Canada - Sir John George Bourinot (thriller novels to read .txt) 📗

at that time managed by the Huguenots, William and Emeric Caen. They were, however, received by the Recollets, who had removed to a convent, Notre-Dame des Anges, which they had built by the St. Charles, of sufficient strength to resist an attack which, it is reported on sufficiently good authority, the Iroquois made in 1622. The first Jesuit establishment was built in 1625 on the point at the meeting of the Lairet and St. Charles, where Cartier had made his little fort ninety years before.

We come now to a critical point in the fortunes of the poor and struggling colony. The ruling spirit of France, Cardinal Richelieu, at last intervened in Canadian affairs, and formed the Company of New France, generally called the company of the Hundred Associates, who received a perpetual monopoly of the fur-trade, and a control of all other commerce for sixteen years, beside dominion over an immense territory extending from Florida to the Arctic Seas, and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the great Fresh Water Sea, the extent of which was not yet known. Richelieu placed himself at the head of the enterprise. No Huguenot thenceforth was to be allowed to enter the colony under any conditions. The company was bound to send out immediately a {87} number of labourers and mechanics, with all their necessary tools, to the St. Lawrence, and four thousand other colonists in the course of fifteen years, and to support them for three years. Not only was the new association a great commercial corporation, but it was a feudal lord as well. Richelieu introduced in a modified form the old feudal tenure of France, with the object of creating a Canadian _noblesse_ and encouraging men of good birth and means to emigrate and develop the resources of the country. This was the beginning of that seigniorial tenure which lasted for two centuries and a quarter.

Champlain was re-appointed lieutenant-governor and had every reason to believe that at last a new spirit would be infused into the affairs of the colony. Fate, however, was preparing for him a cruel blow. In the spring of 1628, the half-starved men of Quebec were anxiously looking for the provisions and men expected from France, when they were dismayed by the news that an English fleet was off the Saguenay. This disheartening report was immediately followed by a message to surrender the fort of Quebec to the English admiral, David Kirk. War had been declared between England and France, through the scheming chiefly of Buckingham, the rash favourite of Charles the First, and an intense hater of the French King for whose queen, Anne of Austria, he had developed an ardent and unrequited passion. English settlements were by this time established on Massachusetts Bay and England was ambitious of extending her dominion over North {88} America, even in those countries where France had preceded her.

Admiral Kirk, who was the son of a gentleman in Derbyshire, and one of the pioneers of the colonisation of Newfoundland, did not attempt the taking of Quebec in 1628, as he was quite satisfied with the capture off the Saguenay, of a French expedition, consisting of four armed vessels and eighteen transports, under the command of Claude de Roquemont, who had been sent by the new company to relieve Quebec. Next year, however, in July, he brought his fleet again to the Saguenay, and sent three ships to Quebec under his brothers, Lewis and Thomas. Champlain immediately surrendered, as his little garrison were half-starved and incapable of making any resistance, and the English flag floated for the first time on the fort of St. Louis. Champlain and his companions, excepting thirteen who remained with the English, went on board the English ships, and Lewis Kirk was left in charge of Quebec. On the way down the river, the English ships met a French vessel off Malbaie, under the command of Emeric Caen, and after a hot fight she became also an English prize.

When the fleet arrived in the harbour of Plymouth, the English Admiral heard to his amazement that peace had been declared some time before, and that all conquests made by the fleets or armies of either France or England after 24th April, 1629, must be restored. The Kirks and Alexander used every possible exertion to prevent the restoration of Quebec and Port Royal, which was also in the {89} possession of the English. Three years elapsed before Champlain obtained a restitution of his property, which had been illegally seized. The King of England, Charles I., had not only renewed a charter, which his father had given to a favourite, Sir William Alexander, of the present province of Nova Scotia, then a part of Acadia, but had also extended it to the "county and lordship of Canada." Under these circumstances Charles delayed the negotiations for peace by every possible subterfuge. At last the French King, whose sister was married to Charles, agreed to pay the large sum of money which was still owing to the latter as the balance of the dower of his queen. Charles had already commenced that fight with his Commons, which was not to end until his head fell on the block, and was most anxious to get money wherever and as soon as he could. The result was the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, signed on March 29, 1632. Quebec as well as Port Royal--to whose history I shall refer in the following chapter--were restored to France, and Champlain was again in his fort on Cape Diamond in the last week of May, 1633. A number of Jesuits, who were favoured by Richelieu, accompanied him and henceforth took the place of the Recollets in the mission work of the colony. In 1634, there were altogether eight Jesuit priests in the country. They appear to have even borrowed the name of the Recollet convent, _Notre Dame des Anges_, and given it to their own establishment and seigniory by the St. Charles.

During the last three years of Champlain's life in Canada no events of importance occurred. The {90} Company of the Hundred Associates had been most seriously crippled by the capture of the expedition in 1628, and were not able to do very much for the colony. The indefatigable lieutenant-governor, true to his trust, succeeded in building a little fort in 1634 at the mouth of the St. Maurice, and founded the present city of Three Rivers, as a bulwark against the Iroquois. It had, however, been for years a trading place, where Brother Du Plessis spent some time in instructing the Indian children and people in the Catholic religion, and was instrumental in preventing a rising of the Montagnais Indians who had become discontented and proposed to destroy the French settlements.

On Christmas Day, 1635, Champlain died from a paralytic stroke in the fort, dominating the great river by whose banks he had toiled and struggled for so many years as a faithful servant of his king and country. Father Le Jeune pronounced the eulogy over his grave, the exact site of which is even now a matter of dispute.

What had the patient and courageous Frenchman of Brouage accomplished during the years--nearly three decades--since he landed at the foot of Cape Diamond? On the verge of the heights a little fort of logs and a chateau of masonry, a few clumsy and wretched buildings on the point below, a cottage and clearing of the first Canadian farmer Hebert, the ruins of the Recollet convent and the mission house of the Jesuits on the St. Charles, the chapel of Notre-Dame de Recouvrance, which he had built close to the fort to commemorate the restoration of {91} Quebec to the French, the stone manor-house of the first seignior of Canada, Robert Giffard of Beauport, a post at Tadousac and another at Three Rivers, perhaps two hundred Frenchmen in the whole valley. These were the only visible signs of French dominion on the banks of the St. Lawrence, when the cold blasts of winter sighed Champlain's requiem on the heights whence his fancy had so often carried him to Cathay. The results look small when we think of the patience and energy shown by the great man whose aspirations took so ambitious and hopeful a range. It is evident by the last map he drew of the country, that he had some idea of the existence of a great lake beyond Lake Huron, and of the Niagara Falls, though he had seen neither. He died, however, ignorant of the magnitude, number, and position of the western lakes, and still deluded by visions, as others after him, of a road to Asia. No one, however, will deny that he was made of the heroic mould from which come founders of states, and the Jesuit historian Charlevoix has, with poetic justice, called him the "Father of New France."



[1] Brule was murdered by the Hurons in 1634 at Toanche, an Indian village in the West.



VII.


GENTLEMEN-ADVENTURERS IN ACADIA.

(1614-1677.)

We must now leave the lonely Canadian colonists on the snow-clad heights of Quebec to mourn the death of their great leader, and return to the shores of Acadia to follow the fortunes of Biencourt and his companions whom we last saw near the smoking ruins of their homes on the banks of the Annapolis. We have now come to a strange chapter of Canadian history, which has its picturesque aspect as well as its episodes of meanness, cupidity, and inhumanity. As we look back to those early years of Acadian history, we see rival chiefs with their bands of retainers engaged in deadly feuds, and storming each other's fortified posts as though they were the castles of barons living in mediaeval times. We see savage Micmacs and Etchemins of Acadia, only too willing to aid in the quarrels and contests of the white men who hate each with a malignity that even the Indian cannot excel; closely shorn, ill-clad mendicant friars who see only good in those who {93} help their missions; grave and cautious Puritans trying to find their advantage in the rivalry of their French neighbours; a Scotch nobleman and courtier who would be a king in Acadia as well as a poet in England; Frenchmen who claim to have noble blood in their veins, and wish to be lords of a wide American domain; a courageous wife who lays aside the gentleness of a woman's nature and fights as bravely as any knight for the protection of her home and what she believes to be her husband's rights. These are among the figures that we see passing through the shadowy vista which opens before us as we look into the depths of the Acadian wilderness two centuries and a half ago.

Among the French adventurers, whose names are intimately associated with the early history of Acadia, no one occupies a more prominent position than Charles de St. Etienne, the son of a Huguenot, Claude de la Tour, who claimed to be of noble birth. The La Tours had become so poor that they were forced, like so many other nobles of those times, to seek their fortune in the new world. Claude and his son, then probably fourteen years of age, came to Port Royal with Poutrincourt in 1610. In the various vicissitudes of the little settlement the father and his son participated, and after it had been destroyed by Argall, they remained with Biencourt and his companions. In the course of time, the elder La Tour established a trading post on the peninsula at the mouth of the