazano’s brother, informing us that here the distance from sea to sea is not more than six miles. A full century elapsed before this notion of the Sea of Verrazano was eliminated from men’s minds, and without taking this fact into the account it is impossible to understand the

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movements of navigators who ascended rivers like the Hudson and the St. Lawrence in the hope of finding passageways into the western sea.

When Verrazano arrived in Dieppe in July, 1525, the king, who had been taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia in February, was a captive at Madrid. His demand for a sight of Father Adam’s will had met with a rude response. He purchased his freedom in January, 1526, by signing a disastrous treaty, but no sooner had he leaped upon his goodly steed, on the French side of the Pyrenees, than he renounced all intention of keeping promises thus made under duress. The worthy Verrazano fared much worse than his royal master. In the year 1526 he entered into an arrangement with Jean Ango and other important citizens of Dieppe for a voyage into the Indian Ocean for spices, but in the course of the following year he was overhauled by Spanish cruisers, who took him prisoner and hanged him as a pirate.¹

There enters now upon the scene a man of whose personality we have a much more distinct conception than we have of Verrazano. As that accomplished Italian is one of the chief glories of the town of Dieppe, so the Breton seaport of

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St. Malo is famous for its native citizen, Jacques Cartier. His portrait hangs in the town hall. Unfortunately its authenticity is not above question, but if it is not surely a true likeness it deserves to be; it well expresses the earnestness and courage, the refinement and keen intelligence of the great Breton mariner! He had roamed the seas for many years, and had won — and doubtless earned — from Spanish mouths the epithets of “corsair” and “pirate,” when at the age of three and forty he was selected by Philippe de Chabot, Admiral of France, to carry on the work of Denys and Aubert and Verrazano, and to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious Square Gulf of Sylvanus.

On April 20, 1534, Cartier sailed from St. Malo with two small craft carrying sixty-one men, and made straight for the coast of Labrador, just north of the Straits of Belle Isle, a region already quite familiar to Breton and Norman fishermen. Passing through the straits he skirted the inner coast of Newfoundland southward as far as Cape Ray, whence he crossed to Prince Edward Island, and turned his prows to the north. The oppressive heat of an American July is commemorated in the name which Cartier gave to the Bay of Chaleur. A little further on, at Gaspe, he set up a cross, and with the

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usual ceremonies took possession of the country in the name of Francis I. Thence he crossed to the eastern end of Anticosti, and followed the north shore of that island nearly to its western point, when he headed about, and passing through Belle Isle made straight for France, carrying with him a couple of Indians whom he had kidnapped, young warriors from far up the St. Lawrence, who had come down to the sea to catch mackerel in hemp nets.

With this voyage of reconnoissance the shadowy Square Gulf of Sylvanus at once becomes clothed with reality. Enough interest was aroused in France to seem to justify another undertaking, and in May, 1535, the gallant Cartier set forth once more, with three small ships and 110 men. Late in July he passed through the Strait of Belle Isle, and on the 10th of August, a day sacred to the martyred St. Lawrence, he gave that name to a small bay on the mainland north of Anticosti. Whales were spouting all around his course as he passed the western point of the island and ploughed into the broad expanse of salt water that seemed to open before him the prospect of a short passage to the Indian Ocean. Day by day, however, the water grew fresher, and by the September morning when he reached the mouth of the Saguenay our explorer was reluctantly convinced that he was not in a strait of the ocean,

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but in one of the mightiest rivers of the earth. To these newcomers from the Old World each day must have presented an impressive spectacle; for except the Amazon and the Orinoco it may be doubted if there be any river which gives one such an overwhelming sense of power and majesty as the St. Lawrence; certainly the Mississippi seems very tame in comparison.

As the Frenchmen inquired the names of the villages along the banks, a reply which they commonly received from their two Indian guides was the word Canada, which is simply a Mohawk word for “village.” Hence Cartier naturally got the impression that Canada was the name of the river or of the country through which it flowed, and from these beginnings its meaning has been gradually expanded until it has come to cover half of a huge continent. Presently on arriving at the site of Quebec, Cartier found there a village named Stadacona, with a chieftain called Donnacona. Painted and bedizened warriors and squaws came trooping to the water’s edge or paddling out in canoes to meet the astounding spectacle of the white-winged floating castles and their pale-faced and bearded people. In the two kidnapped interpreters the men of Stadacona quickly recognized their kinsmen; strings of beads were passed about, dusky figures leaped and danced, and

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doleful yells of welcome resounded through the forest. Was this the principal town of that country? No, it was not. The town in question was many miles up-stream, a great town, and its name was Hochelaga, but it would be rash for the bearded visitors to attempt to go thither, for they would be blinded with falling snow, and their ships would be caught between ice-floes. This ironical solicitude for the safety of the strangers has the genuine Indian smack. The real motive underlying it was doubtless “protection to home industry;” why should the people at Hochelaga get a part of the beads and red ribbons when there were no more than enough for the people at Stadacona? Recourse was had to the supernal or infernal powers. On a fine autumn morning a canoe came down the river, carrying three scowling devils clad in dogskins, with inky-black faces surmounted by long antlers. As they passed the ships they paddled shorewards, prophesying in a dismal monotone, until as the canoe touched the beach all three fell flat upon their faces. Thereupon forth issued from the woods Donnacona’s feathered braves, and in an ecstasy of yelps and groans seized the fallen demons and carried them out of sight behind the canopy of leaves, whence for an hour or so their harsh and guttural hubbub fell upon the ears of the Frenchmen. At last the two young interpreters crawled

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out from the thicket and danced about the shore with agonized cries and gestures of lively terror, until Cartier from his quarter-deck called out to know what was the trouble. It was a message, they said, from the mighty deity Coudouagny, warning the visitors not to venture upon the dangerous journey to Hochelaga, inasmuch as black ruin would surely overtake them. The Frenchman’s reply was couched in language disrespectful to Coudouagny, and the principle of free-trade in trinkets prevailed.

With a forty-ton pinnace and two boats carrying fifty men Cartier kept on up the river, leaving his ships well guarded in a snug harbour within the mouth of the stream now known as the St. Charles. A cheerful voyage of a fortnight brought the little party to Hochelaga, where they landed on a crisp October morning. There came forth to meet them — in the magniloquent phrase of the old narrator — “one of the principal lords of the said city,”¹ with a large company of retainers, for thus did their European eyes interpret the group of clansmen by whom they were welcomed. A huge bonfire was soon blazing and crackling, and Indian tongues, loosened by its genial warmth, poured forth floods of eloquence,

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until presently the whole company took up its march into the great city of Hochelaga. A sketch of this rustic stronghold was published in 1556 in Ramusio’s collection of voyages. The name of the draughtsman has not come down to us, but it was apparently drawn from memory by some one of Cartier’s party, for while it does not answer in all details to Cartier’s description, it is a most characteristic and unmistakable Iroquois town. It was circular in shape. The central portion consisted of about fifty long wigwams, about 150 feet in length by 50 in breadth, framed of saplings tightly boarded in with sheets of bark. Through the middle of each wigwam ran a passageway, with stone fireplaces at intervals coming under openings in the high bark roof whereby some of the smoke might escape. Kettles of baked clay hung over most of the fires, and the smoky atmosphere was redolent of simmering messes of corn and beans and fowl, or, if it were a gala day, of boiled dog, while the fumes of tobacco were omnipresent. On either side were the rows of shelves or benches covered with furs, which served as beds; while here and there, overlooking sheaves of stone arrows and scattered tomahawks, there dangled flint knives and red clay pipes and dried human scalps. These spacious wigwams were arranged about a large central square, and outside of them a considerable interval

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or boulevard intervened between habitations and wall. Such a town might have held a population of from 2500 to 3000 souls, but the actual number was apt to fall short of the capacity. The town wall was ingeniously constructed of three concentric rows of stout saplings. The middle row stood erect in the ground, rising to a height of twelve or fifteen feet; and the two outer rows, planted at a distance of five or six feet on either side of it, were inclined so as to make a two-sided tent-shaped structure. The three rows of saplings met at the top, and were tightly lashed to a horizontal ridge-pole, while at the bottom, and again about halfway up, they were connected by diagonal cross-braces, after the herring-bone pattern, thus securing great strength and stability. Around the inside of this stout wall, and near the top, ran a gallery accessible by short ladders, and upon the gallery our explorers observed piles of stones ready to be hurled at an approaching foe. Outside in all directions stretched rugged half-cleared fields clad in the brown remnant of last summer’s corn crop, and dotted here and there with yellow pumpkins.

The arrival of the white strangers was the cause of wild excitement among the bark cabins and in the open square of Hochelaga. Their demeanour was so courteous and friendly that men, women, and children allowed curiosity

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to prevail over fear; they flocked about the Frenchmen and felt of their steel weapons and stroked their beards. Sick Indians came up to be touched and cured, trinkets were handed about, polite speeches were made, and at length amid a loud fanfare of trumpets the white men took their leave. Before they embarked the Indians escorted them to the summit of the neighbouring hill, which Cartier named Mont Royal, a name which as Montreal still remains attached to the hill and to the noble city at its foot.

It was getting late in the season to make further explorations in this wild and unknown country, and upon returning to Stadacona the Frenchmen went into winter quarters. There they suffered from such intensity of cold as the shores of the English Channel never witnessed, and presently scurvy broke out with such virulence that scarcely a dozen of the whole company were left well enough to take care of the rest. In vain were prayers and litanies and genuflexions in the snow. The heavenly powers were as obdurate as when Cassim Baba forgot the talismanic word that opened the robbers’ cave. But presently Cartier learned from an Indian that a decoction of the leaves of a certain evergreen tree was an infallible cure for scurvy. The experiment was tried with results

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that would have gladdened Bishop Berkeley, had he known them, when he wrote his famous treatise on the virtues of tar water.¹ Whether the tree was spruce, or pine, or balsam fir, is matter of doubt, but we are told that Cartier’s men showed such avidity that within a week they had boiled all the foliage of a tree as big as a full-grown oak, and had quaffed the aromatic decoction, whereupon their cruel distemper was quickly healed.

The ranks had been so thinned by death that Cartier was obliged to leave one of his ships behind. Further exploration must be postponed. It was the common experience. A single season of struggle with the savage continent made it necessary to return to Europe for fresh resources. So it was with Cartier. The midsummer of 1536 saw him once more safe within the walls of St. Malo, and confident that one more expedition would reveal some at least of the wonders which he had heard of, comprising all sorts of things from gold and diamonds to unipeds. As we are confronted again and again with these resplendent dreams of the early voyagers to America, we are reminded

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not only that the wish is father to the thought, but also that the stolid-looking red man is the most facetious of mortals, and in his opinion the most delightful kind of facetiousness, the genuine epicure’s brand of humour, consists in what English slang calls “stuffing,” or filling a victim’s head with all manner of false information. In Cartier’s case one effect was to lead him to kidnap Donnacona and several other chiefs, and carry them to France, that they might tell their brave stories before the king.

Five years elapsed before another expedition was ready for Canada. King Francis made up his mind that a little more flourish of trumpets, such as the crowns of Spain and Portugal indulged in, would not come amiss. Columbus and Gama had been admirals and viceroys; it was high time for the king of France to create a viceroyalty in the New World. To fill this eminent position he selected Jean François, Sieur de Roberval, a nobleman who held large estates in Picardy. This man he created Lord of Norumbega and Viceroy over Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, and so on through a long string of barbaric names. At the same time Cartier was made captain-general, and in his commission the king declares that the lands of Canada and Hochelaga “form the extremity of Asia toward the west.”¹ The flourish of trumpets was loud enough to reach the ears of Charles V., but the Spaniards had become convinced that the codfish coasts contained no such springs of sudden wealth as Cortes and Pizarro had discovered for them, and the Spanish ambassador at Paris advised his master that the soundest policy was to let Francis go on unmolested and waste his money in a bootless enterprise.

The event seemed to justify this cynicism. It was a dismal tale of misdirected energies. So little commercial interest was felt in the voyage that volunteers were not forthcoming and had to be sought in the jails. So much time was consumed in getting ready that it was decided to send on a part of the expedition in advance, and so in May, 1541, Cartier started with three ships, expecting soon to be overtaken by Roberval. In this expectation he tarried six weeks on the Newfoundland coast, until the arrival of August determined him to wait no longer, and he pushed across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the river. Of this voyage we have no such full report as of its predecessor. Very little seems to have been accomplished in new explorations; at Hochelaga there were rumours of hostile plots on the part of the red men; and then there was another

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wretched winter near the site of Quebec; and then a forlorn retreat to the ocean and to France. At one of the harbours on the Newfoundland coast the little fleet of Cartier met that of Roberval, whose detention of a whole year has never been accounted for. Our authorities are here so confused that it is impossible to elicit from them a coherent story. It seems clear, however, that the meeting between the two commanders was not a pleasant one, and that Cartier kept on his way to France, leaving Roberval to shift for himself.

The Lord of Norumbega was not left helpless, however, by this departure. He had sturdy pilots on board, already familiar with these coasts, and one of his three ships was commanded by a veteran navigator who was thought to be unexcelled by any other seaman of France. This was Jean Allefonsce, of the province of Saintonge, over which sweep the salt breezes of the Bay of Biscay. In forty years or more of life upon the ocean he is likely to have visited more than once already these northern waters, such a haunt of Biscayan fishermen. He was now entrusted with an important enterprise. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence the expedition was divided, and it seems clear that while Roberval undertook the task of exploring the river he sent Allefonsce on an ocean trip to find a passage

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into the Sea of Verrazano. This voyage is usually mentioned in such terms as to be unintelligible; as for example by the Recollet friar, Sixte le Tac, writing in 1689, who says that Roberval sent Allefonsce northward to Labrador in quest of a passage to the East Indies, but that Allefonsce was so beset with floating ice that he was fain to rest contented with discovering the strait between Newfoundland and the continent in latitude 52°,¹ or, in other words, the Strait of Belle Isle. Now this is of course absurd, for the Strait of Belle Isle had long been familiar to mariners and was a favourite route for entering the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In one of the most recent books, the late Justin Winsor’s “Cartier to Frontenac,” we get a reverberation of this statement when we are told that “Allefonsce went north along the Labrador coast to find, if possible, a passage to the west. The ice proved so dense that he gave up the search.”² But while most writers have repeated this statement,

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it is to be observed that the careful and thoroughly informed Hakluyt, writing in 1589, knows nothing of any such northern voyage of Allefonsce. The truth is, that eminent sailor, after returning from his expedition with Roberval, wrote an account of his voyages, in which he was aided by a friend, Paulin de Secalart, a geographer of Honfleur. This narrative, written in 1545, still remains in manuscript, a folio of 194 leaves, and is preserved in the National Library at Paris.¹ But in 1559, shortly after the death of Allefonsce, and during that brief period of quickened curiosity about the man which is wont to come at such a time, a book was published at Poitiers, entitled “The Adventurous Voyages of Captain Jean Allefonsce,” and this book ran through at least seven editions. It was compiled by a merchant of Honfleur named Maugis Vumenot, and is a thoroughly uncritical and untrustworthy narrative.² It omits much that Allefonsce tells, and weaves in such interesting material as Master Vumenot happened

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to have at hand, without much regard to its historic verity. Such were the naive methods of sixteenth century writers.

If we consider what Allefonsce himself tells us, although his allusions to places are often far from clear, we cannot fail to see that his voyage in quest of a western passage in the summer of 1542 was directed not northward but southward from the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He seems to have entered Massachusetts Bay, and may have passed through Long Island Sound and Hell Gate; at all events he has much to say about the town of Norumbega, which Mercator’s map of 1569 places upon Manhattan Island; and he tells us that the river of Norumbega is salt for more than ninety miles from its mouth, which is true of the Hudson, but not of any other river which men have sought to associate with Norumbega. Moreover our good pilot feels confident that this great river, if followed far enough to the northward, would be found to unite with the other great river of Hochelaga, that is, the St. Lawrence.¹ This notion, of a union between the Hudson and the St. Lawrence, became a very common one, and found expression upon the famous map of Gastaldi in 1553, and upon other maps.

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If we were to allow a little free play to our fancy, it would not be difficult to assign a suitable explanation for this voyage of Allefonsce in connection with the expedition of Roberval. There is no longer any doubt that the Hudson River was first made known to Europeans by Verrazano in 1524, and was called by various names, of which perhaps the Grand River was the most common. At the Indian village on Manhattan Island French skippers traded for furs, and in 1540 a French blockhouse was built near the site of Albany for the purpose of protecting such traffic with the red men of the Mohawk valley. The name Norumbega unquestionably first appears with Verrazano’s voyage, and for forty years thereafter it was closely associated with the neighbourhood of the Hudson. In reading the string of Roberval’s titles—which begin with Norumbega and run through Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, etc., down to Newfoundland—it is clear that the king meant to concentrate under his rule the various regions which Verrazano and Cartier had discovered. When the expedition arrives on the American coast it seems not unnatural that the viceroy should send his lieutenant to Norumbega while he himself should prosecute the journey to Hochelaga. Possibly, as some believed, the watery channels pursued by the two might unite. At

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all events a passage into the Sea of Verrazano was more likely to be found at the fortieth parallel than at the fifty-second.

It is a pity that these amiable old skippers, in telling of their acts and purposes, should have paid so little heed to posterity’s craving for full and exact knowledge. Just how far the good Allefonsce ever got with his Norumbega voyage, or what turned him back, we are not informed. We may safely say that he did not succeed in sailing into the Sea of Verrazano, and the next summer we find him once more with Roberval on the St. Lawrence. Thither that captain had proceeded at the outset after parting company with Allefonsce. Of his fortunes during the next seventeen months our accounts are but fragmentary. Hakluyt is unusually brief and vague, and we have to rely largely upon a manuscript of 1556,¹ written by the somewhat mendacious André Thevet, who seems to have been an intimate friend of Roberval and a boon companion of the irrepressible buffoon Rabelais. Provokingly scanty as Thevet often is, there are times when he goes into full details, and one of his romantic stories is worthy of mention, since it probably rests upon a basis of fact.

The expedition of Roberval was intended not only for exploring the wilderness but for founding a colony. Homes were to be established

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in the New World, and many of the company brought along with them their wives and children. Among the young women was Marguerite Roberval, niece of the Lord of Norumbega, and on the same ship was a gallant chevalier, and the twain loved one another not wisely but too well. Roberval was a man of stern and relentless disposition, and forgiveness of sins formed no part of his creed. He set his niece ashore on a small barren island, with an old Norman nurse who had been in her confidence, and left them there with a small supply of food and guns for shooting game or noxious beasts. As the ship sailed away, the lover leaped into the sea and by dint of frenzied exertion swam ashore. The place was dreaded by sailors, who called it the Isle of Demons, but bears and wolves were more formidable enemies. On that island was born, during the year 1542, the first child of European parents within the vast region now known as British America, but one after another, child, father, and nurse, succumbed to the hardships of the place and died, leaving the young mother alone in the wilderness. There for more than two years she contrived to sustain life, on three occasions shooting a white bear, and at all times keeping the demons aloof by the sign of the cross, until one day she was picked up by a fishing vessel and

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carried back to France. There Thevet tells us that he met her a little later, in a village of Perigord, and heard the story from her own lips. At all events it was much talked of in France, and forms the subject of the sixty-seventh tale in the famous collection of Queen Margaret of Angoulême, sister of Francis I.¹ The Isle of Demons was often called by sailors the Isle of the Damsel.

Ascending the great river to Cap Rouge, near the site of Quebec, where Cartier had wintered, Roberval made it his headquarters. Little is known as to the course of events, save that in the following summer Allefonsce had returned, and a trip was made up the Saguenay. There were severe hardships and many died. The sternness of Roberval is conspicuous in the narrative, and may have been called forth by apparent necessity. There were occasions on which both men and women were shot for an example, and the whipping-post was frequently in requisition, “by which means,” observes the worthy Thevet, “they lived in peace.” This is about all we know of the mighty viceroyalty of Hochelaga, etc. Lescarbot tells us that in the course of 1543 the king sent out Cartier once

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more, who brought home to France the wretched survivors of the company.¹ About this time Cartier received from the king a grant of a manor on the coast of the Channel, not far from St. Malo, and there we lose sight of the navigator, except for the mention of his death at that place in 1557. Allefonsce seems to have been killed in a sea fight about ten years before, and we are told that Roberval was assassinated one evening on the street in Paris.

After the failure of this expedition there was a partial cessation of French enterprise upon the high seas. The reign of Henry II. was clouded by the disastrous wars with Spain, in which France lost the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and French armies were so woefully defeated at St. Quentin and Gravelines. The death of the king in 1559 was the signal for the rise of the Guises and the pursuance of a policy which brought on one of the most disastrous civil wars of modern times. From 1562 to 1598 some historians enumerate eight successive wars in France, but it is better to call it one great civil war of thirty-six years, with occasional truces. It is still more instructive to regard it all as a phase of the still mightier conflict which was at the same time raging between Spain and the Netherlands, and which presently included

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Queen Elizabeth’s England among the combatants. It was not a favourable time for expending superfluous energy in founding new states beyond sea. During the latter half of the century we witness two feeble and ill-starred attempts at planting Huguenot colonies in America, — the attempt of Villegagnon in Brazil in 1557-58, and that of Ribaut in Florida in 1562-65. The latter of these was formidable in purpose; it represented the master thought of Coligny which led Sir Walter Raleigh to plan the founding of an English nation in America. The violent destruction of this Huguenot colony was the last notable exhibition of Spanish power beyond sea in that century of Spanish preeminence. Spanish energy, too, was getting absorbed in the conflict of Titans in Europe.

The affair of Florida was essentially military in purpose and execution. Attempts at planting commercial colonies on the St. Lawrence must wait for some more favourable opportunity. Yet French fishing vessels steadily plied to and fro across the Atlantic. Investigations in the local account-books of such towns as Dieppe and Honfleur lead to the conclusion that as many as 200 ships were equipped each year in French ports for fishing in American waters.¹ It was no uncommon

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thing for these craft to bring home furs and walrus ivory. But we hear of little in the way of exploration. Dieppe, indeed, boasted something like a school of seamanship. It was a city to which astronomers, geographers, and mapmakers were drawn in order to profit by the experiences of practical navigators, and where questions connected with oceanic exploration were likely to be treated in a scientific spirit. In those days such men as Pierre Desceliers, who has been called the creator of French hydrography, and whose beautiful maps are now of great historical importance, made his headquarters at Dieppe. It was a time of keen intellectual curiosity and bold commercial activity; and nothing was needed but relief from the oppressive anarchy that had ruled so long to see France putting forth new efforts to plant colonies and to prepare for maritime empire. The end of the century saw a new state of things, the military strength of Spain irretrievably broken, the policy of France in the hands of the greatest and wisest ruler that France ever had, with England and the Netherlands looming up as powerful competitors in the world beyond seas. Before the rivals lay the American coasts, inviting experiments in the work of transplanting civilization. It remained to be seen how France would fare in this arduous undertaking.

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