A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Part 17

The result was that La Salle's rivals in Canada were discomfited, and peremptory orders were sent to La Barre to restore his Seigniory at Fort Frontenac and his station on the Illinois; while an expedition, destined for the Gulf of Mexico, was fitted out at La Roch.e.l.le, and eventually sailed on July 24, 1684.

[Sidenote: _La Salle's motives._]

What was in La Salle's mind in suggesting this southern adventure can only be conjectured. Was it the last desperate stake of a ruined gambler? Or was it an over-sanguine attempt to realize the great object of his life, to master the far West by moving up instead of down its waterways, by entering not through Canada, where every step would be dogged by jealousy and intrigue, but through the mouths of the Mississippi, where climate and natives would be less formidable foes than the Governor of Canada and his unscrupulous clique of confederates? If, as it is reasonable to suppose, he still clung with the determination of his character to the western enterprise, in which he had already achieved so much, he added to it a highly-coloured picture of conquest in Mexico; and he drew his map of Mexico as adjoining the lands on the Mississippi, omitting in ignorance most of the wide area of intervening territory, now included in the State of Texas.

[Sidenote: _The expedition sails._]

[Sidenote: _It reaches the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico._]

[Sidenote: _Landing on the sh.o.r.es of Texas._]

Four vessels set sail, freighted with all things necessary to found a colony, carrying soldiers, artisans, married women, and young girls.

They were a doomed company; from first to last all went wrong. There was divided command, and Beaujeu, the admiral of the ships, a Norman like La Salle, had with some reason little confidence in the expedition or its leader. They made in the first instance for St.

Domingo, but one of the four ships which was carrying the stores was cut off by Spanish buccaneers before reaching the island. At St.

Domingo, La Salle was laid low with fever; and, while he was between life and death, his followers rioted and sickened on sh.o.r.e. After a delay of two months, the {166} expedition started again, weakened by desertion and disease. The ships entered the Gulf of Mexico, pa.s.sed--without knowing it--the mouths of the Mississippi, and on New Year's Day, 1685, anch.o.r.ed off the coast of Texas. Somewhere on this coast, in the vicinity either of Matagorda Bay or of Galveston Bay, La Salle effected a landing, where a series of lagoons that lined the sh.o.r.e concealed, as he thought, the main outlet of the Mississippi.

Disaster still attended the enterprise: one of the ships was wrecked on the reefs, the natives of the land proved unfriendly; and when Beaujeu, the admiral, having given what help he could, sailed away in the middle of March, he left behind on desolate sh.o.r.es a despondent band of French men and women groping for a river which could not be found, in present trouble and without clear guidance for the future.

[Sidenote: _Founding of Fort St. Louis._]

[Sidenote: _Distress of the settlement._]

[Sidenote: _Attempt to reach Canada._]

Skirting the sea-line, the would-be colonists had reached a large bay, into the head of which a river ran; and on the banks of this stream La Salle formed a settlement, to which, as to his colony on the Illinois, he gave the name of Fort St. Louis. Gathered within palisades, the settlers worked and waited, dwindling in numbers, while their leader explored, but explored in vain. Setting out at the end of October, 1685, La Salle returned in the following March, having accomplished nothing and having lost his last vessel, a small frigate, the _Belle_. Again in a month's time, towards the end of April, 1686, he set out to make his way to Canada; once more, in October, he returned to the fort, baffled and disappointed. His followers were sadly reduced in numbers: of some 180, no more than forty-five were left; and of them he could trust but few. Return to France was cut off, and from France time had shown that no help was forthcoming. There was no alternative but to make one more attempt to reach Canada, and thence to bring rescue to the fort in Texas.

[Sidenote: _Death of La Salle._]

It was a forlorn hope at best, but the attempt was made. {167} Half of the company remained at the fort. The others, including La Salle's brother, the Abbe Cavelier, and two young nephews, followed La Salle himself on his northward journey. It was on January 7, 1687, that the party set out to make their way painfully over prairies, across rivers, through forest, thicket, and scrub. On March 19, near the Trinity river, La Salle fell dead, ambushed and shot by his own men.

No career ever had a more squalid or pitiable ending. It ended in commonplace mutiny and murder. Three or four scoundrels, discontented and badly handled, nursed their personal grudges against a severe and domineering leader, until, in an outbreak of irritation, they killed three of his immediate following and the leader himself.

[Sidenote: _Fate of his company._]

The brother escaped; so did one of the nephews, and Joutel, a gardener's son from Rouen--the most honest and capable of the band--who afterwards told the unvarnished tale. They companied for a while with the murderers, roaming among the Indians of the west, until one and another of the guilty men fell by each other's hands or strayed into savagery. In the end seven Frenchmen, with the help of Indian guides, reached the Arkansas river, found an outpost established there by Tonty, made their way thence to the Illinois, and so to Canada and France. On the Illinois and in Canada they concealed, from policy or fear, the fact of La Salle's death. In the dead man's name his brother, the coward priest, obtained from Tonty advances for his home journey; and it was not till after he was safe in Europe, in the autumn of 1688, that the tragedy came to light.

[Sidenote: _Indifference in France as to La Salle's death._]

Few seemed to care. A man had gone, who by the age of forty-three had achieved great deeds, had dared and suffered much; but he was a man who had few friends and many enemies, and he served a Government in whose eyes failure was a crime, and to which grat.i.tude was unknown.

{168} An order was given that, if the murderers reappeared in Canada, they should be arrested, and with that order the name of La Salle pa.s.sed out of official ken.

[Sidenote: _Extermination of the colony in Texas._]

[Sidenote: _Tonty's faithfulness._]

The Government made no attempt to relieve the hapless exiles in Texas. They were left to perish, just as, many years before, the Huguenot settlers in Florida had been abandoned and betrayed. Tonty alone was mindful of his friend. Already, in 1686, before La Salle had started on his last march, he had descended the Mississippi to its mouth, and had searched the coast in vain, hoping to bring succour and relief; and when, in the autumn of 1688, he knew the full truth, again he started, to save if possible the remnant of the expedition. He penetrated to the Red river and beyond, but could not reach the fort in Texas; and it was from Spanish sources that the fate of the last settlers was afterwards known. An expedition from Mexico, sent to root out the intruders, found the fort a desolate ruin. The Indians had been beforehand in the work of destruction, and had butchered or carried off the inmates, two or three of whom exchanged captivity among savages for Spanish prisons.

[Sidenote: _Importance of La Salle's work._]

Such was the end of La Salle's last venture--misery, ruin, death, and, for the time, comparative oblivion. Yet his name lives in history and deserves to live, and his work was not all undone. We look back not merely on his hardihood and his sufferings. We see in him not only an explorer of the boldest type; but he stands out pre-eminently as the man, who, above all others, grasped the conception of a North American dominion, which should be from sea to sea--based on the great geographical factor in North America, its nearly continuous water communication--and in which the natives of North America should be banded together in war and peace, under the leadership of France. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, by river and lake, his vision was that Frenchmen and their native subjects should come and go, carrying from fort to {169} fort, from settlement to settlement, the produce of forest and prairie, the wealth of the West.

It was a great conception, too great to be realized; but it harmonized with the genius of the French people. Their gift was to be ever moving, their strength was not to sit still. What success they won was on the lines that La Salle marked out. With all his failures, he knew the land and he knew his race.

[Sidenote: _Colonization of Louisiana by Iberville._]

The eighteenth century had not ended before the colonization of Louisiana became more than a dream. Tonty continued to urge it. The English threatened to take it in hand; Spain was rea.s.serting her claim to the ownership of the Gulf of Mexico; and, lest the French should be excluded altogether, Le Moyne d'Iberville, best of Canadian leaders, obtained permission to sail for the Mississippi. More skilful than La Salle, or better informed, he reached its mouth in March, 1699; but the first settlements were made to the east of the river, at Biloxi in the present State of Mississippi, and on Mobile Bay. It was not till the year 1718 that the city of New Orleans was first founded by Bienville, Iberville's brother, who at intervals governed Louisiana for many years. Bandied about from Crown to company, and from company to Crown, the prey of speculators, the scene, like Canada itself, of artificial settlement and regulated colonization, Louisiana made but slow progress. Yet in time it became a factor to be reckoned with in North American history, and to connect it with Canada was in the eighteenth century the aim of the rulers of New France.

[Sidenote: _The Illinois abandoned by the French._]

In 1702, Tonty left Fort St. Louis on the Illinois to join Iberville in the south, and, except for a few years at a little later date, that fort was abandoned. The Indians, too, who had gathered round it, dispersed; some of them moved down to the Mississippi; and connexion between Canada and Louisiana was afterwards sought not so much by the Illinois river, as by the line of the Ohio, the earliest scene of La Salle's discoveries.

{170}

CHAPTER VI

ACADIA AND HUDSON BAY

In the last chapter the main stream of Canadian history has been followed down to the Treaty of Utrecht. New France was essentially the colony on the St. Lawrence; but with the story of Canada proper the story of Acadia is interwoven, and Acadia under another name now forms part of the Canadian Dominion. To complete the tale to 1713, it is necessary to go back to the early days of settlement in the present Maritime Provinces of the Dominion. Some notice must also be made of English commercial enterprise on the northern side of Canada, the sh.o.r.es of Hudson Bay.

[Sidenote: _Acadia._]

Acadia, Acadie--a name which the French took from the Indians[1]--included an ill-defined region. Whoever held it, at any given time, naturally claimed as large an area as possible, and, after it was ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, the question of the boundary was a fruitful source of trouble. Under the French, Acadia was roughly coterminous with the present provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and part of the State of Maine; but Acadia proper was the peninsula of Nova Scotia. There, and on the immediately adjoining coast of the mainland, the fighting and the raids took place. It was not until after the Peace of Utrecht was signed that Cape Breton Island, whose name recalls the nationality of early voyagers to North America, became, under the new t.i.tle of ile Royale, a renowned stronghold of France; while Prince Edward Island, the ile de {171} St. Jean, played little part in the early history of North America.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 36, note.]

[Sidenote: _The peninsula of Nova Scotia._]

Linked to the continent by the isthmus of Chignecto, sixteen miles in breadth, the peninsula of Nova Scotia runs for some 300 miles north-east and south-west, parallel to the North American coast. From that coast it is separated on the southern side of the isthmus by the Bay of Fundy--the Baie Francoise as it was called in old days--a bay into which the sea runs strong and which divides at the head, forming on the left, the mainland side, Chignecto Bay, on the right the Basin of Mines. The sh.o.r.es of this latter land-locked basin were in the eighteenth century a well-known scene of Acadian settlement, and here stood the village of Grand Pre. On the same side of Nova Scotia, lower down than the Basin of Mines, is Annapolis harbour, better known in old days as Port Royal. The opposite sides of New Brunswick and Maine are deeply indented by the estuaries of various rivers--the St. John, the St. Croix, now the border stream between Canada and the United States, and, further south, the Pen.o.bscot and the Kennebec, names that constantly occur in the story of Acadian and New England warfare. Cape Sable--the sand cape--is the southernmost point of Nova Scotia: midway on the Atlantic side of the peninsula is Halifax harbour, formerly known as Chebucto; and on the north the narrow strait known as the Gut of Canso divides Nova Scotia proper from Cape Breton Island. Cape Breton Island on the south, Newfoundland on the north, mark the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They are the b.u.t.tresses of the main gateway of Canada.

[Sidenote: _Geographical importance of Acadia._]

Sea-girt and sea-beaten was and is Acadia, with broken sh.o.r.es and many bays, where fishermen and freebooters came and went: a land to nurse a hardy race in small and scattered settlements, nestling in nooks and corners by inlets of the sea. Its importance did not lie in natural riches, but in its geographical position. It was the borderland of French and {172} English colonization. Whoever held in strength Acadia and Cape Breton on the one side, and Newfoundland on the other, could command the river of Canada.

[Sidenote: _Acadia was in the English sphere of colonization, but was all important to France._]

Taking the two spheres of colonization, the seaboard settlements of the English on the one hand, the inland river settlements of the French on the other, it is clear that Acadia naturally belonged to the former; it was within the sphere of which Boston was the centre, not within that which was ruled by Quebec. The coasts of Maine, of New Brunswick, and of Nova Scotia prolong the sh.o.r.es of New England: any dividing line has been made by man not by nature. The Boston fishermen went faring north, not into strange waters or by foreign coasts, for land and sea were as their own. Between Quebec and Port Royal, on the other hand, there was no natural connexion, yet the possession of Acadia was of more vital importance to France than to England. With Acadia in French hands the New England colonies could still grow in strength; but English occupation of Acadia, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland meant the beginning of the end for New France, the closing of the St. Lawrence, if England kept command of the sea. Thus it was that in the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of Utrecht the French King fought hard to keep Acadia, and, thwarted in this endeavour, made the most of Cape Breton Island, rearing in it the strong fortress of Louisbourg.

[Sidenote: _Early settlers in Acadia._]

Acadia then was a borderland, and its history resembled that of other borderlands. Its first settlers were French, and the majority of the scanty population remained French in language, in tradition, in religion, in sympathy; but for years rival adventurers squabbled and fought, with doubtful allegiance to England or France.

[Sidenote: _The De la Tours._]

We have seen how in 1613 the freebooter Argall,[2] sailing up from Virginia, destroyed Poutrincourt's settlement at Port Royal. In spite of this disaster, Biencourt, {173} Poutrincourt's son, with a handful of Frenchmen, few but st.u.r.dy, still held fast to the sh.o.r.es of Acadia. Among them was a French Huguenot, Claude etienne de la Tour, who with his son, Charles de la Tour, had come out from France in or about the year 1609. When the Port Royal settlement was broken up, he crossed over to the mouth of the Pen.o.bscot, and held a station there until the year 1626, when he was driven out by an expedition from New England. Biencourt appears to have died either in Acadia or in France about the year 1623, and the younger La Tour became the foremost man among the French settlers, holding a small fort near Cape Sable, which seems to have been known by various names--Fort Louis, Fort l'Omeroy or Lomeron, and Fort or Port Latour. In 1627, according to the ordinary account, the father went to France to interest the French Government in the fortunes of Acadia, and to secure the position and t.i.tle of Governor for his son. It was the year in which Richelieu founded the company of the One Hundred a.s.sociates, and in 1628 a French squadron was sent out to America. The ships were intercepted by David Kirke, and Claude de la Tour, who was on board, was carried a prisoner to England.

[Footnote 2: See above, p. 42.]