A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Part 8

Quebec fell and New France was lost. The Convention of Susa and the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye were signed and executed, and the One Hundred a.s.sociates resumed their charge of Canada. Under them Champlain held the government of New France till he died, being succeeded by a soldier, M. de Montmagny, who reached Quebec in June, 1636.

[Sidenote: _Three Rivers. Montreal. Sorel._]

In 1634, while Champlain was still alive, a fort was begun at Three Rivers. The first permanent settlement at Montreal dates from the spring of 1642, and in the same year Fort Richelieu was founded on the site of the present town of Sorel,[1] where the Richelieu--the river of the Iroquois--joins the St. Lawrence. For many years Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal practically comprised New France. Outside them were fur-traders and Jesuit missionaries, carrying their lives in their hands. A few farms were taken up along the river above and below Quebec, but colonization was almost non-existent, and small groups of priests and soldiers at two or three points on the St.

Lawrence feebly upheld the power of France in North America.

[Footnote 1: 'So called from M. de Saurel, who reconstructed the fort in 1665' (Kingsford's _History of Canada_, vol. i, p. 185).]

[Sidenote: _Slow progress of Canada up to 1663._]

The company of the One Hundred a.s.sociates lasted till 1663, and little they did for the land or for themselves. At the end of their tenure, the whole French population of Canada hardly reached 2,500 souls. It had been an integral part of the company's programme to people Canada with French men and French women, but, inasmuch as Huguenots were rigidly excluded, the motive for emigration was wanting. The Catholic citizens of France were comfortable at home.

They might wish to trade with Canada, but they did not wish to spend their lives there. The soldiers of France went out only under orders; they looked for brighter battlefields than the North American backwoods. Priests and nuns {82} alone felt a call to cross the Atlantic, to face the most rigorous winters and the most savage foes.

The French religion was firmly planted in North America during these early years, but the French people were left behind.

De Montmagny was Governor for twelve years, till 1648. His successors under the company's regime were D'Ailleboust, De Lauzon, the Vicomte d'Argenson, and Baron d'Avaugour. Under the Governors there were commandants of the garrisons at Three Rivers and Montreal; and from 1636 onwards there was some kind of Council for framing ordinances and regulating the administration of justice, the Governor and the leading ecclesiastics being always members, and representatives of the settlers being from time to time admitted. In 1645, moreover, the company was reorganized, and the fur trade, which had been vested in the a.s.sociates, was handed over to the colonists. Notwithstanding, there was little increase of strength and little growth of population till the year 1663, and up to that date the history of Canada is no more than a record of savage warfare and missionary enterprise.

[Sidenote: _The foundation of Montreal._]

Religious enthusiasts founded Montreal, and the foundation of Montreal was a challenge to the Iroquois. Always the enemies of the French, the Five Nations saw in the settlement a new menace to their power. Above the Richelieu river, they looked on the St. Lawrence as more especially within their own domain; and when Frenchmen took up ground on the island of Montreal, the Indians resented the intrusion with savage bitterness and with more than savage foresight. On the part of the French, state policy had nothing to say to the new undertaking, nor was it a commercial venture. It was simply and solely the outcome of religious zeal untempered by discretion.

[Sidenote: _The Jesuits in Canada._]

[Sidenote: _They did not promote colonization._]

The Jesuits had abundantly advertised in France the spiritual needs of Canada. They had much to tell, and they told it well, skilful in narrative as they were bold in action. {83} They attracted money to the missionary cause, they enlisted brave men, and, still more, brave and beautiful women. Convents were founded in America, and hospitals; priests and nuns led and lost heroic lives, to widen the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, and to convert the heathen. The deeds done, and the sufferings endured, commanded, and still command admiration, yet withal there was an element of barrenness in the work; it was magnificent, but it was not colonization. It was unsound in two main essentials. First and foremost, liberty was wanting. The white men and the red were to be dominated alike: North America and its peoples were to be in perpetual leading strings, prepared for freedom in the world to come by unquestioning obedience on this side the grave. The Protestant, however narrow and prejudiced in his dealings and mode of life, in theory held and preached a religion which set free, a gospel of glorious liberty. The Roman Catholic missionary preached and acted self-sacrifice so complete, that all freedom of action was eliminated. There was a second and a very practical defect in the system. What Canada wanted was a white population, married settlers, men with wives and children. What the Jesuits asked for, and what they secured, was a following of celibates, men and women sworn to childlessness. The Protestant pastor in New England lived among his flock as one of themselves; he made a human home, and gave hostages to fortune; a line of children perpetuated his name, and family ties gave the land where he settled another aspect than that of a mission field. The Roman Catholic priest was tied to his church, but to nothing else. At her call he was here to-day, and, it might be, gone to-morrow. He more than shared the sufferings and the sorrows of those to whom he ministered, but his life was apart from theirs, and he left no children behind him. Martyrs and virgins the Roman Catholic Church sent out to Canada, but it did not send out men and women. In comparing {84} English and French colonization in America, two points of contrast stand out above all others--the much larger numbers of English settlers, and the much greater activity of French missionaries. Both facts were in great measure due to the influence of the Roman Catholic religion, and notably to the celibacy of its ministers.

[Sidenote: _Religious enthusiasts in Canada._]

Histories of Canada give full s.p.a.ce to the names, the characters, and the careers of the bishops, priests, and nuns who moulded the childhood of New France, and to the struggle for supremacy between the Jesuits and rival sects. We have portraits of the Jesuit heroes Breboeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, Isaac Jogues, and many others; of the ladies whose wealth or whose personal efforts founded the Hotel Dieu at Quebec and at Montreal; of Madame de la Peltrie, Marie Guyard the Mere de l'Incarnation, Jeanne Mance, and Marguerite Bourgeoys; of Laval the first of Canadian bishops; but the record of their devoted lives has only an indirect bearing on the history of colonization. It will be enough to notice very shortly the founding of Montreal, and the episode of the Huron missions, as being landmarks in Canadian story.

[Sidenote: _Montreal settled by a company connected with St.

Sulpice._]

Montreal, it will be remembered, had been in Cartier's time the site of an Indian town, which afterwards disappeared. Champlain had marked it out as a place for a future settlement, and the keen eyes of the Jesuits looked to the island as a mission centre. It had become the property of De Lauzon, one of the One Hundred a.s.sociates and afterwards Governor of Canada, and he transferred his grant to a company, the Company of Montreal, formed exclusively for the service of religion, and especially connected with the priests of St.

Sulpice. The first settlers numbered about sixty in all, in charge of a chivalrous soldier, De Maisonneuve, and including one of the religious heroines of the time, Mdlle. Jeanne Mance, who was entrusted with funds by a rich French lady to found a hospital. They arrived in Canada in 1641, {85} and in spite of the warnings of the Governor, who urged that they should settle within reach of Quebec on the Island of Orleans, they chose their site at Montreal in the same autumn, and in the following spring began to build a settlement.

Ville Marie was the name given to it at the time, the enterprise being dedicated to the Virgin. At the first ceremony, on landing, a Jesuit priest bade the little band of worshippers be of good courage, for they were as the grain of mustard seed; and now the distant, dangerous outpost of France in North America, which a few whole-hearted zealots founded, has become the great city of Montreal.

[Sidenote: _The influence of religion on colonization._]

Religion has been a potent force in colonial history. On the one hand it has promoted emigration. It carried the Huguenots from France to other lands. It peopled New England with Puritans. On the other hand, it has sent forerunners of the coming white men among the coloured races, bearers of a message of peace, but too often bringing in their train the sword. As explorers and as pioneers, missionaries have done much for colonization; but from another point of view they have endangered the cause by going too fast and too far. In South Africa, a hundred years ago, the work, the speeches, and the writings of Protestant missionaries led indirectly to the dispersion of colonists, to race feuds, and to political complications which, but for this agency, would certainly have been postponed, and might possibly never have arisen. Similarly in Canada, Jesuit activity and forwardness added to the difficulties and dangers with which the French settlers and their rulers had to contend.

[Sidenote: _Montreal and the Five Nations._]

The Governor, who vainly attempted to dissuade the founders of Montreal from going so far afield, was right in his warnings. Very few were the French in North America, their struggle for existence was hard, their enemies were watchful and unrelenting. Safety lay in concentration, in making Quebec a strong and comparatively populous centre, in keeping aloof from the Iroquois, instead of straying within {86} their range. To form a weak settlement 160 miles higher up the river than Quebec, within striking distance of the Five Nations, was to provoke the Indians and to offer them a prey. This was the immediate result of the foundation of Montreal. Year after year went by, and there was the same tale to tell: a tale of a hand to mouth existence, of settlers cooped up within their palisades, ploughing the fields at the risk of their lives, cut off by twos and threes, murdered or carried into captivity. Moreover, between Montreal in its weakness and the older and stronger settlement at Quebec, there was an element of jealousy. What with rival commandants and rival ecclesiastics, controversy within and ravening Iroquois without, the early days of the French in Canada were days of sorrow.

[Sidenote: _The Huron missions._]

Far away from civilization in the seventeenth century was Montreal, but further still was the Huron country. The first white man to visit the Hurons was the Recollet friar, Le Caron, in the year 1615, and from that date onward, till Kirke took Quebec, a very few Franciscan and Jesuit priests preached their faith by the sh.o.r.es of Georgian Bay. Suspended for a short time, while the English held Canada, the missions were resumed by the Jesuits in 1634, foremost among the missionaries being Father de Breboeuf, who had already worked among the Hurons, and came back to work and die.

Few stories are so dramatic, few have been so well told[2] as the tale of the Huron missions. No element of tragedy is wanting. The background of the scene gives a sense of distance and immensity. The action is comprised in very few years, years of bright promise, speedily followed by absolute desolation. The contrast between the actors on either side is as great as can be found in the range of human life, between savages almost superhuman in savagery, and Christian preachers almost superhuman in endurance and {87} self-sacrifice; and all through there runs the pity of it, the pathos of a religion of love bearing as its first-fruits barren martyrdom and wholesale extermination.

[Footnote 2: By Francis Parkman in _The Jesuits in North America_.]

Between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay the Hurons dwelt, accessible to the Frenchmen only by the Ottawa river and Lake Nip.i.s.sing, for the Iroquois barred the alternative route up the St. Lawrence and by Lake Ontario. Montreal was left far behind, and many miles of a toilsome, dangerous route were traversed, until by the sh.o.r.es of the great freshwater sea were found the homes of a savage but a settled people.

To men inspired by religion and by Imperial views of religion, who looked to be the ministers of a world-wide power, including and dominating all the kingdoms of the earth, the greatness of the distances, the remoteness of the land, the unbounded area of unknown waters stretching far off to the west, were but calls to the imagination and incentives to redoubled effort.

But, ambitious as they were, the Jesuits were not mere enthusiasts: they were practical and politic men, diplomatists in the American backwoods as at the Court of France. Not wandering outcasts, like the Algonquins of the lower St. Lawrence; not, like the Iroquois, wholly given to perpetual murder; with some peaceful impulses, traders to a small extent, and tillers of the ground, and above all, since Champlain first came among them, sworn allies of the French--the Hurons seemed such a people as might be moulded to a new faith, and become a beacon attracting other North American natives to the light of Christianity. So the Jesuit fathers went among them in 1634, and in 1640 built and fortified a central mission station--St. Marie--a mile from where a little river--the Wye--flows into an inlet of Lake Huron.

To convert a race of suspicious savages is no easy task. The priests carried their lives in their hands. They were pitted against native sorcerers, they were called upon to give {88} rain, they were held responsible for small-pox. Yet year by year, by genuine goodness and by pious fraud, they made headway, until some eleven mission posts were in existence among the Hurons and the neighbouring tribes, the most remote station being at the outlet of Lake Superior. The promise was good. Money was forthcoming from France. There were eighteen priests at work, there were lay a.s.sistants, there was a handful of French soldiers. Earthly as well as spiritual wants were supplied at St. Marie, and far off in safety at Quebec was a seminary for Huron children. It seemed as though on the far western horizon of discovery and colonization, the Roman Catholic Church was achieving a signal triumph, its agents being Frenchmen, and its political work being credited to France. Yet after fifteen years all was over, and the land was left desolate without inhabitants. The heathen learnt from their Christian teachers to obey and to suffer, but in learning they lost the spirit of resistance and of savage manhood. As in Paraguay, a more submissive race, under Jesuit influence, dwindled in numbers, so even the Hurons, after the French priests came among them, seem to have become an easier prey than before to their hereditary foes.

[Sidenote: _Destruction of the missions by the Iroquois._]

[Sidenote: _Dispersion of the Hurons._]

In July, 1648, the mission station of St. Joseph, fifteen miles from St. Marie, was utterly destroyed, the priest in charge was shot dead, and 700 prisoners were carried off. In the following year 1,200 warriors of the Five Nations swept like a torrent through the Huron cantons, fifteen native towns were attacked, ravaged, and burnt, and the brave priest, De Breboeuf, was tortured and slain. Other devoted missionaries shared his fate; the shepherds were slaughtered, and the survivors of the flock were scattered abroad. For the Hurons made little or no attempt to defend themselves; fear came upon them and trouble; they fell down, and there was none to help them. The fort at St. Marie stood, for even the Iroquois hesitated to attack armed walls; but its purpose {89} was gone with the slaughter and dispersion of the Huron clans. The priests who still lived abandoned it, and spent a miserable winter with a crowd of Indian fugitives on a neighbouring island in Lake Huron. There too they built a fort; but famine and the Iroquois followed them, and in 1650 they left the country, taking with them to Quebec some 300 Huron converts. The refugees were settled on the Isle of Orleans; yet even there, five or six years later, they were attacked by the Iroquois, and at length they found a secure abiding-place at Lorette, near the banks of the river St. Charles. The rest of their kinsfolk were scattered abroad.

Some were incorporated in the Five Nations. Others, driven from point to point, were found in after years at the northern end of Lake Michigan or at Detroit, and, under the new name of Wyandots, played some part in later Canadian history; but the Huron nation was blotted out, the Huron country became a desert, and the light which had shone brightly for a few years in the far-off land was put out for ever.

[Sidenote: _Weakness of the French in Canada._]

Most readers of the story of the Huron missions will study it mainly as an episode in religious enterprise. They will note the heroism of the Jesuit priests--their faithfulness unto death, their constancy under torture and suffering not surpa.s.sed by the stoicism of the North American Indians themselves. They will mourn the failure of their efforts, the butchery, the martyrdom, but will record that all was not absolutely thrown away; for even in the lodges of the Five Nations we read that some of the nameless Hurons held to the faith which their French teachers loved and served so well. But this is not the true moral of the story. The significance of the events lay in proving the French to be weak and the Iroquois to be strong, in demonstrating with horrible thoroughness that the white men in Canada were powerless to protect their friends, in thus making more difficult what was difficult enough already, in r.e.t.a.r.ding the progress of {90} European colonization in Canada. The want of concentration, the attempt to do too much, the somewhat paralysing influence of the particular form of the Christian religion which the French brought with them--all these elements of weakness came out in connexion with the Huron missions; and meanwhile precious years were lost to France which could not be afterwards made good; for in these same years the English, not producing martyrs and heroes, so much as fathers of families, were taking firm root in North American soil, plodding slowly but surely along the road to colonization.

[Sidenote: _The strength and ferocity of the Iroquois._]

The Iroquois were like man-eating tigers. The taste of human blood whetted their appet.i.te for more. Fresh from the slaughter of the Hurons, in 1650-1 they fell upon the Neutral Nation, whose home was on the northern sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie, stretching to the east across the Niagara river. The Neutrals had held aloof from Iroquois and Huron alike, whence their name; but their neutrality did not protect them from utter extermination at the hands of the Five Nations. Over against them on the southern side of the lake were the Eries, second to none as ferocious savages, and known to the French as the 'Nation of the Cats.' Their turn came next, in 1654-5. They fought hard, behind palisades and with poisoned arrows; but they too were blotted out, and only on the south were left native warriors to cope with the conquering Iroquois. These were the Andastes, on the line of the Susquehanna river, who year after year gave blow for blow, until they too succ.u.mbed to superior numbers.

Nothing withstood the Five Nations; yet their fighting men were few, and their losses great. For the time they nearly ruined the French cause in Canada, but in the end their work of destruction rendered the triumph of the white man more inevitable and more complete. They broke up and killed out tribes, whose forces, if united to their own, might have overwhelmed the Europeans; and in doing so {91} they sapped their own strength. They kept up their numbers only by the incorporation of natives who had learned to look to Europeans for guidance and support; and in course of time, fallen from their high estate, they found salvation not as leaders of red men but as allies of white.

[Sidenote: _Mission of Le Moyne to the Five Nations._]

It seems marvellous that the confederation held together, and there were, it is true, occasional outbursts of inter-tribal jealousy and suspicion. Difference of geographical position tended to difference of policy. The most determined foes of the French were the Mohawks--the easternmost nation, supplied with firearms by the Dutchmen at Albany, and having easy access to the St. Lawrence. At the other end of the line the Senecas had their hands full in the Erie war, and were little disposed, while it lasted, to molest the Europeans. In the centre, the Onondagas, always few in numbers and already recruited by captive Hurons, were minded to attract to their ranks the Huron refugees at Quebec. So about the autumn of 1653, overtures of peace were made to the French, even the Mohawks for the moment dissembling their enmity; and in the following year a Jesuit priest, Le Moyne, was sent as an envoy to the Iroquois country.

The mission was notable in more ways than one. Le Moyne was the first white man to follow up the St. Lawrence from Montreal to Lake Ontario, and his journey marked the beginning of diplomatic relations between the French and the Iroquois. Thenceforward there was always the nucleus of a French party among the Five Nations, the elements of a divided policy in lieu of solid hostility to the French. Here was an ill.u.s.tration too of the value of the Jesuit priests to the French cause, as well as of the danger of employing them. None equalled these priests in the statecraft necessary for dealing with savages, but none were at the time in question so ready in season or out of season to promote a forward policy, involving future complications and dispersion of strength.

{92} [Sidenote: _Attempt at a French settlement among the Five Nations._]

Le Moyne's mission was to the Onondagas, and its result was an application from that tribe that a French settlement should be established among them. The invitation was accepted; and in the summer of 1656 between forty and fifty Frenchmen established themselves on Lake Onondaga, in the very heart of the Iroquois country. It was a desperate enterprise. The men could ill be spared from Quebec, and they were but hostages among the Five Nations. The Indians pretended peace, but even while the Onondagas were escorting the Frenchmen up the river, the Mohawks attacked the expedition, and subsequently under the very guns of Quebec carried off Huron captives from the Isle of Orleans. For a little less than two years, the small band of French colonists remained amid the Onondagas, in hourly peril of their lives; and finally, towards the end of 1658, at dead of night, while the Indians were overcome by gluttony and debauch, they launched their boats and canoes on the Oswego river, reached Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, and found themselves once more at Montreal.

It was a fit ending to the first stage of Canadian history--a hopeless venture, a confession of weakness, a hairsbreadth escape. So far there had been no colonization of Canada. There had been one wise, far-seeing man--Champlain. Brave soldiers had come from France, and still braver priests. There had been going in and out among the natives, toil and hardship, adventure and loss of life. But the French had as yet no real hold on Canada. Between Quebec and the Three Rivers--between the Three Rivers and Montreal, not they but the Iroquois were masters of the St. Lawrence. A trading company claimed to rule: its rule was nothingness. Within Quebec bishops and Governors quarrelled for precedence: under its walls the Mohawks yelled defiance. Montreal, the story goes, was only saved by a band of Frenchmen, who, in a log hut on the Ottawa, sold their lives as dearly as the heroes of Greek or Roman legend; and to crown it all, {93} at the beginning of 1663, the shock of a mighty earthquake was felt throughout the land, making the forts and convents tremble, sending, as it were, a shiver through the feeble frame of New France.

[Sidenote: _The One Hundred a.s.sociates surrender their charter._]

It was the prelude of a better time. In March, 1663, the One Hundred a.s.sociates surrendered their charter to the Crown. A century later, by the Peace of Paris in 1763, France lost Canada. In those hundred years a fair trial was given to French colonization. How much was done to leave the impress of a great nation on Canada, the province of Quebec to-day will testify. Wherein the work was found wanting is told in history.

[Sidenote: _The Company of the West._]

In 1663, we read, Canada became a Royal Province. It pa.s.sed out of the keeping of a company and came under the direct control of the French King and his ministers. The statement requires some modification, for in 1664 Colbert created a new Chartered Company, the Company of the West, whose sphere, like that of the Netherlands West India Company, included the whole of the western half of the world, so far as it was or might be French--America North and South, the West Indies, and West Africa. Canada was within the terms of its charter, which included a monopoly of trade for forty years and, on paper, sovereign rights within the wide limits to which the charter extended. Thus the members of the company claimed to be feudal Seigniors of the soil of New France and to nominate the Council of Government, with the exception of the Governor and Intendant; while from the dues which they levied the cost of government was to be defrayed.

Such was the outline and the intention of the scheme: the actual result was that the carrying trade was monopolized by the company, together with one-fourth of the beaver skins of all Canada, and the whole of the traffic of the lower St. Lawrence, which centred at Tadoussac. Out of their monopoly they paid all or part of the expenses of government, {94} but the administration practically remained in the hands of the Crown. Like its predecessor, this company was a miserable failure. It lasted for ten years only, and during those years it was an incubus on Canada.