II

THE BEGINNINGS OF QUEBEC

The year 1598 was a memorable one in the history of France, for it witnessed the death of that insatiable schemer, Philip II. of Spain, supporter of the Guises, and it also saw the end of the long wars of religion and the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes. The time seemed to be more propitious than before for commercial enterprises, and the thoughts of a few bold spirits turned once more to the St. Lawrence. One of these was the Marquis de la Roche, a Breton nobleman, who obtained from Henry IV. a commission very similar to that under which Roberval had sailed. But so little popular interest was felt in the enterprise that volunteers would not come forward, and it became necessary to gather recruits from the jails. The usual scenes of forlorn and squalid tragedy followed. Roche was cast ashore on the Breton coast in a tempest, and was thrown into a dungeon by the king’s enemy, the Duke de Mercœur;¹ while his convicts were landed on Sable

Island, and only saved from starving by the wild cattle descended from Léry’s kine of fourscore years before.

While these things were going on there was a skipper of St. Malo, a man of good family and some property, François Grave, Sieur du Pont, commonly known as Pontgrave, who had made up his mind that the Canada fur-trade was something that ought to be developed. He had sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as Three Rivers, and had feasted his eyes upon the soft glossy pelts of mink and otter, lynx and wolverene. The thing to do was to get a monopoly of the trade in furs, and with this end in view Pontgrave applied to a friend of the king, a wealthy merchant of Honfleur named Pierre Chauvin and a staunch Huguenot withal. Another man of substance, the Sieur de Monts, became interested in the scheme, and the three formed a partnership; while the king granted them a monopoly of the fur-trade on the condition that they should establish a colony. This privilege awakened fierce heart-burnings among the gallant skippers of St. Malo, who declared that they had done more than anybody else to maintain the hold of France upon the St. Lawrence country, and there was no justice in singling out one of their number for royal favour, along with merchants from Honfleur and elsewhere.

Similar complaints were heard from Rouen, Dieppe, and Rochelle; the parliaments of Normandy and Brittany took up the matter, and a fierce outcry was made because Chauvin and Monts were Protestants. But this argument naturally went for little with Henry IV., and the monopoly was granted.

Pontgravé and Chauvin made their headquarters at Tadousac, where the waters of the Saguenay flow into the St. Lawrence. The traffic in furs went on briskly, but the business of colonization was limited to the leaving of miserable garrisons in the wilderness to perish of starvation and scurvy. So things went on from 1599 to 1603, when Chauvin on his third voyage died in Canada. The partnership was thus broken up, and the monopoly for the moment went a-begging.

It was only for a moment, however. The governor of Dieppe since 1589 was Aymar de Chastes, a stout Catholic of the national party and a friend of Henry IV. On the great day of Arques in 1589, when the Leaguers boasted that their fat Duke of Mayenne,¹ with his army of 30,000, would make short work of the king with his 7000, when the fashionable world of Paris was hiring windows in the Faubourg St.

Antoine, to see the rugged Bearnese brought in tied hand and foot, it was largely through the aid of Chastes that Henry won his brilliant victory and scattered the hosts of Midian.¹ It was therefore not strange that when upon the death of Chauvin this scarred and grizzled veteran asked for the monopoly in furs, his request was promptly granted. Chastes soon found an able ally in Pontgravé, but even with the allurements of rich cargoes of peltries it was hard to get people to subscribe money for such voyages. Loans for such purposes were classed on the market as loans at heavy risk, and the rate of interest demanded was usually from 35 to 40 per cent.²

While the preparations were briskly going on a new figure entered upon the scene, the noble figure of the founder of New France. Samuel Champlain was now about six and thirty years of age, having been born in or about the year 1567, at Brouage, a small seaport in the province of Saintonge, not many miles south of Rochelle. The district, situated on the march between the Basque and Breton countries, was famous as a

nursery of hardy sailors, and the neighbourhood of Rochelle was one of the chief centres of Huguenot ferment. Champlain’s father was a seafaring man, but nothing is positively known as to his station in society or as to his religion. One local biographer calls him an humble fisherman, but the son’s marriage contract describes him as of noble birth. The son was often called by contemporaries the Sieur de Champlain, but that was chiefly perhaps after he had risen to eminence in Canada. The baptismal names of the father and mother, Antoine and Marguerite, indicate that they were born Catholics; while Samuel, the baptismal name of the son, affords a strong presumption that at the time of his birth they had become Huguenots. In later life Champlain appears as a man of deeply religious nature but little interested in sectarian disputes, a man quite after the king’s own heart, who realized that there were other things in the world more important than the differences between Catholic and Huguenot. Champlain was to the core, a loyal Frenchman, without a spark of sympathy with those intolerant partisans who were ready to see France dragged in the wake of Spain.

The early years of this noble and charming man were mostly spent upon the sea. He was a true viking, who loved the tossing waves and

the howling of the wind in the shrouds. His strength and agility seemed inexhaustible; in the moment of danger his calmness was unruffled as he stood with hand on tiller, calling out his orders in cheery tones that were heard above the tempest.¹ He was a strict disciplinarian, but courteous and merciful as well as just and true; and there was a blitheness of mood and quaintness of speech about him that made him a most lovable companion. In the whole course of French history there are few personages so attractive as Samuel Champlain.

For several years until the peace of 1598 Champlain served in the army of Henry IV. as deputy quartermaster-general. One of his uncles was pilot major of the Spanish fleets, and after the peace Champlain accompanied him to Seville. A fleet was on the point of sailing for Mexico, under the Admiral Francisco Colombo, and Champlain obtained, through his uncle’s influence, the command of one of the ships. The voyage, with the journeys on land, lasted more than two years, and Champlain kept a diary, from which after returning to France he wrote out a narrative z which so pleased the king that he granted

him a pension. In this relation Champlain described things with the keen insight and careful attention of a naturalist. Shores, havens, and mountains lie spread out before you, with the wonderful effects of snow-clad peaks rising from the masses of tropical verdure, birds of strange colour sing in the treetops, while hearsay griffins, with eagles’ heads, bats’ wings and crocodiles’ tails lurk in the background; and worse than such monsters, our traveller thinks, are the spectacles of Indians flogged for non-attendance at mass, and heretics burned at the stake. While making a halt at the Isthmus of Panama it occurs to him that a ship-canal at that point would shorten the voyage to Asia even more effectually than the discovery of a northwest passage.

When Champlain returned to France he found Aymar de Chastes preparing to send Pontgrave upon a voyage to Canada. The veteran Pontgrave was brave and wise, resourceful and light-hearted, just the sort of man whom Champlain would be sure to like. It is therefore not strange that we find him embarking in the

enterprise with Father Pontgrave, as he used affectionately to call him. The two sailed from Honfleur on the 15th of March, 1603, and seventy days later they were gliding past the mouth of the Saguenay. As they approached the St. Charles they saw no traces of the Iroquois town of Stadacona. On they went, as far as Hochelaga, where Cartier had been entertained sixty-eight years before, but not one of its long bark cabins was left, nor a vestige of its stout triple palisade, nor a living soul to tell the story of the dire catastrophe. No Iroquois were now to be met upon the St. Lawrence except as invaders, nor were the accents of their speech to be heard from the lips of the red men who emerged from the thickets to greet Champlain and Pontgrave. Another name than “Canada” would have become attached to that country had these explorers been the first to penetrate its wilds. No doubt, whatever, can attach to the facts. There is no doubt that in 1535 Iroquois villages stood upon the sites of Montreal and Quebec, or that the Iroquois language was that of the natives who dwelt along the shores of the St. Lawrence; while in 1603 the villages with their people and their language had vanished from these places, and instead of them were found Algonquin villages of a much lower type and a ruder people,

known as Adirondacks, and speaking an Algonquian language. The visits of our good Frenchmen have placed dates upon a portion of one of those displacements or wanderings of people that have commonly gone on in barbaric ages alike in the Old World and in the New. Just as we find Hunnish hordes in one age breaking their strength against the great wall of China and in another age mowed down by the swords of Roman and Visigoth in the valley of the Marne, just as we see the Arab smile and hear the Arabic guttural in Cordova and in Lucknow, so in the New World we find Dacotahs or Sioux strayed afar into the Carolinas with their identity veiled under the name “Catawbas,” and we recognize in the brave and intelligent Cherokees of Georgia pure-blooded Iroquois, own cousins of the Mohawks.

Now the Iroquois, as we know them, while preëminent in power of organization, have not been a numerous family. Within our historic ken, which is so provokingly narrow, the most fruitful and abounding Indian stock has been that of the Algonquins. They include the Blackfeet of the Rocky Mountains and the Crees of the Hudson Bay country along with the Powhatans of Old Virginia, and Eliot’s version of the Bible for the natives of Massachusetts Bay is to-day for the most part intelligible to the Ojibways

of Minnesota. Obviously within recent times, that is to say since the fourteenth century, the Algonquins have been for a period of some duration a rapidly multiplying and spreading race, and their weight of numbers for a time proved too much for the more civilized but less numerous Iroquois to withstand. Thus in the Appalachian region we find the mound-building Cherokees retiring from the Ohio valley into Georgia before the advancing swarms of Shawnees; and we see the Tuscaroras, another band of Iroquois, pushed into Carolina by the expansion of the Algonquin Powhatans and Delawares.

From the time when white men first became interested in the Five Nations of New York, it was a firmly established tradition among the latter that their forefathers had once lived on the St. Lawrence, and in particular that they had a stronghold upon or hard by the site of Montreal; but that they had been driven to the southward of Lake Ontario by the hostility of a tribe of Algonquins known as Adirondacks.¹ Their first movement seems to have been up the St. Lawrence and across Lake Ontario to the mouth of the Oswego River, where for some time they had their central strongholds. Thence they spread in both directions. Those

who settled at the head of the Canandaigua lake became known by the Algonquin name of Senecas, which has been variously interpreted. Those who stopped at a lake to the eastward, with a marsh at its foot, called Cayuga, or “mucky land,” were known by that name. Those who kept up the ancestral council fires, and spread over the divide between the Oswego and Mohawk watersheds, and so on over the gentle rolling country eastward of the Skaneateles or “long lake,” have ever since been known as Onondagas, or “men of the hills.” Eastward from this central region the people were called Oneidas, or “men of the boulders” (or perhaps “men of granite”), from the profusion of erratic blocks strewn over their territory. Furthest to the east, and most famous of these confederated warriors, were the people who called themselves, or were called by their kinsmen, Caniengas, or “people of the flint” that was used in striking fire; they are best known to history, however, by the name of Mohawk, or “man-eater,” bestowed upon them by their Algonquin foes, and which all the Iroquois seem abundantly to have earned by their cannibal propensities.¹

The driving of the Iroquois up the St. Lawrence

valley into central New York by their Algonquin assailants had remarkable consequences. For military and commercial purposes the situation was the best on the Atlantic slope of North America. The line of the Five Nations stretched its long length between the treasures of beaver and otter on the great lakes and the wampum beds on the coast of Long Island; but if an enemy, from any quarter of the compass, ventured to attack that long line, forthwith it proved to be an interior line in following which he was apt to be overwhelmed.

Along with this singular advantage of geographical position the Five Nations soon learned the value of political confederation in preserving peace among themselves while increasing their military strength. It was a common thing for Indian tribes of allied lineage to enter into confederation, but no other union of this sort was so artfully constructed, harmonious, and enduring as the League of the Iroquois. The date of the founding of this confederacy seems to have been not far from 1450, and we may suppose the great movement from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the lakes of central New York to have occurred about a century earlier. This group of Iroquois, which became the Five Nations, was an overgrown tribe which underwent expansion and segmentation. From the expanding Onondagas

the extreme wings first broke off as Senecas and Mohawks; afterward the Onondagas again threw off the Cayugas, while a portion of the Mohawks became marked off as Oneidas. To abolish war throughout their smiling country by referring all affairs of general concern to a representative council was the great thought of the Onondaga chief Hiawatha, who, after bitter opposition in his own tribe, found a powerful ally in Dagonoweda, the Mohawk.¹ Soon after the middle of the fifteenth century the work of these sagacious statesmen was accomplished, and thenceforth the people of the five tribes, from Canandaigua, “the chosen settlement,” to Schenectady, “the plain beyond the opening,” were proud to call themselves Hodenosaunee, or “Kinsmen of the Long House.” Thenceforth they found themselves more than a match for the Algonquin foe, and able to go forth and assail him.

But there were yet other Iroquois kinsmen beside those of the Long House. To the north of the St. Lawrence and of Lake Ontario as far west as the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron one might have encountered the populous tribe of Hurons. In blood and speech they differed no more from Mohawks than a Frank from a Frisian, or a Welshman of Wales from a Welshman of Cornwall. They were the rear of the

retiring Iroquois host, the buffer that took the first brunt of the Algonquin onsets. They were probably the last to leave the valley of the St. Lawrence. In all probability the towns of Hochelaga and Stadacona, visited in 1535 by Cartier, were Huron towns, which in the course of the next half century were swept away by the last advancing Algonquin wave. In Champlain’s time the Huron boundaries all stopped west of the meridian of Niagara, and their population of 20,000 souls was to be found mostly between Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay. Between these Hurons and Lake Erie, west of the Niagara River, dwelt another tribe of identical blood and speech, known as the Attiwendaronks; and south of Lake Erie came the Eries; while down in the pleasant valley of the Susquehanna were the villages of the powerful tribe variously called Susquehannocks, Andastes, or Conestogas. All these were Iroquois, and were severely blamed by the Five Nations for refusing to accept Hiawatha’s “Gift of Peace” and join the confederacy. They were scorned as base and froward creatures, so bent upon having their own way that they held aloof from the only arrangement that could put a curb upon the perpetual slaughter; such, at least, was the purport of the solemn speeches that used to be made before the council fires at Onondaga. The Five

Nations were bound to be peace-makers, even at the cost of massacring all the human population of America. They fully appreciated the injunction “Compel them to enter in.” In the course of the seventeenth century we find them annihilating successively the Hurons, Attiwendaronks, Eries, and Conestogas, and after the customary orgies of torment and slaughter, adopting the remnants into their own tribes. In Champlain’s time the hatred between the Five Nations and the Hurons had come to such a pass that the latter forgot their ancient hostility to the Algonquins of the St. Lawrence, and were wont to make common cause with them against the dreaded Long House. In these ways, when Champlain arrived upon the scene, a situation had been prepared for him and for France, of which he understood absolutely nothing.

Five years were to pass, however, before the gallant Frenchman was to taste the first fruits of the true significance of the disappearance of Hochelaga. When in the autumn of 1603 the returning ships arrived at Havre, they were met by the news that Chastes was dead. Once more the business must be reorganized, and this time it was the Sieur de Monts, already mentioned, who took the lead. This nobleman turned his thoughts a little to the southward, perhaps with a view to milder winters, and obtained from the king a grant

extending from about the latitude of Montreal as far south as that of Philadelphia. There is a Micmac word, Acadie or Aquoddy, which means simply “place” or “region,” and which appears in such names as Passamaquoddy. In French it has a romantic flavour, which is perhaps slightly enhanced in the English Acadia. To the country since famous under that name the Sieur de Monts brought his little company in the spring of 1604. There had been indignant outcries over the circumstance that this gentleman was a Huguenot, but the king laughed at these protests. He insisted that Monts should so far defer to public opinion as to take a Romish priest with him to preach the gospel to the heathen; but he allowed him also to take a Calvinist minister for his own spiritual solace and enlivenment. Hardly had the French coast-line sunk below the horizon when the tones of envenomed theological discussion were heard upon the quarter-deck. The ship’s atmosphere grew as musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that of a room at the Sorbonne, and now and then a scene of Homeric simplicity was enacted, when the curate and the parson engaged in personal combat. “I forget just now,” says Champlain, “which was the hardest hitter, but I leave you to imagine what a fine spectacle they made, aiming and dodging blows, while the sailors gathered around and backed

them according to their sectarian prejudices,”¹ some shouting “Hang the Huguenot!” and others “Down with the Papist!” On shore similar scenes recurred, with an accompaniment of capering and yelping Indians, to whom it was quite enough that a scrimmage was going on, and who were perhaps scarcely worse fitted than the combatants themselves to understand the issues involved. It happened that amid the hardships which assailed the little company these two zealous men of God succumbed at about the same time, whereupon, says one of our chroniclers with a shudder, the sailors buried them in the same grave, expressing a hope that after so much strife they would repose in peace together.

In our brief narrative there is no need for entering into the details of this first experience of white men in Acadia. The experiment extended over three years, during which there were voyages back and forth across the ocean with reinforcements to offset the losses from disease. Among the company, besides its leaders, were two men of rare and excellent quality, the Baron de Poutrincourt and Marc Lescarbot, an advocate and man of letters who was seized by a sudden inclination for wild life. Among Lescarbot’s accomplishments was a knack of turning off long Alexandrine verses by

the yard, but what was of far more value, he wrote a shrewd and pithy prose, abounding in good sense and cheer. After the priceless writings of Champlain himself there are few books about the beginnings of New France with which we should be so loath to part as the three teeming volumes of Lescarbot.

The first attempt at settlement was made at the mouth of the river Ste. Croix, but the fancy of Poutrincourt was captivated by the beautiful gulf to which the English in later days gave the name of Annapolis. He obtained from Monts a grant of the spot with its adjacent territory, and called it Port Royal. There after a while the work of these colonists was concentrated, while Champlain spent much time in exploring and delineating the coasts. Of making charts he was never weary, and in following sinuous shore-lines he found delight. One of his first discoveries was the grand and picturesque island which he called “isle of the desert mountains,” “L’Isle des Monts Deserts,” a name which to this day by its noticeable accent on the final syllable preserves a record of this French origin. A little further to the west he entered and explored for some distance the Penobscot, which fishermen often called the river of Norumbega, but he found no traces of the splendid city into which popular fancy had

magnified Allefonsce’s Indian village upon the island of Manhattan.¹ Farther on he ascended the Kennebec, and was correctly told by Indians of the route to the St. Lawrence by the valley of the Chaudière, the route which was traversed with such bitter hardship by Benedict Arnold and his men in 1775. As the French navigator passed Casco Bay he began to notice a marked superiority in the Indians over the squalid Micmacs and Etetchemins of Acadia. The wigwams were better built, and the fields of maize, beans, and pumpkins wore a kind of savage cheerfulness under the scorching July sun. Champlain entered the Charles River, and mistook it for the great stream which was soon to be explored by Henry Hudson. After duly astonishing the natives of the triple-peaked peninsula, he passed on to Plymouth, sailed around Cape Cod, and proceeded as far as Nauset Harbour, where the supplies began to give out, and a direct return was made to the Bay of Fundy.

The object of this coasting voyage was to see if any spot could be found for a settlement that would be preferable to those already visited in Canada or on the Bay of Fundy. For a moment the Charles River seems to have tempted these worthy Frenchmen, but they decided to go further.

Their narrative indicates a much greater coast population of red men than was found by the Mayflower Pilgrims fifteen years later, and enables us to form some idea of the magnitude of the pestilence which in the interval nearly depopulated the shores of Massachusetts Bay. In 1605 all the best spots seemed to show Indian villages. The next summer Champlain made another reconnoitring voyage from Port Royal, in company with Poutrincourt. They lost but little time in getting to Cape Cod, and then in rounding Cape Malabar they had a singular experience. At a distance of a league and a half from the shore they found the depth of water rapidly diminishing to less than a fathom, while on every side the waves leaped and gambolled in the wildest confusion. They got their bark across this ugly shoal with a broken rudder, little dreaming that only four years before the same spot, proudly rearing its head above the sea, had been described by Bartholomew Gosnold under the name of Nauset Island. It had lately been beaten down and submerged by the angry waters, but nearly three centuries were consumed in washing away the fragments. The sea is now six fathoms deep there.¹

After getting clear of this dangerous place Poutrincourt put into Chatham Harbour for repairs,

and there he remained a fortnight, closely watched from the bushes by peering red men who one morning before daybreak came swarming about a party of sleeping Frenchmen, and killed several. Thence our voyagers kept on to Hyannis, and from that neighbourhood descried a shore-line to the southward, which must have been either Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. By this time Poutrincourt had made up his mind that Port Royal was the best place for his colony after all, and so the prow was turned in that direction.

Things went well enough with them until in a stress of weather near Mount Desert their rudder broke, and their last hundred and fifty miles were far from comfortable. As they entered the harbour of Port Royal a singular spectacle greeted them. That fortress consisted of a large wooden quadrangle enclosing a courtyard. At one corner, which came down to the water’s edge, was an arched gateway flanked by rude bastions mounting a few cannon. One side of the quadrangle comprised the dining-room and officers’ quarters, on the second side were the barracks for the men, on the third the kitchen and oven, and on the fourth the store-rooms. Now on the November evening when Champlain and Poutrincourt sailed into the harbour they saw the buildings brightly lighted and the arch surmounted

by the royal arms supported on either hand by the heraldic emblems of Baron Poutrincourt and the Sieur de Monts. While the weary voyagers were admiring the pageant there stepped forth from the gateway no less a personage than old Neptune, Lord of the Ocean, with a pompous retinue of Tritons, who marched with measured step to meet the ship, declaiming long Alexandrine rhymed couplets of praise and welcome. Thus was the tedium of the wilderness relieved by the ingenious Lescarbot, whose active brain was never idle, but in the intervals of work was sure to be teeming with quips and quirks and droll conceits. During the summer he had kept the men at work to good purpose, and not only raised a crop of maize, but made a respectable beginning with barley, wheat, and rye. It was to a well-stocked home that he politely ushered the voyagers, after wanderings which he would refrain from comparing with those of æneas and Ulysses, inasmuch as he did not like to soil their holy missionary enterprise with unclean pagan similitudes. In such whimsicalities there was a strong sympathy between the mariner of Saintonge and the lawyer of Vervins. Champlain praised Lescarbot’s thrifty housekeeping, and devised a plan whereby their table might be always well supplied. The magnates at Port Royal, who occupied the dining-room, were fifteen in number; Champlain

formed them into an order of knighthood, which he called “The Order of Good Times,” and each member in regular rotation was Grand Master of the Order for one day, during which he was responsible not only for the supply of the larder but for the cooking and serving of the meals. The result was a delicious sequence of venison, bear, and grouse, ducks, geese, and plover, as well as fresh fish innumerable, to go with their breadstuffs and dried beans. Lescarbot boasted that the fare could not be excelled in the best restaurants of Paris, and they had brought moreover such a generous quantity of claret that every man in the colony received three pints daily. Under such circumstances we need not wonder that there was no scurvy, or that there were only four deaths during the winter. Such comfort and immunity were unusual in those improvident days.

It was with high hopes that these blithe Frenchmen hailed the approach of spring, but its arrival brought unwelcome news and reminded them of the flimsiness of the basis on which such hopes had been sustained. The merchants and fishermen of Normandy and Brittany had never approved of the monopoly granted to Monts; on the contrary they had never ceased to fight against it at court with money and personal influence, and now at last

they had procured a repeal of the monopoly. Monts had spent on the enterprise a sum exceeding $100,000 of our modern money; he was allowed an indemnity of $6000 provided he could collect it from fur-traders. The blow was decisive. If it proved so hard to found colonies even with the advantages of a monopoly, clearly there was no use in going on without such aid. The good Poutrincourt could not be induced to give up his plans for Port Royal, but three years elapsed before he was enabled to renew his work there. Meanwhile we must follow the fortunes of Champlain and Monts after their return to France.

They first betook themselves to Paris, to confer with the king; and Champlain tells us how day after day he walked the streets of the great city like a man in a dream. In early days he had loved the ocean and felt suffocated in an air that was not spiced with adventure. He had now left his heart in the wilderness, a subtle robber that in such matters never makes restitution. He longed to follow up each entrancing vista in the woodland, and to improve his ac quaintance with its denizens, four-footed or winged as well as human. Especially was his curiosity whetted by the recollection of the mighty river which he had once ascended for so many miles. At

Hochelaga, or rather upon the shore where that barbaric town had once stood, he had heard of oceans to the westward, by which his informants doubtless meant the great lakes, and he had been told of a cataract a league in width, down which leaps a mighty mass of water, which certainly sounds to our ears like a reference to Niagara Falls. Champlain wished to see such things for himself, and he believed that the St. Lawrence fur-trade would prove a source of great wealth; nor was he at all lacking in missionary zeal. He was more than once heard to say that the saving of a soul is worth more than the conquest of an empire. Here then was important work which he felt that Frenchmen were called upon to do. He consulted with his comrades Monts and Pontgravé, and found in them abundant sympathy. Henry IV. was inclined to look with favour upon such schemes, but his able minister Sully took a different view. The European schemes of these two statesmen were far-reaching and of the utmost importance, and Sully believed that France had need at home of all the able-bodied men she could muster; it was poor economy, he thought, to be wasting lives in Canada. There was also the cry against monopolies, but Henry nevertheless yielded so far as to renew to Monts the monopoly in furs for one year, a concession which was far from showing the king’s customary

soundness of judgment, since it was too brief to be of much use. The grantee and his friends, however, could go on in the hope of further renewals; and so in fact they did.

In April, 1608, the expedition sailed from Honfleur, Champlain following Pontgrave at a week’s interval. On arriving at Tadousac our French adventurers got into further trouble in the matter of Father Adam’s will. Pontgrave found a party of Basques trading with the Indians, and so far were they from taking his remonstrance in good part that a tussle ensued in which they boarded his ship, killing and wounding some of his men, and seized all his fire-arms. But on the arrival of Champlain the strangers became more peacefully inclined, and an agreement was made by which the whole matter was referred to the courts of justice in France.

Champlain then pursued his way up-stream past the island of Orleans to the narrow place where a mighty promontory rears its head over opposite Point Levi. The French continued calling it by its Algonquin name Quebec, or “The Narrows,”¹ and there, in what is now the Lower Town, they speedily reared a stack of buildings enclosed by a wooden wall mounting a few cannon and loopholed for musketry. While the building was going on

there was a leaven of treason at work in the company. A locksmith, named Duval, took it into his head that more was to be gained from playing into the hands of the Spaniards who had not yet left Tadousac than from loyally serving his own country. What private motives may have urged him we do not know. The plan was to murder Champlain and hand over the new fortress and all the property to the Basques. But the secret was entrusted to too many persons, and so came to Champlain’s ears. Just as he had learned all the details a pinnace sent up from Tadousac by Pontgrave arrived upon the scene, and in it was a man whose fidelity was above suspicion. Champlain instructed him to invite Duval and three accomplices to a social evening glass in the cabin, telling them that the wine was a present from some Basque friends. The bait was eagerly swallowed, and no sooner had the plotters set foot aboard the pinnace than to their amazement they were seized and handcuffed. It was not clear just how far the plot had spread, but it mattered little now. In the middle of the summer night the little colony was aroused from its slumbers, and many a heart quaked with fear as the announcement was made of the detection of the plot and the arrest of the ringleaders. The long rays of the morning sun revealed the severed head of the locksmith Duval adorning

the wooden gateway of the courtyard; his three accomplices were sent to France to work in the galleys; and a proclamation of pardon without further inquiry put everybody else at his ease. Treason and assassination had suddenly become unpopular.

A terrible winter followed. When Pontgrave set sail for France in September with a magnificent cargo of furs he left Champlain at Quebec with twenty-eight men. At the end of May only nine of these were left alive. At last the good Pontgrave appeared with reinforcements and supplies, and it was arranged that he should carry on his trading at Quebec while Champlain should explore the country. This was a task the meaning of which was to be learned only through harsh experience, but it was obvious from the first that it would involve penetrating the forest to a great and unknown distance from any possible civilized base of operations. It was work of immense difficulty. To carry on such work with an army had well-nigh overtaxed the genius of such commanders as Soto and Coronado, with the treasury of the Indies to back them. For Champlain, without any such resources, different methods must be sought. He must venture into the wilderness with a handful of followers and as little encumbrance as possible of any sort. There seemed to be but

one feasible way of approaching this problem, and this was to cultivate the friendship of such native tribes as might be most serviceable to him on his long routes. By assimilating these expeditions to journeys through a friendly country the risks might be greatly diminished, and the solid results indefinitely increased. It was such considerations as these that started French policy in America upon the path which it was destined thenceforth to follow to the end. It was a choice that was fraught with disaster, yet it would be unjust to blame Champlain for that. Nothing short of omniscience could have looked forward through the tangle of wilderness politics that seems so simple to us looking backward. For Champlain’s purposes his choice was natural and sagacious, but as to the particular people with whom he should ally himself he can hardly be said to have had any choice. Grim destiny had already selected his allies. The valley of the St. Lawrence was the route for the fur-trade, and friendship must be preserved with the tribes along its banks and inward on the way to those great seas of which Champlain had heard. The tribes on the St. Lawrence were Algonquins whom the French called Montagnais, but who were afterward known as Adirondacks to the English of New

York. They were less intelligent and more barbarous than the Iroquois. Agriculture and village life were but slightly developed among them, they were more dependent upon hunting and fishing, and as they showed less foresight in storing provisions for the winter their numbers were more frequently depleted by famine and disease. Farther up the great river and commanding the northwestern trails were the Ottawas, another Algonquin people considerably more advanced than the Montagnais; while southerly from the Ottawas and bordering on the Georgian Bay, as already observed, were the Hurons, who rather than join the league of their Iroquois brethren preferred to maintain a sullen independence, and to this end kept up an alliance with their Algonquin neighbours. For such conduct the Hurons were denounced by the confederated Iroquois as the vilest of traitors.

Thus the allies marked out for Champlain and his colony were the neighbouring Algonquins and the Hurons. It was absolutely necessary that friendship with these tribes should be maintained. In the autumn of 1608 Champlain learned that it was in his power to do them a signal favour. A young Ottawa chief who happened to visit Quebec was astounded at its massive wooden architecture and overwhelmed with awe

at the voice of the cannon and the distant effects wrought by their bullets. Could not these weird strangers be induced to hurl their thunders and lightnings at the insolent enemy of the Algonquins? The suggestion suited Champlain’s love of adventure as well as his policy. It was an excellent means of getting access to the Ottawa’s country. Late in the following June the woods about Quebec resounded with the yells of three hundred newly arrived Hurons and Ottawas impatient to start on such an expedition as these forests had never witnessed before. It is a pity that we have no account of it from the red man’s point of view; it is fortunate, however, that we have such a narrative as Champlain’s own.

On the 28th of June, 1609, after the customary feast and war dance, they started from Quebec, some three to four hundred barbarians in bark canoes, and Champlain with eleven other Frenchmen, clad in doublets protected with light plate armour, and armed with arquebuses, in a shallop, which the Indians assured Champlain could pass without serious hindrance to the end of their route. The weapons of the red men were stone arrows, lances, and tomahawks, but already there were many sharp French hatchets to be seen which had been bought with beaver skins. Their route lay across that broad stretch of the St. Lawrence known as Lake St. Peter to the river which a generation

later received the name of Richelieu. There they paused for some fishing and feasting, and something happened which has been characteristic of savage warfare in every age. A fierce quarrel broke out among the Indians, and three fourths of the whole number quit the scene in a towering passion and paddled away for their northern homes. The depleted war party, taking a fresh start, soon reached the rapids and carrying-place above Chambly, and there it was found that the shallop could go no further, since she could not stem the rapids, and was too heavy to be carried. Why the Indians had misinformed their white ally on this point it would be hard to say. Perhaps the inborn love of hoaxing may have prevailed over military prudence, or perhaps they may have entertained misplaced notions of the Frenchman’s supernatural powers. At all events the shallop must go back to Quebec, but Champlain decided to go forward in a canoe, and from his men he selected two volunteers as companions. After they had passed the portage there was a grand roll-call, and it was found that the total force was four and twenty canoes carrying sixty feathered warriors and the three white men.

As they approached the noble lake which now bears the name of Champlain, but was long known as Lake of the Iroquois, their movements became more circumspect, they sent scouts in

advance, and occasionally they consulted the tutelar spirits of departed Algonquin and Huron heroes. To the pious Champlain this sort of invocation seemed like an uncanny attempt to raise the Devil, but he observed it narrowly and described it fully, according to his custom. A small circular tent was raised, of saplings covered with deerskins, and into it crawled the medicine-man, with shudders and groans, and drew together the skins which curtained him off from the spectators. Then the voice of the tutelar spirit was heard in a thin shrill squeak, like that of a Punch and Judy show, and if the manifestation were thoroughly successful the frail tent was rocked and swayed hither and thither with frantic energy. This motion was thought by the awestruck spectators to be the work of the spirits, but the scoffing Champlain tells us that he caught several distinct glimpses of a human fist shaking the poles, — which would seem to be a way that spirits have had in later, as in earlier times.

As the war party came nearer and nearer to the enemy’s country they took more pains in scouting, and at last they advanced only by night. As the sky reddened in the morning they would all go ashore, draw up their canoes under the bushes, and slumber on the carpet of moss and pine-needles until sunset; then they would stealthily embark and

briskly ply the paddles until dawn. It was on the 29th of July, a full month after leaving Quebec, that they were approaching the promontory since famous under its resounding Iroquois name of Ticonderoga, or “meeting of the waters,” since there Lake George is divided only by a thin strip of land from Lake Champlain; as they were approaching this promontory late in the evening they descried a dark multitude of heavy elm-bark canoes which were at once recognized as Iroquois. Naval battles are not to the red man’s taste. The Iroquois landed at once and began building a barricade, while the invaders danced a scornful jig in their canoes, and the very air was torn asunder with yells. All night the missiles in vogue were taunts and jeers, with every opprobrious and indecent epithet that the red man’s gross fancy could devise. Early in the morning the invaders landed, all except the Frenchmen, who lay at full length, covered with skins. There was no thought of tactics. The landing was unopposed, though the enemy were at least three to one. There were as many as 200 of them, all Mohawks, tall, lithe, and many of them handsome, the best fighters in the barbaric world. In the ordinary course of things the invaders would have paid dearly for their rashness. As it was, their hearts began to quake, and they called

aloud for Champlain. Then he arose and coolly stepped ashore before the astounded Mohawks, while his two comrades moving to a flank position stationed themselves among the trees. Half palsied with terror at this supernatural visitation, the Mohawks behaved like staunch men, and raised their bows to shoot, when a volley from Champlain’s arquebus, into which he had stuffed four balls, instantly slew two of their chiefs and wounded another. A second fatal shot, from one of the other Frenchmen, decided the day. The Mohawks turned and fled in a panic, leaving many prisoners in Algonquin hands. Most of these poor wretches were carried off to the Huron and Ottawa countries, to be slowly burned to death for the amusement of the squaws and children. There was an intention of indulging to some extent in this pastime on the night following the victory, but Champlain put a stop to it. The infliction of torture was a sight to which he was not accustomed; at the hissing of the live flesh under the firebrand he could not contain himself, but demanded the privilege of shooting the prisoner, and his anger was so genuine and imperative that the barbarians felt obliged to yield. After this summer day’s work there was a general movement homewards. It was a fair average specimen, doubtless, of warfare in the

Stone Age; a long, desultory march, a random fight, a few deaths on the field and a few more at the stake, and nothing definitely accomplished.

This last remark, however, will not apply to Champlain’s first forest fight. A specimen of the Stone Age in all other particulars, it was in one particular — the presence of the three Frenchmen — entirely remote from the Stone Age. In that one particular it not only accomplished something definite, but it marked an epoch. Of the many interesting military events associated with Ticonderoga it seems the most important. There was another July day 149 years later when a battle was fought at Ticonderoga in which 20,000 men were engaged and more than 2000 were killed and wounded. That battle, in which Americans and British were woefully defeated by the Marquis de Montcalm, was a marvellous piece of fighting, but it is now memorable only for its prodigies of valour which failed to redeem the dulness of the English general. It decided nothing, and so far as any appreciable effect upon the future was concerned, it might as well not have been fought. But the little fight of 1609, in which a dozen or more Indians were killed, marks with strong emphasis the beginning of the deadly hostility between the French in Canada and the strongest Indian power on the continent

of North America. In all human probability the breach between Frenchmen and Iroquois would in any case have come very soon; it is difficult to see what could have prevented it. But in point of fact it actually did begin with Champlain’s fight with the Mohawks.

On the July day when the Frenchman’s thunder and lightning so frightened those dusky warriors, a little Dutch vessel named the Half-Moon, with an English captain, was at anchor in Penobscot Bay, while the ship’s carpenter was cutting and fitting anew foremast. A few weeks later the Half-Moon dropped anchor above the site of Troy and within the very precincts over which the warriors of the Long House kept watch. How little did Henry Hudson imagine what a drama had already been inaugurated in those leafy solitudes! A few shots of an arquebus on that July morning had secured for Frenchmen the most dangerous enemy and for Dutchmen and Englishmen the most helpful friend that the mysterious American wilderness could afford.