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Title: Canada: the Empire of the North

Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom

Author: Agnes C. Laut

Release Date: December 14, 2006 [eBook #20110]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CANADA: THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH***

Transcriber's note:

Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99} in the left margin. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that section.

Map of Western Canada

CANADA

THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH

BEING THE ROMANTIC STORY OF THE
NEW DOMINION'S GROWTH FROM
COLONY TO KINGDOM

BY

AGNES C. LAUT

AUTHOR OF "THE CONQUEST OF THE GREAT NORTH-WEST"
"LORDS OF THE NORTH," ETC.

BOSTON AND LONDON
GINN AND COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
1909

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY AGNES C. LAUT
ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

To re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's great dramas again upon the stage of action,—frankly, this may not be formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes, stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on treaties. Such pictures may not be history, but they breathe life into the skeletons of the past.

Canada's past is more dramatic than any romance ever penned. The story of that past has been told many times and in many volumes, with far digressions on Louisiana and New England and the kingcraft of Europe. The trouble is, the story has not been told in one volume. Too much has been attempted. To include the story of New England wars and Louisiana's pioneer days, the story of Canada itself has been either cramped or crowded. To the eastern writer, Canada's history has been the record of French and English conflict. To him there has been practically no Canada west of the Great Lakes; and in order to tell the intrigue of European tricksters, very often the writer has been compelled to exclude the story of the Canadian people,—meaning by people the breadwinners, the toilers, rather than the governing classes. Similarly, to the western writer, Canada meant the Hudson's Bay Company. As for the Pacific coast, it has been almost ignored in any story of Canada.

Needless to say, a complete history of a country as vast as Canada, whose past in every section fairly teems with action, could not be crowded into one volume. To give even the story {iv} of Canada's most prominent episodes and actors is a matter of rigidly excluding the extraneous.

All that has been attempted here is such a story—story, not history—of the romance and adventure in Canada's nation building as will give the casual reader knowledge of the country's past, and how that past led along a trail of great heroism to the destiny of a Northern Empire. This volume is in no sense formal history. There will be found in it no such lists of governors with dates appended, of treaties with articles running to the fours and eights and tens, of battles grouped with dates, as have made Canadian history a nightmare to children.

It is only such a story as boys and girls may read, or the hurried business man on the train, who wants to know "what was doing" in the past; and it is mainly a story of men and women and things doing.

I have not given at the end of each chapter the list of authorities customary in formal history. At the same time it is hardly necessary to say I have dug most rigorously down to original sources for facts; and of secondary authorities, from Pierre Boucher, his Book, to modern reprints of Champlain and L'Escarbot, there are not any I have not consulted more or less. Especially am I indebted to the Documentary History of New York, sixteen volumes, bearing on early border wars; to Documents Relatifs à la Nouvelle France, Quebec; to the Canadian Archives since 1886; to the special historical issues of each of the eastern provinces; and to the monumental works of Dr. Kingsford. Nearly all the places described are from frequent visits or from living on the spot.

INTRODUCTION

"The Twentieth century belongs to Canada."

The prediction of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of the Dominion, seems likely to have bigger fulfillment than Canadians themselves realize. What does it mean?

Canada stands at the same place in the world's history as England stood in the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth—on the threshold of her future as a great nation. Her population is the same, about seven million. Her mental attitude is similar, that of a great awakening, a consciousness of new strength, an exuberance of energy biting on the bit to run the race; mellowed memory of hard-won battles against tremendous odds in the past; for the future, a golden vision opening on vistas too far to follow. They dreamed pretty big in the days of Queen Elizabeth, but they did n't dream big enough for what was to come; and they are dreaming pretty big up in Canada to-day, but it is hard to forecast the future when a nation the size of all Europe is setting out on the career of her world history.

To put it differently: Canada's position is very much the same to-day as the United States' a century ago. Her population is about seven million. The population of the United States was seven million in 1810. One was a strip of isolated settlements north and south along the Atlantic seaboard; the other, a string of provinces east and west along the waterways that ramify from the St. Lawrence. Both possessed and were flanked by vast unexploited territory the size of Russia; the United States by a Louisiana, Canada by the Great Northwest. What the Civil War did for the United States, Confederation did for the Canadian provinces—welded them into a nation. The parallel need not be carried farther. If the same development {vi} follows Confederation in Canada as followed the Civil War in the United States, the twentieth century will witness the birth and growth of a world power.

To no one has the future opening before Canada come as a greater surprise than to Canadians themselves. A few years ago such a claim as the Premier's would have been regarded as the effusions of the after-dinner speaker. While Canadian politicians were hoping for the honor of being accorded colonial place in the English Parliament, they suddenly awakened to find themselves a nation. They suddenly realized that history, and big history, too, was in the making. Instead of Canada being dependent on the Empire, the Empire's most far-seeing statesmen were looking to Canada for the strength of the British Empire. No longer is there a desire among Canadians for place in the Parliament at Westminster. With a new empire of their own to develop, equal in size to the whole of Europe, Canadian public men realize they have enough to do without taking a hand in European affairs.

As the different Canadian provinces came into Confederation they were like beads on a string a thousand miles apart. First were the Maritime Provinces, with western bounds touching the eastern bounds of Quebec, but in reality with the settlements of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island separated from the settlements of Quebec by a thousand miles of untracked forest. Only the Ottawa River separated Quebec from Ontario, but one province was French, the other English, aliens to each other in religion, language, and customs. A thousand miles of rock-bound, winter-bound wastes lay between Ontario and the scattered settlement of Red River in Manitoba. Not an interest was in common between the little province of the middle west and her sisters to the east. Then prairie land came for a thousand miles, and mountains for six hundred miles, before reaching the Pacific province of British Columbia, more completely cut off from other parts of Canada than from Mexico or Panama. In fact, it would have been easier for British Columbia to trade with Mexico and Panama than with the rest of Canada.

{vii} To bind these far-separated patches of settlement, oases in a desert of wilds, into a nation was the object of the union known as Confederation. But a nation can live only as it trades what it draws from the soil. Naturally, the isolated provinces looked for trade to the United States, just across an invisible boundary. It seemed absurd that the Canadian provinces should try to trade with each other, a thousand miles apart, rather than with the United States, a stone's throw from the door of each province. But the United States erected a tariff wall that Canada could not climb. The struggling Dominion was thrown solely on herself, and set about the giant task of linking the provinces together, building railroads from Atlantic to Pacific, canals from tide water to the Great Lakes. In actual cash this cost Canada four hundred million dollars, not counting land grants and private subscriptions for stock, which would bring up the cost of binding the provinces together to a billion. This was a staggering burden for a country with smaller population than Greater New York—a burden as big as Japan and Russia assumed for their war; but, like war, the expenditure was a fight for national existence. Without the railroads and canals, the provinces could not have been bound together into a nation.

These were Canada's pioneer days, when she was spending more than she was earning, when she bound herself down to grinding poverty and big risks and hard tasks. It was a long pull, and a hard pull; but it was a pull altogether. That was Canada's seed time; this is her harvest. That was her night work, when she toiled, while other nations slept; now is the awakening, when the world sees what she was doing. Railroad man, farmer, miner, manufacturer, all had the same struggle, the big outlay of labor and money at first, the big risk and no profit, the long period of waiting.

Canada was laying her foundations of yesterday for the superstructure of prosperity to-day and to-morrow—the New Empire.

When one surveys the country as a whole, the facts are so big they are bewildering.

{viii} In the first place, the area of the Dominion is within a few thousand miles of as large as all Europe. To be more specific, you could spread the surface of Italy and Spain and Turkey and Greece and Austria over eastern Canada, and you would still have an area uncovered in the east alone bigger than the German Empire. England spread flat on the surface of Eastern Canada would just serve to cover the Maritime Provinces nicely, leaving uncovered Quebec, which is a third bigger than Germany; Ontario, which is bigger than France; and Labrador (Ungava), which is about the size of Austria.

In the west you could spread the British Isles out flat, and you would not cover Manitoba—with her new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay. It would take a country the size of France to cover the province of Saskatchewan, a country larger than Germany to cover Alberta, two countries the size of Germany to cover British Columbia and the Yukon, and there would still be left uncovered the northern half of the West—an area the size of European Russia.

No Old World monarch from William the Conqueror to Napoleon could boast of such a realm. People are fond of tracing ancestry back to feudal barons of the Middle Ages. What feudal baron of the Middle Ages, or Lord of the Outer Marches, was heir to such heritage as Canada may claim? Think of it! Combine all the feudatory domains of the Rhine and the Danube, you have not so vast an estate as a single western province. Or gather up all the estates of England's midland counties and eastern shires and borderlands, you have not enough land to fill one of Canada's inland seas,—Lake Superior.

If there were a population in eastern Canada equal to France,—and Quebec alone would support a population equal to France,—and in Manitoba equal to the British Isles, and in Saskatchewan equal to France, and in Alberta equal to Germany, and in British Columbia equal to Germany,—ignoring Yukon, Mackenzie River, Keewatin, and Labrador, taking only those parts of Canada where climate has been tested and lands surveyed,—Canada would support two hundred million people.

{ix} The figures are staggering, but they are not half so improbable as the actual facts of what has taken place in the United States. America's population was acquired against hard odds. There were no railroads when the movement to America began. The only ocean goers were sailboats of slow progress and great discomfort. In Europe was profound ignorance regarding America; to-day all is changed. Canada begins where the United States left off. The whole world is gridironed with railroads. Fast Atlantic liners offer greater comfort to the emigrant than he has known at home. Ignorance of America has given place to almost romantic glamour. Just when the free lands of the United States are exhausted and the government is putting up bars to keep out the immigrant, Canada is in a position to open her doors wide. Less than a fortieth of the entire West is inhabited. Of the Great Clay Belt of North Ontario only a patch on the southern edge is populated. The same may be said of the Great Forest Belt of Quebec. These facts are the magnet that will attract the immigrant to Canada. The United States wants no more immigrants.

And the movement to Canada has begun. To her shores are thronging the hosts of the Old World's dispossessed, in multitudes greater than any army that ever marched to conquest under Napoleon. When the history of America comes to be written in a hundred years, it will not be the record of a slaughter field with contending nations battling for the mastery, or generals wading to glory knee-deep in blood. It will be an account of the most wonderful race movement, the most wonderful experiment in democracy the world has known.

The people thronging to Canada for homes, who are to be her nation builders, are people crowded out of their home lands, who had n't room for the shoulder swing manhood and womanhood need to carve out honorable careers. Look at them in the streets of London, or Glasgow, or Dublin, or Berlin, these émigrés, as the French called their royalists, whom revolution drove from home, and I think the word émigré is a truer description of the newcomer to Canada than the word "emigrant." They are {x} poor, they are desperately poor, so poor that a month's illness or a shut-down of the factory may push them from poverty to the abyss. They are thrifty, but can neither earn nor save enough to feel absolutely sure that the hollow-eyed specter of Want may not seize them by the throat. They are willing to work, so eager to work that at the docks and the factory gates they trample and jostle one another for the chance to work. They are the underpinnings, the underprops of an old system, these émigrés, by which the masses were expected to toil for the benefit of the classes.

"It's all the average man or woman is good for," says the Old Order, "just a day's wage representing bodily needs."

"Wait," says the New Order. "Give him room! Give him an opportunity! Give him a full stomach to pump blood to his muscles and life to his brain! Wait and see! If he fails then, let him drop to the bottom of the social pit without stop of poorhouse or help!"

A penniless immigrant boy arrives in New York. First he peddles peanuts, then he trades in a half-huckster way whatever comes to hand and earns profits. Presently he becomes a fur trader and invests his savings in real estate. Before that man dies, he has a monthly income equal to the yearly income of European kings. That man's name was John Jacob Astor.

Or a young Scotch boy comes out on a sailing vessel to Canada. For a score of years he is an obscure clerk at a distant trading post in Labrador. He comes out of the wilds to take a higher position as land commissioner. Presently he is backing railroad ventures of tremendous cost and tremendous risk. Within thirty years from the time he came out of the wilds penniless, that man possesses a fortune equal to the national income of European kingdoms. The man's name is Lord Strathcona.

Or a hard-working coal miner emigrates to Canada. The man has brains as well as hands. Other coal miners emigrate at the same time, but this man is as keen as a razor in foresight and care. From coal miner he becomes coal manager, from manager {xi} operator, from operator owner, and dies worth a fortune that the barons of the Middle Ages would have drenched their countries in blood to win. The man's name is James Dunsmuir.

Or it is a boy clerking in a departmental store. He emigrates. When he goes back to England it is to marry a lady in waiting to the Queen. He is now known as Lord Mount-Stephen.

What was the secret of the success? Ability in the first place, but in the second, opportunity; opportunity and room for shoulder swing to show what a man can do when keen ability and tireless energy have untrammeled freedom to do their best.

Examples of the émigrés' success could be multiplied. It is more than a mere material success; it is eternal proof that, given a fair chance and a square deal and shoulder swing, the boy born penniless can run the race and outstrip the boy born to power.

"Have you, then, no menial classes in Canada?" asked a member of the Old Order.

"No, I'm thankful to say," said I.

"Then who does the work?"

"The workers."

"But what's the difference?"

"Just this: your menial of the Old Country is the child of a menial, whose father before him was a menial, whose ancestors were in servile positions to other people back as far as you like to go,—to the time when men were serfs wearing an iron collar with the brand of the lord who owned them. With us no stigma is attached to work. Your menial expects to be a menial all his life. With our worker, just as sure as the sun rises and sets, if he continues to work and is no fool, he will rise to earn a competency, to improve himself, to own his own labor, to own his own home, to hire the labor of other men who are beginners as he once was himself."

"Then you have no social classes?"

"Lots. The ups, who have succeeded; and the half-way ups, who are succeeding; and the beginners, who are going to succeed; and the downs, who never try. And as success doesn't necessarily mean money, but doing the best at whatever one tries, {xii} you can see that the ups and the halfway ups, and the beginners and the downs have each their own classes of special workers."

"That," she answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution." She was thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry.

"It is not revolution," I explained. "It is rebirth! When you send your émigré out to us, he is a made-over man."

But it is not given to all émigré's to become great capitalists or great leaders. Some who have the opportunity have not the ability, and the majority would not, for all the rewards that greatness offers, choose careers that entail long years of nerve-wracking, unflagging labor. But on a minor scale the same process of making over takes place. One case will illustrate.

Some years before immigration to Canada had become general, two or three hundred Icelanders were landed in Winnipeg destitute. From some reason, which I have forgotten,—probably the quarantine of an immigrant,—the Icelanders could not be housed in the government immigration hall. They were absolutely without money, household goods, property of any sort except clothing, and that was scant, the men having but one suit of the poorest clothes, the women thin homespun dresses so worn one could see many of them had no underwear. The people represented the very dregs of poverty. Withdrawing to the vacant lots in the west end of Winnipeg,—at that time a mere town,—the newcomers slept for the first nights, herded in the rooms of an Icelander opulent enough to have rented a house. Those who could not gain admittance to this house slept under the high board sidewalks, then a feature of the new town. I remember as a child watching them sit on the high sidewalk till it was dark, then roll under. Fortunately it was summer, but it was useless for people in this condition to go bare to the prairie farm. To make land yield, you must have house and barns and stock and implements, and I doubt if these people had as much as a jackknife. I remember how two or three of the older women used to sit crying each night in despair till they disappeared in the crowded house, fourteen or {xiii} twenty of them to a room. Within a week, the men were all at work sawing wood from door to door at a dollar and a half a cord the women out by the day washing at a dollar a day. Within a month they had earned enough to buy lumber and tar paper. Tar-papered shanties went up like mushrooms on the vacant lots. Before winter each family had bought a cow and chickens. I shall not betray confidence by telling where the cow and chickens slept. Those immigrants were not desirable neighbors. Other people moved hastily away from the region. Such a condition would not be tolerated now, when there are spacious immigration halls and sanitary inspectors to see that cows and people do not house under the same roof. What with work and peddling milk, by spring the people were able to move out on the free prairie farms. To-day those Icelanders own farms clear of debt, own stock that would be considered the possession of a capitalist in Iceland, and have money in the savings banks. Their sons and daughters have had university educations and have entered every avenue of life, farming, trading, practicing medicine, actually teaching English in English schools. Some are members of Parliament. It was a hard beginning, but it was a rebirth to a new life. They are now among the nation builders of the West.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Canada's nation builders consisted entirely of poor people. The race movement has not been a leaderless mob. Princes, nobles, adventurers, soldiers of fortune, were the pathfinders who blazed the trail to Canada. Glory, pure and simple, was the aim that lured the first comers across the trackless seas. Adventurous young aristocrats, members of the Old Order, led the first nation builders to America, and, all unconscious of destiny, laid the foundations of the New Order. The story of their adventures and work is the history of Canada.

It is a new experience in the world's history, this race movement that has built up the United States and is now building up Canada. Other great race movements have been a tearing down of high places, the upward scramble of one class on the {xiv} backs of the deposed class. Instead of leveling down, Canada's nation building is leveling up.

This, then, is the empire—the size of all the nations in Europe, bigger than Napoleon's wildest dreams of conquest—to which Canada has awakened.[1]

[1]COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF AREAS OF CANADA AND EUROPE

Canada . . 3,750,000 square miles   Europe . . 3,797,410 square miles

Maritime Provinces   Square Miles                   Square Miles
  Nova Scotia  . . . . .   20,600   England  . . . . .    50,867
  Prince Edward Island      2,000   Germany  . . . . .   208,830
  New Brunswick  . . . .   28,200   France   . . . . .   204,000
                           ------   Italy  . . . . . .   110,000
                           50,800   Spain  . . . . . .   197,000
Quebec   . . . . . . . .  347,350   Austria and Hungary  241,000
Ontario  . . . . . . . .  222,000   Russia in Europe   2,000,000
Manitoba
Saskatchewan              204,000
Alberta  . . . . . . . .  350,000
British Columbia   . . .  383,000
Unorganized Territory of
  Keewatin   . . . . . .  756,000
  Yukon  . . . . . . . .  200,000
  MacKenzie River and
    Ungava . . . . . .  1,000,000

COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF POPULATION IN CANADA
AND THE UNITED STATES

It will be noticed that for twenty years Canada's population becomes almost stagnant. The reason for this will be found as the story of Canada is related. If she keeps up the increase at the pace she has now set, or at the rate the United States' population went ahead during the same period of industrial development, the results can be forecast from the following table:

{xv} A few years ago, when talking to a leading editor of Canada, I chanced to say that I did not think Canadians had at that time awakened to their future. The editor answered that he was afraid I had contracted the American disease of "bounce" through living in the United States; to which I retorted that if Canadians could catch the same disease and accomplish as much by it in the twentieth century as Americans had in the nineteenth, it would be a good thing for the country. It is wonderful to have witnessed the complete face-about of Canadian public opinion in the short space of six years, this editor shouting as loud as any of his exuberant brethren. Still, as the outlook in Canadian affairs may be regarded as flamboyant, it is worth while quoting the comment of the most critical and conservative newspaper in the world,—the London Times. The Times says: "Without doubt the expansion of Canada is the greatest political event in the British Empire to-day. The empire is face to face with development which makes it impossible for indefinite maintenance of the present constitutional arrangements."

Regarding the Iceland immigrants, to whom reference is made, I recently met in London a famed traveler, who was in Iceland when the people were setting out for Canada, Mrs. Alec. Tweedie. She explains in her book how these people were absolutely poverty-stricken when they left Iceland. In fact, the sufferings endured the first year in Winnipeg were mild compared to their privations in Iceland before they sailed.

The explanations of Canada's hard times from Confederation to 1898—say from 1871, when all the provinces had really gone into Confederation, to 1897, when the Yukon boom poured gold into the country—can be figured out. Of a population of 3,000,000, four fifths need not be counted as taxpayers, as they include women, children, clerks, farmers' help, domestic help,—classes who pay no taxes but the indirect duty on clothes they wear and food they eat. This practically means that the billion-dollar burden of making the ideal of Confederation into a reality by building railroads and canals was borne by 600,000 people, which means again a large quota per man to the public treasury. People forget that you can't take more out of the public treasury than you put into it, that it is n't like an artesian well, self-supplied, and the truth is, at this period Canadians were paying more into the public treasury than they could afford,—more than the investment was bringing them in.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

CANADA

THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH

CHAPTER I

FROM 1000 TO 1600

Early voyages to America—Voyages of the Cabots—The French fisher folk—Cartier's first voyage—Cartier's second voyage—Cartier's third voyage—Marguerite Roberval

Who first found Canada? As many legends surround the beginnings of empire in the North as cling to the story of early Rome.

When Leif, son of Earl Eric, the Red, came down from Greenland with his Viking crew, which of his bearded seamen in Arctic furs leaned over the dragon prow for sight of the lone new land, fresh as if washed by the dews of earth's first morning? Was it Thorwald, Leif's brother, or the mother of Snorri, first white child born in America, who caught first glimpse through the flying spray of Labrador's domed hills,—"Helluland, place of slaty rocks"; and of Nova Scotia's wooded meadows,—"Markland"; and Rhode Island's broken vine-clad shore,—"Vinland"? The question cannot be answered. All is as misty concerning that Viking voyage as the legends of old Norse gods.

Leif, the Lucky, son of Earl Eric, the outlaw, coasts back to Greenland with his bold sea-rovers. This was in the year 1000.

For ten years they came riding southward in their rude-planked ships of the dragon prow, those Norse adventurers; and Thorwald, Leif's brother, is first of the pathfinders in America to lose his life in battle with the "Skraelings" or Indians. Thornstein, another brother, sails south in 1005 with Gudrid, his wife; but a roaring nor'easter tears the piping {2} sails to tatters, and Thornstein dies as his frail craft scuds before the blast. Back comes Gudrid the very next year, with a new husband and a new ship and two hundred colonists to found a kingdom in the "Land of the Vine." At one place they come to rocky islands, where birds flock in such myriads it is impossible to land without trampling nests. Were these the rocky islands famous for birds in the St. Lawrence? On another coast are fields of maize and forests entangled with grapevines. Was this part of modern New England? On Vinland—wherever it was—Gudrid, the Norse woman, disembarks her colonists. All goes well for three years. Fish and fowl are in plenty. Cattle roam knee-deep in pasturage. Indians trade furs for scarlet cloth and the Norsemen dole out their barter in strips narrow as a little finger; but all beasts that roam the wilds are free game to Indian hunters. The cattle begin to disappear, the Indians to lurk armed along the paths to the water springs. The woods are full of danger. Any bush may conceal painted foe. Men as well as cattle lie dead with telltale arrow sticking from a wound. The Norsemen begin to hate these shadowy, lonely, mournful forests. They long for wild winds and trackless seas and open world. Fur-clad, what do they care for the cold? Greenland with its rolling drifts is safer hunting than this forest world. What glory, doomed prisoners between the woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great fear? The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came dank and unwholesome to these men. Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed to sail. And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid. Ordering the vessels loaded with timber good for masts and with wealth of furs, she gathered up her people and led them from the "Land of the Vine" back to Greenland.

VIKING SHIP RECENTLY DISCOVERED.

Where was Vinland? Was it Canada? The answer is unknown. It was south of Labrador. It is thought to have been Rhode Island; but certainly, passing north and south, the Norse were the first white men to see Canada.

Did some legend, dim as a forgotten dream, come down to Columbus in 1492 of the Norsemen's western land? All sailors of Europe yearly fished in Iceland. Had one of Columbus's crew heard sailor yarns of the new land? If so, Columbus must have thought the new land part of Asia; for ever since Marco Polo had come from China, Europe had dreamed of a way to Asia by the sea. What with Portugal and Spain dividing the New World, all the nations of Europe suddenly awakened to a passion for discovery.

DIVISION OF THE NEW WORLD BETWEEN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.

There were still lands to the north, which Portugal and Spain had not found,—lands where pearls and gold might abound. At Bristol in England dwelt with his sons John Cabot, the Genoese master mariner, well acquainted with Eastern-trade. Henry VII commissions him on a voyage of discovery—an empty honor, the King to have one fifth of all profit, Cabot to bear all expense. The Matthew ships from Bristol with a crew of eighteen in May of 1497. North and west sails the tumbling craft two thousand miles. Colder grows the air, stiffer the breeze in the bellying sails, till the Matthew's crew are shivering on decks amid fleets of icebergs that drift from Greenland in May and June. This is no realm of spices and gold. Land looms through the mist the last week in June, {4} rocky, surf-beaten, lonely as earth's ends, with never a sound but the scream of the gulls and the moan of the restless water-fret along endless white reefs. Not a living soul did the English sailors see. Weak in numbers, disappointed in the rocky land, they did not wait to hunt for natives. An English flag was hastily unfurled and possession taken of this Empire of the North for England. The woods of America for the first time rang to the chopper. Wood and water were taken on, and the Matthew had anchored in Bristol by the first week of August. Neither gold nor a way to China had Cabot found; but he had accomplished three things: he had found that the New World was not a part of Asia, as Spain thought; he had found the continent itself; and he had given England the right to claim new dominion.

A TYPICAL "HOLE IN THE WALL" AT "KITTY VIDDY," NEAR ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND

England went mad over Cabot. He was granted the title of admiral and allowed to dress in silks as a nobleman. King Henry gave him 10 pounds, equal to $500 of modern money, and a pension of 20 pounds, equal to $1000 to-day. It is sometimes said that modern writers attribute an air of romance to these old pathfinders, {5} which they would have scorned; but "Zuan Cabot," as the people called him, wore the halo of glory with glee. To his barber he presented an island kingdom; to a poor monk he gave a bishopric. His son, Sebastian, sailed out the next year with a fleet of six ships and three hundred men, coasting north as far as Greenland, south as far as Carolina, so rendering doubly secure England's title to the North, and bringing back news of the great cod banks that were to lure French and Spanish and English fishermen to Newfoundland for hundreds of years.

SEBASTIAN CABOT

Where was Cabot's landfall?

I chanced to be in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, shortly after the 400th anniversary of Cabot's voyage. King's Cove, landlocked as a hole in a wall, mountains meeting sky line, presented on one flat rock in letters the size of a house claim that it was here John Cabot sent his sailors ashore to plant the flag on cairn of bowlders; but when I came back from Newfoundland by way of Cape Breton, I found the same claim there. For generations the tradition has been handed down from father to son among Newfoundland fisher folk that as Cabot's vessel, pitching and rolling to the tidal bore, came scudding into King's Cove, rock girt as an inland lake, the sailors shouted "Bona Vista—Beautiful View"; but Cape Breton has her legend, too. It was Cabot's report of the cod banks that brought the Breton fishermen out, whose name Cape Breton bears.

{6} As Christopher Columbus spurred England to action, so Cabot now spurred Portugal and Spain and France.

Gaspar Cortereal comes in 1500 from Portugal on Cabot's tracks to that land of "slaty rocks" which the Norse saw long ago. The Gulf Stream beats the iron coast with a boom of thunder, and the tide swirl meets the ice drift; and it isn't a land to make a treasure hunter happy till there wander down to the shore Montaignais Indians, strapping fellows, a head taller than the tallest Portuguese. Cortereal lands, lures fifty savages on board, carries them home as slaves for Portugal's galley ships, and names the country—"land of laborers"—Labrador. He sailed again, the next year; but never returned to Portugal. The seas swallowed his vessel; or the tide beat it to pieces against Labrador's rocks; of those Indians slaked their vengeance by cutting the throats of master and crew.

And Spain was not idle. In 1513 Balboa leads his Spanish treasure seekers across the Isthmus of Panama, discovers the Pacific, and realizes what Cabot has already proved—that the New World is not a part of Asia. Thereupon, in swelling words, he takes possession of "earth, air, and water from the Pole Arctic to the Pole Antarctic" for Spain. A few years later Magellan finds his way to Asia round South America; but this path by sea is too long.

From France, Normans and Bretons are following Cabot's tracks to Newfoundland, to Labrador, to Cape Breton, "quhar men goeth a-fishing" in little cockleshell boats no bigger than three-masted schooner, with black-painted dories dragging in tow or roped on the rolling decks. Absurd it is, but with no blare of trumpets or royal commissions, with no guide but the wander spirit that lured the old Vikings over the rolling seas, these grizzled peasants flock from France, cross the Atlantic, and scatter over what were then chartless waters from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Grand Banks.

Just as they may be seen to-day bounding over the waves in their little black dories, hauling in… hauling in the endless line, or jigging for squid, or lying at ease at the noonday hour {7} singing some old land ballad while the kettle of cod and pork boils above a chip fire kindled on the stones used as ballast in their boats—so came the French fisher folk three years after Cabot had discovered the Grand Banks. Denys of Honfleur has led his fishing fleet all over the Gulf of St. Lawrence by 1506. So has Aubert of Dieppe. By 1517, fifty French vessels yearly fish off the coast of New-Found-Land. By 1518 one Baron de Lery has formed the project of colonizing this new domain; but the baron's ship unluckily came from the Grand Banks to port on that circular bank of sand known as Sable Island—from twenty to thirty miles as the tide shifts the sand, with grass waist high and a swampy lake in the middle. The Baron de Lery unloads his stock on Sable island and roves the sea for a better port.

The King of France, meanwhile, resents the Pope dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal. "I should like to see the clause in Father Adam's will that gives the whole earth to you," he sent word to his brother kings. Verrazano, sea rover of Florence, is commissioned to explore the New World seas; but Verrazano goes no farther north in 1524 than Newfoundland, and when he comes on a second voyage he is lost—some say hanged as a pirate by the Spaniards for intruding on their seas.

In spite of the loss of the King's sea rover, the fisher folk of France continue coming in their crazy little schooners, continue fishing in the fogs of the Grand Banks from their rocking black-planked dories, continue scudding for shelter from storm… here, there, everywhere; into the south shore of Newfoundland; into the long arms of the sea at Cape Breton, dyed at sundawn and sunset by such floods of golden light, these arms of the sea become known as Bras d'Or Lakes—Lakes of Gold; into the rock-girt lagoons of Gaspé; into the holes in the wall of Labrador…; till there presently springs up a secret trade in furs between the fishing fleet and the Indians. The King of France is not to be balked by one failure. "What," he asked, "are my royal brothers to have all America?" Among the Bank fishermen were many sailors of St. Malo. Jacques Cartier, master pilot, {8} now forty years of age, must have learned strange yarns of the New World from harbor folk. Indeed, he may have served as sailor on the Banks. Him the King chose, with one hundred and twenty men and two vessels, in 1534, to go on a voyage of discovery to the great sea where men fished. Cartier was to find if the sea led to China and to take possession of the countries for France. Captain, masters, men, march to the cathedral and swear fidelity to the King. The vessels sail on April 20, with the fishing fleet.

Jacques Cartier

Piping winds carry them forward at a clipper pace. The sails scatter and disappear over the watery sky line. In twenty days Cartier is off that bold headland with the hole in the wall called Bona Vista. Ice is running as it always runs there in spring. What with wind and ice, Cartier deems it prudent to look for shelter. Sheering south among the scarps at Catalina, where the whales blow and the seals float in thousands {9} on the ice pans, Cartier anchors to take on wood and water. For ten days he watches the white whirl driving south. Then the water clears and his sails swing to the wind, and he is off to the north, along that steel-gray shore of rampart rock, between the white-slab islands and the reefy coast. Birds are in such flocks off Funk Island that the men go ashore to hunt, as the fisher folk anchor for bird shooting to-day.

Higher rises the rocky sky line; barer the shore wall, with never a break to the eye till you turn some jagged peak and come on one of those snug coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle. Reefs white as lace fret line the coast. Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways. Gray finback whales flounder in schools. The lazy humpbacks lounge round and round the ships, eyeing the keels curiously. A polar bear is seen on an ice pan. Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of Newfoundland—Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, rock girt, treeless, always windy, desolate, with an eternal moaning of the tide over the fretful reefs.

WHERE THE FISHER HAMLETS NOW NESTLE, NEWFOUNDLAND

{10} To the north, off a little seaward, is Belle Isle. Here, storm or calm, the ocean tide beats with fury unceasing and weird reëchoing of baffled waters like the scream of lost souls. It was sunset when I was on a coastal ship once that anchored off Belle Isle, and I realized how natural it must have been for Cartier's superstitious sailors to mistake the moan of the sea for wild cries of distress, and the smoke of the spray for fires of the inferno. To French sailors Belle Isle became Isle of Demons. In the half light of fog or night, as the wave wash rises and falls, you can almost see white arms clutching the rock.

As usual, bad weather caught the ships in Belle Isle Straits. Till the 9th of June brown fog held Cartier. When it lifted the tide had borne his ships across the straits to Labrador at Castle Island, Château Bay. Labrador was a ruder region than Newfoundland. Far as eye could scan were only domed rocks like petrified billows, dank valleys moss-grown and scrubby, hillsides bare as slate; "This land should not be called earth," remarked Cartier. "It is flint! Faith, I think this is the region God gave Cain!" If this were Cain's realm, his descendants were "men of might"; for when the Montaignais, tall and straight as mast poles, came down to the straits, Cartier's little scrub sailors thought them giants. Promptly Cartier planted the cross and took possession of Labrador for France. As the boats coasted westward the shore rock turned to sand,—huge banks and drifts and hillocks of white sand,—so that the place where the ships struck across for the south shore became known as Blanc Sablon (White Sand). Squalls drove Cartier up the Bay of Islands on the west shore of Newfoundland, and he was amazed to find this arm of the sea cut the big island almost in two. Wooded mountains flanked each shore. A great river, amber with forest mold, came rolling down a deep gorge. But it was not Newfoundland Cartier had come to explore; it was the great inland sea to the west, and to the west he sailed.

July found him off another kind of coast—New Brunswick—forested and rolling with fertile meadows. Down a broad shallow stream—the Miramichi—paddled Indians waving furs {11} for trade; but wind threatened a stranding in the shallows. Cartier turned to follow the coast north. Denser grew the forests, broader the girths of the great oaks, heavier the vines, hotter the midsummer weather. This was no land of Cain. It was a new realm for France. While Cartier lay at anchor north of the Miramichi, Indian canoes swarmed round the boats at such close quarters the whites had to discharge a musket to keep the three hundred savages from scrambling on decks. Two seamen then landed to leave presents of knives and coats. The Indians shrieked delight, and, following back to the ships, threw fur garments to the decks till literally naked. On the 18th of July the heat was so intense that Cartier named the waters Bay of Chaleur. Here were more Indians. At first the women dashed to hiding in the woods, while the painted warriors paddled out; but when Cartier threw more presents into the canoes, women and children swarmed out singing a welcome. The Bay of Chaleur promised no passage west, so Cartier again spread his sails to the wind and coasted northward. The forests thinned. Towards Gaspé the shore became rocky and fantastic. The inland sea led westward, but the season was far advanced. It was decided to return and report to the King. Landing at Gaspé on July 24, Cartier erected a cross thirty feet high with the words emblazoned on a tablet, Vive le Roi de France. Standing about him were the painted natives of the wilderness, one old chief dressed in black bearskin gesticulating protest against the cross till Cartier explained by signs that the whites would come again. Two savages were invited on board. By accident or design, as they stepped on deck, their skiff was upset and set adrift. The astonished natives found themselves in the white men's power, but food and gay clothing allayed fear. They willingly consented to accompany Cartier to France. Somewhere north of Gaspé the smoke of the French fishing fleet was seen ascending from the sea, as the fishermen rocked in their dories cooking the midday meal.

August 9 prayers are held for safe return at Blanc Sablon,—port of the white, white sand,—and by September 5 Cartier is {12} home in St. Malo, a rabble of grizzled sailor folk chattering a welcome from the wharf front.

He had not found passage to China, but he had found a kingdom; and the two Indians told marvelous tales of the Great River to the West, where they lived, of mines, of vast unclaimed lands.

Cartier had been home only a month when the Admiral of France ordered him to prepare for another voyage. He himself was to command the Grand Hermine, Captain Jalobert the Little Hermine, and Captain Le Breton the Emerillon. Young gentlemen adventurers were to accompany the explorers. The ships were provisioned for two years; and on May 16, 1535, all hands gathered to the cathedral, where sins were confessed, the archbishop's blessing received, and Cartier given a Godspeed to the music of full choirs chanting invocation. Three days later anchors were hoisted. Cannon boomed. Sails swung out; and the vessels sheered away from the roadstead while cheers rent the air.

Head winds held the ship back. Furious tempests scattered the fleet. It was July 17 before Cartier sighted the gull islands of Newfoundland and swung up north with the tide through the brown fogs of Belle Isle Straits to the shining gravel of Blanc Sablon. Here he waited for the other vessels, which came on the 26th.

The two Indians taken from Gaspé now began to recognize the headlands of their native country, telling Cartier the first kingdom along the Great River was Saguenay, the second Canada, the third Hochelaga. Near Mingan, Cartier anchored to claim the land for France; and he named the great waters St. Lawrence because it was on that saint's day he had gone ashore. The north side of Anticosti was passed, and the first of September saw the three little ships drawn up within the shadow of that somber gorge cut through sheer rock where the Saguenay rolls sullenly out to the St. Lawrence. The mountains presented naked rock wall. Beyond, rolling back… rolling back to an impenetrable wilderness… were the primeval {13} forests. Through the canyon flowed the river, dark and ominous and hushed. The men rowed out in small boats to fish but were afraid to land.

As the ships advanced up the St. Lawrence the seamen could scarcely believe they were on a river. The current rolled seaward in a silver flood. In canoes paddling shyly out from the north shore Cartier's two Indians suddenly recognized old friends, and whoops of delight set the echoes ringing.

Keeping close to the north coast, russet in the September sun, Cartier slipped up that long reach of shallows abreast a low-shored wooded island so laden with grapevines he called it Isle Bacchus. It was the Island of Orleans.

Then the ships rounded westward, and there burst to view against the high rocks of the north shore the white-plumed shimmering cataract of Montmorency leaping from precipice to river bed with roar of thunder.

Cartier had anchored near the west end of Orleans Island when there came paddling out with twelve canoes, Donnacona, great chief of Stadacona, whose friendship was won on the instant by the tales Cartier's Indians told of France and all the marvels of the white man's world.

Cartier embarked with several young officers to go back with the chief; and the three vessels were cautiously piloted up little St. Charles River, which joins the St. Lawrence below the modern city of Quebec. Women dashed to their knees in water to welcome ashore these gayly dressed newcomers with the gold-braided coats and clanking swords. Crossing the low swamp, now Lower Town, Quebec, the adventurers followed a path through the forest up a steep declivity of sliding stones to the clear high table-land above, and on up the rolling slopes to the airy heights of Cape Diamond overlooking the St. Lawrence like the turret of some castle above the sea. Did a French soldier, removing his helmet to wipe away the sweat of his arduous climb, cry out "Que bec" (What a peak!) as he viewed the magnificent panorama of river and valley and mountain rolling from his feet; or did their Indian guide point to the water of the river narrowing like {14} a strait below the peak, and mutter in native tongue, "Quebec" (The strait)? Legend gives both explanations of the name. To the east Cartier could see far down the silver flood of the St. Lawrence halfway to Saguenay; to the south, far as the dim mountains of modern New Hampshire. What would the King of France have thought if he could have realized that his adventurers had found a province three times the size of England, one third larger than France, one third larger than Germany? And they had as yet reached only one small edge of Canada, namely Quebec.

Heat haze of Indian summer trembled over the purple hills. Below, the river quivered like quicksilver. In the air was the nutty odor of dried grasses, the clear tang of coming frosts crystal to the taste as water; and if one listened, almost listened to the silence, one could hear above the lapping of the tide the far echo of the cataract. To Cartier the scene might have been the airy fabric of some dream world; but out of dreams of earth's high heroes are empires made.

But the Indians had told of that other kingdom, Hochelaga. Hither Cartier had determined to go, when three Indians dressed as devils—faces black as coals, heads in masks, brows adorned with elk horns—came gyrating and howling out of the woods on the mountain side, making wild signals to the white men encamped on the St. Charles. Cartier's interpreters told him this was warning from the Indian god not to ascend the river. The god said Hochelaga was a realm of snow, where all white men would perish. It was a trick to keep the white men's trade for themselves.

Cartier laughed.

"Tell them their god is an old fool," he said. "Christ is to be our guide."

The Indians wanted to know if Cartier had spoken to his God about it.

"No," answered Cartier. Then, not to be floored, he added, "but my priest has."

{15} With three cheers, fifty young gentlemen sheered out on September 19 from the St. Charles on the Emerillon to accompany Cartier to Hochelaga.

ANCIENT HOCHELAGA. (From Ramusio)

Beyond Quebec the St. Lawrence widened like a lake. September frosts had painted the maples in flame. Song birds, the glory of the St. Lawrence valley, were no longer to be heard, but the waters literally swarmed with duck and the forests were alive with partridge. Where to-day nestle church spires and whitewashed hamlets were the birch wigwams and night camp fires of Indian hunters. Wherever Cartier went ashore, Indians rushed knee-deep to carry him from the river; and one old chief at Richelieu signified his pleasure by presenting the whites with two Indian children. Zigzagging leisurely, now along the north shore, now along the south, pausing to hunt, pausing to explore, pausing to powwow with the Indians, the adventurers came, on September 28, to the reedy shallows and breeding grounds of wild fowl at Lake St. Peter. Here they were so close ashore the Emerillon caught her keel in the weeds, and the explorers left her aground under guard and went forward in rowboats.

{16} "Was this the way to Hochelaga?" the rowers asked Indians paddling past.

"Yes, three more sleeps," the Indians answered by the sign of putting the face with closed eyes three times against their hand; "three more nights would bring Cartier to Hochelaga"; and on the night of the 2d of October the rowboats, stopped by the rapids, pulled ashore at Hochelaga amid a concourse of a thousand amazed savages.

It was too late to follow the trail through the darkening forest to the Indian village. Cartier placed the soldiers in their burnished armor on guard and spent the night watching the council fires gleam from the mountain. And did some soldier standing sentry, watching the dark shadow of the hill creep longer as the sun went down, cry out, "Mont Royal," so that the place came to be known as Montreal?

At peep of dawn, while the mist is still smoking up from the river, Cartier marshals twenty seamen with officers in military line, and, to the call of trumpet, marches along the forest trail behind Indian guides for the tribal fort. Following the river, knee-deep in grass, the French ascend the hill now known as Notre Dame Street, disappear in the hollow where flows a stream,—modern Craig Street,—then climb steeply through the forests to the plain now known as the great thoroughfare of Sherbrooke Street. Halfway up they come on open fields of maize or Indian corn. Here messengers welcome them forward, women singing, tom-tom beating, urchins stealing fearful glances through the woods. The trail ends at a fort with triple palisades of high trees, walls separated by ditches and roofed for defense, with one carefully guarded narrow gate. Inside are fifty large wigwams, the oblong bark houses of the Huron-Iroquois, each fifty feet long, with the public square in the center, or what we would call the courtyard.

It needs no trick of fancy to call up the scene—the winding of the trumpet through the forest silence, the amazement of the Indian drummers, the arrested frenzy of the dancers, the sunrise turning burnished armor to fire, the clanking of swords, {17} the wheeling of the soldiers as they fall in place, helmets doffed, round the council fire! Women swarm from the long houses. Children come running with mats for seats. Bedridden, blind, maimed are carried on litters, if only they may touch the garments of these wonderful beings. One old chief with skin like crinkled leather and body gnarled with woes of a hundred years throws his most precious possession, a headdress, at Cartier's feet.

Poor Cartier is perplexed. He can but read aloud from the Gospel of St. John and pray Christ heal these supplicants. Then he showers presents on the Indians, gleeful as children—knives and hatchets and beads and tin mirrors and little images and a crucifix, which he teaches them to kiss. Again the silver trumpet peals through the aisled woods. Again the swords clank, and the adventurers take their way up the mountain—a Mont Royal, says Cartier.

The mountain is higher than the one at Quebec. Vaster the view—vaster the purple mountains, the painted forests, the valleys bounded by a sky line that recedes before the explorer as the rainbow runs from the grasp of a child. This is not Cathay; it is a New France. Before going back to Quebec the adventurers follow a trail up the St. Lawrence far enough to see that Lachine Rapids bar progress by boat; far enough, too, to see that the Gaspé Indians had spoken truth when they told of another grand river—the Ottawa—coming in from the north.

By the 11th of October Cartier is at Quebec. His men have built a palisaded fort on the banks of the St. Charles. The boats are beached. Indians scatter to their far hunting grounds. Winter sets in. Canadian cold is new to these Frenchmen. They huddle indoors instead of keeping vigorous with exercise. Ice hangs from the dismantled masts. Drifts heap almost to top of palisades. Fear of the future falls on the crew. Will they ever see France again? Then scurvy breaks out. The fort is prostrate. Cartier is afraid to ask aid of the wandering Indians lest they learn his weakness. To keep up show of strength he has his men fire off muskets, batter the fort walls, march and drill and {18} tramp and stamp, though twenty-five lie dead and only four are able to keep on their feet. The corpses are hidden in snowdrifts or crammed through ice holes in the river with shot weighted to their feet.

In desperation Cartier calls on all the saints in the Christian calendar. He erects a huge crucifix and orders all, well and ill, out in procession. Weak and hopeless, they move across the snows chanting psalms. That night one of the young noblemen died. Toward spring an Indian was seen apparently recovering from the same disease. Cartier asked him what had worked the cure and learned of the simple remedy of brewed spruce juice.

By the time the Indians came from the winter hunt Cartier's men were in full health. Up at Hochelaga a chief had seized Cartier's gold-handled dagger and pointed up the Ottawa whence came ore like the gold handle. Failing to carry any minerals home, Cartier felt he must have witnesses to his report. The boats are rigged to sail, Chief Donnacona and eleven others are lured on board, surrounded, forcibly seized, and treacherously carried off to France. May 6, 1536, the boats leave Quebec, stopping only for water at St. Pierre, where the Breton fishermen have huts. July 16 they anchor at St. Malo.

Did France realize that Cartier had found a new kingdom? Not in the least; but the home land gave heed to that story of minerals, and had the kidnapped Indians baptized. Donnacona and all his fellow-captives but the little girl of Richelieu die, and Sieur de Roberval is appointed lord paramount of Canada to equip Cartier with five vessels and scour the jails of France for colonists. Though the colonists are convicts, the convicts are not criminals. Some have been convicted for their religion, some for their politics. What with politics and war, it is May, 1541, before the ships sail, and then Roberval has to wait another year for his artillery, while Cartier goes ahead to build the forts.

From the first, things go wrong. Head winds prolong the passage for three months. The stock on board is reduced to a diet of cider, and half the cattle die. Then the Indians of Quebec {19} ask awkward questions about Donnacona. Cartier flounders midway between truth and lie. Donnacona had died, he said; as for the others, they have become as white men. Agona succeeds Donnacona as chief. Agona is so pleased at the news that he gives Cartier a suit of buckskin garnished with wampum, but the rest of the Indians draw off in such resentment that Cartier deems it wise to build his fort at a distance, and sails nine miles up to Cape Rouge, where he constructs Bourg Royal. Noel, his nephew, and Jalobert, his brother-in-law, take two ships back to France. While Cartier roams exploring, Beaupré commands Bourg Royal.

In his roamings, ever with his eyes to earth for minerals, he finds stones specked with mica, and false diamonds, whence the height above Quebec is called Cape Diamond. It is enough. The crews spend the year loading the ships with cargo of worthless stones, and set sail in May, high of hope for wealth great as Spaniard carried from Peru. June 8 the ships slip in to St. John's, Newfoundland, for water. Seventeen fishing vessels rock to the tide inside the landlocked lagoon, and who comes gliding up the Narrows of the harbor neck but Viceroy Roberval, mad with envy when he hears of the diamond cargoes! He breaks the head of a Portuguese or two among the fishing fleet and forthwith orders Cartier back to Quebec.

Cartier shifts anchor from too close range of Roberval's guns and says nothing. At dead of night he slips anchor altogether and steals away on the tide, with only one little noiseless sail up on each ship through the dark Narrows. Once outside, he spreads his wings to the wind and is off for France. The diamonds prove worthless, but Cartier receives a title and retires to a seigneurial mansion at St. Malo.

The episode did not improve Roberval's temper. The new Viceroy was a soldier and a martinet, and his authority had been defied. With his two hundred colonists, taken from the prisons of France, commanded by young French officers,—a Lament and a La Salle among others,—he proceeded up the coast of Newfoundland to enter the St. Lawrence by Belle Isle. {20} Among his people were women, and Roberval himself was accompanied by a niece, Marguerite, who had the reputation of being a bold horsewoman and prime favorite with the grandees who frequented her uncle's castle. Perhaps Roberval had brought her to New France to break up her attachment for a soldier. Or the Viceroy may have been entirely ignorant of the romance, but, anchored off Belle Isle,—Isle of Demons,—the angry governor made an astounding discovery. The girl had a lover on board, a common soldier, and the two openly defied his interdict. Coming after Cartier's defection, the incident was oil to fire with Roberval. Sailors were ordered to lower the rowboat. One would fain believe that the tyrannical Viceroy offered the high-spirited girl at least the choice of giving up her lover. She was thrust into the rowboat with a faithful old Norman nurse. Four guns and a small supply of provisions were tossed to the boat. The sailors were then commanded to row ashore and abandon her on Isle of Demons. The soldier lover leaped over decks and swam through the surf to share her fate.

Isle of Demons, with its wailing tides and surf-beaten reefs, is a desolate enough spot in modern days when superstitions do not add to its terrors. The wind pipes down from The Labrador in fairest weather with weird voices as of wailing ghosts, and in winter the shores of Belle Isle never cease to echo to the hollow booming of the pounding surf.

Out of driftwood the castaways constructed a hut. Fish were in plenty, wild fowl offered easy mark, and in springtime the ice floes brought down the seal herds. There was no lack of food, but rescue seemed forever impossible; for no fishing craft would approach the demon-haunted isle. A year passed, two years,—a child was born. The soldier lover died of heartbreak and despondency. The child wasted away. The old nurse, too, was buried. Marguerite was left alone to fend for herself and hope against hope that some of the passing sails would heed her signals. No wonder at the end of the third year she began to hear shrieking laughter in the lonely cries of tide and wind, and to imagine that she saw fiendish arms snatching through the spume of storm drift.

{21} Towards the fall of 1545, one calm day when spray for the once did not hide the island, some fishermen in the straits noticed the smoke of a huge bonfire ascending from Isle Demons. Was it a trick of the fiends to lure men to wreck, or some sailors like themselves signaling distress?

The boat drew fearfully near and nearer. A creature in the strange attire of skins from wild beasts ran down the rocks, signaling frantically. It was a woman. Terrified and trembling, the sailors plucked up courage to land. Then for the first time Marguerite Roberval's spirit gave way. She could not speak; she seemed almost bereft of reason. It was only after the fishermen had nourished her back to semblance of womanhood that they drew from her the story. On returning to France, Marguerite Roberval entered a convent. It was there an old court friend of her château days sought her out and heard the tale from her own lips.

THE "DAUPHIN MAP" OF CANADA, CIRCA 1543, SHOWING CARTIER'S DISCOVERIES

{22} A colony begun under such ill omen was not likely to prosper. Roberval had proceeded to Cape Rouge, where he landed in July, and before winter had a respectable fort constructed. Fifty of his colonists died of scurvy. As many as six were hanged in a single day for insubordination, and the whipping post became the emblem of an authority that trembled in the balance. Roberval, in troth, was not thinking of the colony. He was thinking of those minerals which the Indians said were at the head waters of the Saguenay. Leaving thirty women at the fort, he ascended the Saguenay with seventy men in spring and explored as far as Lake St. John, where the village of Roberval commemorates his feat; but he found no minerals and lost eight men running rapids. When Cartier came out in 1543, Roberval took the remaining colonists home, a profoundly embittered man. Legend has it that he either perished on a second voyage in 1549, or was assassinated in Paris.

So falls the curtain on the first attempt to colonize Canada.

CHAPTER II

FROM 1600 TO 1607

English voyages to North America—Sir Humphrey Gilbert—Henry Hudson—Champlain's first voyage—Founding of Ste. Croix—The colonists in Acadia

The second attempt to plant a French colony in the New World was more disastrous than the first.

Though my Lord Roberval fails, the French fishing vessels continue to bound over the billows of the Atlantic to the New World. By 1578 there are a hundred and fifty French fishing vessels off Newfoundland alone. The fishing folk engage in barter. Cartier's heirs ask for a monopoly of the fur trade in Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly, with many high-sounding titles as Governor, and the added obligation that he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is 1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred people taken from jails, all but sixty have obtained their freedom by paying a ransom. With these sixty La Roche follows the fishing fleet out to the Grand Banks, then rounds southwestward for milder clime, where he may winter his people.

Straight across the ship's course lies the famous sand bank, the graveyard of the Atlantic,—what the old navigators called "the dreadful isle,"—Sable Island. The sea lies placid as glass between the crescent horns of the long, low reefs,—thirty miles from horn to horn, with never a tree to break the swale of the grass waist-high.

The marquis lands his sixty colonists to fish for supplies, while he goes on with the crew to find place for settlement.

Barely has the topsail dipped over the watery sky before breakers begin to thunder on the sand reefs. Air and earth lash to fury. Sails are torn from the ship of the marquis. His {24} masts go overboard, and the vessel is driven, helpless as a chip in a maelstrom, clear back to the ports of France. Here double misfortune awaits La Roche. His old patrons of the court are no longer powerful. He is thrown in prison by a rival baron.

In vain the colonists strain tired eyes for a sail at sea. Days become weeks, weeks months, summer autumn; and no boat came back. As winter gales assailed the sea, sending the sand drifting like spray, the convicts built themselves huts out of driftwood, and scooped beds for themselves in the earth like rabbit burrows. Of food there was plenty. The people had their fishing lines; and the stock, left by the Baron de Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl, too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ashore on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge.

Like Robinson Crusoe cast on a desert isle, the desperate people fought their fate. Traps were set for the foxes, snares for the birds, and scouts kept tramping from end to end of the island for sight of a sail. Racked with despair and anxiety, these outcasts of civilization soon fell to bitter quarreling. Traps were found rifled. Dead men lay beside the looted traps; and, doubtless, not a few men lost their lives in spring when the ice floes drifted down with the seal herds, and the men gave mad chase from ice pan to ice pan for seal pelts to make clothing. Spring wore to summer. The graves on the sand banks increased. For a second winter the dreary snowfall wrapped the island in a mantle white as death sheet. Then came the same weary monotony,—the frenzied seal hunt over the blood-stained floes; the long summer days with the drone of the tide on the sand banks; the men mad with hope at sight of a sail peak over the far wave tops, only to be plunged in despair as the fisher boat passed too far for signal; the fading of the grasses to russet in the sad autumn light; then snowfall again—and despair.

Five years passed before La Roche could aid his people; and the pilot who went to their rescue won himself immortal contempt by robbing the castaways of their furs. Word of the {25} rescue came to the ears of the court. Royalty commanded the refugees brought before the throne. Only twelve had survived, and these marched before the royal presence clothed in the skins of seals, hair unkempt, beards to mid-waist, "like river gods of yore," says the old record. The King was so touched that he commanded fifty crowns given to each man and the stolen furs restored. La Roche died of chagrin.

While France is trying to colonize Canada, England has not forgotten that John Cabot first coasted these northern shores and erected the English flag.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

About the time that Marguerite Roberval was left alone on Isle Demons, two boys—half-brothers—were playing on the sands of the English Channel, sailing toy boats and listening to sailor yarns of loot on the Spanish Main. One was Humphrey Gilbert; the other, Walter Raleigh. These two were destined to lead England's first colonies to America.

Martin Frobisher had already poked the prows of English ships into the icy straits of Greenland waters, seeking way to {26} China. He had come out with a fleet of fifteen sails and one hundred mariners in 1578 to found colonies, but was led away by the lure of "fool's gold." Loading his vessels with worthless rocks which he believed contained gold enough "to suffice all the gold gluttons of the world," he sailed back to England without leaving the trace of a colony. Francis Drake, the very same year, had for the first time plowed an English furrow around the seas of the world, chasing Spanish treasure boats up the west coast of South America and loading his own vessel with loot to the water line. Afraid to go back the way he had come, round South America, where all the Spanish frigates lay in wait to catch him, Drake pushed on up the west coast as far as California, and landing, took possession of what he called "New Albion" for Queen Elizabeth. But still no colony had been planted for England.

THE BOYHOOD OF GILBERT AND RALEIGH. (From the painting by Sir John Millais)

Gilbert and Raleigh, the two half-brothers, were both zealous for glory. Both stood high in court favor. Both had fought for Queen Elizabeth in the wars. Gilbert had fame as seaman and geographer. He asks for the privilege of founding England's first colony. The Queen will incur no expense. Gilbert and Raleigh and their friends will fit out the vessels. Elizabeth deeds to Gilbert all that old domain discovered by John Cabot, reserving only one fifth of the minerals he may find; and she sends him a present of a golden anchor as a Godspeed. June 11, 1583, Sir Humphrey sets sail with a fleet of three splendid merchantmen, fitted out as men-of-war, and two heavily armed little frigates. The crews number three hundred and sixty men, but they are for the most part impressed seamen and riotous. The fleet is only well away when the biggest of the merchantmen signals that plague has broken out, and flees back to England. Later, as fog hides the boats from one another, the pirate crew on board the little frigate Swallow run down an English fisherman on the Grand Banks, board her, and at bayonet point loot the schooner from stem to stern. When the ships lower sail to come in on the tide through the long Narrows, to the rock-girt harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland, {27} the hundreds of fishing vessels lying at anchor there object to the pirate Swallow; but Sir Humphrey reads his commission from the Queen, and the fishing fleet roars a welcome that sets the rocks ringing. Sunday, August 4, the next day after entering, Biscayans and French and Portuguese and English send their new Governor tribute in provisions,—fish from the English, marmalade and wines and spices from the foreigners. The admiral gives a feast to the master mariners each week he is in port, and entertains—as the old record says—"right bountifully." Wandering round the rocky harbor, up the high cliff to the left where remnants of an old fortress may be seen to-day, along the circular hills to the right where the fishing stages cover the water front, Gilbert's men find "fool's gold," rock with specks of iron and mica. Daniel, the refiner of metals, declares it is a rich specimen of silver. The find goes to Sir Humphrey's head. He sees himself a second Francis Drake, ships crammed with gold. When the captains of the other vessels in his fleet would see the treasure, he answers: "Content yourselves! It is enough! I have seen it but I would have no speech made of it in harbor; for the Portuguese and {28} Biscayans and French might learn of it. We shall soon return hither again."

SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT

Many of the men are in ill health. Gilbert decides to send the invalids home in the Swallow; but he transfers the bold pirate crew of that frigate to the big ship Delight, which carries provisions for the colony. While planning to make St. John's the headquarters of his new kingdom, Sir Humphrey wishes to explore those regions where Cartier had gone and whence the fishing schooners bring such wealth in furs.

August 20 the remainder of his fleet rounds out of St. John's south west for the Gulf of St. Lawrence,—the Delight with the provisions, the Golden Hinde with the majority of the people, the little frigate Squirrel weighted down by artillery stores but under command of Gilbert himself, because the smaller ship can run close ashore to explore. To keep up the spirits of the men, there is much merrymaking. Becalmed off Cape Breton, Sir Humphrey visits the big ship Delight, where the trumpets and the drums and the pipes and the cornets reel off wild sailor jigs. "There was," says the old record, "little watching for danger." Wednesday, August 26, the sounding line forewarned the reefs of Sable Island. Breakers were sighted. The Delight signaled that her captain wanted to shift southwest to deeper water, but Gilbert wanted to enter the St. Lawrence and signaled back to go on northwest. That night a storm raged. The provision ship ran full tilt into the sand banks of Sable Island, and was battered into chips before the other ships could come to rescue. All supplies were lost and all the pirate crew perished but sixteen, who jumped into the pinnace dragging astern, and, with only one oar, half punted, half drifted for seven days till the wave wash carried them to the shores of Newfoundland. There they were picked up by a fishing vessel.

With provisions gone, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colony was doomed. He must turn back. Saturday, August 31, they reversed the course. When halfway across the Atlantic the admiral rowed from the little Squirrel across to the Golden Hinde to have a lame foot treated by the surgeon. "Cheer {29} up," he urged the men. "Next year her Majesty will loan me 1000 pounds, and we shall come again."

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

As storm was gathering, the men begged him to remain on the larger ship, but Gilbert refused to leave the sailors of the Squirrel. The frigate was as safe for him as for them, he said. Some one called his attention to the fact that the frigate was overweighted with cannon. Gilbert laughed all danger to scorn. Soon afterwards the waves began to break short and high—a dangerous sea for a small, overweighted ship. It had been arranged that both ships should swing lanterns fore and aft to keep each other in sight at night. On the night of September 9 a phosphorescent light was seen to gleam above the mainmast of the Squirrel,—certain sign to the superstitious sailors of dire disaster; but when the Hinde slackened speed, and the great waves threw the vessels almost together, there was Sir Humphrey sitting aloft, book in hand, shouting out, "We are as near Heaven by sea as by land." The Hinde fell to the rear. The Squirrel led away, her stern lanterns lighting a trail across the shiny dark of the tempestuous billows. Suddenly, at midnight, the guiding {30} light was lost. The Squirrel's stern lanterns were seen to descend the pitching trough of a mountain wave, and when the wall of water fell, no light came up. Down into the abyss the little craft had plunged, never to rise again, carrying explorer, treasure hunters, colonists, to a watery grave.

It may be added that the disaster took place halfway across the ocean, and not off Newfoundland, as the ballad relates.

But for all this misfortune, England did not desist. The very next year Raleigh, who had played on the sands with Humphrey Gilbert, sends out his colonists to the Roanoke, and lays the foundations for the beginning of empire in the Southern States. English sailors explore Cape Cod. Ten years after Frobisher had brought home his cargo of worthless stones from Labrador, Davis, the master mariner, is out exploring the waters west of Greenland; and Henry Hudson, the English pilot who had discovered Hudson River, New York, for the Dutch, is retained by the English in 1610 to explore those waters west of Greenland where both Frobisher and Davis reported open passage.

It is midsummer of 1610 when Hudson enters Hudson Straits. The ice jam of Ungava Bay, Labrador, has almost torn his ships' timbers apart and has set fear shivering like an aspen leaf among the crew. Old Juett, the mate, rages openly at Hudson for venturing such a frail ship on such a sea; but when the ship anchors at the west end of Hudson Straits, five hundred miles from the Atlantic, there opens to view another sea,—a sea large as the Mediterranean, that, like the Mediterranean, may lead to another world. It is as dangerous to go back as forward; and forward Hudson sails, southwestward for that sea Drake had cruised off California, the old mate's mutiny rumbling beneath decks like a volcano. South, southwestward, seven hundred miles sails Hudson, past the high rocks and airy cataracts of Richmond Gulf, past silence like the realms of death, on down where Hudson Bay rounds into James Bay and the shallows plainly show this is no way to a western sea, but a blind inlet, bowlder-strewn and muddy as swamps.

{31}

AT EASTERN ENTRANCE TO HUDSON STRAITS

When the ship runs aground and all hands must out to waist in ice water to pull her ashore as the tide comes in, Juett's rage bursts all bounds. As they toil, snow begins to fall. They are winter bound and storm bound in an unknown land. Half the crew are in open mutiny; the other half build winter quarters and range the woods of James Bay for game. Of game there is plenty, but the rebels refuse to hunt. A worthless lad named Green, whom Hudson had picked off the streets of London, turns traitor and talebearer, fomenting open quarrels till the commander threatens he will hang to the yardarm the first man guilty of disobedience. So passes the sullen winter. Provisions are short when the ship weighs anchor for England in June of 1611. With tears in his eyes, Hudson hands out the last rations. Ice blocks the way. Delay means starvation. If the crew were only half as large, Henry Green whispers to the mutineers, there would be food enough for passage home. The ice floes clear, the sails swing rattling to the breeze, but as Hudson steps on deck, the mutineers leap upon him like wolves. He is bound and thrown into the rowboat. With him are thrust his son and {32} eight others of the crew. The rope is cut, the rowboat jerks back adrift, and Hudson's vessel, manned by mutineers, drives before the wind. A few miles out, the mutineers lower sails to rummage for food. The little boat with the castaways is seen coming in pursuit. Guilt-haunted, the crew out with all sails and flee as from avenging ghosts. So passes Henry Hudson from the ken of all men, though Indian legend on the shores of Hudson Bay to this day maintains that the castaways landed north of Rupert and lived among the savages.

HUDSON COAT OF ARMS

Not less disastrous were English efforts than French to colonize the New World. Up to 1610 Canada's story is, in the main, a record of blind heroism, dogged courage, death that refused to acknowledge defeat.

Four hundred French vessels now yearly come to reap the harvest of the sea; in and out among the fantastic rocks of Gaspé, pierced and pillared and scooped into caves by the wave wash, where fisher boats reap other kind of harvest, richer than the silver harvest of the sea,—harvest of beaver, and otter, and marten; up the dim amber waters of the Saguenay, within the shadow of the somber gorge, trafficking baubles of bead and red print for furs, precious furs. Pontgravé, merchant prince, comes out with fifty men in 1600, and leaves sixteen at Tadoussac, ostensibly as colonists, really as wood lopers to scatter through the forests and learn the haunts of the Indians. Pontgravé comes back for men and furs in 1601, and comes again in 1603 with two vessels, accompanied by a soldier of fortune from the French court, who acts as geographer,—Samuel Champlain, now in his thirty-sixth year, with service in war to his credit and a journey across Spanish America.

{33} The two vessels are barely as large as coastal schooners; but shallow draft enables them to essay the Upper St. Lawrence far as Mount Royal, where Cartier had voyaged. Of the palisaded Indian fort not a vestige remains. War or plague has driven the tribe westward, but it is plain to the court geographer that, in spite of former failures, this land of rivers like lakes, and valleys large as European kingdoms, is fit for French colonists.

THE FANTASTIC ROCKS OF GASPÉ

When Champlain returns to France the King readily grants to Sieur de Monts a region roughly defined as anywhere between Pennsylvania and Labrador, designated Acadia. This region Sieur de Monts is to colonize in return for a monopoly of the fur trade. When other traders complain, De Monts quiets them by letting them all buy shares in the venture. With him are associated as motley a throng of treasure seekers as ever stampeded for gold. There is Samuel Champlain, the court geographer; there is Pontgravé, the merchant prince, on a separate {34} vessel with stores for the colonists. Pontgravé is to attend especially to the fur trading. There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son, Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons. Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with tongues and fists that the sailors threaten to bury them in the same grave to see if they can lie at peace in death.

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN

Before the boats sight Acadia, it is early summer of 1604. Pontgravé leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac. De Monts enters the little bay of St. Mary's, off the northwest corner of Nova Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.

Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill. Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that he is hopelessly lost. The last shafts of {35} sunlight disappear. The chill of night settles on the darkening woods. The priest shouts till he is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl. Aubry wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless ages, … on and on, … till gray dawn steals through the forest and midday wears to a second night.

Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions. Could the Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him? De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite of fiercest denials. All night cannon were fired from the vessel and bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the priest did not come.

De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay, and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line of wooded meadows like home-land parks. Poutrincourt is so delighted, he at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.

On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks, making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St. John's Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking vainly for more minerals. Westward is another river, known to-day as the Ste. Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. Dochet Island at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site. A fort here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians say leads back to the St. Lawrence. Thinking more of fort than farms, De Monts plants his colony on Ste. Croix River, on an island composed mainly of sand and rock.

While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals. As {36} the vessel coasts near St. Mary's Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the shore. Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement. A hat on the end of a pole is waved weakly from the beach. The men can scarcely believe their senses. It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he disappeared. For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and roots, before he found his way back to the sea.

PORT ROYAL OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN, 1609 (From Lescarbot's map)

Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgravé has taken one vessel up the St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the other for supplies. A worse beginning could hardly have been made. The island was little better than a sand heap. No hills shut out the cold winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried in ice jam from the south. As the snow began to fall, padding the stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness of winter in a forest chill their hearts. {37} Cooped up on the island by the ice, they did little hunting. Idleness gives time for repinings. Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little cemetery outside the palisades. De Monts has had enough of Ste. Croix. When Pontgravé comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares to move. Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod, looking for a place to plant the capital of New France. It is amusing to speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste. Croix in August, to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia. While Champlain and Pontgravé volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.

What had De Monts to show for his two years' labor? His company had spent what would be $20,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony. While Champlain hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgravé bartered furs during the winter of 1605-1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits. De Monts remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt and Lescarbot sail on the Jonas with more colonists and supplies for Port Royal.

Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis. To Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland—the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness. {38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The Jonas runs up the French ensign. Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled by the old chief Membertou. He signals back to the watchers behind the gates. Musketry shots ring out welcome. The ship's cannon answer, setting the waters churning. Trumpets blare. The gates fly wide and out marches the garrison—two lone Frenchmen. The rest, despairing of a ship that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgravé and Champlain, overjoyed to find the ship from France. Poutrincourt has a hogshead of wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.

BUILDINGS ON STE. CROIX ISLAND, 1613 (From Champlain's diagram)

When Pontgravé carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the colonists in Acadia. Poutrincourt and his son {39} attend to trade. Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand pranks of the Paris advocate. First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening, and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his noblesse long enough to wield the hoe. Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond. The weather is almost mild as summer until January. The woods ring to many a merry picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of nobility—the Order of Good Times. Each day one of the number must cater to the messroom table of the fort. This means keen hunting, keen rivalry for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts. And all is done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet. When the chapel bell rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck, truncheon in his hand. The gavel strikes, and there enter the Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand,—moose hump, beaver tail, bears' paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only to out-of-doors men. Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites. Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.

At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master. It is all child's play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.

Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper,—a handwritten sheet giving the doings of the day,—perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing. At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance. As all the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy, Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green. The lawyer's good spirits proved contagious. The French songs that rang through the woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper's {40} labors, were the best antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last. While L'Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell from the blue. Instead of De Monts' vessel there came in spring a fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded. No more money would be advanced. Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt, resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the present all took sad leave of the little settlement—Poutrincourt, Champlain, L'Escarbot—and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for France, where they landed in October, 1607.

Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts—all had failed to establish France in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey's colonists lay bleaching skeletons at the bottom of the sea.

CHAPTER III

FROM 1607 TO 1635

Argall of Virginia attacks the French—Champlain on the St. Lawrence—Champlain and the Iroquois—Champlain explores the Ottawa—Champlain with the Indians—Discovery of the Great Lakes—War with the Iroquois—Conflicting interests in New France—The English take Quebec

Though the monopoly had been rescinded, Poutrincourt set himself to interesting merchants in the fur trade of Acadia, and the French king confirmed to him the grant of Port Royal. Yet it was 1610 before Baron Poutrincourt had gathered supplies to reëstablish the colony, and an ominous cloud rose on the horizon, threatening his supremacy in the New World. Nearly all the merchants supporting him were either Huguenots or moderate Catholics. The Jesuits were all powerful at court, and were pressing for a part in his scheme. The Jesuit, Father Biard, was waiting at Bordeaux to join the ship. Poutrincourt evaded issues with such powerful opponents. He took on board Father La Fléché, a moderate, and gave the Jesuit the slip by sailing from Dieppe in February.

To this quarrel there are two sides, as to all quarrels. The colony must now be supported by the fur trade; and fur traders, world over, easily add to their profits by deeds which will not bear the censure of missionaries. On the other hand, to Poutrincourt, the Jesuits meant divided authority; and the most lawless scoundrel that ever perpetrated crimes in the fur trade could win over the favor of the priests by a hypocritical semblance of contrition at the confessional. Contrition never yet undid a crime; and civil courts can take no cognizance of repentance.

When the ships sailed in to Port Royal the little fort was found precisely as it had been left. Not even the furniture had been disturbed, and old Membertou, the Indian chief, welcomed the white men back with taciturn joy. Père La Fléché assembles the savages, tells them the story of the Christian faith, then to the beat of drum and chant of "Te Deum" receives, one {42} afternoon, twenty naked converts into the folds of the church. Membertou is baptized Henry, after the King, and all his frowsy squaws renamed after ladies of the most dissolute court in Christendom.

Young Biencourt is to convey the ship back to France. He finds that the Queen Dowager has taken the Jesuits under her especial protection. Money enough to buy out the interests of the Huguenot merchants for the Jesuits has been advanced. Fathers Biard and Massé embark on The Grace of God with young Biencourt in January, 1611, for Port Royal. Almost at once the divided authority results in trouble. Coasting the Bay of Fundy, Biencourt discovers that Pontgravé's son has roused the hostility of the Indians by some shameless act. Young Biencourt is for hanging the miscreant to the yardarm, but the sinner gains the ear of the saints by woeful tale of penitence, and Father Biard sides with young Pontgravé. Instead of the gayety that reigned at Port Royal in L'Escarbot's day, now is sullen mistrust.

The Jesuits threaten young Biencourt with excommunication. Biencourt retaliates by threatening them with expulsion. For three months no religious services are held. The boat of 1612 brings out another Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet; and the Jonas, which comes in 1613 with fifty more men,—La Saussaye, commander, Fleury, captain,—has been entirely outfitted by friends of the Jesuits. By this time Baron de Poutrincourt, in France, was involved in debt beyond hope; but his right to Port Royal was unshaken, and the Jesuits decided to steer south to seek a new site for their colony.

PORT ROYAL (From Champlain's diagram)

Zigzagging along the coast of Maine, Captain Fleury cast anchor off Mount Desert at Frenchman's Bay. A cross was erected, mass celebrated, and four white tents pitched to house the people; but the clash between civil and religious authority broke out again. The sailors would not obey the priests. Fleury feared mutiny. Saussaye, the commander, lost his head, and disorder was ripening to disaster when there appeared over the sea the peak of a sail,—a sail topped by a little red ensign, the {43} flag of the English, who claimed all this coast. And the sail was succeeded by decks with sixty mariners, and hulls through whose ports bristled fourteen cannon. The newcomer was Samuel Argall of Virginia, whom the Indians had told of the French, now bearing down full sail, cannon leveled, to expel these aliens from the domain of England's King. Drums were beating, trumpets blowing, fifes shrieking—there was no mistaking the purpose of the English ship. Saussaye, the French commander, dashed for hiding in the woods. Captain Fleury screamed for some one, every one, any one, "to fire—fire"; but the French sailors had imitated their commander and fled to the woods, while the poor Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet, fell weltering in blood from an English cannonade that swept the French decks bare and set all sails in flame. In the twinkling of an eye, Argall had captured men and craft. Fifteen of the French prisoners he set adrift in open boat, on the chance of their joining the French fishing fleet off Cape Breton. They were ultimately carried to St. Malo. {44} The rest of the prisoners, including Father Biard, he took back to Virginia, where the commission held from the French King assured them honorable treatment in time of peace; but Argall was promptly sent north again with his prisoners, and three frigates to lay waste every vestige of French settlement from Maine to St. John. Mount Desert, the ruins of Ste. Croix, the fortress beloved by Poutrincourt at Port Royal, the ripening wheat of Annapolis Basin—all fed the flames of Argall's zeal; and young Biencourt's wood runners, watching from the forests the destruction of all their hopes, the ruin of all their plans, ardently begged their young commander to parley with Argall that they might obtain the Jesuit Biard and hang him to the highest tree. To his coming they attributed all the woes. It was as easy for them to believe that the Jesuit had piloted the English destroyer to Port Royal, as it had been ten years before for the Catholics to accuse the Huguenots of murdering the lost priest Aubry; and there was probably as much truth in one charge as the other.

So fell Port Royal; but out round the ruins of Port Royal, where the little river runs down to the sea past Goat Island, young Biencourt and his followers took to the woods—the first of that race of bush lopers, half savages, half noblemen, to render France such glorious service in the New World.

When De Monts lost the monopoly of furs in Acadia, Champlain, the court geographer, had gone home from Port Royal to France. De Monts now succeeds in obtaining a fresh monopoly for one year on the St. Lawrence, and sends out two ships in 1608 under his old friends, Pontgravé, who is to attend to the bartering, Champlain, who is to explore. With them come some of the colonists from Port Royal, among others Louis Hebert, the chemist, first colonist to become farmer at Quebec, and Abraham Martin, whose name was given to the famous plains where Wolfe and Montcalm later fought.

Pontgravé arrived at the rendezvous of Tadoussac early in June. Here he found Basque fishermen engaged in the peltry {45} traffic with Indians from Labrador. When Pontgravé read his commission interdicting all ships but those of De Monts from trade, the Basques poured a fusillade of musketry across his decks, killed one man, wounded two, then boarded his vessel and trundled his cannon ashore. So much for royal commissions and monopoly!

TADOUSSAC (From Champlain's map)

At this stage came Champlain on the second boat. Two vessels were overstrong for the Basques. They quickly came to terms and decamped. Champlain steered his tiny craft on up the silver flood of the St. Lawrence to that Cape Diamond where Cartier's men had gathered worthless stones. Between the high cliff and the river front, not far from the market place of Quebec City to-day, workmen began clearing the woods for the site of the French habitation. The little fort was palisaded, of course, with a moat outside and cannon commanding the river. The walls were loopholed for musketry; and inside ran a gallery to serve as lookout and defense. Houses, barracks, garden, and fresh-water supply completed the fort. One day, as Champlain {46} worked in his garden, a colonist begged to speak with him. Champlain stepped into the woods. The man then blurted out how a conspiracy was on foot, instigated by the Basques, to assassinate Champlain, seize the fort, and stab any man who dared to resist. One of Pontgravé's small boats lay at anchor. Champlain sent for the pilot, told him the story of the plot, gave him two bottles of wine, and bade him invite the ringleaders on board that night to drink. The ruse worked. The ringleaders were handcuffed, the other colonists awakened in the fort and told that the plot had been crushed. The body of Duval, the chief plotter, in pay of the Basques, swung as warning from a gibbet; and his head was exposed on a pike to the birds of the air. Though Pontgravé left a garrison of twenty-eight when he sailed for France, less than a dozen men had survived the plague of scurvy when the ships came back to Champlain in 1609.

Champlain's part had been to explore. Now that his fort was built, he planned to do this by allying himself with the Indians, who came down to trade at Quebec. These were the Hurons and Montaignais, the former from the Ottawa, the latter from Labrador. Both waged ceaseless war on the Iroquois south of the St. Lawrence. After bartering their furs for weapons from the traders, the allied tribes would set out on the warpath against the Iroquois. In June, Champlain and eleven white men accompanied the roving warriors.

The way led from the St. Lawrence south, up the River Richelieu. Champlain's boat was a ponderous craft; and when the shiver of the sparkling rapids came with a roar through the dank forest, the heavy boat had to be sent back to Quebec. Adopting the light birch canoe of the Indian, Champlain went on, accompanied by only two white men. Of Indians, there were twenty-four canoes with sixty warriors. For the first part of the voyage night was made hideous by the grotesque war dances of the braves lashing themselves to fury by scalp raids in pantomime, or by the medicine men holding solemn converse with the demons of earth; the tent poles of the medicine lodge rocked as if by wind, while eldritch howls predicted victory. {47} Then the long line of silent canoes had spread out on that upland lake named after Champlain, the heavily forested Adirondacks breaking the sky line on one side, the Green Mountains rolling away on the other. Caution now marked all advance. The Indians paddled only at night, withdrawing to the wooded shore through the morning mist to hide in the undergrowth for the day. This was the land of the Iroquois.

DEFEAT OF THE IROQUOIS (From Champlain's drawing)

On July 29, as the invaders were stealing silently along the west shore near Crown Point at night about ten o'clock, there were seen by the starlight, coming over the water with that peculiar galloping motion of paddlers dipping together, the Iroquois war canoes. Each side recognized the other, and the woods rang with shouts; but gathering clouds and the mist rising from the river screened the foes from mutual attack, though the night echoed to shout and countershout and challenge and abuse. Through the half light Champlain could see that the Iroquois were working like beavers erecting a barricade of logs. The assailants kept to their canoes under cover of bull-hide shields till daylight, when Champlain buckled on his armor—breastplate, helmet, thigh pieces—and landing, advanced. There were not less than two hundred Iroquois. Outnumbering the Hurons three times over, they uttered a jubilant whoop and {48} came on at a rush. Champlain and his two white men took aim. The foremost chiefs dropped in their tracks. Terrified by "the sticks that thundered and spat fire," the Iroquois fell back in amaze, halted, then fled. The victory was complete; but it left as a legacy to New France the undying enmity of the Iroquois.

When Champlain came out from France in 1610, he would have repeated the raid; but a fight with invading Iroquois at the mouth of the Richelieu delayed him, and the expiration of De Monts' monopoly took him back to France.

In 1611 trade was free to all comers. Fur traders flocked to the St. Lawrence like birds of passage. The only way to secure furs for De Monts was to go higher up the river beyond Quebec; and ascending to Montreal, Champlain built a factory called Place Royale, with a wall of bricks to resist the ice jam. This was the third French fort Champlain helped to found in Canada.

Presently, on his tracks to Montreal, came a flock of free traders. When the Hurons come shooting down the foamy rapids—here, a pole-shove to avoid splitting canoes on a rock in mid-rush; there, a dexterous whirl from the trough of a back wash—the fur traders fire off their guns in welcome. The Hurons are suspicious. What means it, these white men, coming in such numbers, firing off their "sticks that thunder"? At midnight they come stealthily to Champlain's lodge to complain. Peltries and canoes, the Indians transfer themselves above the rapids, and later conduct Champlain down those same white whirlpools to the uneasy amaze of the explorer.

It is clear to Champlain he must obtain royal patronage to stem the boldness of these free traders. In France he obtains the favor of the Bourbons; and he obtains it more generously because the world of Paris has gone agog about a fabulous tale that sets the court by the ears. From the first Champlain has encouraged young Frenchmen to winter with the Indian hunters and learn the languages. Brulé is with them now. Nicholas Vignau has just come back from the Ottawa with a fairy story of a marvelous voyage he has made with the Indians through {49} the forests to the Sea of the North—the sea where Henry Hudson, the Englishman, had perished. As the romance gains the ear of the public, the young man waxes eloquent in detail, and tells of the number of Englishmen living there. Champlain is ordered to follow this exploration up.

May, 1613, he is back at Montreal, opposite that island named St. Helen, after the frail girl who became his wife, preparing to ascend the Ottawa with four white men—among them Vignau. What Vignau's sensations were, one may guess. The vain youth had not meant his love of notoriety to carry him so far; and he must have known that every foot of the way led him nearer detection; but the liar is always a gambler with chance. Mishap, bad weather, Indian war—might drive Champlain back. Vignau assumed bold face.

The path followed was that river trail up the Ottawa which was to become the highway of empire's westward march for two and a half centuries. Mount Royal is left to the rear as the voyageurs traverse the Indian trail through the forests along the rapids to that launching place named after the patron saint of French voyageur—Ste. Anne's. The river widens into the silver expanse of Two Mountains Lake, rimmed to the sky line by the vernal hills, with a silence and solitude over all, as when sunlight first fell on face of man. Here the eagle utters a lonely scream from the top of some blasted pine; there a covey of ducks, catching sight of the coming canoes, dive to bottom, only to reappear a gunshot away. Where the voyageurs land for their nooning, or camp at nightfall, or pause to gum the splits in their birch canoes, the forest in the full flush of spring verdure is a fairy woods. Against the elms and the maples leafing out in airy tracery that reveals the branches bronze among the budding green, stand the silver birches, and the somber hemlocks, and the resinous pines. Upbursting from the mold below is another miniature forest—a forest of ferns putting out the hairy fronds that in another month will be above the height of a man. Overhead, like a flame of fire, flashes the scarlet tanager with his querulous call; or the oriole flits from branch to branch, {50} fluting his springtime notes; or the yellow warbler balances on topmost spray to sing his crisp love song on the long journey north to nest on Hudson Bay. And over all and in all, intangible as light, intoxicating as wine, is the tang of the clear, unsullied, crystal air, setting the blood coursing with new life. Little wonder that Brulé, and Vignau, and other young men whom Champlain sent to the woods to learn wood lore, became so enamored of the life that they never returned to civilization.

Presently the sibilant rush of waters forewarns rapids. Indians and voyageurs debark, invert canoes on their shoulders, packs on back with straps across foreheads, and amble away over the portages at that voyageurs' dog-trot which is half walk, half run. So the rapids of Carillon and Long Sault are ascended. Night time is passed on some sandy shore on a bed under the stars, or under the canoes turned upside down. Tents are erected only for the commander, Champlain; and at day dawn, while the tips of the trees are touched with light and the morning mist is smoking up from the river shot with gold, canoes are again on the water and paddle blades tossing the waves behind.

The Laurentian Hills now roll from the river in purpling folds like fields of heather. The Gatineau is passed, winding in on the right through dense forests. On the left, flowing through the rolling sand hills, and joining the main river just where the waters fall over a precipice in a cataract of spray, is the Rideau River with its famous falls resembling the white folds of a wind-blown curtain. Then the voyageurs have swept round that wooded cliff known as Parliament Hill, jutting out in the river, and there breaks on view a wall of water hurtling down in shimmering floods at the Chaudière Falls. The high cliff to the left and countercurrent from the falls swirl the canoes over on the right side to the sandy flats where the lumber piles to-day defile the river. Here boats are once more hauled up for portage—a long portage, nine miles, all the way to the modern town of Aylmer, where the river becomes wide as a lake, Lake Du Chêne of the oak forests. Here camp for the night was made, and leaks in the canoes mended with resin, round fires gleaming red as an angry eye across the {51} darkening waters, while the prowling wild cats and lynx, which later gave such good hunting in these forests that the adjoining rapids became known as the Chats, sent their unearthly screams shivering through the darkness.

Somewhere near Allumette Isle, Champlain came to an Indian settlement of the Ottawa tribe. He camped to ask for guides to go on. Old Chief Tessouat holds solemn powwow, passing the peace pipe round from hand to hand in silence, before the warriors rise to answer Champlain. Then with the pompous gravity of Abraham dickering with the desert tribes, they warn Champlain it is unsafe to go farther. Beyond the Ottawa is the Nipissing, where dwell the Sorcerer Indians—a treacherous people. Beyond the Nipissing is the great Fresh Water Sea of the Hurons. They will grant Champlain canoes, but warn him against the trip. Later the interpreter comes with word they have changed their minds. Champlain must not go on. It is too dangerous. Attack would involve war.

"What," demanded Champlain, rushing into the midst of the council tent, "not go? Why, my young man, here"—pointing to Vignau—"has gone to that country and found no danger."

What Vignau thought at that stage is not told. The Indians turned on him in fury.

"Nicholas, did you say you had visited the Nipissings?"

Vignau hems and haws, and stammers, "Yes."

"Liar," roars the chief. "You slept here every night, and if you went to the Nipissings, you went in a dream." Then to Champlain, "Let him be tortured."

Champlain took the fellow to his own tent. Vignau reiterated his story. Champlain took him back to the council. The Indians jeered his answers and tore the story he told to tatters, showing Champlain how utterly wrong Vignau's descriptions were.

That night, on promise of forgiveness, Vignau fell on his knees and confessed the imposture to Champlain. When the fur canoes came down the Ottawa to trade at Montreal, Champlain accompanied them to the St. Lawrence, and sailed for France. His exploration had been an ignominious failure.

{52} Champlain was ever Knight of the Cross as well as explorer. He longed with the zeal of a missionary to reclaim the Indians from savagery, and at last raised funds in France to pay the expense of bringing four or five Recollets—a branch of the Franciscan Friars—to Quebec in May of 1615. With the peaked hood thrown back, the gray garb roped in at the waist, the bare feet protected only by heavy sandals, the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages.

Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea. Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen, the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brulé, his interpreter. In order to hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada, Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from a chance war party.

Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa. Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening {53} on a low-lying, clay-colored lake—the country of the Nipissings, with whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.

In a few sleeps—they tell him—he will reach the Sweet Water Sea. The news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake—French River. This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the bodies of countless French voyageurs. It is more dangerous going with rapids than against them; for the hastening current is sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before the roar of the waterfall has given warning. And the country is barren of game.

As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is dependent on chance fishing. Indian hunters are met,—three hundred of them,—the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their headdress tipped by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is very near the Inland Sea.

It comes as discoveries nearly always come—his finding of the Great Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the region. You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters—long lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels. Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes. Instead of the earthy smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose itself at the horizon. There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your view. The river begins to coil in and out among islands. The amber waters have become sheeted silver. You wind from island to island, islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted pine, islands that are in themselves forests. There is no end to these islands. They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands. Then you see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line. You are not on a river at all. You are on an inland sea. You have been on the lake for hours. One {54} can guess how Champlain's men scrambled from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.

But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea. With the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang. Where these little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.

Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron tribe. How numerous were they? Records differ. Certainly at no time more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children. Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century before.

Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail to the Huron villages. Here he found the missionary. One can guess how the souls of these two heroes burned as the deep solemn chant of the Te Deum for the first time rolled through the forests of Lake Huron.

But now Champlain must to business; and his business is war. Brulé and twelve Indians are sent like the carriers of the fiery cross in the Highlands of Scotland to rally tribes of the Susquehanna to join the Hurons against the Iroquois. A wild war dance is held with mystic rites in the lodges of the Hurons; and the braves set out with Champlain from Lake Simcoe for Lake Ontario by way of Trent River. As they near what is now New York state, buckskin is flung aside, the naked bodies painted and greased, and the trail shunned for the pathless woods off the beaten track where the Indians glide like beasts of prey through the frost-tinted forest.

THE ONONDAGA FORT (From Champlain's diagram)

October 9 they suddenly come on some Onondagas fishing, and they begin torturing their captives by cutting off a girl's finger, when Champlain commands them to desist. Presently the forest opens to a farm clearing where the Iroquois are harvesting their corn. Spite of all Champlain could do, the wild Hurons uttered their war cry and rushed the field, but the Iroquois turned on the rabble and drove them back to the woods. Champlain was furious. They should have waited for Brulé to come with their allies; and the foolish attack had only served to forewarn the enemy. He frankly told the Hurons if they were going to fight under his command, they must fight as white men fight; and he set them to building a platform from which marksmen could shoot over the walls of the Iroquois town. But the admonitions {56} fell on frenzied ears. No sooner was the command to advance given than the Hurons broke from cover like maniacs, easy marks for the javelin throwers inside the walls, and hurled themselves against the Iroquois palisades in blind fury, making more din with yelling than woe with shots. Boiling water poured from the galleries inside drove the braves back from the walls, and the poisoned barb of the Iroquois arrows pursued their flight. A score fell wounded, among them Champlain with an arrow in his knee-cap. The flight became panic fast and furious, with the wounded carried on wicker stretchers whose every jolt added agony to pain.

VIEW OF QUEBEC (From Champlain's plan)

As for Brulé, he arrived with the allies only to find that the Hurons had fled, and here was he, alone in a hostile land, with Iroquois warriors rampant as molested wasps. In the swift retreat off the trail Brulé lost his way. He was without food {57} or powder, and had to choose between starvation or surrender to the Iroquois. Throwing down his weapons, he gave himself up to what he knew would be certain torture. Had he winced or whined as they tore the nails from his fingers and the hair from his head, the Iroquois would probably have brained him on the spot for a poltroon; but the young man, bound to a stake, pointed to a gathering storm as sign of Heaven's displeasure. The high spirit pleased the Iroquois. They unbound him and took him with them in their wanderings for three years.

The Hurons had promised to convey Champlain back down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, but the defeat had caused loss of prestige. The man "with the stick that thundered" was no more invulnerable to wounds than they. They forgot their promises and invented excuses for not proceeding to Quebec. Champlain wintered with the hunters somewhere north of Lake Ontario, and came down the Ottawa with the fur canoes the next summer. He was received at Quebec as one risen from the dead.

While Champlain had been exploring, New France had not prospered as a colony. Royal patron after royal patron sold the monopoly to fresh hands, and each new master appointed Champlain viceroy. The fur trade merchants could pay forty per cent dividends, but could do nothing to advance settlement. Less than one hundred people made up the population of New France; and these were torn asunder by jealousies. Huguenot and Catholic were opposed; and when three Jesuits came to Quebec, Jesuits and Recollets distrusted each other.

Madam Champlain joined her husband at Quebec, in 1620, to stay for four years, and that same year Champlain built himself a new habitation—the famous Castle of St. Louis on the cliff above the first dwelling. Louis Hebert, the apothecary of Port Royal, is now a farmer close to the Castle of Quebec; and the wife of Abraham Martin has given birth to the first white child born in New France.

Now came a revolutionary change. Cardinal Richelieu was virtual ruler of France. He quickly realized that the monopolists {58} were sucking the lifeblood of the colony in furs and were giving nothing in return to the country. In 1627, under the great cardinal's patronage, the Company of One Hundred Associates was formed. In this company any of the seaport traders could buy shares. Indeed, they were promised patent of nobility if they did buy shares. Exclusive monopoly of furs was given to the company from Florida to Labrador. In return the Associates were to send two ships yearly to Canada. Before 1643 they were to bring out four thousand colonists, support them for three years, and give them land. In each settlement were to be supported three priests; and, to prevent discord, Huguenots were to be banished from New France.

To Champlain it must have seemed as if the ambition of his life were to be realized. Just when the sky seemed clearest the bolt fell.

Early in April, 1628, the Associates had dispatched colonists and stores for Quebec; but war had broken out between France and England. Gervais Kirke, an English Huguenot of Dieppe, France, who had been put under the ban by Cardinal Richelieu, had rallied the merchants of London to fit out privateers to wage war on New France. The vessels were commanded by the three sons, Thomas, Louis, and David; and to the Kirkes rallied many Huguenots banished from France.

Quebec was hourly looking for the annual ships, when one morning in July two men rushed breathless through the woods and up the steep rock to Castle St. Louis with word that an English fleet of six frigates lay in hiding at Tadoussac, ready to pounce on the French! Later came other messengers—Indians, fishermen, traders—confirming the terrible news. Then a Basque fisherman arrives with a demand, from Kirke for the keys to the fort. Though there is no food inside the walls, less than fifty pounds of ammunition in the storehouse, and not enough men to man the guns, Champlain hopes against hope, and sends the Basque fisherman back with suave regrets that he cannot comply with Monsieur Kirke's polite request. Quebec's one chance lay in the hope that the French vessels might {59} slip past the English frigates by night. Days wore on to weeks, weeks to months, and a thousand rumors filled the air; but no ships came. The people of Quebec were now reduced to diet of nuts and corn. Then came Indian runners with word that the French ships had been waylaid, boarded, scuttled, and sunk. Loaded to the water line with booty, the English privateers had gone home.

QUEBEC (From Champlain's map)

For that winter Quebec lived on such food as the Indians brought in from the woods. By the summer of 1629 men, women, and children were grubbing for roots, fishing for food, ranging the rocks for berries. There are times when the only thing to do is—do nothing; and it is probably the hardest task a brave man ever has. When the English fleet came back in July Champlain had a ragamuffin, half-starved retinue of precisely sixteen men. Yet he haggled for such terms that the English promised to convey the prisoners to France. On July 20, for the first time in history, the red flag of England blew to the winds above the heights of Quebec.

But New France was only a pawn to the gamesters of French and English diplomacy. Peace was proclaimed; and for the {60} sake of receiving $200,000 as dowry due his French wife, Charles of England restored to France the half continent which the Kirkes had captured, David Kirke receiving the paltry honor of a title as compensation for the loss. Champlain was back in Quebec by 1633; but his course had run. Between Christmas eve and Christmas morning, in 1635, the brave Soldier of the Cross, the first knight of the Canadian wildwoods, passed from the sphere of earthly life—a life without a stain, whether among the intriguing courtiers of Paris or in the midst of naked license in the Indian camp.

CHAPTER IV

FROM 1635 TO 1666

Frays between La Tour and Charnisay—Madame La Tour defends the fort—Charnisay's treachery

When Port Royal fell before Argall, it will be remembered, young Biencourt took to the woods with his French bush lopers and Indian followers of Nova Scotia. The farms and fort of Annapolis Basin granted to his father by special patents lay in ruins. Familiar with the woods as the English buccaneer, who had destroyed the fort, was with his ship's cabin, Biencourt withdrew to the southwest corner of Nova Scotia, where he built a rude stronghold of logs and slabs near the modern Cape Sable. Here he could keep in touch with the French fishermen off Cape Breton, and also traffic with the Indians of the mainland.

With Biencourt was a young man of his own age, boon comrade, kindred spirit, who had come to Port Royal a boy of fourteen, in 1606, in the gay days of Marc L'Escarbot—Charles de La Tour. Sea rovers, bush lopers, these two could bid defiance to English raiders. Whether Biencourt died in 1623 or went home to France is unknown; but he deeded over to his friend, Charles de La Tour, all possessions in Acadia.

And now England again comes on the scene. By virtue of Cabot's discovery and Argall's conquest, the King of England, in 1621, grants to Sir William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, all of Acadia, renamed Nova Scotia—New Scotland. By way of encouraging emigration, the order of Nova Scotia Baronets is created, a title being granted to those who subscribe to the colonization company.

Sir William Alexander's colonists shun the French bush lopers under Charles de La Tour down at Fort St. Louis on Cape Sable. The seventy Scotch colonists go on up the Annapolis Basin and build their fort four miles from old Port Royal. How did they pass the pioneer years—these Scotch retainers of the {62} Nova Scotia Baronets? Report among the French fishing fleet says thirty died of scurvy; but of definite information not a vestige remains. The annals of these colonists are as completely lost to history as the annals of the lost Roanoke colony in Virginia.

Under the same English patent Lord Ochiltree lands English colonists in Cape Breton, the grand summer rendezvous of the French fishermen; but two can play at Argall's game of raids. French seamen swoop down on Ochiltree's colony, capture fifty, destroy the settlement, and run up the white flag of France in place of the red standard of England.

SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER

Charles de La Tour with his Huguenots hides safely ensconced behind his slab palisades with the swarthy faces of half a hundred Indian retainers lighted up by the huge logs at blaze on the hearth. Charles de La Tour takes counsel with himself. English at Port Royal, English at Cape Breton, English on the mainland at Boston, English ships passing and repassing his lone lodge in the wilderness, he will be safer, will Charles de La Tour, with wider distance between himself and the foe; and he will take more peltries where there are fewer traders. Still keeping his fort in Nova Scotia, La Tour goes across Fundy Bay and builds him a second, stronger fort on St. John River, New Brunswick, near where Carleton town stands to-day.

Then two things happened that upset all plans.

{63} The Hundred Associates are given all Canada—Quebec and Acadia. Founded by Cardinal Richelieu, the Hundred Associates are violently Catholic, violently anti-Protestant. Charles de La Tour need expect no favors, if indeed the grant that he holds from Biencourt be not assailed. Double reason for moving the most of his possessions across Fundy Bay to St. John River.

Then the Englishmen, under the Kirke brothers, capture Quebec. As luck or ill luck will have it, among the French captured from the French ships of the Hundred Associates down at Tadoussac, is Claude de La Tour, the father of Charles. Claude de La Tour was a Protestant. This and his courtly manner and his noble birth commended him to the English court. What had France done for Claude de La Tour? Placed him under the ban on account of his religion.

Claude de La Tour promptly became a British subject, received the title Baronet of Nova Scotia with enormous grants of land on St. John River, New Brunswick, married an English lady in waiting to the Queen, and sailed with three men-of-war for Nova Scotia to win over his son Charles. No writer like Marc Lescarbot was present to describe the meeting between father and son; but one can guess the stormy scene,—the war between love of country and love of father, the guns of the father's vessels pointing at the son's fort, the guns of the son's fort pointing at the father's vessels. The father's arguments were strong. What had France done for the La Tours? By siding with England they would receive safe asylum in case of persecution and enormous grants of land on St. John River. But the son's arguments were stronger. The father must know from his English bride—maid in waiting to the English Queen—that England had no intentions of keeping her newly captured possessions in Canada, but had already decided to trade them back to France for a dowry to the English Queen. If Canada were given back to France, what were English grants in New Brunswick worth? "If those who sent you think me capable of betraying my country even at the prayer of my father, they are mightily mistaken," thundered the young man, ordering his gunners to their places. {64} "I don't purchase honors by crime! I don't undervalue the offer of England's King; but the King of France is just as able to reward me! The King of France has confided the defense of Acadia to me; and I'll defend it to my last breath."

Stung by his son's rebuke, the elder La Tour retired to his ship, wrote one more unavailing appeal, then landed his mariners to rush the fort. But the rough bush lopers inside the palisades were expert marksmen. Their raking cross fire kept the English at a distance, and the father could neither drive nor coax his men to the sticking point of courage to scale palisades in such an unnatural war. Claude de La Tour was now in an unenviable plight. He dare not go back to France a traitor. He could not go back to England, having failed to win the day. The son built him a dwelling outside the fort; and there this famous courtier of two great nations, with his noble wife, retired to pass the end of his days in a wildwood wilderness far enough from the gaudy tinsel of courts. The fate of both husband and wife is unknown.

MAP SHOWING LA TOUR'S POSSESSIONS IN ACADIA

Charles de La Tour's predictions were soon verified. The Treaty of St.-Germain-en-Laye, in 1632, gave back all Canada to France; and the young man's loyalty was rewarded by the French King confirming the father's English patent to the lands of St. John River, New Brunswick. Perhaps he expected more. He certainly wanted to be governor of Acadia, and may have looked for fresh title to Port Royal, which Biencourt had deeded {65} to him. His ambition was embittered. Cardinal Richelieu of the Hundred Associates had his own favorites to look after. Acadia is divided into three provinces. Over all as governor is Isaac Razilli, chief of the Hundred Associates. La Tour holds St. John. One St. Denys is given Cape Breton; and Port Royal, the best province of all, falls to Sieur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, friend and relative of Richelieu; and when Razilli dies in 1635, Charnisay, with his strong influence at court, easily secures the dead man's patents with all land grants attached. Charnisay becomes governor of Acadia.

For a second time La Tour is thwarted. Things are turning out as his father had foretold. Who began the border warfare matters little. Whether Charnisay as lord of all Acadia first ordered La Tour to surrender St. John, or La Tour, holding his grant from Biencourt to Port Royal, ordered Charnisay to give up Annapolis Basin, war had begun,—such border warfare as has its parallel only in the raids of rival barons in the Middle Ages. Did La Tour's vessels laden with furs slip out from St. John River across Fundy Bay bound for France? There lay at Cape Sable and Sable Island Charnisay's freebooters, Charnisay's wreckers, ready to board the ship or lure her a wreck on Sable Island reefs by false lights. It is unsafe to accept as facts the charges and countercharges made by these two enemies; but from independent sources it seems fairly certain that Charnisay, unknown to Cardinal Richelieu, was a bit of a freebooter and wrecker; for his men made a regular business of waylaying English ships from Boston, Dutch ships from New York, as they passed Sable Island; and Charnisay's name became cordially hated by the Protestant colonies of New England. La Tour, being Huguenot, could count on firm friends in Boston.

Countless legends cling to Fundy Bay of the forays between these two. In 1640 La Tour and his wife, cruising past Annapolis Basin in their fur ships, rashly entered and attacked Port Royal. Their ship was run aground by Charnisay's vessels and captured; but the friars persuaded the victor to set La Tour and his wife free, pending an appeal to France. France, of {66} course, decided in favor of Charnisay, who was of royal blood, a relative of Richelieu's, in high favor with the court. La Tour's patent was revoked and he was ordered to surrender his fort on the St. John.

CARDINAL RICHELIEU

In answer, La Tour loaded his cannon, locked the fort gates, and bade defiance to Charnisay. Charnisay sails across Fundy Bay in June, 1643, with a fleet of four vessels and five hundred men to bombard the fort. La Tour was without provisions, though his store ship from France lay in hiding outside, blocked from entering by Charnisay's fleet. Days passed. Resistance was hopeless. On one side lay the impenetrable forest; on the other, Charnisay's fleet. On the night of June 12th, La Tour and his wife slipped from a little sally port in the dark, ran along the shore, and, evading spies, succeeded in rowing out to the store ship. Ebb tide carried them far from the four men-of-war anchored fast in front of the abandoned fort. Then sails out, the store ship fled for Boston, where La Tour and his wife appealed for aid.

The Puritans of Boston had qualms of conscience about interfering in this French quarrel; but they did not forget that Charnisay's wreckers had stripped their merchant ships come to grief on the reefs of Sable Island. La Tour gave the Boston merchants a mortgage on all his belongings at St. John, and in return obtained four vessels, fifty mariners, ninety-two soldiers, {67} thirty-eight cannon. With this fleet he swooped down on Fundy Bay in July. Charnisay's vessels lay before Fort St. John, where the stubborn little garrison still held out, when La Tour came down on him like an enraged eagle. Charnisay's fur ships were boarded, scuttled, and sunk, while the commander himself fled in terror for Port Royal. All sails pressed, La Tour pursued right into Annapolis Basin, wounding seven of the enemy, killing three, taking one prisoner. Charnisay's one remaining vessel grounded in the river. A fight took place near the site of the mill which Poutrincourt had built long ago, but Charnisay succeeded in gaining the shelter of Port Royal, where his cannon soon compelled La Tour to fly from Annapolis Basin. Charnisay found it safer to pass that winter in France, and La Tour gathered in all the peltry traffic of the bay.

Early in 1644 Charnisay returned and sent a friar to secure the neutrality of the New Englanders. All summer negotiations dragged on between Boston and Port Royal, La Tour meanwhile scouring land and sea unchecked, packing his fort with peltries. Finally, Charnisay promised to desist from all fur trade along the coast if the New England colonies would remain neutral; and the colonies promised not to aid La Tour. La Tour was now outlawed by the French government, and Charnisay had actually induced New England to promise not to convey either La Tour or his wife to or from Bay of Fundy in English boats.

La Tour chanced to be absent from his fort in 1645. Like a bird of prey Charnisay swooped on St. John River; but he had not reckoned on Madame La Tour—Frances Marie Jacqueline. With the courage and agility of a trained soldier, she commanded her little garrison of fifty and returned the raider's cannonade with a fury that sent Charnisay limping back to Port Royal with splintered decks, twenty mangled corpses jumbled aft, and a dozen men wounded to the death lying in the hold.

With all the power of France at his back Charnisay had been defeated by a woman,—the Huguenot wife of an outlaw! He must reduce La Tour or stand discredited before the world. {68} Furious beyond words, he hastened to France to prepare an overwhelming armament.

But Madame La Tour was not idle. She, too, hastened across the Atlantic to solicit aid in London. One can imagine how Charnisay gnashed his teeth. Here, at last, was his chance. The Boston vessels were not to convey the La Tours back to Acadia. Like a hawk Charnisay cruised the sea for the outcoming ship with its fair passenger; but Madame La Tour had made a cast-iron agreement with the master of the sailing vessel to bring her direct to Boston. Instead of this, the vessel cruised the St. Lawrence, trading with the Indians, and so delayed the aid coming to La Tour; but when Charnisay's searchers came on board off Sable Island, Madame La Tour was hidden among the freight in the hold. For the delay she sued the sailing master in Boston and obtained a judgment of 2000 pounds; and when he failed to pay, had his cargo seized and sold, and with the proceeds equipped three vessels to aid her outlawed husband. So the whole of 1646 passed, each side girding itself for the final fray.

April, 1647, spies brought word to Charnisay that La Tour was absent from his fort. Waiting not a moment, Charnisay hurried ships, soldiers, cannon across the bay. Inside La Tour's fort was no confusion. Madame La Tour had ordered every man to his place. Day and night for three days the siege lasted, Charnisay's men closing in on the palisades so near they could bandy words with the fighters on the galleries inside the walls. Among La Tour's fighters were Swiss mercenaries—men who fight for the highest pay. Did Charnisay in the language of the day "grease the fist" of the Swiss sentry, or was it a case of a boorish fellow refusing to fight under a woman's command? Legend gives both explanations; but on Easter Sunday morning Charnisay's men gained entrance by scaling the walls where the Swiss sentry stood. Madame La Tour rushed her men to an inner fort loopholed with guns. Afraid of a final defeat that would disgrace him before all the world, Charnisay called up generous terms if she would surrender. To save the {69} lives of the men Madame La Tour agreed to honorable surrender, and the doors were opened. In rushed Charnisay! To his amazement the woman had only a handful of men. Disgusted with himself and boiling over with revenge for all these years of enmity, Charnisay forgot his promise and hanged every soul of the garrison but the traitor who acted as executioner, compelling Madame La Tour to watch the execution with a halter round her neck amid the jeers of the soldiery. Legend says that the experience drove her insane and caused her death within three weeks. Charnisay was now lord of all Acadia, with 10,000 pounds worth of Madame La Tour's jewelry transferred to Port Royal and all La Tour's furs safe in the warehouses of Annapolis Basin; but he did not long enjoy his triumph. He had the reputation of treating his Indian servants with great brutality. On the 24th of May, 1650, an Indian was rowing him up the narrows near Port Royal. Charnisay could not swim. Without apparent cause the boat upset. The Indian swam ashore. The commander perished. Legend again avers that the Indian upset the boat to be revenged on Charnisay for some brutality.

MAP OF ANNAPOLIS BASIN

La Tour had been wandering from Newfoundland to Boston and Quebec seeking aid, but a lost cause has few friends, and if La Tour turned pirate on Boston boats, he probably thought he was justified in paying off the score of Boston's bargain with Charnisay. Later he turned trader with the Indians from Hudson Bay, and found friends in Quebec. Word of his wrongs reached the French court. When Charnisay perished, La Tour was at last appointed lieutenant governor of Acadia. Widow {70} Charnisay, left with eight children, all minors, made what reparation she could to La Tour by giving back the fort on the St. John, and La Tour, to wipe out the bitter enmity, married the widow of his enemy in February of 1653.

But this was not the seal of peace on his troubled life. Cromwell was now ascendant in England, and Major Sedgwick of Boston, in 1654, with a powerful fleet, captured Port Royal and St. John. Weary of fighting what seemed to be destiny, La Tour became a British subject, and with two other Englishmen was granted the whole of Acadia. Ten years later his English partners bought out his rights, and La Tour died in the land of his many trials about 1666. A year later the Treaty of Breda restored Acadia to France.

CHAPTER V

FROM 1635 TO 1650

Mystics come to Canada—A city built of dreams—First night at Montreal—Maisonneuve fights raiders—Le Jeune joins the hunters—Brébeuf goes to Lake Huron—Life at the Huron mission—The scourge of the Iroquois—The fight at St. Louis—Rageneau's converts resist—Flight of the Hurons

While Charles de La Tour and Charnisay scoured the Bay of Fundy in border warfare like buccaneers of the Spanish Main, what was Quebec doing?

The Hundred Associates were to colonize the country; but fur trading and farming never go together. One means the end of the other; and the Hundred Associates shifted the obligation of settling the country by granting vast estates called seigniories along the St. Lawrence and leaving to these new lords of the soil the duty of bringing out habitants. Later they deeded over for an annual rental of beaver skins the entire fur monopoly to the Habitant Company, made up of the leading people of New France. So ended all the fine promises of four thousand colonists.

Years ago Pontgravé had learned that the Indians of the Up-Country did not care to come down the St. Lawrence farther than Lake St. Peter's, where Iroquois foe lay in ambush; and the year before Champlain died a double expedition had set out from Quebec in July: one to build a fort north of Lake St. Peter's at the entrance to the river with three mouths,—in other words, to found Three Rivers; the other, under Father Brébeuf, the Jesuit, and Jean Nicolet, the wood runner, to establish a mission in the country of the Hurons and to explore the Great Lakes.

In fact, it must never be forgotten that Champlain's ambitions in laying the foundations of a new nation aimed just as much to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth as to win a new kingdom for France. Always, in the minds of the fathers of New France, Church was to be first; State, second. When Charles de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, landed in Quebec one June morning in 1636, to succeed Champlain as governor of New France, he noticed a crucifix planted by the path side where {72} viceroy and officers clambered up the steep hill to Castle St. Louis. Instantly Montmagny fell to his knees before the cross in silent adoration, and his example was followed by all the gay train of beplumed officers. The Jesuits regarded the episode as a splendid omen for New France, and set their chapel organ rolling a Te Deum of praise, while Governor and retinue filed before the altars with bared heads.

It was in the same spirit that Montreal was founded.

The Jesuits' letters on the Canadian missions were now being read in France. Religious orders were on fire with missionary ardor. The Canadian missions became the fashion of the court. Ladies of noble blood asked no greater privilege than to contribute their fortunes for missions in Canada. Nuns lay prostrate before altars praying night and day for the advancement of the heavenly kingdom on the St. Lawrence. The Jesuits had begun their college in Quebec. The very year that Champlain had first come to the St. Lawrence there had been born in Normandy, of noble parentage, a little girl who became a passionate devotee of Canadian missions. To divert her mind from the calling of a nun, her father had thrown her into a whirl of gayety from which she emerged married; but her husband died in a few years, and Madame de la Peltrie, left a widow at twenty-two, turned again heart and soul to the scheme of endowing a Canadian mission. Again her father tried to divert her mind, threatening to cut off her fortune if she did not marry. An engagement to a young noble, who was as keen a devotee as herself, quieted her father and averted the loss of her fortune. On the death of her father the formal union was dissolved, and Madame de la Peltrie proceeded to the Ursuline Convent of Tours, where the Jesuits had already chosen a mother superior for the new institution to be founded at Quebec—Marie of the Incarnation, a woman of some fifty years, a widow like Madame de la Peltrie, and, like Madame de la Peltrie, a mystic dreamer of celestial visions and divine communings and heroic sacrifices. How much of truth, how much of self-delusion, {73} lay in these dreams of heavenly revelation is not for the outsider to say. It is as impossible for the practical mind to pronounce judgment on the mystic as for the mystic to pronounce sentence on the scientist. Both have their truths, both have their errors; and by their fruits are they known.

MADAME DE LA PELTRIE (After a picture in the Ursuline Convent, Quebec)

May 4th, 1639, Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation embarked from Dieppe for Canada. In the ship were also another Ursuline nun, three hospital sisters to found the Hôtel Dieu at Quebec, Father Vimont, superior of Quebec Jesuits, and two other priests. The boat was like a chapel. Ship's bell tolled services. Morning prayer and evensong were chanted from the decks, and the pilgrims firmly believed that their vows allayed a storm. July 1st they were among the rocking dories of the Newfoundland fishermen, and then on the 15th the little sailboat washed and rolled to anchor inshore among the fur traders under the heights of Tadoussac.

At sight of the somber Saguenay, the silver-flooded St. Lawrence, the frowning mountains, the far purple hills, the primeval forests through which the wind rushed with the sound of the sea, the fishing craft dancing on the tide like cockle boats, the grizzled fur traders bronzed as the crinkled oak forests where they passed their lives, the tawny, naked savages agape at these white-skinned women come from afar, the hearts of the {74} housed-up nuns swelled with emotions strange and sweet,—the emotions of a new life in a new world. And when they scrambled over the rope coils aboard a fishing schooner to go on up to Quebec, and heard the deep-voiced shoutings of the men, and witnessed the toilers of the deep fighting wind and wave for the harvest of the sea, did it dawn on the fair sisterhood that God must have workers out in the strife of the world, as well as workers shut up from the world inside convent walls? Who knows?… Who knows? At Tadoussac, that morning, to both Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation it must have seemed as if their visions had become real. And then the cannon of Quebec began to thunder till the echoes rolled from hill to hill and shook—as the mystics thought—the very strongholds of hell. Tears streamed down their cheeks at such welcome. The whole Quebec populace had rallied to the water front, and there stood Governor Montmagny in velvet cloak with sword at belt waving hat in welcome. Soldiers and priests cheered till the ramparts rang. As the nuns put foot to earth once more they fell on their knees and kissed the soil of Canada. August 1st was fête day in Quebec. The chapel chimes rang … and rang again their gladness. The organ rolled out its floods of soul-shattering music, and deep-throated chant of priests invoked God's blessing on the coming of the women to the mission. So began the Ursuline Convent of Quebec and the Hôtel Dieu of the hospital sisters; but Montreal was still a howling wilderness untenanted by man save in midsummer, when the fur traders came to Champlain's factory and the canoes of the Indians from the Up-Country danced down the swirling rapids like sea birds on waves.

The letters from the Jesuit missions touched more hearts than those of the mystic nuns.

In Anjou dwelt a receiver of taxes—Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière, a stout, practical, God-fearing man with a family, about as far removed in temperament from the founders of the Ursulines as a character could well be. Yet he, too, had mystic {75} dreams and heard voices bidding him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversière had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum. Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness where there were no people. Also in Paris dwelt a young priest, Jean Jacques Olier, who heard the self-same voices uttering the self-same command. These two men were unknown to each other; yet when they met by chance in the picture gallery of an old castle, there fell from their eyes, as it were, scales, and they beheld as in a vision each the other's soul, and recognized in each fellow-helper and comrade of the spirit. To all this the practical man cries out "Bosh"! Yet Montreal is no bosh, but a stately city, and it sprang from the dreams—"fool dreams," enemies would call them—of these two men, the Sulpician priest and the Anjou tax collector.

Hour after hour, arm in arm, they walked and talked, the man of prayers and the man of taxes. People or no people at Montreal, money or no money, they decided that the inner voice must be obeyed. A Montreal Society was formed. Six friends joined. What would be equal to $75,000 was collected. There were to be no profits on this capital. It was all to be invested to the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven. Unselfish if you like, foolish they may have been, but not hypocrites.

First of all, they must become Seigneurs of Montreal; but the island of Montreal had already been granted by the Hundred Associates to one Lauson. To render the title doubly secure, Dauversière and Olier obtained deeds to the island from Lauson and from the Hundred Associates.

Forty-five colonists, part soldiers, part devotees, were then gained as volunteers; but a veritable soldier of Heaven was desired as commander. Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, was noted for his heroism in war and zeal in religion. When other officers returned from battle for wild revels, Maisonneuve withdrew to play the flute or pass hours in religious {76} contemplation. His name occurred to both Dauversière and Olier as fittest for command; but to make doubly sure, they took lodgings near him, studied his disposition, and then casually told him of their plans and asked his coöperation. Maisonneuve was in the prime of life, on the way to high service in the army. His zeal took fire at thought of founding a Kingdom of God at Montreal; but his father furiously opposed what must have seemed a mad scheme. Maisonneuve's answer was the famous promise of Christ: "No man hath left house or brethren or sister for my sake but he shall receive a hundredfold."

Maisonneuve was warned there would be no earthly reward—no pay—for his arduous task; but he answered, "I devote my life and future; and I expect no recompense."

Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, thirty-four years old, who had given herself to good works from childhood, though she had not yet joined the cloister, now felt the call to labor in the wilderness. Later, in 1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than introspection of the soul. Dauversière and Olier remained in France. Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of the cross, carried the heavenly standard to the wilderness.

It was too late to ascend the St. Lawrence when the ship brought the crusaders to Quebec in August, 1641; and difficulties harried them from the outset. Was Montmagny, the Governor, jealous of Maisonneuve; or did he simply realize the fearful dangers Maisonneuve's people would run going beyond the protection of Quebec? At all events, he disapproved this building of a second colony at Montreal, when the first colony at Quebec could barely gain subsistence. He offered them the Island of Orleans in exchange for the Island of Montreal, and warned them of Iroquois raid.

"I have not come to argue," answered Maisonneuve, "but to act. It is my duty to found a colony at Montreal, and thither I go though every tree be an Iroquois."

{77} Maisonneuve passed the winter building boats to ascend the St. Lawrence next spring; and Madame de la Peltrie, having established the Ursulines at Quebec, now cast in her lot with the Montrealers for two years.

May 8, 1642, the little flotilla set out from Quebec—a pinnace with the passengers, a barge with provisions, two long boats propelled by oars and a sweep. Montmagny and Father Vimont accompanied the crusaders; and as the boats came within sight of the wooded mountain on May 17, hymns of praise rose from the pilgrims that must have mingled strangely on Indian ears with the roar of the angry rapids. One can easily call up the scene—the mountain, misty with the gathering shadows of sunset, misty as a veiled bride with the color and bloom of spring; the boats, moored for the night below St. Helen's Island, where the sun, blazing behind the half-foliaged trees, paints a path of fire on the river; the white bark wigwams along shore with the red gleam of camp fire here and there through the forest; the wilderness world bathed in a peace as of heaven, as the vesper hymn floats over the evening air! It is a scene that will never again be enacted in the history of the world—dreamers dreaming greatly, building a castle of dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic shriek where the crusaders' hymn rose that May night. A great city has risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! Another generation may scoff at our too-much-worldliness, with our dreamless grind and visionless toil and harder creeds that reject everything which cannot be computed in the terms of traffic's dollar! Well for us if the fruit of our creeds remain to attest as much worth as the deeds of these crusaders!

Early next morning the boats pulled in ashore where Cartier had landed one hundred years before and Champlain had built his factory thirty years ago. Maisonneuve was first to spring on land. He dropped to his knees in prayer. The others as {78} they landed did likewise. Their hymns floated out on the forest. Madame de la Peltrie, Jeanne Mance, and the servant, Charlotte Barré, quickly decorated a wildwood altar with evergreens. Then, with Montmagny the Governor, and Maisonneuve the soldier, standing on either side, Madame de la Peltrie and Jeanne Mance and Charlotte Barré, bowed in reverence, with soldiers and sailors standing at rest unhooded, Father Vimont held the first religious services at Mont Royal. "You are a grain of mustard seed," he said, "and you shall grow till your branches overshadow the earth."

Maisonneuve cut the first tree for the fort; and a hundred legends might be told of the little colony's pioneer trials. Once a flood threatened the existence of the fort. A cross was erected to stay the waters and a vow made if Heaven would save the fort a cross should be carried and placed on the summit of the mountain. The river abated, and Maisonneuve climbed the steep mountain, staggering under the weight of an enormous cross, and planted it at the highest point. Here, in the presence of all, mass was held, and it became a regular pilgrimage from the fort up the mountain to the cross.

In 1743 came Louis d'Ailleboust and his wife, both zealously bound by the same vows as devotees, bringing word of more funds for Ville Marie, as Montreal was called. Montmagny's warning of Iroquois proved all too true. Within a year, in June, 1743, six workmen were beset in the fields, only one escaping. Because his mission was to convert the Indians, Maisonneuve had been ever reluctant to meet the Iroquois in open war, preferring to retreat within the fort when the dog Pilot and her litter barked loud warning that Indians were hiding in the woods. Any one who knows the Indian character will realize how clemency would be mistaken for cowardice. Even Maisonneuve's soldiers began to doubt him.

"My lord, my lord," they urged, "are the enemy never to get a sight of you? Are we never to face the foe?"

Maisonneuve's answer was in March, 1644, when ambushed hostiles were detected stealing on the fort.

{79} "Follow me," he ordered thirty men, leaving D'Ailleboust in command of the fort.

Near the place now known as Place d'Armes the little band was greeted by the eldritch scream of eighty painted Iroquois. Shots fell thick and fast. The Iroquois dashed to rescue their wounded, and a young chief, recognizing Maisonneuve as the leader of the white men, made a rush for the honor of capturing the French commander alive. Maisonneuve had put himself between his retreating men and the advancing warriors. Firing, he would retreat a pace, then fire again, keeping his face to the foe. His men succeeded in rushing up the hillock, then made for the gates in a wild stampede. Maisonneuve was backing away, a pistol in each hand. The Iroquois circled from tree to tree, near and nearer, and like a wildwood creature of prey was watching his chance to spring, when the Frenchman fired. The pistol missed. Dodging, the Indian leaped. Maisonneuve discharged the other pistol. The Iroquois fell dead, and while warriors rescued the body, Maisonneuve gained the fort gates. This was only one of countless frays when the dog Pilot with her puppies sounded the alarm of prowlers in the woods.

What were the letters, what the adventures described by the Jesuits, that aroused such zeal and inspired such heroism? It would require many volumes to record the adventures of the Jesuits in Canada, and a long list to include all their heroes martyred for the faith. Only a few of the most prominent episodes in the Jesuits' adventures can be given here.

When Pierre le Jeune reached Quebec after the victory of the Kirke brothers, he found only the charred remains of a mission on the old site of Cartier's winter quarters down on the St. Charles. Of houses, only the gray-stone cottage of Madame Hebert had been left standing. Here Le Jeune was welcomed and housed till the little mission could be rebuilt. At first it consisted of only mud-plastered log cabins, thatch-roofed, divided into four rooms, with garret and cellar. One room decorated with saints' images and pictures served as chapel; another, as {80} kitchen; a third, as lodgings; the fourth, as refectory. In this humble abode six Jesuit priests and two lay brothers passed the winter after the war. The roof leaked like a sieve. The snow piled high almost as the top of the door. Le Jeune's first care was to obtain pupils. These consisted of an Indian boy and a negro lad left by the English. Meals of porridge given free attracted more Indian pupils; but Le Jeune's greatest difficulty was to learn the Indian language. Hearing that a renegade Indian named Pierre, who had served the French as interpreter, lodged with some Algonquins camped below Cape Diamond, Le Jeune tramped up the river bank, along what is now the Lower Road, where he found the Indians wigwamming, and by the bribe of free food obtained Pierre. Pierre was at best a tricky scoundrel, who considered it a joke to give Le Jeune the wrong word for some religious precept, gorged himself on the missionaries' food, stole their communion wine, and ran off at Lent to escape fasting.

PIERRE LE JEUNE

When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more priests joined the Jesuits' mission. Among them was the lion-hearted giant, Brébeuf.

If Champlain's bush lopers could join bands of wandering Indians for the extension of French dominion, surely the Jesuits could dare as perilous a life "for the greater glory of God,"—as their vows declared.

{81} Le Jeune joined a band of wandering Montaignais, Pierre, the rascal, tapping the keg of sacramental wine the first night out, and turning the whole camp into a drunken bedlam, till his own brother sobered him with a kettle of hot water flung full in the face. That night the priest slept apart from the camp in the woods. By the time the hunters reached the forest borderland between Quebec and New Brunswick, their number had increased to forty-five. By Christmas time game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not yet driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth. In vain the medicine man had pounded his tom-tom and shouted at the Indian gods from the top of the wigwams and offered sacrifice of animals to be slain. No game had come as the result of the medicine man's invocation.

Le Jeune gathered the people about him and through Pierre, the interpreter, bade them try the white man's God. In the largest of the wigwams a little altar was fitted up. Then the Indians repeated this prayer after Le Jeune:

Jesus, Son of the Almighty … who died for us … who promised that if we ask anything in Thy name, Thou wilt do it—I pray Thee with all my heart, give food to these people … this people promises Thee faithfully they will trust Thee entirely and obey Thee with all their heart! My Lord, hear my prayer! I present Thee my life for this people, most willing to die that they may live and know Thee.

"Take that back," grunted the chief. "We love you! We don't want you to die."

"I only want to show that I am your friend," answered the priest.

Le Jeune then commanded them to go forth to the hunt, full of faith that God would give them food.

{82} But alas for the poor father's hopes and the childlike Indian vow! True, they found abundance of food,—a beaver dam full of beaver, a moose, a porcupine taken by the Indian medicine man. Father Le Jeune, with radiant face, met the hunters returning laden with game.

"We must thank your God for this," said the Indian chief, throwing down his load.

"Bah," says Pierre, "you 'd have found it anyway."

"This is not the time to talk," sneered the medicine man. "Let the hungry people eat."

And by the time the Indians had gorged themselves with ample measure for their long fast, they were torpid with sleep. The sad priest was fain to wander out under the stars. There, in the snow-padded silences of the white-limned forest, far from the joyous peal of Christmas bells, he knelt alone and worshiped God.

For five months he wandered with the Montaignais, and now in April the hunters turned toward Quebec with their furs. At three in the morning Le Jeune knocked on the door of the mission house at Quebec, and was welcomed home by the priests. The pilgrimage had taught him what the Jesuits have always held—the way to power with a people is through the education of the children. "Give me a child for the first seven years of its life," said a famous educator, "and I care not what you do with him the rest of his years." Missions and schools must be established among the tribes of Hurons and Iroquois.

Consequently, when Champlain sent his soldiers in 1634 to build a fort at Three Rivers, they were accompanied by three Jesuits, chief of whom was Jean de Brébeuf, lion-hearted, bound for the land of the Hurons. The chapel bells of Quebec rang and rang again in honor of the new Jesuit mission—morning, noon, and night they chimed in airy music, calling men's thoughts to God, just as you may hear the chimes to-day; and the ramparts below Quebec thundered and reëchoed with salvos of cannon when the missionaries set out for Three Rivers.

{83} At Three Rivers waited the Indians of the Up-Country. The Jesuits embarked with them for the land of the Hurons. The priests traveled barefoot to avoid injuring the frail bark of the canoes. Barely had farewell cheers faded on the river, when the canoes spread apart. With pieces of buckskin hoisted on fishing rods for sail, and a flipping of paddles as naked, bronzed arms set the pace, the voyage had begun. Heroism is easy with chapel bells ringing; it is another matter, barefoot and with sleeves rolled up.

It was the same trail that Champlain had followed up the Ottawa. Only Champlain was assured of good treatment, for he had promised to fight in the Indian wars; but the Jesuits were dependent on the caprice of their conductors. Any one, who, from experience in the wilds, has learned how the term "tenderfoot" came to be applied, will realize the hardships endured—and endured without self-pity—by these scholarly men of immured life. The rocks of the portage cut their naked feet. The Indians refused to carry their packs overland and flung bundles of clothing and food into the water. In fair weather the voyageurs slept on the sand under the overturned canoes; in rain a wigwam was raised, and into the close confines of this tent crowded men, women, and children, for the most part naked, and with less idea of decency than a domestic dog. Each night, as the boats were beached, the priests wandered off into the woods to hold their prayers in privacy. Soon the canoes were so far apart the different boats did not camp together, and the white men were scattered alone among the savages. Robberies increased till, when Brébeuf reached Georgian Bay, thirty days from leaving Three Rivers, he had little left but the bundles he had carried for himself.

Brébeuf had been to the Huron country before with Etienne Brulé, Champlain's pathfinder; but of the first mission no record exists. Brébeuf found that Brulé had been murdered near the modern Penetang; and the Indians had scarcely brought the priest's canoe ashore, when they bolted through the woods, leaving him to follow as best he could.

{84} Take a map of modern Ontario. Draw a circle round Georgian Bay, running from Muskoka through Lake Simcoe and up into Manitoulin Island. Here, on the very stamping ground of the summer tourist, was the scene of the Jesuits' Huron mission.

GEORGIAN BAY

When Brébeuf's tall frame emerged from the woods, the whole village of Ihonateria dashed out to welcome him, shouting, "He has come! He has come again! Behold, the Black Robe has come again!" Young braves willingly ran back through the forest for the baggage, which the voyageurs had thrown aside; and at one o'clock in the morning, as the messengers came through the moonlit forest, Brébeuf took up his abode in the house of the leading chief. Later came Fathers Davost and Daniel. By October the Indians had built the missionaries their wigwam, a bark-covered house of logs, thirty-six feet long, divided into three rooms, reception room, living quarters, church. In the entrance hall assembled the Indians, squatting on the floor, gazing in astonishment at the religious pictures on the wall, and, above all, at the clock.

{85} "What does he say?" they would ask, listening solemnly to the ticking.

"He says 'Hang on the kettle,'" Brébeuf would answer as the clock struck twelve, and the whole conclave would be given a simple meal of corn porridge; but at four the clock sang a different song.

"It says 'Get up and go home,'" Brébeuf would explain, and the Indians would file out, knowing well that the Black Robes were to engage in prayer.

No holiday in the wildwoods was the Jesuit mission. Chapel bell called to service at four in the morning. Eight was the breakfast hour. The morning was passed teaching, preaching, visiting. At two o'clock was dinner, when a chapter of the Bible was read. After four the Indians were dismissed, and the missionaries met to compare notes and plan the next day's campaign.

By 1645, five mission houses had been established, with Ste. Marie on the Wye, east of Midland, as the central house. Near Lake Simcoe were two missions,—St. Jean Ba'tiste and St. Joseph; near Penetang, St. Louis, and St. Ignace. Westward of Ste. Marie on the Wye were half a dozen irregular missions among the Tobacco Indians. Each of the five regular missions boasted palisaded inclosures, a chapel of log slabs with bell and spire, though the latter might be only a high wooden cross. At Ste. Marie, the central station, were lodgings for sixty people, a hospital, kitchen garden, with cattle, pigs, and poultry. At various times soldiers had been sent up by the Quebec governors, till some thirty or forty were housed at Ste. Marie. In all were eighteen priests, four lay brothers, seven white servants, and twenty-three volunteers, unpaid helpers—donnés, they were called, young men ardently religious, learning woodlore and the Indian language among the Jesuits, as well as exploring whenever it was possible for them to accompany the Indians. Among the volunteers was one Chouart Groseillers, who, if he did not accompany Father Jogues on a preaching tour to the tribes of Lake Superior, had at least gone as far as the Sault and learned of the vast unexplored world beyond Lake Superior. {86} Food, as always, played a large part in winning the soul of the redskin. On church fête days as many as three thousand people were fed and lodged at Ste. Marie. That the priests suffered many trials among the unreasonable savages need not be told. When it rained too heavily they were accused of ruining the crops by praying for too much rain; when there was drouth they were blamed for not arranging this matter with their God; and when the scourge of smallpox raged through the Huron villages, devastating the wigwams so that the timber wolves wandered unmolested among the dead, it was easy for the humpback sorcerer to ascribe the pestilence also to the influence of the Black Robes. Once their houses were set on fire. Again and again their lives were threatened. Often after tramping twenty miles through the sleet-soaked, snow-drifted spring forests, arriving at an Indian village foredone and exhausted, the Jesuit was met with no better welcome than a wigwam flap closed against his entrance, or a rabble of impish children hooting and jeering him as he sought shelter from house to house.

But an influence was at work on the borders of the St. Lawrence that yearly rendered the Hurons more tractable. From raiding the settlements of the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois were sweeping in a scourge more deadly than smallpox up the Ottawa to the very forests of Georgian Bay. The Hurons no longer dared to go down to Quebec in swarming canoes. Only a few picked warriors—perhaps two hundred and fifty—would venture so near the Iroquois fighting ground.

One winter night, as the priests sat round their hearth fire watching the mournful shadows cast by the blazing logs on the rude walls, Brébeuf, the soldier, lion-hearted, the fearless, told in a low, dreamy voice of a vision that had come,—the vision of a huge fiery cross rising slowly out of the forest and moving across the face of the sky towards the Huron country. It seemed to come from the land of the Iroquois. Was the priest's vision a dream, or his own intuition deeper than reason, assuming dire form, portending a universal fear? Who can tell? I can but repeat the story as it is told in their annals.

{87} "How large was the cross?" asked the other priests. Brébeuf gazes long in the fire.

"Large enough to crucify us all," he answers.

And, as he had dreamed, fell the blow.

St. Joseph, of the Lake Simcoe region, was situated a day's travel from the main fortified mission of Ste. Marie. Round it were some two thousand Hurons to whom Father Daniel ministered. Father Daniel was just closing the morning services on July the 4th, 1648. His tawny people were on their knees repeating the responses of the service, when from the forest, humming with insect and bird life, arose a sound that was neither wind nor running water—confused, increasing, nearing! Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,—"The enemy! the Iroquois!" and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable. Painted redskins, naked but for the breech clout, were dashing across the cornfields to scale the palisades or force the hastily slammed gates. Father Daniel rushed from church to wigwams rallying the Huron warriors, while the women and children, the aged and the feeble, ran a terrified rabble to the shelter of the chapel. Before the Hurons could man the walls, Iroquois hatchets had hacked holes of entrance in the palisades. The fort was rushed by a bloodthirsty horde making the air hideous with fiendish screams.

"Fly! Save yourselves!" shouted the priest. "I stay here! We shall this day meet in Heaven!"

In the volley and counter volley of ball and arrow, Father Daniel reeled on his face, shot in the heart. In a trice his body was cut to pieces, and the Iroquois were bathing their hands in his warm lifeblood. A moment later the village was in roaring flames, and on the burning pile were flung the fragments of the priest's body. The victors set out on the homeward tramp with a line of more than six hundred prisoners, the majority, women and children, to be brained if their strength failed on the march, to be tortured in the Iroquois towns if they survived the abuse on the way.

{88} Next westward from the Lake Simcoe missions were St. Ignace with four hundred people and St. Louis with seven hundred, near the modern Penetang and within short distance of the Jesuits' strong headquarters on the River Wye. At these two missions labored Brébeuf, the giant, and a fragile priest named Lalemant.

Encouraged by the total destruction of St. Joseph, the Iroquois that very fall took the warpath with more than one thousand braves. Ascending the Ottawa leisurely, they had passed the winter hunting and cutting off any stray wanderers found in the forest.

The Hurons knew the doom that was slowly approaching. Yet they remained passive, stunned, terrified by the blow at St. Joseph. It was spring of 1649 before the warriors reached Georgian Bay. March winds had cleared the trail of snowdrifts, but the forests were still leafless. St. Ignace mission lay between Lake Simcoe and St. Louis. Approaching it one windy March night, the Iroquois had cut holes through the palisades before dawn and burst inside the walls with the yells and gyrations of some hideous hell dance. Here a warrior simulated the howl of the wolf. There another approached in the crouching leaps of a panther, all the while uttering the yelps and screams of a beast of prey lashed to fury. The poor Hurons were easy victims. Nearly all their braves happened to be absent hunting, and the four hundred women and children, rushing from the long houses half dazed with sleep, fell without realizing their fate, or found themselves herded in the chapel like cattle at the shambles, Iroquois guards at every window and door.

Luckily three Hurons escaped over the palisades and rushed breathless through the forest to forewarn Brébeuf and Lalemant cooped up in St. Louis. The Iroquois came on behind like a wolf pack.

"Escape! Escape! Run to the woods, Black Robes! There is yet time," the Indian converts urged Brébeuf; but the lion-hearted stood steadfast, though Lalemant, new to scenes of carnage, turned white and trembled in spite of his resolution.

{89} "Who would protect the women if the men fled like deer to the woods?" demanded Brébeuf, and the tigerish yells of the on-rushing horde answered the question.

BRÉBEUF

Before day dawn had tipped the branches of the leafless trees with shafted sunlight, the enemy were hacking furiously at the palisades. Trapped and cornered, the most timid of animals will fight. With such fury, reckless from desperation, cherishing no hope, the Hurons now fought, but they were handicapped by lack of guns and balls. Thirty Iroquois had been slain, a hundred wounded, and the assailants drew off for breath. It was only the lull between two thunderclaps. A moment later they were on St. Louis' walls and had hacked through a dozen places. At these spots the fiercest fighting occurred, and those Iroquois who had not already bathed their faces in the gore of victims at St. Ignace were soon enough dyed in their own blood. Here, there, everywhere, were Brébeuf and Lalemant, fighting, administering last rites, exhorting the Hurons to perish valiantly. Then the rolling clouds of flame and smoke told the Hurons that their village was on fire. Some dashed back to die inside the burning wigwams. Others fought desperately to escape through the broken walls. A few, in the confusion and smoke, succeeded in reaching the woods, whence they ran to warn Ste. Marie on the Wye. Brébeuf and Lalemant had been knocked down, stripped, bound, and were now {90} half driven, half dragged, with the other captives to be tortured at Ignace. Not a sign of fear did either priest betray.

One would fain pass over the next pages of the Jesuit records. It is inconceivable how human nature, even savage nature, so often stoops beneath the most repellent cruelties of the brute world. It is inconceivable unless one acknowledge an influence fiendish; but let us not judge the Indians too harshly. When the Iroquois warriors were torturing the Hurons and their missionaries, the populace of civilized European cities was outdoing the savages on victims whose sins were political.

While the Jesuits of Ste. Marie were praying all day and night before the lighted altar for heavenly intervention to rescue Brébeuf and Lalemant, the two captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes, the gapingstock of a thousand fiends. When the Iroquois singed Brébeuf from head to foot with burning birch bark, he threatened them in tones of thunder with everlasting damnation for persecuting the servants of God. The Iroquois shrieked with laughter. Such spirit in a man was to their liking. Then, to stop his voice, they cut away his lips and rammed a red-hot iron into his mouth. Not once did the giant priest flinch or writhe at the torture stake. Then they brought out Lalemant, that Brébeuf might suffer the agony of seeing a weaker spirit flinch. Poor Lalemant fell at his superior's feet, sobbing out a verse of Scripture. Then they wreathed Lalemant in oiled bark and set fire to it.

"We baptize you," they yelled, throwing hot water on the dying man. Then they railed out blasphemies, obscenities unspeakable, against the Jesuits' religion. Brébeuf had not winced, but his frame was relaxing. He sank to his knees, a dying man. With the yells of devils jealous of losing their prey, they ripped off his scalp while he was still alive, tore his heart from his breast, and drank the warm lifeblood of the priest. Brébeuf died at four in the afternoon. Strange to relate, Lalemant, of the weaker body, survived the tortures till daybreak, when, weary of the sport, the Indians desisted from their mad night orgies and put an end to his sufferings by braining him.

{91} Over at Ste. Marie, Ragueneau and the other priests momentarily awaited the attack; but at Ste. Marie were forty French soldiers and ample supply of muskets. The Iroquois was bravest as the wolf is bravest—when attacking a lamb. Three hundred Hurons lay in ambush along the forest trail. These ran from the Iroquois like sheep; but when three hundred more sallied from the fort, led by the French, it was the Iroquois' turn to run, and they fled back behind the palisades of St. Louis. The Hurons followed, entered by the selfsame breaches the Iroquois had made, and drove the invaders out. More Iroquois rushed from Ignace to the rescue. A hundred Iroquois fell in the day's fight, and when they finally recaptured St. Louis, only twenty Hurons remained of the three hundred. The victory had been bought at too great cost. Tying their prisoners to stakes at St. Ignace, they heaped the courtyard with inflammable wood, set fire to all, and retreated, taking only enough prisoners to carry their plunder.

REMNANTS OF WALLS OF FORT ST. MARY ON CHRISTIAN ISLAND IN 1891

Ste. Marie for the time was safe. The invaders had gone; but the blow had crushed forever the prowess of the Huron nation. The remaining towns had thought for nothing but flight. {92} Town after town was forsaken and burned in the summer of 1649, the corn harvest left standing in the fields, while the panic-stricken people put out in their canoes to take refuge on the islands of Georgian Bay. Ste. Marie on the Wye alone remained, and the reason for its existence was vanishing like winter snow before summer sun, for its people fled … fled … fled … daily fled to the pink granite islands of the lake. The Hurons begged the Jesuits to accompany them, and there was nothing else for Ragueneau to do. Ste. Marie was stripped, the stock slain for food. Then the buildings were set on fire. June 14, just as the sunset bathed water and sky in seas of gold, the priest led his homeless people down to the lake as Moses of old led the children of Israel. Oars and sweeps, Georgian Bay calm as glass, they rafted slowly out to the Christian Islands,—Faith, Hope, and Charity,—which tourists can still see from passing steamers, a long wooded line beyond the white water-fret of the wind-swept reefs. The island known on the map as Charity, or St. Joseph, was heavily wooded. Here the refugees found their haven, and the French soldiers cleared the ground {93} for a stone fort of walled masonry,—the islands offering little else than stone and timber, though the fishing has not failed to this day.

MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES Showing the territory of the Jesuit Huron missions

By autumn the walled fort was complete, but some eight thousand refugees had gathered to the island. Such numbers could not subsist on Georgian Bay in summer. In winter their presence meant starvation, and before the spring of 1650 half had perished. Of the survivors, many had fed on the bodies of the dead. No help had come from Quebec for almost three years. The clothing of the priests had long since worn to shreds. Ragueneau and his helpers were now dressed in skins like the Indians, and reduced to a diet of nuts and smoked fish.

With warm weather came sickness. And also came bands of raiding Iroquois striking terror to the Tobacco Indians. Among them, too, perished Jesuit priests, martyrs to the faith. Did some of the Hurons venture from the Christian Islands across to the mainland to hunt, they were beset by scalping parties and came back to the fort with tales that crazed Ragueneau's Indians with terror. The Hurons decided to abandon Georgian Bay. Some scattered to Lake Superior, to Green Bay, to Detroit. Others found refuge on Manitoulin Island. A remnant of a few hundreds followed Ragueneau and the French down the Ottawa to take shelter at Quebec. Their descendants may be found to this day at the mission of Lorette.

To-day, as tourists drive through Quebec, marveling at the massive buildings and power and wealth of Catholic orders, do they pause to consider that the foundation stones of that power were dyed in the blood of these early martyrs? Or, as the pleasure seekers glide among the islands of Georgian Bay, do they ever ponder that this fair world of blue waters and pink granite islands once witnessed the most bloody tragedy of brute force, triumphant over the blasted hopes of religious zeal?

CHAPTER VI

FROM 1650 TO 1672

Radisson captured by Iroquois—Radisson escapes—At Onandaga—How the French were saved—Word of the western land—Westward bound—Dollard's Heroes—The fight at the Long Sault—To seek the north sea—Discovers Hudson Bay—Origin of the great fur company

Having destroyed the Hurons, who were under French protection, it is not surprising that the Iroquois now set themselves to destroy the French. From Montreal to Tadoussac the St. Lawrence swarmed with war canoes. No sooner had the river ice broken up and the birds begun winging north than the Iroquois flocked down the current of the Richelieu, across Lake St. Peter to Three Rivers, down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. And the snows of midwinter afforded no truce to the raids, for the Iroquois cached their canoes in the forest, and roamed the woods on snowshoes. Settlers fled terrified from their farms to the towns; farmers dared not work in their fields without a sentry standing guard; Montreal became a prison; Three Rivers lay blockaded; and at Quebec the war canoes passed defiantly below the cannon of Cape Diamond, paddles beating defiance against the gun'els, or prows flaunting the scalps of victims within cannon fire of Castle St. Louis. Rich and poor, priests and parishioners, governors and habitants, all alike trembled before the lurking treachery. Father Jogues had been captured on his way from the Huron mission; Père Poncet was likewise kidnapped at Quebec and carried to the tortures of the Mohawk towns; and a nephew of the Governor of Quebec was a few years later attacked while hunting near Lake Champlain.

The outraged people of New France realized that fear was only increasing the boldness of the Iroquois. A Mohawk-chief fell into their hands. By way of warning, they bound him to a stake and burned him to death. The Indian revenge fell swift and sure. In 1653 the Governor of Three Rivers and twelve leading citizens were murdered a short distance from the fort gates. {95} One night in May of 1652 a tall, slim, swarthy lad about sixteen years of age was seen winding his way home to Three Rivers from a day's shooting in the marshes. He had set out at day dawn with some friends, but fear of the Iroquois had driven his comrades back. Now at nightfall, within sight of Three Rivers, when the sunset glittered from the chapel spire, he unslung his bag of game and sat down to reload his musket. Then he noticed that the pistols in his belt had been water-soaked from the day's wading, and he reloaded them too.

Any one who is used to life in the open knows how at sundown wild birds foregather for a last conclave. Ducks were winging in myriads and settling on the lake with noisy flacker. Unable to resist the temptation of one last shot, the boy was gliding noiselessly forward through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, the Iroquois were upon him.

When he regained consciousness, he was pegged out on the sand amid a flotilla of beached canoes, where Iroquois warriors were having an evening meal. So began the captivity, the love of the wilds, the wide wanderings of one of the most intrepid explorers in New France,—Pierre Esprit Radisson.

His youth and the fact that he would make a good warrior were in his favor. When he was carried back to the Mohawk town and with other prisoners compelled to run the gauntlet between two lines of tormentors, Radisson ran so fast and dodged so dexterously that he was not once hit. The feat was greeted with shrieks of delight by the Iroquois; and the high-spirited boy was given in adoption to a captive Huron woman.

Things would have gone well had he not bungled an attempt to escape; but one night, while in camp with three Iroquois hunters, an Algonquin captive entered. While the Iroquois {96} slept with guns stacked against the trees, the sleepless Algonquin captive rose noiselessly where he lay by the fire, seized the Mohawk warriors' guns, threw one tomahawk across to Radisson, and with the other brained two of the sleepers. The French boy aimed a blow at the third sleeper, and the two captives escaped. But they might have saved themselves the trouble. They were pursued and overtaken on Lake St. Peter, within sight of Three Rivers. This time Radisson had to endure all the diableries of Mohawk torture. For two days he was kept bound to the torture stake. The nails were torn from his fingers, the flesh burnt from the soles of his feet, a hundred other barbarous freaks of impish Indian children wreaked on the French boy. Arrows with flaming points were shot at his naked body. His mutilated finger ends were ground between stones, or thrust into the smoking bowl of a pipe full of coals, or bitten by fiendish youngsters being trained up the way a Mohawk warrior should go.

A CANADIAN IN SNOWSHOES (After La Potherie)

Radisson's youth, his courage, his very dare-devil rashness, together with presents of wampum belts from his Indian parents, {97} saved his life for a second time, and a year of wild wanderings with Mohawk warriors finally brought him to Albany on the Hudson, where the Dutch would have ransomed him as they had ransomed the two Jesuits, Jogues and Poncet; but the boy disliked to break faith a second time with his loyal Indian friends. Still, the glimpse of white man's life caused a terrible upheaval of revulsion from the barbarities, the filth, the vice, of the Mohawk camp. He could endure Indian life no longer. One morning, in the fall of 1653, he stole out from the Mohawk lodges, while the mist of day dawn still shadowed the forest, and broke at a run down the trail of the Mohawk valley for Albany. All day he ran, pursued by the phantom fright of his own imagination, fancying everything that crunched beneath his moccasined tread some Mohawk warrior, seeing in the branches that reeled as he passed the arms of pursuers stretched out to stop him;—on … and on … and on, he ran, pausing neither to eat nor rest; here dashing into the bed of a stream and running along the pebbled bottom to throw pursuers off the trail; there breaking through a thicket of brushwood away from the trail, only to come back to it breathless farther on, when some alarm of the wind in the trees or deer on the move had proved false. Only muscles of iron strength, lithe as elastic, could have endured the strain. Nightfall at last came, hiding him from pursuers; but still he sped on at a run, following the trail by the light of the stars and the rush of the river. By sunrise of the second day he was staggering; for the rocks were slippery with frost and his moccasins worn to tatters. It was four in the afternoon before he reached the first outlying cabin of the Dutch settlers. For three days he lay hidden in Albany behind sacks of wheat in a thin-boarded attic, through the cracks of which he could see the Mohawks searching everywhere. The Jesuit Poncet gave him passage money to take ship to Europe by way of New York. New York was then a village of a few hundred houses, thatch-roofed, with stone fort, stone church, stone barracks. Central Park was a rocky wilderness. What is now Wall Street was the stamping ground of pigs and goats. January of 1654 Radisson {98} reached Europe, no longer a boy, but a man inured to danger and hardships and daring, though not yet eighteen.

When Radisson came back to Three Rivers in May he found changes had taken place in New France. Among the men murdered with the Governor of Three Rivers by the Mohawks the preceding year had been his sister's husband, and the widow had married one Medard Chouart de Groseillers, who had served in the Huron country as a lay helper with the martyred Jesuits. Also a truce had been patched up between the Iroquois and the French. The Iroquois were warring against the Eries and wanted arms from the French. A still more treacherous motive underlay the Iroquois' peace. They wanted a French settlement in their country as a guarantee of non-intervention when they continued to raid the refugee Hurons. Such duplicity was unsuspected by New France. The Jesuits looked upon the peace as designed by Providence to enable them to establish missions among the Iroquois. Father Le Moyne went from village to village preaching the gospel and receiving belts of wampum as tokens of peace—one belt containing as many as seven thousand beads. When the Onondagas asked for a French colony, Lauzon, the French Governor, readily consented if the Jesuits would pay the cost, estimated at about $10,000; and in 1656 Major Dupuis had led fifty Frenchmen and four Jesuits up the St. Lawrence in long boats through the wilderness to a little hill on Lake Onondaga, where a palisaded fort was built, and the lilies of France, embroidered on a white silk flag by the Ursuline nuns, flung from the breeze above the Iroquois land. The colony was hardly established before three hundred Mohawks fell on the Hurons encamped under shelter of Quebec, butchered without mercy, and departed with shouts of laughter that echoed below the guns at Cape Diamond, scalps waving from the prow of each Iroquois canoe. Quebec was thunderstruck, numb with fright. The French dared not retaliate, or the Iroquois would fall on the colony at Onondaga. Perhaps people who keep their vision too constantly fixed on heaven lose {99} sight of the practical duties of earth; but when eighty Onondagas came again in 1657, inviting a hundred Hurons to join the Iroquois Confederacy, the Jesuits again suspected no treachery in the invitation, but saw only a providential opportunity to spread one hundred Huron converts among the Iroquois pagans. Father Ragueneau, who had led the poor refugees down from the Christian Islands on Georgian Bay, now with another priest offered to accompany the Hurons to the Iroquois nation. An interpreter was needed. Young Radisson, now twenty-one years of age, offered to go as a lay helper, and the party of two hundred and twenty French, eighty Iroquois, one hundred Hurons, departed from the gates of Montreal, July 26.

SAUSON'S MAP, 1656

Hardly were they beyond recall, before scouts brought word that twelve hundred Iroquois had gone on the warpath against Canada, and three Frenchmen of Montreal had been scalped. At last the Governor of Quebec bestirred himself: he caused twelve Iroquois to be seized and held as hostages for the safety of the French.

The Onondagas had set out from Montreal carrying the Frenchmen's baggage. Beyond the first portage they flung the packs on the ground, hurried the Hurons into canoes so that no two Hurons were in one boat, and paddled over the {100} water with loud laughter, leaving the French in the lurch. Father Ragueneau and Radisson quickly read the ominous signs. Telling the other French to gather up the baggage, they armed themselves and paddled in swift pursuit. That night Ragueneau's party and the Onondagas camped together. Nothing was said or done to evince treachery. Friends and enemies, Onondagas and Hurons and white men, paddled and camped together for another week; but when, on August 3, four Huron warriors and two women forcibly seized a canoe and headed back for Montreal, the Onondagas would delay no longer. That afternoon as the Indians paddled inshore to camp on one of the Thousand Islands, some Onondaga braves rushed into the woods as if to hunt. As the canoes grated the pebbled shore a secret signal was given. The Huron men with their eyes bent on the beach, intent on landing, never knew that they had been struck. Onondaga hatchets, clubs, spears, were plied from the water side, and from the hunters ambushed on shore crashed musketry that mowed down those who would have fled to the woods.

By night time only a few Huron women and the French had survived the massacre. Such was the baptism of blood that inaugurated the French colony at Onondaga. Luckily the fort built on the crest of the hill above Lake Onondaga was large enough to house stock and provisions. Outside the palisades there daily gathered more Iroquois warriors, who no longer dissembled a hunger for Jesuits' preaching. Among the warriors were Radisson's old friends of the Mohawks, and his foster father confessed to him frankly that the Confederacy were only delaying the massacre of the French till they could somehow obtain the freedom of the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.

Daily more warriors gathered; nightly the war drum pounded; week after week the beleaguered and imprisoned French heard their stealthy enemy closing nearer and nearer on them, and the painted foliage of autumn frosts gave place to the leafless trees and the drifting snows of midwinter. The French were hemmed in completely as if on a desert isle, and no help could come from Quebec, where New France was literally under Iroquois siege.

{101} The question was, what to do? Messengers had been secretly sent to Quebec, but the Mohawks had caught the scouts bringing back answers, and there was no safe escape from the colony through ambushed woods in midwinter. The Iroquois could afford to bide their time for victims who could not escape. All winter the whites secretly built boats in the lofts of the fort, but when the timbers were put together the boats had to be brought downstairs, and a Huron convert spread a terrifying report of a second deluge for which the white men were preparing a second Noah's Ark. Mohawk warriors at once scented an attempt to escape when the ice broke up in spring, and placed their braves in ambush along the portages. Also they sent a deputation to see if that story of the boats were true. Forewarned by Radisson, the whites built a floor over the boats, heaped canoes above the floor, and invited the Mohawk spies in. The Mohawks smiled grimly and were reassured. Canoes would be ripped into shingles if they ran the ice jam of spring. The Iroquois felt doubly certain of their victims; but Radisson, free to go among the warriors as one of themselves, learned that they were plotting to murder half the colony and hold the other half as hostages for the safety of the twelve Indians in the dungeon at Quebec. The whites could delay no longer. Something must be done, but what? Radisson, knowing the Indian customs, proposed a way out.

No normally built savage could refuse an invitation to a sumptuous feast. According to Indian custom, no feaster dare leave uneaten food on his plate. Waste to the Indian is crime. In the words of the Scotch proverb, "Better burst than waste." And all Indians have implicit faith in dreams. Radisson dreamed—so he told the Indians—that the white men were to give them a marvelous banquet. No sooner dreamed than done! The Iroquois probably thought it a chance to obtain possession inside the fort; but the whites had taken good care to set the banquet between inner and outer walls.

Such a repast no savage had ever enjoyed in the memory of the race. All the ambushed spies flocked in from the portages. {102} The painted warriors washed off their grease, donned their best buckskin, and rallied to the banquet as to battle. All the stock but one solitary pig, a few chickens and dogs, had been slaughtered for the kettle. Such an odor of luscious meat steamed up from the fort for days as whetted the warriors' hunger to the appetite of ravenous wolves. Finally, one night, the trumpets blew a blare that almost burst eardrums. Fifes shrilled, and the rub-a-dub-dub of a dozen drums set the air in a tremor. A great fire had been kindled between the inner and outer walls that set shadows dancing in the forest. Then the gates were thrown open, and in trooped the feasters. All the French acting as waiters, the whites carried in the kettles—kettles of wild fowl, kettles of oxen, kettles of dogs, kettles of porridge and potatoes and corn and what not? That is it—what not? Were the kettles drugged? Who knows? The feasters ate till their eyes were rolling lugubriously; and still the kettles came round. The Indians ate till they were torpid as swollen corpses, and still came the white men with more kettles, while the mischievous French lad, Radisson, danced a mad jig, shouting, yelling, "Eat! eat! Beat the drum! Awake! awake! Cheer up! Eat! eat!"

By midnight every soul of the feast had tumbled over sound asleep, and at the rear gates were the French, stepping noiselessly, speaking in whispers, launching their boats loaded with provisions and ammunition. The soldiers were for going back and butchering every warrior, but the Jesuits forbade such treachery. Then Radisson, light-spirited as if the refugees had been setting out on a holiday, perpetrated yet a last trick on the warriors. To the bell rope of the main gate he fastened a pig, so when the Indians would pull the rope for admission, they would hear the tramp of a sentry inside. Then he stuffed effigies of men on guard round the windows of the fort.

It was a pitchy, sleety night, the river roaring with the loose ice of spring flood, the forests noisy with the boisterous March wind. Out on the maelstrom of ice and flood launched the fifty-three colonists, March 20, 1658. By April they were safe {103} inside the walls of Quebec, and chance hunters brought word that what with sleep, and the measured tramp, tramp of the pig, and the baying of the dogs, and the clucking of the chickens inside the fort, the escape of the whites had not been discovered for a week. The Indians thought the whites had gone into retreat for especially long prayers. Then a warrior climbed the inner palisades, and rage knew no bounds. The fort was looted and burnt to the ground.

Peltry traffic was the life of New France. Without it the colony would have perished, and now the rupture of peace with the Iroquois cut off that traffic. To the Iroquois land south of the St. Lawrence the French dared not go, and the land of the Hurons was a devastated wilderness. The boats that came out to New France were compelled to return without a single peltry, but there still remained the unknown land of the Algonquin northwest and beyond the Great Lakes. Year after year young French adventurers essayed the exploration of that land. In 1634 Jean Nicolet, one of Champlain's wood runners, had gone westward as far as Green Bay and coasted the shores of Lake Michigan. Jesuits, where they preached on Lake Superior, had been told of a vast land beyond the Sweet Water Seas,—Great Lakes,—a land where wandered tribes of warriors powerful as the Iroquois.

Yearly, when the Algonquins came down the Ottawa to trade, Jesuits and young French adventurers accompanied the canoes back up the Ottawa, hoping to reach the Unknown Land, which rumor said was bounded only by the Western Sea. However, the priests went no farther than Lake Nipissing; but two nameless French wood runners came back from Green Bay in August of 1656 with marvelous tales of wandering hunters to the north called "Christines" (Crees), who passed the winter hunting buffalo on a land bare of trees (the prairie) and the summer fishing on the shores of the North Sea (Hudson's Bay). They told also of fierce tribes south of the Christines (the Sioux), who traded with the Indians of the Spanish settlements in Mexico.

{104} All New France became fired by these reports. When Radisson returned from Onondaga in April of 1659, he found his brother-in-law, Chouart Groseillers, just back from Nipissing, where he had been serving the Jesuits, with more tales of this marvelous undiscovered land. The two kinsmen decided to go back with the Algonquins that very year; for, confessed Radisson in his journal, "I longed to see myself again in a boat."

Thirty other Frenchmen and two Jesuits had assembled in Montreal to join the Algonquins. More than sixty canoes set out from Montreal in June, the one hundred and forty Algonquins well supplied with firearms to defend themselves from marauding Iroquois. Numbers begot courage, courage carelessness; and before the fleet had reached the Chaudière Falls, at the modern city of Ottawa, the canoes had spread far apart in utter forgetfulness of danger. Not twenty were within calling distance when an Indian prophet, or wandering medicine man, ran down to the shore, throwing his blanket and hatchet aside as signal of peace, and shouting out warning of Iroquois warriors ambushed farther up the river.

Drunk with the new sense of power from the possession of French firearms, perhaps drunk too with French brandy obtained at Montreal, the Algonquins paused to take the strange captive on board, and returned thanks for the friendly warning by calling their benefactor a "coward and a dog and a hen." At the same time they took the precaution of sleeping in mid-stream with their canoes abreast tied to water-logged trees. A dull roar through the night mist foretold they were nearing the great Chaudière Falls; and at first streak of day dawn there was a rush to land and cross the long portage before the mist lifted and exposed them to the hostiles.

To any one who knows the region of Canada's capital the scene can easily be recalled: the long string of canoes gliding through the gray morning like phantoms; Rideau Falls shimmering on the left like a snowy curtain; the dense green of Gatineau Point as the birch craft swerved across the river inshore to the right; the wooded heights, now known as Parliament Hill, {105} jutting above the river mist, the new foliage of the topmost trees just tipped with the first primrose shafts of sunrise; then the vague stir and unrest in the air as the sun came up till the gray fog became rose mist shot with gold, and rose like a curtain to the upper airs, revealing the angry, tempest-tossed cataract straight ahead, hurtling over the rocks of the Chaudière in walls of living waters. Where the lumber piles of Hull on the right to-day jut out as if to span Ottawa River to Parliament Hill, the voyageurs would land to portage across to Lake Du Chêne.

Just as they sheered inshore the morning air was split by a hideous din of guns and war whoops. The Iroquois had been lying in ambush at the portage. The Algonquins' bravado now became a panic. They abandoned canoes and baggage, threw themselves behind a windfall of trees, and poured a steady rain of bullets across the portage in order to permit the other canoes to come ashore. When the fog lifted, baggage and canoes lay scattered on the shore. Behind one barricade of logs lay the French and Algonquins; behind another, the Iroquois; and woe betide the warrior who showed his head or dared to cross the open. All day the warriors kept up their cross fire. Thirteen Algonquins had perished, and the French were only waiting a chance to abandon the voyage. Luckily, that night was pitch-dark. The Algonquin leader blew a long low call through his birch trumpet. All hands rallied and rushed for the boats to cross the river. All the Frenchmen's baggage had been lost. Of the white adventurers every soul turned back but Groseillers and Radisson.

The Algonquins now made up in caution what they had at first lacked. They voyaged only by night and hid by day. No camp fires were kindled. No muskets were fired even for game; and the paddlers were presently reduced to food of tripe de roche—green moss scraped from rocks. Birch canoes could not cross Lake Huron in storm; so the Indians kept close to the south shore of Georgian Bay, winding among the pink granite islands, past the ruined Jesuit missions across to the Straits of Mackinac and on down Lake Michigan to Green Bay.

{106} "But our mind was not to stay here," relates Radisson, "but to know the remotest people." Sometime between April and July of 1659 the two white men had followed the Indian hunters across what is now the state of Wisconsin to "a mighty river like the St. Lawrence." They had found the Mississippi, first of white men to view the waters since the treasure-seeking Spaniards of the south crossed the river. They had penetrated the Unknown. They had discovered the Great Northwest—a world boundlessly vast; so vast no man forever after in the history of the human race need be dispossessed of his share of the earth. Something of the importance of the discovery seems to have impressed Radisson; for he speaks of the folly of the European nations fighting for sterile, rocky provinces when here is land enough for all—land enough to banish poverty.

The two Frenchmen's wanderings with the tribes of the prairie—whether those tribes were Omahas or Iowas or Mandanes or Mascoutins or Sioux—cannot be told here. It would fill volumes. I have told the story fully elsewhere. By spring of 1660 Radisson and Groseillers are back at Sault Ste. Marie, having gathered wealth of beaver peltries beyond the dreams of avarice; but scouts have come to the Sault with ominous news—news of one thousand Iroquois braves on the warpath to destroy every settlement in New France. Hourly, daily, weekly, have Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal been awaiting the blow.

The Algonquins refuse to go down to Quebec with Radisson and Groseillers. "Fools," shouts Radisson in full assembly of their chiefs squatting round a council fire, "are you going to allow the Iroquois to destroy you as they destroyed the Hurons? How are you going to fight the Iroquois unless you come down to Quebec for guns? Do you want to see your wives and children slaves? For my part, I prefer to die like a man rather than live a slave."

The chiefs were shamed out of their cowardice. Five hundred young warriors undertook to conduct the two white men down to Quebec. They embarked at once, scouts to the fore reconnoitering all portages, and guards on duty wherever the {107} boats landed. A few Iroquois braves were seen near the Long Sault Rapids, but they took to their heels in such evident fright that Radisson was puzzled to know what had become of the one thousand braves on the warpath. Carrying the beaver pelts along the portage so they could be used as shields in case of attack, the Algonquins came to the foot of the Long Sault Rapids near Montreal, and saw plainly what had happened to the invading warriors. A barricade of logs the shape of a square fort stood on the shore. From the pickets hung the scalps of dead Indians and on the sands lay the charred remains of white men. Every tree for yards round was peppered with bullet holes. Here was a charred stake where some victim had been tortured; there the smashed remnants of half-burnt canoes; and at another point empty powder barrels. A terrible battle had been waged but a week before. Radisson could trace, inside the barricade of logs, holes scooped in the sand where the besieged, desperate with thirst, had drunk the muddy water. At intervals in the palisades openings had been hacked, and these were blood stained, as if the scene of the fiercest fighting. Bark had been burnt from the logs in places, where the assailants had set fire to the fort.

From Indian refugees at Montreal, Radisson learned details of the fight. It was the battle most famous in early Canadian annals—the Long Sault. All winter Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal had cowered in terror of the coming Iroquois. In imagination the beleaguered garrisons foresaw themselves martyrs of Mohawk ferocity. It was learned that seven hundred of the Iroquois warriors were hovering round the Richelieu opposite Three Rivers. The rest of the braves had passed the winter man-hunting in the Huron country, and were in spring descending the Ottawa to unite with the lower band.

Week after week Quebec awaited the blow; but the blow never fell, for at Montreal was a little band of seventeen heroes, led by a youth of twenty-five,—Adam Dollard,—who longed to wipe out the stain of a misspent boyhood by some glorious exploit in the service of the Holy Cross.

{108} When word came that the upper foragers were descending from the country of the Hurons to unite with the lower Iroquois against Montreal, Dollard proposed to go up the Ottawa with a picked party of chosen fighters, waylay the Iroquois at the foot of the Long Sault Rapids, and so prevent the attack on Montreal. Sixteen young men volunteered to join him. Charles Le Moyne, now acting as interpreter at Montreal, begged the young heroes to delay till reënforcements could be obtained: seventeen Frenchmen against five hundred Mohawks meant certain death; but delay meant risk, and Dollard coveted nothing more than a death of glory. At the chapel of the Hôtel Dieu the young heroes made what they knew would certainly be their last confession, bade eternal farewell to friends, and with crushed corn for provisions set out in canoes for the upper Ottawa. May 1, they came to the foot of the Long Sault. Here a barricade of logs had been erected in some skirmish the year before, and here, too, was the usual camping place of the Iroquois as their canoes came bounding down the swift waters of the Ottawa. Dollard and his brave boys landed, slung their kettles for the night meal, and sent scouts upstream to forewarn when the Iroquois came. The night was passed in prayer. Next day arrived unexpected reënforcements. Two bands of forty Hurons and four Algonquins, under a brave Huron convert of the Christian Islands, had asked Maisonneuve's permission to join Dollard and wreak their pent vengeance on the Mohawks. Early one morning the scouts reported five Iroquois canoes coming slowly downstream, and two hundred more warriors behind. There was not even care to bring a supply of water inside the barricade or remove kettles from the sticks. Posted in ambush, the young soldiers fired as soon as the first canoes came within range. This put the rest of the Iroquois on guard. The whites rushed for the shelter of their barricade. The Indians dashed to erect a fort of their own. Inside Dollard's palisades all was activity. Cracks were plastered up with mud between logs, four marksmen with double stands of arms posted at each loophole, and a big musketoon leveled straight for the {109} Iroquois redoubt. The Iroquois rushed out yelling like fiends, and jumping sideways as they advanced, to avoid becoming targets; but the scattering fire of the musketoon caught them full abreast and a Seneca chief fell dead. The Iroquois then broke up Dollard's canoes and tried to set fire to the logs; but again the musketoon's scattering bullets mowed a swath of death in the advancing ranks, and for a second time the red warriors sought shelter behind the logs. Probably to obtain truce till they could send word to the other warriors on the Richelieu, the Iroquois then hung out a flag of parley; but the Huron chief knew what peace with an Iroquois meant. He it was, on the Christian Islands, who, when the Iroquois had proposed a similar parley for the purpose of massacring the Hurons, invited their chiefs into the Huron camp and brained them for their treachery. Dollard's band made answer to the flag hoisted above the Iroquois pickets by rushing out, securing the head of the Seneca chief, and elevating it on a pike above their fort.

But as the fight went on, the whites had to have water, and a few rushed for the river to fill kettles. This rejoiced the hearts of the Iroquois. They could guess if the whites were short of water, it only required more warriors to surround the barricade completely and compel surrender. Scouts had meanwhile gone for the Iroquois at Richelieu; and on the fifth day of the siege a roar, gathering volume as it approached, told Dollard that the seven hundred warriors were coming through the forest. Among the newcomers were Huron renegades, who approached within speaking distance of the fort and called out for the Hurons to save themselves from death by surrender. Death was plainly inevitable, and all the Hurons but the chief deserted. This reduced Dollard's band, from sixty to twenty. The whites were now weak from lack of food and sleep; but for three more days and nights the marksmen and musketoon plied such deadly aim at the assailants that the Iroquois actually held a council whether they should retire. The Iroquois chiefs argued that it would disgrace the nation forever if one thousand of their warriors were to retire before a handful of beardless white boys. {110} Solemnly the bundle of war sticks was thrown on the ground. Then each warrior willing to go on with the siege picked up a stick. The chiefs chose first and the rest were shamed into doing likewise. Inside the fort, Dollard's men were at the last extremities. Blistered and blackened with powder smoke, the fevered men were half delirious from lack of sleep and water. Some fell to their knees and prayed. Others staggered with sleep where they stood. Others had not strength to stand and sank, muttering prayers, to their knees. The Iroquois were adopting new tactics. They could not reach the palisades in the face of the withering fire from the musketoon, so they constructed a movable palisade of trees, behind which marched the entire band of warriors. In vain Dollard's marksmen aimed their bullets at the front carriers. Where one fell another stepped in his place. Desperate, Dollard resolved on a last expedient. Some accounts say he took a barrel of powder; others, that he wrapped powder in a huge bole of birch bark. Putting a light to this, he threw it with all his might; but his strength had failed; the dangerous projectile fell back inside the barricade, exploding; marksmen were driven from their places. A moment later the Iroquois were inside the barricade screeching like demons. They found only three Frenchmen alive; and so great was the Mohawk rage to be foiled of victims that they fell on the Huron renegades in their own ranks and put them to death on the spot.

Such was the Battle of the Long Sault of which Radisson saw the scars on his way down the Ottawa. It saved New France. If seventeen boys could fight in this fashion, how—the Iroquois asked—would a fort full of men fight? A few days later Radisson was conducted in triumph through the streets of Quebec and personally welcomed by the new governor, d'Argenson.

It can well be imagined that Radisson's account of the vast new lands discovered by him aroused enthusiasm at Quebec. Among the Crees, Radisson and Groseillers had heard of that Sea of the North—Hudson Bay—to which Champlain had {111} tried to go by way of the Ottawa. The Indians had promised to conduct the two Frenchmen overland to the North Sea; but Radisson deemed it wise not to reveal this fact lest other voyageurs should forestall them. Somehow the secret leaked out. Either Groseillers told it or his wife dropped some hint of it to her father confessor; but the two explorers were amazed to receive official orders to conduct the Jesuits to the North Sea by way of the Saguenay. They refused point-blank to go as subordinates on any expedition. The fur trade was at this time regulated by license. Any one who proceeded to the woods without license was liable to imprisonment, the galleys for life, death if the offense were repeated. Radisson and Groseillers asked for a license to go north in 1661. D'Avaugour, a bluff soldier who had become governor, would grant it only on condition of receiving half the profits. Groseillers and Radisson set off by night without a license.

TITLE-PAGE—JESUIT RELATION OF 1662-1663

{112} This time the Indian canoes struck off into Lake Superior instead of Lake Michigan, and coasted that billowy inland sea with its iron shore and shadowy forests. On the northwest side of the lake, somewhere between Duluth and Fort William, the explorers joined the Crees, and proceeded northwestward with them, hunting along that Indian trail to become famous as the fur traders' highway—from Lake Superior to the Lake of the Woods. The first white man's fort built west of the Great Lakes, the terrible famine that winter, and the visits of the Sioux—are all a story in themselves. Spring found the explorers following the Crees over the height of land from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay. As soon as the ice loosened, dugouts were launched, and the voyageurs began that hardest of all canoe trips in America, through the forest hinterland of Ontario. Here the rivers were a stagnant marsh, with outlet hidden by dankest forest growth where the light of the sun never penetrated. There the waters swollen by spring thaw and broken by the ice jam whirled the {113} boats into rapids before the paddlers realized. There was wading to mid-waist in ice water. There were nights when camp was made on water-soaked moss. There were days when the windfall compelled the canoemen to take the canoes out of the water and carry them half the time. "At last," writes Radisson, "we came to the sea, where we found an old house all demolished and battered with bullets. The Crees told us about Europeans being here; and we went from isle to isle all that summer." At this time the canoes must have been coasting the south shore of James Bay, headed east; for Radisson presently explains that they came to a river, which rose in a lake near the source of the Saguenay—namely Rupert River. What was the old house battered with bullets? Was it Hudson's winter fort of 1610-1611? The Indians of Rupert River to this day have legends of Hudson having come back to his fort when cast away by the mutineers.

THE JESUIT MAP OF LAKE SUPERIOR (From the Relation of 1670-1671)

The furs that Radisson and Groseillers brought back from the north this time were worth fabulous wealth. The cargo saved New France from bankruptcy; but the explorers had defied both Church and Governor, and all the greedy monopolists of Quebec fell on Radisson and Groseillers with jealous fury. They were fined $20,000 to build a fort at Three Rivers, though given permission to inscribe their coats of arms on the gate. A $30,000 fine went to the public treasury of New France, and a tax of $70,000 was imposed by the Farmers of the Revenue. Of the total cargo there was left to Radisson and Groseillers only $20,000.

Disgusted, the two explorers personally appealed to the Court of France; but there the monopolists were all-powerful, and justice was denied. They tried to induce some of the fishing fleet off Cape Breton to venture to the North Sea; but there the monopolists' malign influence was again felt. They were accused of having broken the laws of Quebec. Zechariah Gillam, a sea captain of Boston, who chanced to be at Port Royal, offered them his vessel for a voyage to Hudson Bay; but when the {114} doughty captain came to the ice-locked straits, his courage failed and he refused to enter. Finally, at Port Royal, with the last of their meager and dwindling capital, they hired two ships for a voyage; but one was wrecked on Sable Island while fishing for supplies, and instead of sailing for Hudson Bay in 1665, Radisson and Groseillers were summoned to Boston in a lawsuit over the lost vessel.

In Boston they met commissioners of the English government and were invited to lay their plans before Charles II, King of England. At last the tide of fortune seemed to be turning. Sailing with Sir George Carterett, after pirate raid and shipwreck, they reached London to find the plague raging, and were ordered to Windsor, where Charles received them, recommended their venture to Prince Rupert, and provided 2 pounds a week each for their living expenses.

Charles II

From being penniless outcasts, Radisson and Groseillers suddenly wakened to find themselves famous. Groseillers seems to have kept in the background, but Radisson, the younger man, enjoyed the full blaze of glory, was seen in the King's box at the theater, and was presently paying furious court to Mistress Mary Kirke, daughter of Sir John Kirke, whose ancestors had captured Quebec. What with war and the plague, it was 1668 before the English Admiralty could loan the two ships Eaglet and Nonsuch for a voyage to Hudson Bay. The expense was to be defrayed by a band of {115} friends known as the "Gentlemen Adventurers of England Trading to Hudson Bay," subscribing so much stock in cash, provision, and goods for trade. Radisson's ship, the Eaglet, was driven back, damaged by storm; but the other, under Groseillers, went on to Hudson Bay, where the marks set up on the overland voyage were found at Rupert River, and a small fort was built for trade. During the delay Radisson was not idle in London. He wrote the journals of his first four voyages. He married Mary Kirke—some accounts say, eloped with her. With the help of King Charles and Prince Rupert he organized what is now known as the Hudson's Bay Fur Company; for when Groseillers' ship returned in the fall of 1669, its success in trade had been so great that the Adventurers at once applied for a royal charter of exclusive monopoly in trade to all the regions, land and sea, rivers and territories, adjoining Hudson Bay. The monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company to the Great Northwest was granted by King Charles in May, 1670.

Here, then, was the situation. England was intrenched south of the St. Lawrence. England was taking armed possession of all lands bordering on Hudson Bay and such other lands as the Adventurers might find. Wedged between was New France with a population of less than six thousand. If France could have foreseen what her injustice to two poor adventurers would cost the nation in blood and money, it would have paid her to pension Radisson like a prince of the blood royal.

NOTE TO CHAPTER VI. The viceroys of New France were shifted so frequently that little record remains of several but their names. The official list of the governors under the French régime stands as follows:

Samuel de Champlain, died at Quebec, Christmas, 1635.

Marc Antoine de Chasteaufort, pro tem.

Charles Huault de Montmagny, 1636.

Louis d'Ailleboust of the Montreal Crusaders, 1648.

Jean de Lauzon, 1651.

Charles de Lauzon-Charny (son), pro tem.

Louis d'Ailleboust, 1657.

Viscount d'Argenson, 1658, a young man who quarreled with Jesuits.

Viscount d'Avagour, 1661, a bluff soldier, who also quarreled with Jesuits.

De Mezy, 1663, appointed by Jesuits' influence, but quarreled with them.

{116} Marquis de Tracy, 1663, who was viceroy of all French possessions in America, and really sent out to act as general.

De Courcelle, 1665, who acts as governor under De Tracy and succeeds him.

Frontenac, 1672, was recalled through influence of Jesuits, whose interference he would not tolerate in civil affairs.

De La Barre, 1682, an impotent, dishonest old man, who came to mend his fortunes.

De Brisay de Denonville, 1685.

Frontenac, 1689.

De Calliere, 1699.

Marquis de Vaudreuil, 1703.

Charles le Moyne, Baron de Longeuil, 1725, son of Le Moyne, the famous fighter and interpreter of Montreal; brother of Le Moyne d'Iberville, the commander.

Marquis de Beauharnois, 1726.

Count de la Galissoniere, 1747.

Marquis de la Jonquiere, 1749.

Charles le Moyne, Baron de Longeuil, 1752, son of former Governor.

Duquesne,1752.

Marquis de Vaudreuil, 1755, descendant of first Vaudreuil.

CHAPTER VII

FROM 1672 TO 1688

The fur fairs of Montreal—Customs of people—Shiploads of brides—The Iroquois and De Tracy—Who first found Ontario?—Through western Ontario—Up the Great Lakes—Marquette and Jolliet—Frontenac and La Salle—La Salle rouses enemies—La Salle descends the Mississippi—Death of La Salle

While Radisson and other coureurs of the woods were ranging the wilds from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay, changes were almost revolutionizing the little colony of New France. No longer was everything subservient to missions. When Marguerite Bourgeoys and Jeanne Mance, of Ville-Marie Mission at Montreal, went home to France to bring out more colonists in 1659, they learned that the founder of their mission—Dauversière, the tax collector—had gone bankrupt. Montreal was penniless, though sixty more men and thirty-two girls were accompanying the nuns out this very year. The Sulpician priests had from the first been ardent friends of the Montrealers. The priests of St. Sulpice now assumed charge of Montreal. Though "God's Penny" was still collected at the fairs and market places of Old France for the conversion of Indians at Mont Royal, the fur trade was rapidly changing the character of the place.

Afraid of the Iroquois raiders, the tribes of the Up-Country now flocked to Montreal instead of Quebec, where the traders met them annually at the great Fur Fairs.

No more picturesque scene exists in Canada's past than these Fur Fairs. Down the rapids of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence bounded the canoes of the Indian hunters, Hurons and Pottawatomies from Lake Michigan, Crees and Ojibways from Lake Superior, Iroquois and Eries and Neutrals from what is now the Province of Ontario, the northern Indians in long birch canoes light as paper, the Indians of Ontario in dugouts of oak and walnut. The Fur Fair usually took place between June and August; and the Viceroy, magnificent in red cloak faced with velvet and ornamented with gold braid, came up from Quebec {118} for the occasion and occupied a chair of state under a marquee erected near the Indian tents. Wigwams then went up like mushrooms, the Huron and Iroquois tents of sewed bark hung in the shape of a square from four poles, the tepees of the Upper Indians made of birch and buffalo hides, hung on poles crisscrossed at the top to a peak, spreading in wide circle to the ground. Usually the Fur Fair occupied a great common between St. Paul Street and the river. Furs unpacked, there stalked among the tents great sachems glorious in robes of painted buckskin garnished with wampum, Indian children stark naked, young braves flaunting and boastful, wearing headdresses with strings of eagle quills reaching to the ground, each quill signifying an enemy taken. Then came "the peddlers,"—the fur merchants,—unpacking their goods to tempt the Indians, men of the colonial noblesse famous in history, the Fôrests and Le Chesnays and Le Bers. Here, too, gorgeous in finery, bristling with firearms, were the bushrovers, the interpreters, the French voyageurs, who had to come out of the wilds once every two years to renew their licenses to trade. There was Charles Le Moyne, son of an innkeeper of Dieppe, who had come to Montreal as interpreter and won such wealth as trader that his family became members of the French aristocracy. Two of his descendants became governors of Canada; and the history of his sons is the history of Canada's most heroic age. There was Louis Jolliet, who had studied for the Jesuit priesthood but turned fur trader among the tribes of Lake Michigan. There was Daniel Greysolon Duluth, a man of good birth, ample means, and with the finest house in Montreal, who had turned bushrover, gathered round him a band of three or four hundred lawless, dare-devil French hunters, and now roamed the woods from Detroit halfway to Hudson Bay, swaying the Indians in favor of France and ruling the wilds, sole lord of the wilderness. There were Groseillers and Radisson and a shy young man of twenty-five who had obtained a seigniory from the Sulpicians at Lachine—Robert Cavelier de La Salle. Sometimes, too, Father Marquette came down with his Indians from the missions on Lake Superior. Maisonneuve, {119} too, was there, grieving, no doubt, to see this Kingdom of Heaven, which he had set up on earth, becoming more and more a kingdom of this world. Later, when the Hundred Associates lost their charter and Canada became a Royal Province governed directly by the Crown, Maisonneuve was deprived of the government of Montreal and retired to die in obscurity in Paris. Louis d'Ailleboust, Governor of Montreal when Maisonneuve is absent, Governor at Quebec when state necessities drag him from religious devotion, moves also in the gay throng of the Fur Fair. In later days is a famous character at the Fur Fairs—La Motte Cadillac of Detroit, bushrover and gentleman like Duluth, but prone to break heads when he comes to town where the wine is good.

PLAN OF MONTREAL IN 1672

Trade was regulated by royal license. Only twenty-five canoes a year were allowed to go to the woods with three men in each, and a license was good for only two years. Fines, branding, the galleys for life, death, were the penalties for those who traded without license; but that did not prevent more than one thousand young Frenchmen running off to the woods to live like Indians. In fact, there was no other way for the youth of New {120} France to earn a living. Penniless young noblemen, criminals escaping the law, the sons of the poorest, all were on the same footing in the woods. He who could persuade a merchant to outfit him for trade disappeared in the wilds; and if he came back at all, came back with wealth of furs and bought off punishment, "wearing sword and lace and swaggering as if he were a gentleman," the annals of the day complain; and a long session in the confessional box relieved the prodigal's conscience from the sins of a life in the woods. If my young gentleman were rich enough, the past was forgotten, and he was now on the highroad to distinguished service and perhaps a title.

LA SALLE'S HOUSE NEAR MONTREAL

In the early days a beaver skin could be bought for a needle or a bell or a tin mirror; and in spite of all the priests could do to prevent it, brandy played a shameful part in the trade. In vain the priests preached against it, and the bishop thundered anathemas. The evils of the brandy traffic were apparent to all—the Fur Fairs became a bedlam of crime; but when the Governor called in all the traders to confer on the subject, it was plain that if the Indians did not obtain liquor from the French, they would go on down with their furs to the English of New York, and the French Governor was afraid to forbid the evil.

KITCHEN, CHÂTEAU DE RAMEZAY, MONTREAL

The Fur Fair over, the Governor departed for Quebec; the Indians, for their own land; the bushrovers, for their far wanderings; and there settled over Montreal for another year drowsy quiet but for the chapel bells of St. Sulpice and Ville Marie and Bon Secours—the Chapel of Ste. Anne's Good Help—built close on the verge of the river, that the voyageurs coming and going might cross themselves as they passed her spire; drowsy peace but for the chapel chimes ringing … ringing … ringing … morning … noon … and night … lilting and singing and calling all New France to prayers. As the last canoe glided up the river, and sunset silence fell on Montreal, there knelt before the dimly lighted altars of the chapels, shadow figures—Maisonneuve praying for his mission; D'Ailleboust, asking Heaven's blessing on the new shrine down at St. Anne de Beaupré near Quebec, which he had built for the miraculous {121} healing of physical ills; Dollier de Casson, priest of the wilds, manly and portly and strong, wilderness fighter for the Cross. Then the organ swells, and the chant rolls out, and till the next Fur Fair Montreal is again a mission.

When New France becomes a Crown Colony, the government consists solely and only of the Sovereign Council, to whom the King transmits his will. This council consists of the Governor, his administrative officer called the "Intendant," the bishop, and several of the inhabitants of New France nominated by the other members of the council. Of elections there are absolutely none. Popular meetings are forbidden. New France is a despotism, with the Sovereign Council representing the King. Domestic disputes, religious quarrels, civil cases, crimes,—all come before the Sovereign Council. Clients could plead their own cases without a fee, or hire a notary. Cases are tried by the Sovereign Council. Laws are passed by it. Fines are imposed and sentences pronounced; but as the Sovereign Council met only once a week, the management of affairs fell chiefly to the Intendant, whose palace became known as the Place of Justice. Of systematic taxation there was none. One fourth of all beaver went for public revenue. Part of Labrador was reserved as the King's Domain for trading, and sometimes a duty of ten per cent was charged on liquor brought into the colony. The stroke of the Sovereign Council's pen could create a law, and the stroke of the King's pen annul it. Laws are passed forbidding men, who are not nobles, assuming the title of Esquire or Sieur on penalty of what would be a $500 fine. "Wood is not to be piled on the streets." "Chimneys are to be built large enough to admit a chimney sweep." "Only shingles of oak and walnut may be used in towns where there is danger of fire." Swearing is punished by fines, by the disgrace of being led through the streets at the end of a rope and begging pardon on knees at the church steps, by branding if the offense be repeated. Murderers are punished by being shot, or exposed in an iron cage on the cliffs above the St. Lawrence till death {122} comes. No detail is too small for the Sovereign Council's notice. In fact, a case is on record where a Mademoiselle André is expelled from the colony for flirting so outrageously with young officers that she demoralizes the garrison. Mademoiselle avoids the punishment by bribing one of the officers on the ship where she is placed, and escaping to land in man's clothing.

The people of New France were regulated in every detail of their lives by the Church as well as the Sovereign Council. For trading brandy to the Indians, Bishop Laval thunders excommunication at delinquents; and Bishop St. Vallière, his successor, publicly rebukes the dames of New France for wearing low-necked dresses, and curling their hair, and donning gay ribbons in place of bonnets. "The vanity of dress among women becomes a greater scandal than before," he complains. "They affect immodest headdress, with heads uncovered or only concealed under a collection of ribbons, laces, curls, and other vanities."

LAVAL (After the portrait in Laval University, Quebec)

The laws came from the King and Sovereign Council. The enforcement of them depended on the Intendant. As long as he was a man of integrity, New France might live as happily as a family under a despotic but wise father. It was when the Intendant became corrupt that the system fell to pieces. {123} Of all the intendants of New France, one name stands preeminent, that of Jean Talon, who came to Canada, aged forty, in 1665, at the time the country became a Crown Province. One of eleven children of Irish origin, Talon had been educated at the Jesuit College of Paris, and had served as an intendant in France before coming to Canada. Officially he was to stand between the King and the colony, to transmit the commands of one and the wants of the other. He was to stand between the Governor and the colony, to watch that the Governor did not overstep his authority and that the colony obeyed the laws. He was to stand between the Church and the colony, to see that the Church did not usurp the prerogatives of the Governor and that the people were kept in the path of right living without having their natural liberties curtailed. He was, in a word, to accept the thankless task of taking all the cuffs from the King and the kicks from the colony, all the blame of whatever went amiss and no credit for what went well.

When Talon came to Canada there were less than two thousand people in the colony. He wrote frantically to His Royal Master for colonists. "We cannot depeople France to people Canada," wrote the King; but from his royal revenue he set aside money yearly to send men to Canada as soldiers, women as wives. In 1671 one hundred and sixty-five girls were sent out to be wedded to the French youth. A year later came one hundred and fifty more. Licenses would not be given to the wood rovers for the fur trade unless they married. Bachelors were fined unless they quickly chose a wife from among the King's girls. Promotion was withheld from the young ensigns and cadets in the army unless they found brides. Yearly the ships brought girls whom the curés of France had carefully selected in country parishes. Yearly Talon gave a bounty to the middle-aged duenna who had safely chaperoned her charges across seas to the convents of Quebec and Montreal, where the bashful suitors came to make choice. "We want country girls, who can work," wrote the Intendant; and girls who could work the King sent, instructing Talon to mate as many as he {124} could to officers of the Carignan Regiment, so that the soldiers would be likely to turn settlers. Results: by 1674 Canada had a population of six thousand seven hundred; by 1684, of nearly twelve thousand, not counting the one thousand bush lopers who roamed the woods and married squaws.

Between Acadia and Quebec lay wilderness. Jean Talon opened a road connecting the two far-separated provinces. The Sovereign Council had practically outlawed the bush lopers. Talon pronounced trade free, and formed them into companies of bush fighters—defenders of the colony. Instead of being wild-wood bandits, men like Duluth at Lake Superior and La Motte Cadillac at Detroit became commanders, holding vast tribes loyal to France. For years there had been legends of mines. Talon opened mines at Gaspé and Three Rivers and Cape Breton. All clothing had formerly been imported from France. Talon had the inhabitants taught—and they badly needed it, for many of their children ran naked as Indians—to weave their own clothes, make rugs, tan leather, grow straw for hats,—all of which they do to this day, so that you may enter a habitant house and not find a single article except saints' images, a holy book, and perhaps a fiddle, which the habitant has not himself made. "The Jesuits assume too much authority," wrote the King. Talon lessened their power by inviting the Recollets to come back to Canada and by encouraging the Sulpicians. Instead of outlawing young Frenchmen for deserting to the English, Talon asked the King to grant titles of nobility to those who were loyal, like the Godefrois and the Denis' and the Le Moynes and young Chouart Groseillers, son of Radisson's brother-in-law, so that there sprang up a Canadian noblesse which was as graceful with the frying pan of a night camp fire in the woods as with the steps of a stately dance in the governor's ballroom. Above all did Talon encourage the bush-rovers in their far wanderings to explore new lands for France.

New France had not forgotten the Iroquois treachery to the French colony at Onondaga. Iroquois raid and ambuscade kept the hostility of these sleepless foes fresh in French memory. {125} When Jean Talon came to Canada as intendant, there had come as governor Courcelle, with the Marquis de Tracy as major general of all the French forces in America,—the West Indies as well as Canada. The Carignan Regiment of soldiers seasoned in European campaigns had been sent to protect the colonists from Indian raid; and it was determined to strike the Iroquois Confederacy a blow that would forever put the fear of the French in their hearts.

Richelieu River was still the trail of the Mohawk warrior; and De Tracy sent his soldiers to build forts on this stream at Sorel and Chambly—named after officers of the regiment. January, 1666, Courcelle, the Governor, set out on snowshoes to invade the Iroquois Country with five hundred men, half Canadian bushrovers, half regular soldiers. By some mistake the snow-covered trail to the Mohawks was missed, the wrong road followed, and the French Governor found himself among the Dutch at Schenectady. March rains had set in. Through the leafless forests in driving sleet and rain retreated the French. Sixty had perished from exposure and disease before Courcelle led his men back to the Richelieu. The Mohawk warriors showed their contempt for this kind of white-man warfare by raiding some French hunters on Lake Champlain and killing a young nephew of De Tracy.

Nevertheless, on second thought, twenty-four Indian deputies proceeded to Quebec with the surviving captives to sue for peace. De Tracy was ready for them. Solemnly the peace pipe had been puffed and solemnly the peace powwow held. The Mohawk chief was received in pompous state at the Governor's table. Heated with wine and mistaking French courtesy for fear, the warrior grew boastful at the white chief's table.

"This is the hand," he exclaimed, proudly stretching out his right arm, "this is the hand that split the head of your young man, O Onontio!"

"Then by the power of Heaven," thundered the Marquis de Tracy, springing to his feet ablaze with indignation, "it is the hand that shall never split another head!"

{126} Forthwith the body of the great Mohawk chief dangled a scarecrow to the fowls of the air; and the other terrified deputies tore breathlessly back for the Iroquois land with such a story as one may guess.

With thirteen hundred men and three hundred boats the Marquis de Tracy and Courcelle set out from the St. Lawrence in October for the Iroquois cantons. Charles Le Moyne, the Montreal bushrover, led six hundred wild-wood followers in their buckskin coats and beaded moccasins, with hair flying to the wind like Indians; and one hundred Huron braves were also in line with the Canadians. The rest of the forces were of the Carignan Regiment. Dollier de Casson, the Sulpician priest, powerful of frame as De Tracy himself, marched as chaplain.

A MAP IN THE RELATION OF 1662-1663 (This map includes Lake Ontario and the Iroquois Country. It shows the relative positions of the Five Nations and Fort d'Orange (Albany). It also gives plans of the forts on the Richelieu and shows their location)

Never had such an expedition been seen before on the St. Lawrence. Drums beat reveille at peep of dawn. Fifes outshrilled the roar of rapids, and stately figures in gold braid {127} and plumed hats glided over the waters of the Richelieu among the painted forests of the frost-tinted maples. Indians have a way of conveying news that modern trappers designate as "the moccasin telegram." "Moccasin telegram" now carried news of the coming army to the Iroquois villages, and the alarm ran like wildfire from Mohawk to Onondaga and from Onondaga to Seneca. When the French army struck up the Mohawk River, and to beat of drum charged in full fury out of the rain-dripping forests across the stubble fields to attack the first palisaded village, they found it desolate, deserted, silent as the dead, though winter stores crammed the abandoned houses and wildest confusion showed that the warriors had fled in panic. So it was with the next village and the next. The Iroquois had stampeded in blind flight, and the only show of opposition was a wild whoop here and there from ambush. De Tracy took possession of the land for France, planted a cross, and ordered the villages set on fire. For a time, at least, peace was assured with the Iroquois.

Who first discovered the Province of Ontario? Before Champlain had ascended the Ottawa, or the Jesuits established their missions south of Lake Huron, young men sent out as wood rovers had canoed up the Ottawa and gone westward to the land of the Sweet Water Seas. Was it Vignau, the romancer, or Nicolet, the coureur de bois, or the boy Etienne Brulé, who first saw what has been called the Garden of Canada, the rolling meadows and wooded hills that lie wedged in between the Upper and the Lower of the Great Lakes? Tradition says it was Brulé; but however that may be, little was known of what is now Ontario except in the region of the old Jesuit missions around Georgian Bay. It was not even known that Michigan and Huron were two lakes. The Sulpicians of Montreal had a mission at the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario, and the south shore of the lake, where it touched on Iroquois territory, was known to the Jesuits; but from Quinte Bay to Detroit—a distance equal to that from New York to Chicago, or London to Italy—was an unknown world.

{128} But to return to the explorations which Jean Talon, the Intendant, had set in motion—

When Dollier de Casson, the soldier who had become Sulpician priest, returned from the campaign against the Iroquois, he had been sent as a missionary to the Nipissing Country. There he heard among the Indians of a shorter route to the Great River of the West—the Mississippi—than by the Ottawa and Sault Ste. Marie. The Indians told him if he would ascend the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, he could portage overland to the Beautiful River,—Ohio,—which would carry him down to the Mississippi.

The Sulpicians had been encouraged by Talon in order to eclipse and hold in check the Jesuits. They were eager to send their missionaries to the new realm of this Great River, and hurried Dollier de Casson down to Quebec to obtain Intendant Talon's permission.

There, curiously enough, Dollier de Casson met Cavalier de La Salle, the shy young seigneur of La Chine, intent on almost the same aim,—to explore the Great River. Where the Sulpicians had granted him his seigniory above Montreal he had built a fort, which soon won the nickname of La Chine,—China,—because its young master was continually entertaining Iroquois Indians within the walls, to question them of the Great River, which might lead to China.

Governor Courcelle and Intendant Talon ordered the priest and young seigneur to set out together on their explorations. The Sulpicians were to bear all expenses, buying back La Salle's lands to enable him to outfit canoes with the money. Father Galinée, who understood map making, accompanied Dollier de Casson, and the expedition of seven birch canoes, with three white men in each, and two dugouts with Seneca Indians, who had been visiting La Salle, set out from Montreal on July 6, 1669. Not a leader in the party was over thirty-five years of age. Dollier de Casson, the big priest, was only thirty-three and La Salle barely twenty-six. Corn meal was carried as food. For the rest, they were to depend on chance shots. With {129} numerous portages, keeping to the south shore of the St. Lawrence because that was best known to the Seneca guides, the canoes passed up Lake St. Louis and Lake St. Francis and glided through the sylvan fairyland of the Thousand Islands, coming out in August on Lake Ontario, "which," says Galinée, "appeared to us like a great sea." Striking south, they appealed to the Seneca Iroquois for guides to the Ohio, but the Senecas were so intent on torturing some prisoners recently captured, that they paid no heed to the appeal. A month was wasted, and the white men proceeded with Indian slaves for guides, still along the south shore of the lake.

GALINÉE'S MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES, 1669 (The next oldest chart to that of Champlain)

At the mouth of Niagara River they could hear the far roar of the famous falls, which Indian legend said "fell over rocks twice the height of the highest pine tree." The turbulent torrent of the river could not be breasted, so they did not see the falls, but rounded on up Lake Ontario to the region now near the city of Hamilton. Here they had prepared to portage overland to some stream that would bring them down to Lake Erie, when, to their amazement, they learned from a passing Indian camp that two Frenchmen were on their way down this very lake from searching copper mines on Lake Superior.

{130} The two Frenchmen were Louis Jolliet, yet in his early twenties, to become famous as an explorer of the Mississippi, and one Monsieur Jean Peré, soldier of fortune, who was to set France and England by the ears on Hudson Bay. September 24, as La Salle and Dollier were dragging their canoes through the autumn-colored sumacs of the swamp, there plunged from among the russet undergrowth the two wanderers from the north,—Jolliet and Peré, dumb with amazement to meet a score of men toiling through this tenantless wilderness. The two parties fell on each other's necks with delight and camped together. Jolliet told a story that set the missionaries' zeal on fire and inflamed La Salle with mad eagerness to pass on to the goal of his discoveries. Jolliet and Peré had not found the copper mine for Talon on Lake Superior, but they had learned two important secrets from the Indians. First, if Iroquois blocked the way up the Ottawa, there was clear, easy water way down to Quebec by Lake Huron and Lake Ste. Claire and Lake Erie. Jolliet's guide had brought them down this way, first of white men to traverse the Great Lakes, only leaving them as they reached Lake Erie and advising them to portage across up Grand River to avoid Niagara Falls. Second, the Indians told him the Ohio could be reached by way of Lake Erie.

Sitting round the camp fires near what is now Port Stanley, La Salle secretly resolved to go on down to Quebec with Jolliet and rearrange his plans independent of the missionaries. The portaging through swamps had affected La Salle's health, and he probably judged he could make quicker time unaccompanied by missionaries. As for Galinée and Dollier, when they knelt in prayer that night, they fervently besought Heaven to let them carry the Gospel of truth to those benighted heathen west of Lake Michigan, of whom Jolliet told. Dollier de Casson sent a letter by Jolliet to Montreal, begging the Sulpicians to establish a mission near what is now Toronto. Early next morning an altar was laid on the propped paddles of the canoes and solemn service held. La Salle and his four canoes went back to Montreal with Jolliet and Peré; Dollier and Galinée coasted along the shores of Lake Erie westward.

{131} It was October. The forests were leafless, the weather damp, the lake too stormy for the frail canoes. As game was plentiful, the priests decided to winter on a creek near Port Dover. Here log houses were knocked up, and the servants dispersed moose hunting for winter supplies. Then followed the most beautiful season of the year in the peninsula of Ontario, Indian summer, dreamy warm days after the first cold, filling the forest with a shimmer of golden light, the hills with heat haze, while the air was odorous with smells of nuts and dried leaves and grapes hanging thick from wild vines. "It was," writes Galinée, "simply an Earthly Paradise, the most beautiful region that ever I have seen in my life, with open woods and meadows and rivers and game in plenty." In this Earthly Paradise the priests passed the winter, holding services three times a week—"a winter that ought to be worth ten years of any other kind of life" Dollier calculated, counting up masses and vespers and matins. Sometimes when the snow lay deep and the weird voices of the wind hallooed with bugle sound through the lonely forest, the priests listening inside fancied that they heard "the hunting of Arthur,"—unearthly huntsmen coursing the air after unearthly game.

March 23 (Sunday), 1670, the company paraded down to Lake Erie from their sheltered quarters, and, erecting a cross, took possession of this land for France. Then they launched their boats to ascend the other Sweet Water Seas. The preceding autumn the priests had lost some of their baggage, and now, in camp near Point Pelee, a sweeping wave carried off the packs in which were all the holy vessels and equipments for the mission chapel. They decided to go back to Montreal by way of Sault Ste. Marie, and ascended to Lake Ste. Claire. Game had been scarce for some days, the weather tempestuous, and now the priests thought they had found the cause. On one of the rocks of Lake Ste. Claire was a stone, to which the Indians offered sacrifices for safe passage on the lakes. To the priests the rude drawing of a face seemed graven images of paganism,—signs of Satan, who had baffled their hunting and caused loss {132} of their packs. "I consecrated one of my axes to break this god of stone, and, having yoked our canoes abreast, we carried the largest pieces to the middle of the river and cast them in. God immediately rewarded us, for we killed a deer." Following the east shore of Lake Huron, the priests came, on May 25, to Sault Ste. Marie, where the Jesuits Dablon and Marquette had a mission. Three days late, they embarked by way of the Ottawa for Montreal, where they arrived on June 18, 1670.

Meanwhile, what had become of Jolliet and Peré and La Salle?

They have no sooner reached Quebec with their report than Talon orders St. Lusson to go north and take possession at Sault Ste. Marie of all these unknown lands for France. Jolliet accompanies St. Lusson. Nicholas Perrot, a famous bushrover, goes along to summon the Indians, and the ceremony takes place on June 14, 1671, in the presence of the Jesuits at the Sault, by which the King of France is pronounced lord paramount of all these regions.

When Jolliet comes down again to Quebec, he finds Count Frontenac has come as governor, and Jean Talon, the Intendant, is sailing for France. Before leaving, Talon has recommended Jolliet as a fit man to explore the Great River of the West. With him is commissioned Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit, who has labored among the Indians west of Lake Superior. The two men set out in birch canoes, with smoked meat for provisions, from Michilimackinac mission, May 17, 1673, for Green Bay, Lake Michigan. Ascending Fox River on June 17, they induce the Mascoutin Indians, who had years ago conducted Radisson by this same route, to pilot them across the portage to the headwaters of the Wisconsin River.

Their way lies directly across that wooded lake region, which has in our generation become the resort first of the lumberman, then of the tourist,—a rolling, wooded region of rare sylvan beauty, park-like forests interspersed with sky-colored lakes. Six weeks from the time they had left the Sault, Wisconsin River carried their canoe out on the swift eddies of a mighty river {133} flowing south,—the Mississippi. For the first time the boat of a Canadian voyageur glided down its waters.

Each night as the explorers landed to sleep under the stars, the tilted canoe inverted with end on a log as roof in case of rain, Marquette fell to knees and invoked the Virgin's aid on the expedition; and each morning as Jolliet launched the boat out on the waters through the early mist, he headed closely along shore on the watch for sign or footprint of Indian.

The river gathered volume as it rolled southward, carving the clay cliffs of its banks in a thousand fantastic forms. Where the bank was broken, the prairies were seen in heaving seas of grass billowing to the wind like water, herds of countless buffalo pasturing knee-deep. To Marquette and Jolliet, burning with enthusiasm, it seemed as if they were finding a new world for France half as large as all Europe. For two weeks not a sail, not a canoe, not a soul did they see. Then the river carried them into the country of the Illinois, past Illinois Indians who wore French clothing, and pictured rocks where the Indians had painted their sign language. There was no doubt now in the explorers' minds,—the Mississippi did not lead to China but emptied in the Gulf of Mexico. A furious torrent of boiling muddy water pouring in on the right forewarned the Missouri; and in a few more days they passed on the left the clear current of Beautiful River,—the Ohio.

It was now midsummer. The heat was heavy and humid. Marquette's health began to suffer, and the two explorers spread an awning of sailcloth above the canoe as they glided with the current. Towards the Arkansas, Indians appeared on the banks, brandishing weapons of Spanish make. Though Jolliet, with a peace pipe from the Illinois Indians, succeeded in reassuring the hostiles, it was unsafe to go farther south. They had established the fact,—the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico,—and on July 17 turned back. It was harder going against stream, which did not mend Marquette's health; so when the Illinois Indians offered to show them a shorter way to Lake Michigan, they followed up Illinois River and crossed the Chicago portage {134} to Lake Michigan. Jolliet went on down to Quebec with his report. Marquette remained half ill to establish missions in Michigan. Here, traveling with his Indians in 1675, the priest died of the malady contracted in the Mississippi heat, and was buried in a lonely grave of the wildwood wilderness where he had wandered. Louis Jolliet married and settled down on his seigniory of Anticosti Island.

Though he had as yet little to show for the La Chine estate, which he had sacrificed, La Salle had not been idle, but was busy pushing French dominion by another route to the Mississippi.

Count Frontenac had come to New France as all the viceroys came—penniless, to mend his fortunes; and as the salary of the Governor did not exceed $3000 a year, the only way to wealth was by the fur trade; but which way to look for fur trade! Hudson Bay, thanks to Radisson, was in the hands of England. Taudoussac was farmed out to the King. The merchants of Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal absorbed all the furs of the tribes from the Ottawa; and New England drained the Iroquois land. There remained but one avenue of new trade, and that was west of the Lakes, where Jolliet had been.

Taking only La Salle into his confidence, Frontenac issued a royal mandate commanding all the officers and people of New France to contribute a quota of men for the establishment of a fort on Lake Ontario. By June 28, 1673, the same year that Jolliet had been dispatched for the Mississippi, there had gathered at La Chine, La Salle's old seigniory near Montreal, four hundred armed men and one hundred and twenty canoes, which Frontenac ordered painted gaudily in red and blue. With these the Governor moved in stately array up the St. Lawrence, setting the leafy avenues of the Thousand Islands ringing with trumpet and bugle, and sweeping across Lake Ontario in martial lines to the measured stroke of a hundred paddles.

Long since, La Salle's scouts had scurried from canton to canton, rallying the Iroquois to the council of great "Onontio." At break of day, July 13, while the sunrise was just bursting up {135} over the lake, Frontenac, with soldiers drawn up under arms, himself in velvet cloak laced with gold braid, met the chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy at the place to be known for years as Fort Frontenac, now known as Kingston, a quiet little city at the entrance of Lake Ontario on the north shore.

ROBERT DE LA SALLE

Ostensibly the powwow was to maintain peace. In reality, it was to attract the Iroquois, and all the tribes with whom they traded, away from the English, down to Frontenac's new fort with their furs. It is a question if all the military pomp deceived a living soul. Before the Governor had set his sappers to work on the foundations of a fort, the merchants of Montreal—the Le Bers and Le Moynes and Le Chesnayes and Le Fôrests—were furious with jealousy. Undoubtedly Fort Frontenac would be the most valuable fur post in America.

OLD PLAN OF FORT FRONTENAC

Determined to have the support of the Court, where his wife was in high favor, Count Frontenac dispatched La Salle to France in 1674 with letters of strongest recommendation, which, no doubt, Jean Talon, the former Intendant, indorsed on the spot. La Salle's case was a strong one. He was to offer to found a line of forts establishing French dominion from Lake Ontario to the valley of the Mississippi, which Jolliet had just explored. In return, he asked for patent of nobility and the grant of a seigniory at Fort Frontenac; in other words, the monopoly of the furs there, which would easily clear him $20,000 a year. It has never been proved, but one may suspect that his profits were to be divided with Count Frontenac. Both requests were at once granted; and La Salle came back to a hornet's nest of enmity in Canada. Space forbids to tell of the means taken to defeat him; for, by promising to support Recollet friars at his fort instead of Jesuits, La Salle had added {137} to the enmity of the merchants, the hatred of the Jesuits. Poison was put in his food. Iroquois were stirred up to hostility against him.

Meanwhile no enmity checks his ardor. He has replaced the wooden walls of Fort Frontenac with stone, mounted ten cannon, manned the fort with twenty soldiers, maintained more than forty workmen, cleared one hundred acres for crops, and in 1677 is off again for France to ask permission to build another fort above Niagara. This time, when La Salle comes out, he is accompanied by a man famous in American annals, a soldier of fortune from Italy, cousin of Duluth the bushrover, one Henry Tonty, a man with a copper hand, his arm having been shattered in war, who presently comes to have repute among the Indians as a great "medicine man," because blows struck by that metal hand have a way of being effective. By 1678 the fort is built above Niagara. By 1679 a vessel of forty-five tons and ten cannon is launched on Lake Erie, the Griffon, the first vessel to plow the waters of the Great Lakes. As she slides off her skids, August 17, to go up to Michilimackinac for a cargo of furs, Te Deum is chanted from the new fort, and Louis Hennepin, the Dutch friar, standing on deck in full vestments, asks Heaven's blessing on the ship's venture.

Scant is the courtesy of the Michilimackinac traders as the Griffon's guns roar salute to the fort. Cold is the welcome of the Jesuits as La Salle enters their chapel dressed in scarlet mantle trimmed with gold. And to be frank, though La Salle was backed by the King, he had no right to trade at Michilimackinac, for his monopoly explicitly states he shall not interfere with the trade of the north, but barter only with the tribes towards the Illinois. Never mind! he loads his ships to the water line with furs to pay his increasing debts, and sends the ship on down to Niagara with the cargo, while he and Tonty, with different parties, proceed to the south end of Lake Michigan to cross the Chicago portage leading to the Mississippi. Did the jealous traders bribe the pilot to sink the ship to bottom? Who knows? Certain it is when Tonty and La Salle went down the {138} Illinois early in the new year of 1680, news of disasters came thick and fast. The Griffon had sunk with all her cargo. The ship from France with the year's supplies for La Salle at Fort Frontenac had been wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and worse than these losses, which meant financial ruin, here among the Illinois Indians were Mascoutin Indian spies bribed to stir up trouble for La Salle. Small wonder that he named the fort built here Fort Crèvecoeur,—Fort Broken Heart.

THE BUILDING OF THE GRIFFON (After the engraving in Father Hennepin's "Nouvelle Découverte," Amsterdam, 1704)

If La Salle had been fur trader only, as his enemies averred, and not patriot, one wonders why he did not sit still in his fort at Frontenac and draw his profits of $20,000 a year, instead of risking loss and poison and ruin and calumny and death by chasing the phantom of his great desire to found a New France on the Mississippi.

Never pausing to repine, he orders Hennepin, the friar, to take two voyageurs and descend Illinois River as far as the Mississippi. Tonty he leaves in charge of the Illinois fort. He {139} himself proceeds overland the width of half a continent, to Fort Frontenac and Montreal.

Friar Hennepin's adventures have been told in his own book of marvels, half truth, half lies. Jolliet, it will be remembered, had explored the Great River south of the Wisconsin. Hennepin struck up from the mouth of the Illinois, to explore north, and he found enough adventure to satisfy his marvel-loving soul. The Sioux captured him somewhere near the Wisconsin. In the wanderings of his captivity he went as far north as the Falls of St. Anthony, the site of Minnesota's Twin Cities, and he finally fell in with a band of Duluth's bushrovers from Kaministiquia (modern Fort William), Lake Superior.

The rest of the story of La Salle on the Mississippi is more the history of the United States than of Canada, and must be given in few words.

When La Salle returned from interviewing his creditors on the St. Lawrence, he found the Illinois Indians dispersed by hostile Iroquois whom his enemies had hounded on. Fort Crèvecoeur had been destroyed and plundered by mutineers among his own men. Only Tonty and two or three others had remained faithful, and they had fled for their lives to Lake Michigan. Not knowing where Tonty had taken refuge, La Salle pushed on down the Illinois River, and for the first time beheld the Mississippi, the goal of all his dreams; but anxiety for his lost men robbed the event of all jubilation. Once more united with Tonty at Michilimackinac, La Salle returned dauntlessly to the Illinois. Late in the fall of 1681 he set out with eighteen Indians and twenty Frenchmen from Lake Michigan for the Illinois. February of 1682 saw the canoes floating down the winter-swollen current of the Illinois River for the Mississippi, which was reached on the 6th. A week later the river had cleared of ice, and the voyageurs were camped amid the dense forests at the mouth of the Missouri. The weather became warmer. Trees were donning their bridal attire of spring and the air was heavy with the odor of blossoms. Instead of high cliffs, carved fantastic by {140} the waters, came low-lying swamps, full of reeds, through which the canoes glided and lost themselves. Camp after camp of strange Indian tribes they visited, till finally they came to villages where the Indians were worshipers of the sun and wore clothing of Spanish make. By these signs La Salle guessed he was nearing the Gulf of Mexico. Fog lay longer on the river of mornings now. Ground was lower. They were nearing the sea. April 6 the river seemed to split into three channels. Different canoes followed each channel. The muddy river water became salty. Then the blue sky line opened to the fore through the leafy vista of the forest-grown banks. Another paddle stroke, and the canoes shot out on the Gulf of Mexico,—La Salle erect and silent and stern as was his wont. April 9, 1682, a cross is planted with claim to this domain for France. To fire of musketry and chant of Te Deum a new empire is created for King Louis of France. Louisiana is its name.

Take a map of North America. Look at it. What had the pathfinders of New France accomplished? Draw a line from Cape Breton to James Bay, from James Bay down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Gulf of Mexico across to Cape Breton. Inside the triangle lies the French empire of the New World,—in area the size of half Europe. That had the pathfinders accomplished for France.

La Salle was too ill to proceed at once from the Mississippi to Quebec. As long as Frontenac remained governor, La Salle could rely on his hungry creditors and vicious enemies—now eager as wolves, to confiscate his furs and seize his seigniory at Fort Frontenac—being restrained by the strong hand of the Viceroy; but while La Salle lay ill at the Illinois fort, Frontenac was succeeded by La Barre as viceroy; and the new Governor was a weak, avaricious old man, ready to believe any evil tale carried to his ears. He at once sided with La Salle's enemies, and wrote the French King that the explorer's "head was turned"; that La Salle "accomplished nothing, but spent his life leading bandits through the forests, pillaging Indians; {141} that all the story of discovering the Mississippi was a fabrication." When La Salle came from the wilderness he found himself a ruined man. Fort Frontenac had been seized by his enemies. Supplies for the Mississippi had been stopped, and officers were on their way to seize the forts there.

Leaving Tonty in charge of his interests, La Salle sailed for France where he had a strong friend at court in Frontenac. As it happened, Spain and France were playing at the game of checkmating each other; and it pleased the French King to restore La Salle's forts and to give the Canadian explorer four ships to colonize the Mississippi by way of the Gulf of Mexico. This was to oust Spain from her ancient claim on the gulf; but Beaujeu, the naval commander of the expedition, was not in sympathy with La Salle. Beaujeu was a noble by birth; La Salle, only a noble of the merchant classes. The two bickered and quarreled from the first. By some blunder, when the ships reached the Gulf of Mexico, laden with colonists, in December of 1684, they missed the mouth of the Mississippi and anchored off Texas. The main ship sailed back to France. Two others were wrecked, and La Salle in desperation, after several trips seeking the Mississippi, resolved to go overland by way of the Mississippi valley and the Illinois to obtain aid in Canada for his colonists. All the world knows what happened. Near Trinity River in Texas some of his men mutinied. Early in the morning of the 19th of March, 1687, La Salle left camp with a friar and Indian to ascertain what was delaying the plotters, who had not returned from the hunt. Suddenly La Salle seemed overwhelmed by a great sadness. He spoke of death. A moment later, catching sight of one of the delinquents, he had called out. A shot rang from the underbush; another shot; and La Salle reeled forward dead, with a bullet wound gaping in his forehead. The body of the man who had won a new empire for France was stripped and left naked, a prey to the foxes and carrion birds. So perished Robert Cavelier de La Salle, aged forty-four.

Nor need the fate of the mutineers be told here. The fate of mutineers is the same the world over. Having slain their {142} commander, they fell on one another and perished, either at one another's hands or among the Indians. As for the colonists of men, women, and girls left in Texas, the few who were not massacred by the Indians fell into the hands of the Spaniards. La Salle's debts at the time of his death were what would now be half a million dollars. His life had ended in what the world calls ruin, but France entered into his heritage.

With the passing of Robert de La Salle passes the heroic age of Canada,—its age of youth's dream. Now was to come its manhood,—its struggles, its wars, its nation building, working out a greater destiny than any dream of youth.

CHAPTER VIII

FROM 1679 TO 1713

Radisson quarrels with company—Up Labrador coast—Radisson captures his rivals—Radisson ordered back to England—Death of Radisson—Jan Peré the spy—The raid on Moose Factory—Sargeant besieged

Before leaving for France, Jean Talon, the Intendant, had set another exploration in motion. English trade was now in full sway on Hudson Bay. In possession of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Illinois, the Great Lakes, France controlled all avenues of approach to the Great Northwest except Hudson Bay. This she had lost through injustice to Radisson; and already the troublesome question had come up,—What was to be the boundary between the fur-trading domain of the French northward from the St. Lawrence and the fur-trading domain of the English southward from Hudson Bay. Fewer furs came down to Quebec from Labrador, the King's Domain, from Kaministiquia (Fort William), the stamping ground of Duluth, the forest ranger. The furs of these regions were being drained by the English of Hudson Bay.

Talon determined to put a stop to this, and had advised Frontenac accordingly. August, 1671, Governor Frontenac dispatched the English Jesuit—Father Albanel—with French guides and Indian voyageurs to set up French arms on Hudson Bay and to bear letters to Radisson and Groseillers. The journey was terrific. I have told the story elsewhere. Autumn found the voyageurs beyond the forested shores of the Saguenay and Lake St. John, ascending a current full of boiling cascades towards Lake Mistassini. Then the frost-painted woods became naked as antlers, with wintry winds setting the dead boughs crashing; and the ice, thin as mica, forming at the edges of the streams, had presently thickened too hard for the voyageurs to break with their paddles. Albanel and his comrades wintered in the Montaignais' lodges, which were banked so heavily with snow that scarcely a breath of pure air could penetrate the {144} stench. By day the priest wandered from lodge to lodge, preaching the gospel. At night he was to be found afar in the snow-padded solitudes of the forest engaged in prayer. At last, in the spring of 1672, thaw set the ice loose and the torrents rushing. Downstream on June 10 launched Albanel, running many a wild-rushing rapid, taking the leap with the torrential waters over the lesser cataracts, and avoiding the larger falls by long detours over rocks slippery as ice, through swamps to a man's armpits. The hinterland of Hudson Bay, with its swamps and rough portages and dank forests of unbroken windfall, was then and is to-day the hardest canoe trip in North America; but towards the end of June the French canoes glided out on the arm of the sea called James Bay, hoisted the French flag, and in solemn council with the Indians presented gifts to induce them to come down the Saguenay to Quebec. Fort Rupert, the Hudson's Bay Company's post, consisted of two barrack-like log structures. When Albanel came to the houses he found not a soul, only boxes of provisions and one lonely dog.

A few weeks previously the men of the English company had gone on up the west coast of Hudson Bay, prospecting for the site of a new settlement. Before Albanel had come at all, there was friction among the English. Radisson and Groseillers were Catholics and French, and they were supervisors of the entire trade. Bayly, the English governor, was subject to them. So was Captain Gillam, with whom they had quarreled long ago, when he refused to take his boat into Hudson Straits on the voyage from Port Royal. Radisson and Groseillers were for establishing more posts up the west coast of Hudson Bay, farther from the competition of Duluth's forest rovers on Lake Superior. They had examined the great River Nelson and urged Bayly, the English governor, to build a fort there. Bayly sulked and blustered by turns. In this mood they had come back to Prince Rupert to find the French flag flying above their fort and the English Jesuit, Albanel, snugly ensconced, with passports from Governor Frontenac and personal letters for Radisson and Groseillers.

{145} England and France were at peace. Bayly had to respect Albanel's passports, but he wished this English envoy of French rivals far enough; and when Captain Gillam came from England the old quarrel flamed out in open hostility. Radisson and Groseillers were accused of being in league with the French traders. A thousand rumors of what next happened have gained currency. One writer says that the English and French came to blows; another, that Radisson and Groseillers deserted, going back overland with Albanel. In the Archives of Hudson's Bay House I found a letter stating that the English captain kidnapped the Jesuit Albanel and carried him a captive to England. It may as well be frankly stated these rumors are all sheer fiction. Albanel went back overland as he came. Radisson and Groseillers did not go with him, though there may have been blows. Instead, they went to England on Gillam's ship to present their case to the company.

PRINCE RUPERT (After the painting by Sir P. Lely)

The Hudson's Bay Company was uneasy. Radisson and Groseillers were aliens. True, Radisson had married Mary Kirke, the daughter of a shareholder, and was bound to the English; but if Radisson and Groseillers had forsworn one land, might they not forswear another, and go back to the French, as Frontenac's letters no doubt urged? The company offered Radisson a salary of 100 pounds a year to stay as clerk in England. They did not want him out on the bay again; but {146} France had offered Radisson a commission in the French navy. Without more ado the two Frenchmen left London for Paris, and Paris for America.

The year 1676 finds Radisson back in Quebec engaged in the beaver trade with all those friends of his youth whose names have become famous,—La Salle of Fort Frontenac, and Charles Le Moyne the interpreter of Montreal, and Jolliet of the Mississippi, and La Fôrest who befriended La Salle, Le Chesnaye who opposed him, and Duluth whose forest rangers roved from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay. It can be guessed what these men talked about over the table of the Sovereign Council at Quebec, whither they had been called to discuss the price of beaver and the use of brandy.

The fur traders were at that time in two distinct rings,—the ring of La Salle and La Fôrest, supported by Frontenac; the Montreal ring, headed by Le Chesnaye, who fought against the opening of the west because Lake Ontario trade would divert his trade from the Ottawa. Radisson's report of that west coast of Hudson Bay, in area large as all New France, interested both factions of the fur trade intensely. He was offered two ships for Hudson Bay by the men of both rings. Because England and France were at peace, Frontenac dared not recognize the expedition officially; but he winked at it,—as he winked at many irregularities in the fur trade,—granted the Company of the North license to trade on Hudson Bay, and gave Radisson's party passports "to fish off Gaspé." In the venture Radisson, Groseillers, and the son Chouart Groseillers, invested their all, possibly amounting to $2500 each. The rest of the money for the expedition came from the Godfreys, titled seigneurs of Three Rivers; Dame Sorel, widow of an officer in the Carignan Regiment; Le Chesnaye, La Salle's lieutenant, and others.

The boats were rickety little tubs unfit for rough northern seas, and the crews sulky, underfed men, who threatened mutiny at every watering place and only refrained from cutting Radisson's {147} throat because he kept them busy. July 11, 1682, the explorers sheered away from the fishing fleet of the St. Lawrence and began coasting up the lonely iron shore of Labrador. Ice was met sweeping south in mountainous bergs. Over Isle Demons in the Straits of Belle Isle hung storm wrack and brown fog as in the days when Marguerite Roberval pined there. Then the ships were cutting the tides of Labrador; here through fog; there skimming a coast that was sheer masonry to the very sky; again, scudding from storm to refuge of some hole in the wall.

MAP OF HUDSON BAY

{148} Before September the ships rode triumphantly into Five-Fathom-Hole off Nelson River, Hudson Bay. Here two great rivers, wide as the St. Lawrence, rolled to the sea, separated by a long tongue of sandy dunes. The north river was the Nelson; the south, the Hayes. Approach to both was dangerous, shallow, sandy, and bowlder strewn; but Radisson's vessels were light draught, and he ran them in on the tide to Hayes River on the south, where his men took possession for France and erected log huts as a fort.

Groseillers remained at the fort to command the twenty-seven men. Young Chouart ranged the swamps and woods for Indians, and Radisson had paddled down the Hayes from meeting some Assiniboine hunters, when, to his amazement, there rolled across the wooded swamps the most astonishing report that could be heard in desolate solitudes. It was the rolling reverberation, the dull echo of a far-away cannon firing signal after signal.

Like a flash Radisson guessed the game. After all, the Hudson's Bay Company had taken his advice and were sending ships to trade on the west coast. The most of men, supported by only twenty-seven mutineers, would have scuttled ships and escaped overland, but the explorers of New France, Champlain and Jolliet and La Salle, were not made of the stuff that runs from trouble.

Picking out three men, Radisson crossed the marsh northward to reconnoiter on Nelson River. Through the brush he espied a white tent on what is now known as Gillam's Island, a fortress half built, and a ship at anchor. All night he and his spies watched, but none of the builders came near enough to be seized, and next day at noon Radisson put a bold face on and paddled within cannon shot of the island.

Here was a pretty to-do, indeed! The Frenchman must have laughed till he shook with glee! It was not the Hudson's Bay Company ship at all, but a poacher, a pirate, an interloper, forbidden by the laws of the English Company's monopoly; and who was the poacher but Ben Gillam, of Boston, son of Captain Gillam of the Hudson's Bay Company, with whom, no doubt, he was in collusion to defraud the English traders! Calling for {149} Englishmen to come down to the shore as hostages for fair treatment, Radisson went boldly aboard the young man's ship, saw everything, counted the men, noted the fact that Gillam's crew were mutinous, and half frightened the life out of the young Boston captain by telling him of the magnificent fort the French had on the south river, of the frigates and cannon and the powder magazines. As a friend he advised young Gillam not to permit his men to approach the French; otherwise they might be attacked by the Quebec soldiers. Then the crafty Radisson paddled off, smiling to himself; but not so fast, not so easy! As he drifted down Nelson River, what should he run into full tilt but the Hudson's Bay Company ship itself, bristling with cannon, manned by his old enemy, Captain Gillam!

If the two English parties came together, Radisson was lost. He must beat them singly before they met; and again putting on a bold face, he marched out, met his former associates, and as a friend advised them not to ascend the river farther. Fortunately for Radisson, both Gillam and Bridgar, the Hudson's Bay governor, were drinking heavily and glad to take his advice. The winter passed, with Radisson perpetrating such tricks on his rivals as a player might with the dummy men on a chessboard; but the chessboard, with the English rivals for pawns, was suddenly upset by the unexpected. Young Gillam discovered that Radisson had no fort at all,—only log cabins with a handful of ragamuffin bushrovers; and Captain Gillam senior got word of young Gillam's presence. Radisson had to act, act quickly, and on the nail.

Leaving half a dozen men as hostages in young Gillam's fort, Radisson invited the youth to visit the French fort for which the young Boston fellow had expressed such skeptical scorn. To make a long story short, young Gillam was no sooner out of his own fort than the French hostages took peaceable possession of it, and Gillam was no sooner in Radisson's fort than the French clapped him a prisoner in their guardroom. Ignorant that the French had captured young Gillam's fort, the Hudson's Bay Company men had marched upstream at dead of night to his {150} rescue. The English knocked for admittance. The French guards threw open the gates. In marched the English traders. The French clapped the gates to. The English were now themselves prisoners. Such a double victory would have been impossible to the French if the Hudson's Bay Company men had not fuddled themselves with drink and allowed their fine ship, the Prince Rupert, to be wrecked in the ice drive.

In spring the ice jam wrecked Radisson's vessels, too, so he was compelled to send the most of his prisoners in a sloop down Hudson Bay to Prince Rupert, while he carried the rest with him on young Gillam's ship down to Quebec with an enormous cargo of furs.

By all the laws of navigation Ben Gillam was nothing more or less than pirate. The monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company forbade him trading on Hudson Bay. The license of the Company of the North at Quebec also excluded him. In later years, indeed, young Gillam turned pirate outright, was captured in connection with Captain Kidd at Boston, and is supposed to have been executed with the famous pirate. But when Radisson left Nelson in charge of young Chouart and came down to Quebec with young Gillam's ship as prize, a change had taken place at Quebec. Governor Frontenac had been recalled. In his place was La Barre, whose favor could be bought by any man who would pay the bribe, and who had already ruined La Salle by permitting creditors to seize Fort Frontenac. England and France were at peace. Therefore La Barre gave Gillam's vessel back to him. The revenue collectors were permitted to seize all the furs which La Chesnaye had not already shipped to France. Though La Barre was reprimanded by the King for both acts, not a sou did Radisson and Groseillers and Chouart ever receive for their investment; and Radisson was ordered to report at once to the King in France.

The next part of Radisson's career has always been the great blot upon his memory, a blot that seemed incomprehensible except on the ground that his English wife had induced him to {151} return to the Hudson's Bay Company; but in the memorials left by Radisson himself, in Hudson's Bay House, London, I found the true explanation of his conduct.

France and England were, as yet, at peace; but it was a pact of treacherous kind,—secret treaty by which the King of England drew pay from the King of France. The King of France dared not offend England by giving public approval to Radisson's capture of the Hudson's Bay Company's territory; therefore he ordered Radisson to go back to Hudson's Bay Company service and restore what he had captured. But the King of France had no notion of relinquishing claim to the vast territory of Hudson Bay; therefore he commanded Radisson to go unofficially. Groseillers, the brother, seems to have dropped from all engagements from this time, and to have returned to Three Rivers. A copy of the French minister's instructions is to be found in the Radisson records of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day. Not a sou of compensation was Radisson to receive for the money that he and his friends had invested in the venture of 1682-1683. Not a penny of reparation was he to obtain for the furs at Nelson, which he was to turn over to the Hudson's Bay Company.

In France, preparation went forward as if for a second voyage to Nelson; but Radisson secretly left Paris for London, where he was welcomed by the courtiers of England in May, 1684, and given presents by King Charles and the Duke of York, who were shareholders in the Hudson's Bay Company. May 17 he sailed with the Hudson's Bay Company vessels for Port Nelson, and there took over from young Chouart the French forts with 20,000 pounds worth of furs for the English company.

Young Chouart Groseillers and his five comrades were furious. They had borne the brunt of attack from both English and Indian enemies during Radisson's absence, and they were to receive not a penny for the furs collected. And their fury knew no bounds when they were forcibly carried back to England. The English had invited them on board one of the vessels for last instructions. Quickly the anchor was slipped, sails run {152} out, and the kidnapped Frenchmen carried from the bay. In a second, young Chouart's hand was on his sword, and he would have fought on the spot, but Radisson begged him to conceal his anger; "for," urged Radisson, "some of these English ruffians would like nothing better than to stab you in a scuffle."

In London, Radisson was lionized, publicly thanked by the company, presented to the court, and given a present of silver plate. As for the young French captives, they were treated royally, voted salaries of 100 pounds a year, and all their expenses of lodgings paid; but when they spoke of returning to France, unexpected obstructions were created. Their money was held back; they were dogged by spies. Finally they took the oath of allegiance to England, and accepted engagements to go back as servants of the Hudson's Bay Company to Nelson at salaries ranging from 100 pounds to 40 pounds, good pay as money was estimated in those days, equal to at least five times as much money of the present day. It was even urged on young Chouart that he should take an English wife, as Radisson had; but the young Frenchmen smiled quietly to themselves. Secret offers of a title had been conveyed to Chouart by the French ambassador; and to his mother in Three Rivers he wrote:

I could not go to Paris; I was not at liberty; but I shall be at the rendezvous or perish trying. I cannot say more in a letter. I would have left this kingdom, but they hold back my pay, and orders have been given to arrest me if I try to leave. Assure Mr. Duluth of my humble services. I shall see him as soon as I can. Pray tell my good friend, Jan Peré.

Peré, it will be remembered, was a bushranger of Duluth's band, who had been with Jolliet on Lake Superior.

As for Radisson, the English kept faith with him as long as the Stuarts and his personal friends ruled the English court. He spent the summers on Hudson Bay as superintendent of trade, the winters in England supervising cargoes and sales. His home was on Seething Lane near the great Tower, where one of his friends was commander. Near him dwelt the merchant princes of London like the Kirkes and the Robinsons and the Youngs. His next-door neighbor was the man of fashion, {153} Samuel Pepys, in whose hands Radisson's Journals of his voyages finally fell. His income at this time was 100 pounds in dividends, 100 pounds in salary, equal to about five times that amount in modern money.

Then came a change in Radisson's fortunes. The Stuarts were dethroned and their friends dispersed. The shareholders of the fur company bore names of men who knew naught of Radisson's services. War destroyed the fur company's dividends. Radisson's income fell off to 50 pounds a year. His family had increased; so had his debts; and he had long since been compelled to move from fashionable quarters. A petition filed in a lawsuit avers that he was in great mental anxiety lest his children should come to want; but he won his lawsuits against the company for arrears of salary. Peace brought about a resumption of dividends, and the old pathfinder seems to have passed his last years in comparative comfort. Some time between March and July, 1710, Radisson set out on the Last Long Voyage of all men, dying near London. His burial place is unknown. As far as Canada is concerned, Radisson stands foremost as pathfinder of the Great Northwest.

But to return to "good friend, Jan Peré," whom the Frenchmen, forced into English service, were to meet somewhere on Hudson Bay. It is like a story from borderland forays.

Seven large ships set sail from England for Hudson Bay in 1685, carrying Radisson and young Chouart and the five unwilling Frenchmen. The company's forts on the bay now numbered four: Nelson, highest up on the west; Albany, southward on an island at the mouth of Albany River; Moose, just where James Bay turns westward; and Rupert at the southeast corner. But French ships under La Martinière of the Sovereign Council had also set sail from Quebec in 1685, commissioned by the indignant fur traders to take Radisson dead or alive; for Quebec did not know the secret orders of the French court, which had occasioned Radisson's last defection.

July saw the seven Hudson's Bay ships worming their way laboriously through the ice floes of the straits. Small sails only {154} were used. With grappling hooks thrown out on the ice pans and crews toiling to their armpits in ice slush, the boats pulled themselves forward, resting on the lee side of some ice floe during ebb tide, all hands out to fight the roaring ice pans when the tide began to come in. At length on the night of July 27, with crews exhausted and the timbers badly rammed, the ships steered to rest in a harbor off Digge's Island, sheltered from the ice drive. The nights of that northern sea are light almost as day; but clouds had shrouded the sky and a white mist was rising from the water when there glided like ghosts from gloom two strange vessels. Before the exhausted crews of the English ships were well awake, the waters were churned to foam by a roar of cannonading. The strange ships had bumped keels with the little Merchant Perpetuana of the Hudson's Bay. Radisson, on whose head lay a price, was first to realize that they were attacked by French raiders; and his ship was out with sails and off like a bird, followed by the other English vessels, all except the little Perpetuana, now in death grapple between her foes. Captain Hume, Mates Smithsend and Grimmington fought like demons to keep the French from boarding her; but they were knocked down, fettered and clapped below hatches while the victors plundered the cargo. Fourteen men were put to the sword. August witnessed ship, cargo, and captives brought into Quebec amid noisy acclaim and roar of cannon. The French had not captured Radisson nor ransomed Chouart, but there was booty to the raiders. New France had proved her right to trade on Hudson Bay spite of peace between France and England, or secret commands to Radisson. Thrown in a dungeon below Château St. Louis, Quebec, the English captives hear wild rumors of another raid on the bay, overland in winter; and Smithsend, by secret messenger, sends warning to England, and for his pains is sold with his fellow-captives into slavery in Martinique, whence he escapes to England before the summer of 1686.

But what is Jan Peré of Duluth's bushrovers doing? All unconscious of the raid on the ships, the governors of the four {155} English forts awaited the coming of the annual supplies. At Albany was a sort of harbor beacon as well as lookout, built high on scaffolding above a hill. One morning, in August of 1685, the sentry on the lookout was amazed to see three men, white men, in a canoe, steering swiftly down the rain-swollen river from the Up-Country. Such a thing was impossible. "White men from the interior! Whence did they come?" Governor Sargeant came striding to the fort gate, ordering his cannon manned. Behold nothing more dangerous than three French forest rangers dressed in buckskins, but with manners a trifle too smooth for such rough garb, as one doffs his cap to Governor Sargeant and introduces himself as Jan Peré, a woodsman out hunting.

CONTEMPORARY FRENCH MAP OF HUDSON BAY AND VICINITY

England and France were at peace; so Governor Sargeant invited the three mysterious gentlemen inside to a breakfast of sparkling wines and good game, hoping no doubt that the wines would unlock the gay fellows' tongues to tell what game they were playing. As the wine passed freely, there were stories of {156} the hunt and the voyage and the annual ships. When might the ships be coming? "Humph," mutters Sargeant through his beard; and he does n't urge these knights of the wild woods to tarry longer. Their canoe glides gayly down coast to the salt marshes, where the shooting is good; but by chance that night, purely by chance, the French leave their canoe so that the tide will carry it away. Then they come back crestfallen to the English fort.

Meanwhile a ship has arrived with the story of the raid on the Perpetuana. Sargeant is so enraged that he sends two of the French spies across to Charlton Island, where they can hunt or die; Monsieur Jan Peré he casts into the cellar of Albany with irons on his wrists and balls on his feet. When the ships sail for England, Peré is sent back as prisoner without having had one word with Chouart Groseillers. As for the two Frenchmen placed on Charlton Island, did Sargeant think they were bush-rovers and would stay on an island? By October they have laid up store of moose meat, built themselves a canoe, paddled across to the mainland, and are speeding like wildfire overland to Michilimackinac with word that Jan Peré is held prisoner at Albany. As Jan Peré drops out of history here, it may be said that he was kept prisoner in England as guarantee for the safety of the English crew held prisoners at Quebec. When he escaped to France he was given money and a minor title for his services.

The news that Peré lay in a dungeon on Hudson Bay supplied the very excuse that the Quebec fur traders needed for an overland raid in time of peace. These were the wild rumors of which the captive English crew sent warning to England; but the northern straits would not be open to the company ships before June of 1686, and already a hundred wild French bushrovers were rallying to ascend the Ottawa to raid the English on Hudson Bay.

And now a change comes in Canadian annals. For half a century its story is a record of lawless raids, bloody foray, dare-devil courage combined with the most fiendish cruelty and sublime heroism. Only a few of these raids can be narrated here. {157} June 18, 1686, when the long twilight of the northern night merged with dawn, there came out from the thicket of underbrush round Moose Factory, Hudson Bay, one hundred bush-rovers, led by Chevalier de Troyes of Niagara, accompanied by Le Chesnaye of the fur trade, Quebec, and the Jesuit, Sylvie. Of the raiders, sixty-six were Indians under Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his brothers, Maricourt and Ste. Hélène, aged about twenty-four, sons of Charles Le Moyne, the Montreal interpreter. Moose Factory at this time boasted fourteen cannon, log-slab palisades, commodious warehouses, and four stone bastions,—one with three thousand pounds of powder, another used as barracks for twelve soldiers, another housing beaver pelts, and a fourth serving as kitchen. Iberville and his brothers, scouting round on different sides of the fort, soon learned that not a sentinel was on duty. The great gate opposite the river, studded with brass nails, was securely bolted, but not a cannon {158} had been loaded. The bushrangers then cast aside all clothing that would hamper, and, pistol in hand, advanced silent and stealthy as wild-cats. Not a twig crunched beneath the moccasin tread. The water lay like glass, and the fort slept silent as death. Hastily each raider had knelt for the blessing of the priest. Pistols had been recharged. Iberville bade his wild Indians not to forget that the Sovereign Council of Quebec offered ten crowns reward for every enemy slain, twenty for every enemy captured. In fact, there could be no turning back. Two thousand miles of juniper swamps and forests lay between the bush-rovers and home. They must conquer or perish. De Troyes led his white soldiers round to make a pretense of attack from the water front. Iberville posted his sixty-six Indians along the walls with muskets rammed through the loopholes. Then, with an unearthly yell, the Le Moyne brothers were over the tops of the pickets, swords in hand, before the English soldiers had awakened. The English gunner reeled from his cannon at the main gate with head split to the collar bone. The gates were thrown wide, trees rammed the doors open, and Iberville had dashed halfway up the stairs of the main house before the inmates, rushing out in their nightshirts, realized what had happened. Two men only were killed, one on each side. The French were masters of Moose Fort in less than five minutes, with sixteen captives and rich supply of ammunition.

LE MOYNE D'IBERVILLE

Eastward of Moose was Rupert Fort, where the company's ship anchored. Hither the raiders plied their canoes by sea. Look at the map! Across the bottom of James Bay projects a long tongue of swamp land. To save time, Iberville portaged across this, and by July 1 was opposite Prince Rupert's bastions. At the dock lay the English ship. That day Iberville's men kept in hiding, but at night he had ambushed his men along shore and paddled across to the ship. Just as Iberville stepped on the deck a man on guard sprang at his throat. One blow of Iberville's sword killed the Englishman on the spot. Stamping to call the crew aloft, Iberville sabered the men as they scrambled up the hatches, till the Governor himself threw {159} up hands in unconditional surrender. The din had alarmed the fort, and hot shot snapping fire from the loopholes kept the raiders off till the Le Moyne brothers succeeded in scrambling to the roofs of the bastions, hacking holes through the rough thatch and firing inside. This drove the English gunners from their cannon. A moment later, and the raiders were on the walls. It was a repetition of the fight at Moose Factory. The English, taken by surprise, surrendered at once; and the French now had thirty prisoners, a good ship, two forts, but no provisions.

Northwestward three hundred miles lay Albany Fort. Iberville led off in canoes with his bushrovers. De Troyes followed on the English boat with French soldiers and English prisoners. To save time, as the bay seemed shallow, Iberville struck out from the shore across seas. All at once a north wind began whipping the waters, sweeping down a maelstrom of churning ice. Worse still, fog fell thick as wool. Any one who knows canoe travel knows the danger. Iberville avoided swamping by ordering his men to camp for the night on the shifting ice pans, canoes held above heads where the ice crush was wildest, the voyageurs clinging hand to hand, making a life line if one chanced to slither through the ice slush. When daylight came with worse fog, Iberville kept his pistol firing to guide his followers, and so pushed on. Four days the dangerous traverse lasted, but August 1 the bushrovers were in camp below the cliffs of Albany.

Indians had forewarned Governor Sargeant. The loopholes of his palisades bristled with muskets and heavy guns that set the bullets flying soon as De Troyes arrived and tried to land the cannon captured from the other forts for assault on Albany. Drums beating, flags flying, soldiers in line, a French messenger goes halfway forward and demands of an English messenger come halfway out the surrender of Sieur Jan Peré, languishing in the dungeons of Albany. The English Governor sends curt word back that Peré has been sent home to France long ago, and demands what in thunder the French mean by these raids in time of peace. The French retire that night to consider. {160} Cannon they have, but they have used up nearly all their ammunition. They have thirty prisoners, but they have no provisions. The prisoners have told them there are 50,000 pounds worth of furs stored at Albany.

Inside the fort the English were in almost as bad way. The larder was lean, powder was scarce, and the men were wildly mutinous, threatening to desert en masse for the French on the excuse they had not hired to fight, and "if any of us lost a leg, the company could not make it good."

At the end of two days' desultory firing, the company Governor captured down at Rupert came to Sargeant and told him frankly that the bloodthirsty bushrovers were desperate; they had either to conquer or starve, and if they were compelled to fight, there would be no quarter. Men and women alike would be butchered in hand-to-hand fight. Still Sargeant hung on, hoping for the annual frigate of the company. Then powder failed utterly. Still Sargeant would not show the white flag; so an underfactor flourished a white sheet from an upper window. Chevalier De Troyes came forward and seated himself on one of the cannon. Governor Sargeant went out and seated himself on the same cannon with two bottles of wine. The English of Albany were allowed to withdraw to Charlton Island to await the company ship. As for the other prisoners, those who were not compelled to carry the plundered furs back to Quebec, were turned adrift in the woods to find their way overland north to Nelson. Iberville's bushrovers were back in Montreal by October.

CHAPTER IX

FROM 1686 TO 1698

War with the Iroquois—The year of the massacre—Frontenac returns—The heroine of Verchères—Indian raid and counter-raid—Massacre and Schenectady—The massacre at Fort Loyal—Boston roused to action—Quebec besieged—Phips and Frontenac—Retreat of the English—Iberville's gallant sea fight—Nelson surrenders

For ten years Hudson Bay becomes the theater of northern buccaneers and bushraiders. A treaty of neutrality in 1686 provides that the bay shall be held in common by the fur traders of England and France; but the adventurers of England and the bushrovers of Quebec have no notion of leaving things so uncertain. Spite of truce, both fit out raiders, and the King of France, according to the shifting diplomacy of the day, issues secret orders "to permit not a vestige of English possession on the northern bay."

Maricourt Le Moyne held the newly captured forts on the south shore of James Bay till Iberville came back overland in 1687. The fort at Rupert had been completely abandoned after the French victory of the previous summer, and the Hudson's Bay Company sloop, the Young, had just sailed into the port to reëstablish the fur post. Iberville surrounded the sloop by his bushrovers, captured it with all hands, and dispatched four spies across to Charlton Island, where another sloop, the Churchill, swung at anchor. Here Iberville's run of luck turned. Three of his four spies were captured, fettered, and thrown into the hold of the vessel for the winter. In the spring of 1688 one was brought above decks to help the English sailors. Watching his chance, the grizzled bushrover waited till six of the English crew were up the ratlines. Quick as flash the Frenchman tiptoed across decks in his noiseless moccasins, took one precautionary glance over his shoulder, brained two Englishmen with an ax, liberated his comrades, and at pistol point kept the other Englishmen up the masts till he and his fellows had righted the ship and steered the vessel across to Rupert River, where the provisions were just in time to save Iberville's party from starvation.

{162} This episode is typical of what went on at the Hudson's Bay forts for ten years. Each year, when the English ships came out to Nelson on the west coast, armed bands were sent south to wrest the forts on James Bay from the French; and each spring, when Iberville's bushrovers came gliding down the rivers in their canoes from Canada, there was a fight to drive out the English. Then the Indians would scatter to their hunting grounds. No more loot of furs for a year! The English would sail away in their ships, the French glide away in their canoes; and for a winter the uneasy quiet of calm between two thunderclaps would rest over the waters of Hudson Bay.

In the spring of 1688, about the time that the brave bush-rovers had brought the English ship from Charlton Island across to Rupert River, two English frigates under Captain Moon, with twenty-four soldiers over and above the crews, had come south from Nelson to attack the French fur traders at Albany. As ill luck would have it, the ice floes began driving inshore. The English ships found themselves locked in the ice before the besieged fort. Across the jam from Rupert River dashed Iberville with his Indian bandits, portaging where the ice floes covered the water, paddling where lanes of clear way parted the floating drift. Iberville hid his men in the tamarack swamps till eighty-two Englishmen had landed and all unsuspecting left their ships unguarded. Iberville only waited till the furs in the fort had been transferred to the holds of the vessels. The ice cleared. The Frenchman rushed his bushrovers on board, seized the vessel with the most valuable cargo, and sailed gayly out of Albany for Quebec. The astounded English set fire to the other ship and retreated overland.

But the dare-devil bushrovers were not yet clear of trouble. As the ice drive jammed and held them in Hudson Straits, they were aghast to see, sailing full tilt with the roaring tide of the straits, a fleet of English frigates, the Hudson's Bay Company's annual ships; but Iberville sniffed at danger as a war horse glories in gunpowder. He laughed his merriest, and as the ice drive locked all the ships within gunshot, ran up an {163} English flag above his French crew and had actually signaled the captains of the English frigates to come aboard and visit him, when the ice cleared. Hoisting sail, he showed swift heels to the foe. Iberville's ambition now was to sweep all the English from Hudson Bay, in other words, to capture Nelson on the west coast, whence came the finest furs; but other raids called him to Canada.

It will be recalled that La Salle's enemies had secretly encouraged the Iroquois to attack the tribes of the Illinois; and now the fur traders of New York were encouraging the Iroquois to pillage the Indians of the Mississippi valley, in order to divert peltries from the French on the St. Lawrence to the English at New York. Savages of the north, rallied by Perrot and Duluth and La Motte Cadillac, came down by the lakes to Fort Frontenac to aid the French; but they found that La Barre, the new governor, foolish old man, had been frightened into making peace with the Iroquois warriors, abandoning the Illinois to Iroquois raid and utterly forgetful that a peace which is not a victory is not worth the paper it is written on.

For the shame of this disgraceful peace La Barre was recalled to France and the Marquis de Denonville, a brave soldier, sent out as governor. Unfortunately Denonville did not understand conditions in the colony. The Jesuit missionaries were commissioned to summon the Iroquois to a conference at Fort Frontenac, but when the deputies arrived they were seized, tortured, and fifty of them shipped to France by the King's order to serve as slaves on the royal galleys. It was an act of treachery heinous beyond measure and exposed the Jesuit missionaries among the Five Nations to terrible vengeance; but the Iroquois code of honor was higher than the white man's. "Go home," they warned the Jesuit missionary. "We have now every right to treat thee as our foe; but we shall not do so! Thy heart has had no share in the wrong done to us. We shall not punish thee for the crimes of another, tho' thou didst act as the unconscious tool. But leave us! When our young {164} men chant the song of war they may take counsel only of their fury and harm thee! Go to thine own people"; and furnishing him with guides, they sent him to Quebec.

Though Denonville marched with his soldiers through the Iroquois cantons, he did little harm and less good; for the wily warriors had simply withdrawn their families into the woods, and the Iroquois were only biding their time for fearful vengeance.

This lust of vengeance was now terribly whetted. Dongan, the English governor of New York, had been ordered by King James of England to observe the treaty of neutrality between England and France; but this did not hinder him supplying the Iroquois with arms to raid the French and secretly advising them "not to bury the war hatchet,—just to hide it in the grass, and stand on their guard to begin the war anew."

FORT FRONTENAC AND THE ADJACENT COUNTRY

Nor did the treaty of neutrality prevent the French from raiding Hudson Bay and ordering shot in cold blood any French bushrover who dared to guide the English traders to the country of the Upper Lakes.

In addition to English influence egging on the Iroquois, the treachery of the Huron chief, The Rat, lashed the vengeance {165} of the Five Nations to a fury. He had come down to Fort Frontenac to aid the French. He was told that the French had again arranged peace with the Iroquois, and deputies were even now on their way from the Five Nations.

"Peace!" The old Huron chief was dumbfounded. What were these fool French doing, trusting to an Iroquois peace? "Ah," he grunted, "that may be well"; and he withdrew without revealing a sign of his intentions. Then he lay in ambush on the trail of the deputies, fell on the Iroquois peace messengers with fury, slaughtered half the band, then sent the others back with word that he had done this by order of Denonville, the French governor.

"There," grunted The Rat grimly, "I 've killed the peace for them! We 'll see how Onontio gets out of this mess."

Meanwhile war had been declared between England and France. The Stuarts had been dethroned. France was supporting the exiled monarch, and William of Orange had become king of England. Iberville and Duluth and La Motte Cadillac, the famous fighters of Canada's wildwood, were laying plans before the French Governor for the invasion and conquest of New York; and New York was preparing to defend itself by pouring ammunition and firearms free of cost into the hands of the Iroquois. Then the Iroquois vengeance fell.

Between the night and morning of August 4 and 5, in 1689, a terrific thunderstorm had broken over Montreal. Amidst the crack of hail and crash of falling trees, with the thunder reverberating from the mountain like cannonading, whilst the frightened people stood gazing at the play of lightning across their windows, fourteen hundred Iroquois warriors landed behind Montreal, beached their canoes, and stole upon the settlement. What next followed beggars description. Nothing else like it occurs in the history of Canada. For years this summer was to be known as "the Year of the Massacre."

Before the storm subsided, the Iroquois had stationed themselves in circles round every house outside the walls of Montreal. At the signal of a whistle, the warriors fell on the settlement {166} like beasts of prey. Neither doors nor windows were fastened in that age, and the people, deep in sleep after the vigil of the storm, were dragged from their beds before they were well awake. Men, women, and children fell victims to such ingenuity of cruelty as only savage vengeance could conceive. Children were dashed to pieces before their parents' eyes; aged parents tomahawked before struggling sons and daughters; fathers held powerless that they might witness the tortures wreaked on wives and daughters. Homes which had heard some alarm and were on guard were set on fire, and those who perished in the flames {167} died a merciful death compared to those who fell in the hands of the victors. By daybreak two hundred people had been wantonly butchered. A hundred and fifty more had been taken captives. As if their vengeance could not be glutted, the Iroquois crossed the river opposite Montreal, and, in full sight of the fort, weakly garrisoned and paralyzed with fright, spent the rest of the week, day and night, torturing the white captives. By night victims could be seen tied to the torture stake amid the wreathing flames, with the tormentors dancing round the camp fire in maniacal ferocity. Denonville was simply powerless. He lost his head, and seemed so panic-stricken that he forbade even volunteer bands from rallying to the rescue. For two months the Iroquois overran Canada unchecked. Indeed, it was years before the boldness engendered by this foray became reduced to respect for French authority. Settlement after settlement, the marauders raided. From Montreal to Three Rivers crops went up in flame, and the terrified habitants came cowering with their families to the shelter of the palisades.

WILLIAM OF ORANGE

In the midst of this universal terror came the country's savior. Frontenac had been recalled because he quarreled with the intendant and he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders; but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois' heart. Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting good of the country. Homage he demanded as to a king, once going so far as to drive the Sovereign Councilors from his presence with the flat of a sword; but he firmly believed and he had publicly proved that he was worthy of homage, and that the men who are forever shouting "liberty—liberty and the people's rights," are frequently wolves in sheep's clothing, eating out the vitals of a nation's prosperity.

Here, then, was the haughty, hot-headed, aggressive Frontenac, sent back in his old age to restore the prestige of New France, {168} where both La Barre the grafter, and Denonville the courteous Christian gentleman, had failed.

To this period of Iroquois raids belongs one of the most heroic episodes in Canadian life. The only settlers who had not fled to the protection of the palisaded forts were the grand old seigniors, the new nobility of New France, whose mansions were like forts in themselves, palisaded, with stone bastions and water supply and yards for stock and mills inside the walls. Here the seigniors, wildwood knights of a wilderness age, held little courts that were imitations of the Governor's pomp at Quebec. Sometimes during war the seignior's wife and daughters were reduced to plowing in the fields and laboring with the women servants at the harvest; but ordinarily the life at the seigniory was a life of petty grandeur, with such style as the backwoods afforded. In the hall or great room of the manor house was usually an enormous table used both as court of justice by the seignior and festive board. On one side was a huge fireplace with its homemade benches, on the other a clumsily carved chiffonier loaded with solid silver. In the early days the seignior's bedstead might be in the same room,—an enormous affair with panoplies of curtains and counterpanes of fur rugs and feather mattresses, so high that it almost necessitated a ladder. But in the matter of dress the rude life made up in style what it lacked in the equipments of a grand mansion.

The bishop's description of the women's dresses I have already given, though at this period the women had added to the "sins" of bows and furbelows and frills, which the bishop deplored, the yet more heinous error of such enormous hoops that it required fine maneuvering on the part of a grand dame to negotiate the door of the family coach; and however pompous the seignior's air, it must have suffered temporary eclipse in that coach from the hoops of his spouse and his spouse's daughters. As for the seignior, when he was not dressed in buckskin, leading bushrovers on raids, he appeared magnificent in all the grandeur that a 20 pounds wig and Spanish laces and French ruffles {169} and imported satins could lend his portly person; and if the figure were not portly, one may venture to guess, from the pictures of stout gentlemen in the quilted brocades of the period, that padding made up what nature lacked.

Such a seigniory was Verchères, some twenty miles from Montreal, on the south side of the St. Lawrence. M. de Verchères was an officer in one of the regiments, and chanced to be absent from home during October of 1696, doing duty at Quebec. Madame de Verchères was visiting in Montreal. Strange as it may seem, the fort and the family had been left in charge of the daughter, Madeline, at this time only fourteen years of age. At eight o'clock on the morning of October 22 she had gone four hundred paces outside the fort gates when she heard the report of musket firing. The rest of the story may be told in her own words:

I at once saw that the Iroquois were firing at our settlers, who lived near the fort. One of our servants call out: "Fly, Mademoiselle, fly! The Iroquois are upon us!"

Instantly I saw some forty-five Iroquois running towards me, already within pistol shot. Determined to die rather than fall in their hands, I ran for the fort, praying to the Blessed Virgin, "Holy Mother, save me! Let me perish rather than fall in their hands!" Meanwhile my pursuers paused to fire their guns. Bullets whistled past my ears. Once within hearing of the fort, I shouted, "To arms! To arms!"

There were but two soldiers in the fort, and they were so overcome by fear that they ran to hide in the bastion. At the gates I found two women wailing for the loss of their husbands. Then I saw several stakes had fallen from the palisades where enemies could gain entrance; so I seized the fallen planks and urged the women to give a hand putting them back in their places. Then I ran to the bastion, where I found two of the soldiers lighting a fuse.

"What are you going to do?" I demanded.

"Blow up the fort," answered one cowardly wretch.

"Begone, you rascals," I commanded, putting on a soldier's helmet and seizing a musket. Then to my little brothers: "Let us fight to the death! Remember what father has always said,—that gentlemen are born to shed their blood in the service of God and their King."

My brothers and the two soldiers kept up a steady fire from the loopholes. I ordered the cannon fired to call in our soldiers, who were hunting; {170} but the grief-stricken women inside kept wailing so loud that I had to warn them their shrieks would betray our weakness to the enemy. While I was speaking I caught sight of a canoe on the river. It was Sieur Pierre Fontaine, with his family, coming to visit us. I asked the soldiers to go out and protect their landing, but they refused. Then ordering Laviolette, our servant, to stand sentry at the gate, I went out myself, wearing a soldier's helmet and carrying a musket. I left orders if I were killed the gates were to be kept shut and the fort defended. I hoped the Iroquois would think this a ruse on my part to draw them within gunshot of our walls. That was just what happened, and I got Pierre Fontaine and his family safely inside by putting a bold face on. Our whole garrison consisted of my two little brothers aged about twelve, one servant, two soldiers, one old habitant aged eighty, and a few women servants. Strengthened by the Fontaines, we began firing. When the sun went down the night set in with a fearful storm of northeast wind and snow. I expected the Iroquois under cover of the storm. Gathering our people together, I said: "God has saved us during the day. Now we must be careful for the night. To show you I am not afraid to take my part, I undertake to defend the fort with the old man and a soldier, who has never fired a gun. You, Pierre Fontaine and La Bonte and Galet (the two soldiers), go to the bastion with the women and children. If I am taken, never surrender though I am burnt and cut to pieces before your eyes! You have nothing to fear if you will make some show of fight!"

I posted two of my young brothers on one of the bastions, the old man of eighty on the third, and myself took the fourth. Despite the whistling of the wind we kept the cry "All's well," "All's well" echoing and reëchoing from corner to corner. One would have imagined the fort was crowded with soldiers, and the Iroquois afterwards confessed they had been completely deceived; that the vigilance of the guard kept them from attempting to scale the walls. About midnight the sentinel at the gate bastion called out, "Mademoiselle! I hear something!"

I saw it was our cattle.

"Let me open the gates," urged the sentry.

"God forbid," said I; "the savages are likely behind, driving the animals in."

Nevertheless I did open the gates and let the cattle in, my brothers standing on each side, ready to shoot if an Indian appeared.

At last came daylight; and we were hopeful for aid from Montreal; but Marguerite Fontaine, being timorous as all Parisian women are, begged her husband to try and escape. The poor husband was almost distracted as she insisted, and he told her he would set her out in the canoe with her two sons, who could paddle it, but he would not abandon Mademoiselle in Verchères. I had been twenty-four hours without rest or food, and had not {171} once gone from the bastion. On the eighth day of the siege Lieutenant de La Monnerie reached the fort during the night with forty men.

One of our sentries had called out, "Who goes?"

I was dozing with my head on a table and a musket across my arm. The sentry said there were voices on the water. I called, "Who are you?"

They answered, "French—come to your aid!"

I went down to the bank, saying: "Sir, but you are welcome! I surrender my arms to you!"

"Mademoiselle," he answered, "they are in good hands."

I forgot one incident. On the day of the attack I remembered about one in the afternoon that our linen was outside the fort, but the soldiers refused to go out for it. Armed with our guns, my brothers made two trips outside the walls for our linen. The Iroquois must have thought it a trick to lure them closer, for they did not approach.

It need scarcely be added that brave mothers make brave sons, and it is not surprising that twenty-five years later, when Madeline Verchères had become the wife of M. de La Naudière, her own life was saved from Abenaki Indians by her little son, age twelve.

But to return to Count Frontenac, marching up the steep streets of Quebec to Château St. Louis that October evening of 1689, amid the jubilant shouts of friends and enemies, Jesuit and Recollet, fur trader and councilor,—the haughty Governor set himself to the task of not only crushing the Iroquois but invading and conquering the land of the English, whom he believed had furnished arms to the Iroquois. Now that war had been openly declared between England and France, Frontenac was determined on a campaign of aggression. He would keep the English so busy defending their own borders that they would have no time to tamper with the Indian allies of the French on the Mississippi.

This is one of the darkest pages of Canada's past. War is not a pretty thing at any time, but war that lets loose the bloodhounds of Indian ferocity leaves the blackest scar of all.

There were to be three war parties: one from Quebec to attack the English settlements around what is now Portland, {172} Maine; a second from Three Rivers to lay waste the border lands of New Hampshire; a third from Montreal to assault the English and Dutch of the Upper Hudson.

The Montrealers set out in midwinter of 1690, a few months after Frontenac's arrival, led by the Le Moyne brothers, Ste. Hélène and Maricourt and Iberville, with one of the Le Bers, and D'Ailleboust, nephew of the first D'Ailleboust at Montreal. The raiders consisted of some two hundred and fifty men, one hundred Indian converts and one hundred and fifty bushrovers, hardy, supple, inured to the wilderness as to native air, whites and Indians dressed alike in blanket coat, hood hanging down the back, buckskin trousers, beaded moccasins, snowshoes of short length for forest travel, cased musket on shoulder, knife, hatchet, pistols, bullet pouch hanging from the sashed belt, and provisions in a blanket, knapsack fashion, carried on the shoulders.

QUEBEC, 1689

The woods lay snow padded, silent, somber. Up the river bed of the Richelieu, over the rolling drifts, glided the bushrovers. {173} Somewhere on the headwaters of the Hudson the Indians demanded what place they were to attack. Iberville answered, "Albany." "Humph," grunted the Indians with a dry smile at the camp fire, "since when have the French become so brave?" A midwinter thaw now turned the snowy levels to swimming lagoons, where snowshoes were useless, and the men had to wade knee-deep day after day through swamps of ice water. Then came one of those sudden changes,—hard frost with a blinding snowstorm. Where the trail forked for Albany and Schenectady it was decided to follow the latter, and about four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 8th of February, the bush-rovers reached a hut where there chanced to be several Mohawk squaws. Crowding round the chimney place to dry their clothes now stiff with ice, the bushrangers learned from the Indian women that Schenectady lay completely unguarded. There had been some village festival that day among the Dutch settlers. The gates at both ends of the town lay wide open, and as if in derision of danger from the far distant French, a snow man had been mockingly rolled up to the western gate as sentry, with a sham pipe stuck in his mouth. The Indian rangers harangued their braves, urging them to wash out all wrongs in the blood of the enemy, and the Le Moyne brothers moved from man to man, giving orders for utter silence. At eleven that night, shrouded by the snowfall, the bushrovers reached the palisades of Schenectady. They had intended to defer the assault till dawn, but the cold hastened action, and, uncasing their muskets, they filed silently past the snow man in the middle of the open gate and encircled the little village of fifty houses. When the lines met at the far gate, completely investing the town, a wild yell rent the air! Doors were hacked down. Indians with tomahawks stood guard outside the windows, and the dastardly work began,—as gratuitous a butchery of innocent people as ever the Iroquois perpetrated in their worst raids. Two hours the massacre lasted, and when it was over the French had, to their everlasting discredit, murdered in cold blood thirty-eight men (among them the poor inoffensive dominie), ten women, {174} twelve children; and the victors held ninety captives. To the credit of Iberville he offered life to one Glenn and his family, who had aided in ransoming many French from the Iroquois, and he permitted this man to name so many friends that the bloodthirsty Indians wanted to know if all Schenectady were related to this white man. One other house in the town was spared,—that of a widow with five children, under whose roof a wounded Frenchman lay. For the rest, Schenectady was reduced to ashes, the victors harnessing the Dutch farmers' horses to carry off the plunder. Of the captives, twenty-seven men and boys were carried back to Quebec. The other captives, mainly women and children, were given to the Indians. Forty livres for every human scalp were paid by the Sovereign Council of Quebec to the raiders.

FRENCH SOLDIER OF THE PERIOD

The record of the raiders led from Three Rivers by François Hertel was almost the same. Setting out in January, he was followed by twenty-five French and twenty-five Indians to the border lands between Maine and New Hampshire. The end of March saw the bushrovers outside the little village of Salmon Falls. Thirty inhabitants were tomahawked on the spot, the houses burned, and one hundred prisoners carried off; but news had gone like wildfire to neighboring settlements, and Hertel was pursued by two hundred Englishmen. He placed his bushrovers on a small bridge across Wooster River and here held the pursuers at bay till darkness enabled him to escape.

But the darkest deed of infamy was perpetrated by the third band of raiders,—a deed that reveals the glories of war as they {175} exist, stripped of pageantry. Portneuf had led the raiders from Quebec, and he was joined by that famous leader of the Abenaki Indians, Baron de Saint-Castin, from the border lands between Acadia and Maine. Later, when Hertel struck through the woods with some of his followers, Portneuf's men numbered five hundred. With these he attacked Fort Loyal, or what is now Portland, Maine, in the month of June. The fort boasted eight great guns and one hundred soldiers. Under cover of the guns Lieutenant Clark and thirty men sallied out to reconnoiter the attacking forces ambushed in woods round a pasturage. At a musket crack the English were literally cut to pieces, four men only escaping back to the fort. The French then demanded unconditional surrender. The English asked six days to consider. In six days English vessels would have come to the rescue. Secure, under a bluff of the ocean cliff, from the cannon fire of the fort, the French began to trench an approach to the palisades. Combustibles had been placed against the walls, when the English again asked a parley, offering to surrender if the French would swear by the living God to conduct them in safety to the nearest English post. To these conditions the French agreed. Whether they could not control their Indian allies or had not intended to keep the terms matters little. The English had no sooner marched from the fort than, with a wild whoop, the Indians fell on men, women, and children. Some were killed by a single blow, others reserved for the torture stake. Only four Englishmen survived the onslaught, to be carried prisoners to Quebec.

The French had been victorious on all three raids; but they were victories over which posterity will never boast, which no writer dare describe in all the detail of their horrors, and which leave a black blot on the escutcheon of Canada.

It was hardly to be expected that the New England colonies would let such raids pass unpunished. The destruction of Schenectady had been bad enough. The massacre of Salmon Falls caused the New Englanders to forget their jealousies for the once and to unite in a common cause. All the colonies agreed {176} to contribute men, ships, and money to invade New France by land and sea. The land forces were placed under Winthrop and Schuyler; but as smallpox disorganized the expedition before it reached Lake Champlain, the attack by land had little other effect than to draw Frontenac from Quebec down to Montreal, where Captain Schuyler, with Dutch bushmen, succeeded in ravaging the settlements and killing at least twenty French.

The expedition by sea was placed under Sir William Phips of Massachusetts,—a man who was the very antipodes of Frontenac. One of a poor family of twenty-six children, Phips had risen from being a shepherd boy in Maine to the position of ship's carpenter in Boston. Here, among the harbor folk, he got wind of a Spanish treasure ship containing a million and a half dollars' worth of gold, which had been sunk off the West Indies. Going to England, Phips succeeded in interesting that same clique of courtiers who helped Radisson to establish the Hudson's Bay Company,—Albemarle and Prince Rupert and the King; and when, with the funds which they advanced, Phips succeeded in raising the treasure vessel, he received, in addition to his share of the booty, a title and the appointment as governor of Massachusetts.

SIR WILLIAM PHIPS

Here, then, was the daring leader chosen to invade New France. Phips sailed first for Port Royal, which had in late years become infested with French pirates, preying on Boston commerce. Word had just come of the fearful massacres of {177} colonists at Portland. Boston was inflamed with a spirit of vengeance. The people had appointed days of fasting and prayer to invoke Heaven's blessing on their war. When Phips sailed into Annapolis Basin with his vessels and seven hundred men in the month of May, he found the French commander, Meneval, ill of the gout, with a garrison of about eighty soldiers, but all the cannon chanced to be dismounted. The odds against the French did not permit resistance. Meneval stipulated for an honorable surrender,—all property to be respected and the garrison to be sent to some French port; but no sooner were the English in possession than, like the French at Portland, they broke the pledge. There was no massacre as in Maine, but plunderers ran riot, seizing everything on which hands could be laid, ransacking houses and desecrating the churches; and sixty of the leading people, including Meneval and the priests, were carried off as prisoners. Leaving one English flag flying, Phips sailed home.

Indignation at Boston had been fanned to fury, for now all the details of the butchery at Portland were known; and Phips found the colony mustering a monster expedition to attack the very stronghold of French power,—Quebec itself. England could afford no aid to her colonies, but thirty-two merchant vessels and frigates had been impressed into the service, some of them carrying as many as forty-four cannon. Artisans, sailors, soldiers, clerks, all classes had volunteered as fighters, to the number of twenty-five hundred men; but there was one thing lacking,—they had no pilot who knew the St. Lawrence. Full of confidence born of inexperience, the fleet set sail on the 9th of August, commanded again by Phips.

Time was wasted ravaging the coasts of Gaspé, holding long-winded councils of war, arguing in the commander's stateroom instead of drilling on deck. Three more weeks were wasted poking about the lower St. Lawrence, picking up chance vessels off Tadoussac and Anticosti. Among the prize vessels taken near Anticosti was one of Jolliet's, bearing his wife and mother-in-law. The ladies delighted the hearts of the Puritans by the {178} news that not more than one hundred men garrisoned Quebec; but Phips was reckoning without his host, and his host was Frontenac. Besides, it was late in the season—the middle of October—before the English fleet rounded the Island of Orleans and faced the Citadel of Quebec.

COUNT FRONTENAC (From a statue at Quebec)

Indians had carried word to the city that an Englishwoman, taken prisoner in their raids, had told them more than thirty vessels had sailed from Boston to invade New France. Frontenac was absent in Montreal. Quickly the commander at Quebec sent coureurs with warning to Frontenac, and then set about casting up barricades in the narrow streets that led from Lower to Upper Town.

Frontenac could not credit the news. Had he not heard here in Montreal from Indian coureurs how the English overland expedition lay rotting of smallpox near Lake Champlain, such pitiable objects that the Iroquois refused to join them against the French? New France now numbered a population of twelve thousand and could muster three thousand fighting men; and though the English colonies numbered twenty {179} thousand people, how could they, divided by jealousies, send an invading army of twenty-seven hundred, as the rumor stated? Frontenac, grizzled old warrior, did not credit the news, but, all the same, he set out amid pelting rains by boat for Quebec. Half-way to Three Rivers more messengers brought him word that the English fleet were now advancing from Tadoussac. He sent back orders for the commander at Montreal to rush the bush-rovers down to Quebec, and he himself arrived at the Citadel just as the Le Moyne brothers anchored below Cape Diamond from a voyage to Hudson Bay. Maricourt Le Moyne reported how he had escaped past the English fleet by night, and it would certainly be at Quebec by daybreak.

Scouts rallied the bushrangers on both sides of the St. Lawrence to Quebec's aid. Frontenac bade them guard the outposts and not desert their hamlets, while Ste. Hélène and the other Le Moynes took command of the sharpshooters in Lower Town, scattering them in hiding along the banks of the St. Charles and among the houses facing the St. Lawrence below Castle St. Louis.

Sure enough, at daybreak on Monday, October 16, sail after sail, thirty-four in all, rounded the end of Orleans Island and took up position directly opposite Quebec City. It was a cold, wet autumn morning. Fog and rain alternately chased in gray shadows across the far hills, and above the mist of the river loomed ominous the red-gray fort which the English had come to capture. Castle St. Louis stood where Château Frontenac stands to-day; and what is now the promenade of a magnificent terrace was at that time a breastwork of cannon extending on down the sloping hill to the left as far as the ramparts. In fact, the cannon of that period were more dangerous than they are to-day, for long-range missiles have rendered old-time fortifications adapted for close-range fighting almost useless; and the cannon of Upper Town, Quebec, that October morning swept the approach to three sides of the fort, facing the St. Charles, opposite Point Lévis and the St. Lawrence, where it curves back on itself; and the fourth side was sheer wall—invulnerable.

{180} With a rattling of anchor chains and a creaking of masts the great sails of the English fleet were lowered, and a little boat put out at ten o'clock under flag of truce to meet a boat half-way from Lower Town. Phips' messenger was conducted blindfold up the barricaded streets leading to Castle St. Louis; and the gunners had been instructed to clang their muskets on the stones to give the impression of great numbers. Suddenly the bandage was taken from the man's eyes and he found himself in a great hall, standing before the august presence of Frontenac, surrounded by a circle of magnificently dressed officers. The New Englander delivered his message,—Phips' letter demanding surrender: "Your prisoners, your persons, your estates … and should you refuse, I am resolved by the help of God, in whom I trust, to revenge by force of arms all our wrongs." … As the reading of the letter was finished the man looked up to see an insolent smile pass round the faces of Frontenac's officers, one of whom superciliously advised hanging the bearer of such insolence without waste of time. The New Englander pulled out his watch and signaled that he must have Frontenac's answer within an hour. The haughty old Governor pretended not to see the motion, and then, with a smile like ice, made answer in {181} words that have become renowned: "I shall not keep you waiting so long! Tell your General I do not recognize King William! I know no king of England but King James! Does your General suppose that these brave gentlemen"—pointing to his officers—"would consent to trust a man who broke his word at Port Royal?"

CASTLE ST. LOUIS

As the shout of applause died away, the trembling New Englander asked Frontenac if he would put his answer in writing.

"No," thundered the old Governor, never happier than when fighting, "I will answer your General with my cannon! I shall teach him that a man of my rank"—with covert sneer at Phips' origin, "is not to be summoned in such rude fashion! Let him do his best! I shall do mine!"

It was now the turn of the English to be amazed. This was not the answer they had expected from a fort weakly garrisoned by a hundred men. If they had struck and struck quickly, they might yet have won the day; but all Monday passed in futile arguments and councils of war, and on Tuesday, the 17th, towards night, was heard wild shouting within Quebec walls.

ATTACK ON QUEBEC, 1690

"My faith, Messieurs!" exclaimed one of the French prisoners aboard Phips' ship; "now you have lost your chance! Those {182} are the coureurs de bois from Montreal and the bushrovers of the Pays d'en Haut, eight hundred strong."

The news at last spurred Phips to action. All that night the people of Quebec could hear the English drilling, and shouting "God save King William!" with beat of drum and trumpet calls that set the echoes rolling from Cape Diamond; and on the 18th small boats landed fourteen hundred men to cross the St. Charles River and assault the Lower Town, while the four largest ships took up a position to cannonade the city. It was four in the afternoon before the soldiers had been landed amid peppering bullets from the Le Moyne bushrovers. Only a few cannon shots were fired, and they did no damage but to kill an urchin of the Upper Town.

Firing began in earnest on the morning of October 19. The river was churned to fury and the reverberating echoes set the rocks crashing from Cape Diamond, but it was almost impossible for the English to shoot high enough to damage the upper fort. It was easy for the French to shoot down, and great wounds gaped from the hull of Phips' ship, while his masts went over decks in flame, flag and all. The tide drifted the admiral's flag on shore. The French rowed out, secured the prize, and a jubilant shout roared from Lower Town, to be taken up and echoed and reëchoed from the Castle! For two more days bombs roared in midair, plunging through the roofs of houses in Lower Town or ricochetting back harmless from the rock wall below Castle St. Louis. At the St. Charles the land forces were fighting blindly to effect a crossing, but the Le Moyne bushrovers lying in ambush repelled every advance, though Ste. Hélène had fallen mortally wounded. On the morning of the 21st the French could hardly believe their senses. The land forces had vanished during the darkness of a rainy night, and ship after ship, sail after sail, was drifting downstream—was it possible?—in retreat. Another week's bombarding would have reduced Quebec to flame and starvation; but another week would have exposed Phips' fleet to wreckage from winter weather, and he had drifted down to Isle Orleans, where the {183} dismantled fleet paused to rig up fresh masts. It was Madame Jolliet who suggested to the Puritan commander an exchange of the prisoners captured at Port Royal with the English from Maine and New Hampshire held in Quebec. She was sent ashore by Phips and the exchange was arranged. Winter gales assailed the English fleet as it passed Anticosti, and what with the wrecked and wounded, Phips' loss totaled not less than a thousand men.

CASTLE ST. LOUIS, QUEBEC

Frontenac had been back in Canada only a year, and in that time he had restored the prestige of French power in America. The Iroquois were glad to sue for peace, and his bitterest enemies, the Jesuits, joined the merrymakers round the bonfires of acclaim kindled in the old Governor's honor as the English retreated, and the joy bells pealed out, and processions surged shouting through the streets of Quebec! From Hudson Bay to the Mississippi, from the St. Lawrence to Lake Superior and the land of the Sioux, French power reigned supreme. Only Port Nelson, high up on the west coast of Hudson Bay, remained unsubdued, draining the furs of the prairie tribes to England away from Quebec. Iberville had captured it in the fall of 1694, at the cost of his brother Châteauguay's life; but when Iberville departed from Hudson Bay, English men-of-war had come out in 1696 and wrested back this most valuable of all the fur posts. It was now determined to drive the English forever from Hudson Bay. Le Moyne d'Iberville was chosen for the task.

April, 1697, Sérigny Le Moyne was dispatched from France with five men-of-war to be placed under the command of Iberville at Placentia, Newfoundland, whence he was "to proceed {184} to Hudson Bay and to leave not a vestige of the English in the North." The frigates left Newfoundland July 8. Three weeks later they were crushing through the ice jam of Hudson Straits. Iberville commanded the Pelican with two hundred and fifty men. Bienville, a brother, was on the same ship. Sérigny commanded the Palmier, and there were three other frigates, the Profound, the Violent, the Wasp. Ice locked round the fleet at the west end of Hudson Straits, and fog lay so thick there was nothing visible of any ship but the masthead. For eighteen days they lay, crunched and rammed and separated by the ice drive, till on August 25, early in the morning, the fog suddenly lifted. Iberville saw that Sérigny's ship had been carried back {185} in the straits. The Wasp and Violent were not to be seen, but straight ahead, locked in the ice, stood the Profound, and beside the French vessel three English frigates, the Hampshire, the Deering, the Hudson's Bay, on their annual voyage to Nelson! A lane of water opened before Iberville. Like a bird the Pelican spread her wings to the wind and fled.

PLAN OF QUEBEC (after Franquelin, 1683)

September 3 Iberville sighted Port Nelson, and for two days cruised the offing, scanning the sea for the rest of his fleet. Early on September 5 the sails of three vessels heaved and rose above the watery horizon. Never doubting these were his own ships, Iberville signaled. There was no answer. A sailor scrambled to the masthead and shouted down terrified warning. These were not the French ships! They were the English frigates bearing straight down on the single French vessel commanded by Iberville!

On one side was the enemy's fort, on the other the enemy's fleet coming over the waves before a clipping wind, all sails set. Of Iberville's crew forty men were ill of scurvy. Twenty-five had gone ashore to reconnoiter. He had left one hundred and fifty fighting men. Amid a rush of orders, ropes were stretched across decks for handhold, cannon were unplugged, and the batterymen below decks stripped themselves for the hot work ahead. The soldiers assembled on decks, sword in hand, and the Canadian bushrovers stood to the fore, ready to leap across the enemy's decks.

By nine in the morning the ships were abreast, and roaring cannonades from the English cut the decks of the Pelican to kindling wood and set the masts in flame. At the same instant one fell blast of musketry mowed down forty French; but Iberville's batterymen below decks had now ceased to pour a stream of fire into the English hulls. The odds were three to one, and for four hours the battle raged, the English shifting and sheering to lock in death grapple, Iberville's sharpshooters peppering the decks of the foe.

It had turned bitterly cold. The blood on the decks became ice, and each roll of the sea sent wounded and dead weltering {186} from rail to rail. Such holes had been torn in the hulls of both English and French ships that the gunners below decks were literally looking into each other's smoke-grimmed faces. Suddenly all hands paused. A frantic scream cleft the air. The vessels were careening in a tempestuous sea, for the great ship Hampshire had refused to answer to the wheel, had lurched, had sunk,—sunk swift as lead amid hiss of flames into the roaring sea! Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men escaped. The frigate Hudson's Bay surrendered and the Deering fled. Iberville was victor.

LANDING OF IBERVILLE'S MEN AT PORT NELSON (After La Potherie)

But a storm now broke in hurricane gusts over the sea. Iberville steered for land, but waves drenched the wheel at every wash, and, driving before the storm, the Pelican floundered in the sands a few miles from Nelson. All lifeboats had been shot away. In such a sea the Canadian canoes were useless. The shattered masts were tied in four-sided racks. To these {187} Iberville had the wounded bound, and the crew plunged for the shore. Eighteen men perished going ashore in the darkness. On land were two feet of snow. No sooner did the French castaways build fires to warm their benumbed limbs than bullets whistled into camp. Governor Bayly of Port Nelson had sent out his sharpshooters. Luckily Iberville's other ships now joined him, and, mustering his forces, the dauntless French leader marched against the fort. Storm had permitted the French to land their cannon undetected. Trenches were cast up, and three times Sérigny Le Moyne was sent to demand surrender.

CAPTURE OF FORT NELSON BY THE FRENCH (After La Potherie)

"The French are desperate," he urged. "They must take the fort or perish of want, and if you continue the fight there will be no mercy given."

The Hudson's Bay people capitulated and were permitted to march out with arms, bag and baggage. An English ship carried the refugees home to the Thames.

The rest of Iberville's career is the story of colonizing the Mississippi. He was granted a vast seigniory on the Bay of {188} Chaleur, and in 1699 given a title. On his way from the Louisiana colony to France his ship had paused at Havana. Here Iberville contracted yellow fever and died while yet in the prime of his manhood, July 9, 1706.

After the victory on Hudson Bay the French were supreme in America and Frontenac supreme in New France. The old white-haired veteran of a hundred wars became the idol of Quebec. Friends and enemies, Jesuits and Recollets, paid tribute to his worth. In November of 1698 the Governor passed from this life in Castle St. Louis at the good old age of seventy-eight. He had demonstrated—demonstrated in action so that his enemies acknowledged the fact—that the sterner virtues of the military chieftain go farther towards the making of great nationhood than soft sentiments and religious emotionalism.

CHAPTER X

FROM 1698 TO 1713

Petty regulations and blue laws—Massacre of Deerfield—Madame Freneuse, the painter lady—"Old Wooden Sword"—Subercase at Port Royal—Paul Mascarene's plight—Court dandies cause naval disaster

While Frontenac was striking terror into the heart of New England with his French Canadian bushrovers, the life of the people went on in the same grooves. Spite of a dozen raids on the Iroquois cantons, there was still danger from the warriors of the Mohawk, but the Iroquois braves had found a new stamping ground. Instead of attacking Canada they now crossed westward to war on the allies of the French, the tribes of the Illinois and the Mississippi; and with them traveled their liege friends, English traders from New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The government of Canada continued to be a despotism, pure and simple. The Supreme Council, consisting of the governor, the intendant, the bishop, and at different times from three to twelve councilors, stood between the people and the King of France, transmitting the King's will to the people, the people's wants to the King; and the laws enacted by the council ranged all the way from criminal decrees to such petty regulations as a modern city wardman might pass. Laws enacted to meet local needs, but subject to the veto of an absent ruler, who knew absolutely nothing of local needs, exhibited all the absurdities to be expected. The King of France desires the Sovereign Council to discourage the people from using horses, which are supposed to cause laziness, as "it is needful the inhabitants keep up their snowshoe travel so necessary in their wars." "If in two years the numbers of horses do not decrease, they are to be killed for meat." Then comes a law that reflects the presence of the bishop at the governing board. Horses have become the pride of the country beaux, and the gay be-ribboned carrioles are the distraction of the village curé. "Men are forbidden to gallop their horses within a third of a mile from the church on {190} Sundays." New laws, regulations, arrests, are promulgated by the public crier, "crying up and down the highway to sound of trumpet and drum," chest puffed out with self-importance, gold braid enough on the red-coated regalia to overawe the simple habitants. Though the companies holding monopoly over trade yearly change, monopoly is still all-powerful in New France,—so all pervasive that in 1741, in order to prevent smuggling to defraud the Company of the Indies, it is enacted that "people using chintz-covered furniture" must upholster their chairs so that the stamp "La Cie des Indes" will be visible to the inspector. The matter of money is a great trouble to New France. Beaver is coin of the realm on the St. Lawrence, and though this beaver is paid for in French gold, the precious metal almost at once finds its way back to France for goods; so that the colony is without coin. Government cards are issued as coin, but as Europe will not accept card money, the result is that gold still flows from New France, and the colony is flooded with paper money worthless away from Quebec.

As of old, the people may still plead their own cases in lawsuits before the Sovereign Council, but now the privileges of caste and class and feudalism begin to be felt, and it is enacted that gentlemen may plead their own cases before the council only "when wearing their swords." Young men are urged to qualify as notaries. In addition to the title of "Sieur," baronies are created in Canada, foremost among them that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. The feudal seignior now has his coat of arms emblazoned on the church pew where he worships, on his coach door, and on the stone entrance to his mansion. The habitants are compelled to grind their wheat at his mill, to use his great bake oven, to patronize his tannery. The seigniorial mansion itself is taking on more of pomp. Cherry and mahogany furniture have replaced homemade, and the rough-cast walls are now covered with imported tapestries.

Not gently does the Sovereign Council deal with delinquents. In 1735 it is enacted of a man who suicided, "that the corpse be tied to a cart, dragged on a hurdle, head down, face to ground, {191} through the streets of the town, to be hung up by the feet, an object of derision, then cast into the river in default of a cesspool." Criminals who evade punishment by flight are to be hanged in effigy. Montreal citizens are ordered to have their chimneys cleaned every month and their houses provided with ladders. Also "the inhabitants of Montreal must not allow their pigs to run in the street," and they "are forbidden to throw snowballs at each other," and—a regulation which people who know Montreal winters will appreciate—"they are ordered to make paths through the snow before their houses,"—to all of which petty regulations did royalty subscribe sign manual.

CONTEMPORARY MAP (after La Hontan, 1689) (The line shows the French idea of the territory under English control)

The Treaty of Ryswick closed the war between France and England the year before Frontenac died, but it was not known in Canada till 1698. As far as Canada was concerned it was no peace, barely a truce. Each side was to remain in possession of what it held at the time of the treaty, which meant that France retained all Hudson Bay but one small fort. Though the English of Boston had captured Port Royal, they had left {192} no sign of possession but their flag flying over the tenantless barracks. The French returned from the woods, tore the flag down, and again took possession; so that, by the Treaty of Ryswick, Acadia too went back under French rule.

Indeed, matters were worse than before the treaty, for there could be no open war; but when English settlers spreading up from Maine met French traders wandering down from Acadia, there was the inevitable collision, and it was an easy trick for the rivals to stir up the Indians to raid and massacre and indiscriminate butchery. For Indian raids neither country would be responsible to the other. The story belongs to the history of the New England frontier rather than to the record of Canada. It is a part of Canada's past which few French writers tell and all Canadians would fain blot out, but which the government records prove beyond dispute. Indian warfare is not a thing of grandeur at its best, but when it degenerates into the braining of children, the bayoneting of women, the mutilation of old men, it is a horror without parallel; and the amazing thing is that the white men, who painted themselves as Indians and helped to wage this war, were so sure they were doing God's work that they used to kneel and pray before beginning the butchery. To understand it one has to go back to the Middle Ages in imagination. New France was violently Catholic, New England violently Protestant. Bigotry ever looks out through eyes of jaundiced hatred, and in destroying what they thought was a false faith, each side thought itself instrument of God. As for the French governors behind the scenes, who pulled the strings that let loose the helldogs of Indian war, they were but obeying the kingcraft of a royal master, who would use Indian warfare to add to his domain.

"The English have sent us presents to drive the Black Gowns away," declared the Iroquois in 1702 regarding the French Jesuits. "You did well," writes the King of France to his Viceroy in Quebec, "to urge the Abenakis of Acadia to raid the English of Boston." The Treaty of Ryswick became {193} known at Quebec towards the end of 1698. The border warfare of ravage and butchery had begun by 1701, the English giving presents to the Iroquois to attack the French of the Illinois, the French giving presents to the Abenakis to raid the New England borders. Quebec offers a reward of twenty crowns for the scalp of every white man brought from the English settlements. New England retaliates by offering 20 pounds for every Indian prisoner under ten years of age, 40 pounds for every scalp of full-grown Indian. Presently the young noblesse of New France are off to the woods, painted like Indians, leading crews of wild bushrovers on ambuscade and midnight raid and border foray.

HERTEL DE ROUVILLE

"We must keep things stirring towards Boston," declared Vaudreuil, the French governor. Midwinter of 1704 Hertel de Rouville and his four brothers set out on snowshoes with fifty-one bushrovers and two hundred Indians for Massachusetts. Dressed in buckskin, with musket over shoulder and dagger in belt, the forest rangers course up the frozen river beds southward of the St. Lawrence, and on over the height of land towards the Hudson, two hundred and fifty miles through pine woods snow padded and silent as death. Two miles from Deerfield the marchers run short of food. It is the last day of February, and the sun goes down over rolling snowdrifts high as the slab stockades of the little frontier town whose hearth-fire smoke hangs low in the frosty air, curling and clouding and lighting to rainbow colors as the ambushed {194} raiders watch from their forest lairs. Snowshoes are laid aside, packs unstrapped, muskets uncased and primed, belts reefed tighter. Twilight gives place to starlight. Candles on the supper tables of the settlement send long gleams across the snow. Then the villagers hold their family prayers, all unconscious that out there in the woods are the bushrovers on bended knees, uttering prayers of another sort. Lights are put out. The village lies wrapped in sleep. Still Rouville's raiders lie waiting, shivering in the snow, till starlight fades to the gray darkness that precedes dawn. Then the bushrovers rise, and at moccasin pace, noiseless as tigers, skim across the snow, over the drifts, over the tops of the palisades, and have dropped into the town before a soul has awakened. There is no need to tell the rest. It was not war. It was butchery. Children were torn from their mother's breast to be brained on the hearthstone. Women were hacked to pieces. Houses were set on fire, and before the sun had risen thirty-eight persons had been slaughtered, and the French rovers were back on the forest trail, homeward bound with one hundred and six prisoners. Old and young, women of frail health and children barely able to toddle, were hurried along the trail at bayonet point. Those whose strength was unequal to the pace were summarily knocked on the head as they fagged, or failed to ford the ice streams. Twenty-four perished by the way. Of the one hundred and six prisoners scattered as captives among the Indians, not half were ever heard of again. The others were either bought from the Indians by Quebec people, whose pity was touched, or placed round in the convents to be converted to the Catholic faith. These were ultimately redeemed by the government of Massachusetts.

New England's fury over such a raid in time of peace knew no bounds. Yet how were the English to retaliate? To pursue an ambushed Indian along a forest trail was to follow a vanishing phantom.

From earliest times Boston had kept up trade with Port Royal, and of late years Port Royal had been infested with French pirates, who raided Boston shipping. Colonel Ben {195} Church of Long Island, a noted bushfighter, of gunpowder temper and form so stout that his men had always to hoist him over logs in their forest marches, went storming from New York to Boston with a plan to be revenged by raiding Acadia.

Rouville's bushrovers had burned Deerfield the first of March. By May, Church had sailed from Boston with six hundred men on two frigates and half a hundred whaleboats, on vengeance bent. First he stopped at Baron St. Castin's fort in Maine. St. Castin it was who led the Indians against the English of Maine. The baron was absent, but his daughter was captured, with all the servants, and the fort was burned to the ground. Then up Fundy Bay sailed Church, pausing at Passamaquoddy to knock four Frenchmen on the head; pausing at Port Royal to take eight men prisoners, kill cattle, ravage fields; pausing at Basin of Mines to capture forty habitants, burn the church, and cut the dikes, letting the sea in on the crops; pausing at Beaubassin, the head of Fundy Bay, in August, to set the yellow wheat fields in flames! Then he sailed back to Boston with French prisoners enough to insure an exchange for the English held at Quebec.

No sooner had English sails disappeared over the sea than the French came out of the woods. St. Castin rebuilt his fort in Maine. The local Governor, who had held on with his gates shut and cannon pointed while Church ravaged Port Royal village, now strengthened his walls. Acadia took a breath and went on as before,—a little world in itself, with the pirate ships slipping in and out, loaded to the water line with Boston booty; with the buccaneer Basset throwing his gold round like dust; with the brave soldier Bonaventure losing his head and losing his heart to the painted lady, Widow Freneuse, who came from nobody knew where and lived nobody knew how, and plied her mischief of winning the hearts of other women's husbands. "She must be sent away," thundered the priest from the pulpit, straight at the garrison officer whose heart she dangled as her trophy. "She must be sent away," thundered the King's mandate; but the King was in France, and Madame Freneuse {196} wound her charms the tighter round the hearts of the garrison officers, and bided her time, to the scandal of the parish and impotent rage of the priest. Was she vixen or fool, this fair snake woman with the beautiful face, for whose smile the officers risked death and disgrace? Was she spy or adventuress? She signed herself as "Widow Freneuse," and had applied to the King for a pension as having grown sons fighting in the Indian wars. She will come into this story again, snakelike and soft-spoken, and appealing for pity, and fair to look upon, but leaving a trail of blood and treachery and disgrace where she goes.

The fur trade of Port Royal at this time was controlled by a family ring of La Tours and Charnisays, descendants of the ancient foes; and they lived a life of reckless gayety, spiced with all the excitement of war and privateering and matrimonial intrigue. Such was life inside Port Royal. Outside was the quiet peace of a home-loving, home-staying peasantry. Few of the farmers could read or write. The houses were little square Norman cottages,—"wooden boxes" the commandant called them,—with the inevitable porch shaded by the fruit trees now grown into splendid orchards. By diking out the sea the peasants farmed the marsh lands and saved themselves the trouble of clearing the forests. Trade was carried on with Boston and the West Indies. No card money here! The farmers of Acadia demanded coin in gold from the privateers who called for cargo, and it is said that in time of such raids as Colonel Church's, great quantities of this gold were carried out by night and buried in huge pots,—as much as 5000 louis d'ors (pounds) in one pot,—to be dug up after the raiders had departed. Naturally, as raids grew frequent, men sometimes made the mistake of digging up other men's pots, and one officer lost his reputation over it. All his knowledge of the outside world, of politics, of religion, the Acadian farmer obtained from his parish priest; and the word of the curé was law.

Encouraged by Church's success and stung by the raids of French corsairs from Port Royal, New England set herself seriously to the task of conquering Acadia. Colonel March sailed {197} from Boston with one thousand men and twenty-three transports, and on June 6, 1707, came into Port Royal. Misfortunes began from the first. March's men were the rawest of recruits,—fishermen, farmers, carpenters, turned into soldiers. Unused to military discipline, they resisted command. A French guardhouse stood at the entrance to Port Royal Basin, and fifteen men at once fled to the fort with warning of the English invasion. Consequently, when Colonel March and Colonel Appleton attempted to land their men, they were serenaded by the shots of an ambushed foe. Also French soldiers deserted to the English camp with fabulous stories about the strength of the French under Subercase. These yarns ought to have discredited themselves, but they struck terror to the hearts of March's green fighters. Then came St. Castin from St. John River with bushrovers to help Subercase. To the amazement of the French the English hoisted sail and returned, on June 16, without having fired more than a round of shot. The truth is, March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though reënforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets with shouts of "Old Wooden Sword!"

While Boston was attempting to wreak vengeance on Acadia for the raiders of Quebec, the bushrovers from the St. Lawrence continued to scourge the outlying settlements of New England. To post soldiers on the frontier was useless. Wherever there were guards the raiders simply passed on to some unprotected village, and to have kept soldiers along the line of the whole frontier would have required a standing army. Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New York,—on the frontier of each reigned perpetual terror. And the fiendish work was a paying business to the pagan Indian; for the Christian white men paid well for all scalps, and ransom money could always be extorted for captives. Barely had the Boston raid on Port Royal failed, when Governor de Vaudreuil of Quebec {198} retaliated by turning his raiders loose on Haverhill. The English fleet failed at Port Royal in June. By dawn of Sunday, August 29, Hertel de Rouville had swooped on the English village of Haverhill with one hundred Canadian bushrovers and one hundred and fifty Indians. The story of one raid is the story of all; so this one need not be told. As the raiders were discovered at daylight, the people had a chance to defend themselves, and some of the villagers escaped, the family of one being hidden by a negro nurse under tubs in the cellar. Alarm had been carried to the surrounding settlements, and men rode hot haste in pursuit of the forty prisoners. Hertel de Rouville coolly sent back word, if the pursuers did not desist, all the prisoners would be scalped and left on the roadside. Some fifty English had fallen in the fight, but the French lost fifteen, among them young Jared of Verchéres, brother of the heroine.

CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF PORT ROYAL BASIN

The only peace for Massachusetts was the peace that would be a victory, and again New England girded herself to the task of capturing Acadia. It was open war now, for the crowns of England and France were at odds. The troops were commanded by General Francis Nicholson, an English officer who brought out four war ships and four hundred trained marines. There were, besides, thirty-six transports and three thousand provincial troops, clothed and outfitted by Queen Anne of England. Sunday, September 24, 1710, the fleet glides majestically into Port Royal Basin. That night the wind blew a hurricane and the transport Caesar went aground with a crash that smashed her timbers to kindling wood and sent twenty-four men to a watery grave; but General Nicholson gave the raw provincials no time for panic fright. Day dawn, Monday, drums rolling a martial tread, trumpets blowing, bugles setting the echoes flying, flags blowing to the wind in the morning sun, he commanded Colonel Vetch to lead the men ashore. Inside Port Royal's palisades Subercase, the French commander, had less than three hundred men, half that number absolutely naked of clothing, and all short of powder. There were not provisions to last a month; but, game to his soul's marrow, as all the warriors of {199} those early days, Subercase put up a brave fight, sending his bombs singing over the heads of the English troops in a vain attempt to baffle the landing. Nicholson retaliated by moving his bomb ship, light of draught, close to the French fort and pouring a shower of bombs through the roofs of the French fort. Spite of the wreck the night before, by four o'clock Monday afternoon all the English had landed in perfect order and high spirits. Slowly the English forces swung in a circle completely round the fort. Again and again, by daylight and dark, Subercase's naked soldiers rushed, screeching the war whoop, to ambush and stampede the English line; but Nicholson's regulars stood the fire like rocks, and the desperate sortie of the French ended in fifty of Subercase's soldiers deserting en masse to the English. By Friday Nicholson's guns were all mounted in place to bombard the little wooden fort. Subercase was desperate. Women and children from the settlement had crowded into the fort for protection, and were now crazed with fear by the bursting bombs, while the naked soldiers could be kept on the walls only at the sword point of their commanding officers. {200} For two hundred French to have held out longer against three thousand five hundred English would have been madness. Subercase made the presence of the women in Port Royal an excuse to send a messenger with flag of truce across to Nicholson, asking the English to take the women under their protection. Nicholson might well have asked what protection the French raiders had accorded the women of the New England frontiers; but he sent back polite answer that "as he was not warring on women and children" he would receive them in the English camp, meanwhile holding Subercase's messenger prisoner, as he had entered the English camp without warning, eyes unbound. Sunday, October 1, the English bombs again began singing overhead. Subercase sends word he will capitulate if given honorable terms. For a month the parleying continues. Then November 13 the terms are signed on both sides, the English promising to furnish ships to carry the garrison to some French port and pledging protection to the people of the settlement. November 14 the French officers and their ladies come across to the English camp and breakfast in pomp with the English commanders. Seventeen New England captives are hailed forth from Port Royal dungeons, "all in rags, without shirts, shoes, or stockings." On the 16th Nicholson draws his men up in two lines, one on each side of Port Royal gates, and the two hundred French soldiers marched out, saluting Nicholson as they passed to the transports. On the bridge, halfway out, French officers meet the English officers, doff helmets, and present the keys to the fort. For the last time Port Royal changes hands. Henceforth it is English, and in gratitude for the Queen's help Nicholson renamed the place as it is known to-day,—Annapolis. Among the raiders capitulating is the famous bushrover Baron St. Castin of Maine.

When Nicholson returned to Boston all New England went mad with delight. Thanksgiving services were held, joy bells rang day and night for a week, and bonfires blazed on village commons to the gleeful shoutings of rustic soldiers returned to the home settlements glorified heroes.

PAUL MASCARENE

At Annapolis (Port Royal) Paul Mascarene, a French Huguenot of Boston, has mounted guard with two hundred and fifty New England volunteers. Colonel Vetch is nominally the English governor; but Vetch is in Boston the most of the time, and it is on Mascarene the burden of governing falls. His duties are not light. Palisades have been broken down and must be repaired. Bombs have torn holes in the fort roofs, and all that winter the rain leaks in as through a sieve. The soldier volunteers grumble and mope and sicken. And these are not the least of Paul Mascarene's troubles. French priests minister to the Acadian farmers outside the fort, to the sinister Indians ever lying in ambush, to the French bushrovers under young St. Castin across Fundy Bay on St. John River. Not for love or money can Mascarene buy provisions from the Acadians. Not by threats can he compel them to help mend the breaches in the palisades. The young commandant was only twenty-seven years of age, but he must have guessed whence came the unspoken hostility. The first miserable winter wears slowly past and the winter of 1711 is setting in, with the English garrison even more poverty stricken than the year before, when there drifts into Annapolis Basin, in a birch canoe paddled by a New Brunswick Indian, a white woman with her little son. She has come, she says, from the north side of Fundy Bay, because the French {202} on St. John River are starving. Whether the story be true or false matters little. It was the Widow Freneuse, the snake woman of mischief-making witchery, who had woven her spells round the officers in the days of the French at Port Royal. True or false, her story, added to her smile, excited sympathy, and she was welcomed to the shelter of the fort. It had been almost impossible for the English to obtain trees to repair the walls of the fort, and seventy English soldiers were sent out secretly by night to paddle up the river in a whaleboat for timber. Who conveyed secret warning of this expedition to the French bushraiders outside? No doubt the fair spy, Widow Freneuse, could have told if she would; but five miles from Port Royal, where the river narrowed to a place ever since known as Bloody Brook, a crash of musket shots flared from the woods on each side. Painted Indians, and Frenchmen dressed as Indians, among whom was a son of Widow Freneuse, dashed out. Sixteen English were killed, nine wounded, the rest to a man captured, to be held for ransoms ranging from 10 pounds to 50 pounds. Oddly enough, the very night after the attack, before news of it had come to Annapolis, the Widow Freneuse disappears from the fort. Henceforth Paul Mascarene's men kept guard night and day, and slept in their boots. Ever like a sinister shadow of evil moved St. Castin and his raiders through the Acadian wildwoods.

Only one thing prevented the French recapturing Port Royal at this time. All troops were required to defend Quebec itself from invasion.

Nicholson's success at Port Royal spurred England and her American colonies to a more ambitious project,—to capture Quebec and subjugate Canada. This time Nicholson was to head twenty-five hundred provincial troops by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, while a British army of twelve thousand, half soldiers, half marines, on fifteen frigates and forty-six transports, was to sail from Boston for Quebec. The navy was under command of Sir Hovender Walker; the army, of General Jack Hill, a court favorite of Queen Anne's, more noted for {203} his graces than his prowess. The whole expedition is one of the most disgraceful in the annals of English war. The fleet left Boston on July 30, 1711, Nicholson meanwhile waiting encamped on Lake Champlain. Early in August the immense fleet had rounded Sable Island and was off the shores of Anticosti. Though there was no good pilot on board, the two commanders nightly went to bed and slept the sleep of the just. Off Egg Islands, on the night of August 22, there was fog and a strong east wind. Walker evidently thought he was near the south shore, ignorant of the strong undertow of the tide here, which had carried his ships thirty miles off the course. The water was rolling in the lumpy masses of a choppy cross sea when a young captain of the regulars dashed breathlessly into Walker's stateroom and begged him "for the Lord's sake to come on deck, for there are reefs ahead and we shall all be lost!"

With a seaman's laugh at a landsman's fears, the Admiral donned dressing gown and slippers and shuffled up to the decks. A pale moon had broken through the ragged fog wrack, and through the white light they plainly saw mountainous breakers straight ahead. Walker shouted to let the anchor go and drive to the wind. Above the roar of breakers and trample of panic-stricken seamen over decks could be heard the minute guns of the other ships firing for help. Then pitch darkness fell with slant rains in a deluge. The storm abated, but all night long, above the boom of an angry sea, could be heard shrieks and shoutings for help; and by the light of the Admiral's ship could be seen the faces of the dead cast up by the moil of the sea. Before dawn eight transports had suffered shipwreck and one thousand lives were lost.

It was a night to put fear in the hearts of all but very brave men, and neither Walker nor Hill proved man enough to stand firm to the shock. Walker ascribed the loss to the storm and the storm to Providence; and when war council was held three days later Jack Hill, the court dandy, was only too glad of excuse to turn tail and flee to England without firing a gun. Poor old Nicholson, waiting with his provincials up on Lake Champlain, {204} goes into apoplexy with tempests of rage and chagrin, when he hears the news, stamping the ground, tearing off his wig, and shouting, "Rogues! rogues!" He burns his fort and disbands his men.

The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 for the time closed the war. France had been hopelessly defeated in Europe, and the terms were favorable to England.

All of Hudson Bay was to be restored to the English; but—note well—it was not specified where the boundaries were to be between Hudson Bay and Quebec. That boundary dispute came down as a heritage to modern days—thanks to the incompetency and ignorance of the statesmen who arranged the treaty.

Acadia was given to England, but Cape Breton was retained by the French, and—note well—it was not stated whether Acadia included New Brunswick and Maine, as the French formerly contended, or included only the peninsula south of the Bay of Fundy. That boundary dispute, too, came down.

Newfoundland was acknowledged as an English possession, but the French retained the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, with fishing privileges on the shores of Newfoundland. That concession, too, has come down to trouble modern days,—thanks to the same defenders of colonial interests.

The Iroquois were acknowledged to be subjects of England, but it was not stated whether that concession included the lands of the Ohio raided and subjugated by the Iroquois; and that vagueness was destined to cost both New France and New England some of its best blood.

It has been stated, and stated many times without dispute, that when England sacrificed the interests of her colonies in boundary settlements, she did so because she was in honor bound to observe the terms of treaties. One is constrained to ask whose ignorance was responsible for the terms of those treaties.

Looking back on the record so far,—both of France and England,—which has spent the more both of substance and of life for defense; the mother countries or the colonies?

CHAPTER XI

FROM 1713 TO 1755

La Vérendrye's adventuring to the West—Adventurers reach Lake Winnipeg—From Assiniboine to Missouri—Intrigue with Indians—The building of Louisburg—The siege of the great fort—Jokes bandied by fighters—Quarrels left unsettled—Beyond the Alleghenies—Washington and Jumonville—Braddock's march—Defeat of Braddock—Abbé Le Loutre—The Acadians—Deportation of French—At Lake Champlain—Dieskau defeated

What with clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of its youth. While the population of the English colonies was nearing the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec, accomplished? Look at the map! Her bushrovers had gone overland to Hudson Bay far north as Nelson. Before 1700 Duluth had forts at Kaministiquia (near modern Fort Williams) on Lake Superior. Radisson, Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had blazed a trail to the Mississippi from what is now Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1701 La Motte Cadillac had built what is now Detroit in order to stop the progress of the English traders up the lakes to Michilimackinac; and by 1727 the Company of the Sioux had forts far west as Lake Pepin. With Quebec as the hub of the wheel, draw spokes across the map of North America. Where do they reach? From Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Missouri, to the Upper Mississippi, to Lake Superior, to Hudson Bay. Who blazed the way through these far pathless wilds? Nameless wanderers dressed in rags and tatters,—outcasts of society, forest rovers lured by the Unknown as by a siren, soldiers of fortune, penniless, in debt, heartbroken, slandered, persecuted, driven by the demon of their own genius to earth's ends,—and to ruin!

Spite of clandestine raids and open wars, New France was now setting herself to stretch the lines of her discoveries farther westward.

It will be remembered it was at Three Rivers that the Indians of the Up Country paused on their way down the St. Lawrence. {206} From the days of Radisson in 1660 the passion for discovery had been in the very air of Three Rivers. In this little fort was born in 1686 Pierre Gaultier Varennes de La Vérendrye, son of a French officer. From childhood the boy's ear must have been accustomed to the uncouth babblings of the half-naked Indians, whose canoes came swarming down the river soon as ice broke up in spring. One can guess that in his play the boy many a time simulated Indian voyageur, bushrover, coming home clad in furs, the envy of the villagers. At fourteen young Pierre had decided that he would be a great explorer, but destiny for the time ruled otherwise. At eighteen he was among the bushraiders of New England. Nineteen found him fighting the English in Newfoundland. Then came the honor coveted by all Canadian boys,—an appointment to the King's army in Europe. Young La Vérendrye was among the French forces defeated by the great Marlborough; but the Peace of Utrecht sent him back to Canada, aged twenty-seven, to serve in the far northern fur post of Nepigon, eating his heart out with ambition.

It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail to the Western Sea. La Vérendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time. English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for discoveries, but it gave La Vérendrye permission for a voyage and monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries of La Vérendrye's glory.

Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of red-blooded men jumping. There {207} was the seigniory of La Chine, named in derision of La Salle's project to find a path to China. There was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the Mississippi. Then La Vérendrye came to Duluth's old stamping ground—Kaministiquia.

LA VÉRENDRYE'S FORTS AND THE RIVER OF THE WEST (After Jeffery's map, 1762)

The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St. Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months' ice. La Vérendrye's men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o'-the-wisp to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, while he himself remained at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions. {208} Winter found Jemmeraie's men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped Crees. In summer of 1732 came La Vérendrye, his men in gayest apparel marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags flying. Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle. Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St. Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed log cabins. The Western Sea seemed far as ever,—like the rainbow of the child, ever fleeing as pursued,—and La Vérendrye's merchant partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser. He had been away three years, and there were no profits. Suspicious that he might be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this year. La Vérendrye was in debt to his men for three years' wages, in debt to his partners for three years' provisions. To fail now he dared not. Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.

Young Jean La Vérendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg River's white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander,—and wait. Fishing failed. The hunt failed. The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity that famine stalked through the western woods. La Vérendrye's three forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat. In desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength. He died on the way and was buried in his hunter's blanket beside an unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods. Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Vérendrye decided to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for food and powder. A furious pace was {209} to be kept all the way to Lake Superior. The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and after paddling some miles through the mist had landed to breakfast when a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean La Vérendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies, and by February of 1737 La Vérendrye had moved his main forces west to Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the lake like a tide,—which explained the Indian legend of an inland ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France. The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Vérendrye still pursued.

MAP PUBLISHED IN PARIS IN 1752 SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST

Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land! Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines; past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers' River, from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right; tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, {210} rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west,—La Vérendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees, where two war chiefs waited to meet La Vérendrye. Drawing up their canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.

It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon. It was a world, though La Vérendrye knew it not, five times larger than New France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian Northwest.

One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun,"—the Spaniards.

Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as Fort Rouge, La Vérendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the Western Sea; La Vérendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live on the great waters to the south."

MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH APPROACHES TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755

Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October 18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Vérendrye marches forth with fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses." These must be the Spaniards. La Vérendrye's quest has become a receding phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Vérendrye marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the Prairie on the Assiniboine. Of that march, space forbids to tell. A blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas {212} was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February 10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the Portage of the Prairie.

The wanderings of La Vérendrye and his sons for the next few years led southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana, northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, all La Vérendrye's property had been seized by his creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the explorer's health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.

Look again at the map! The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west, to Hudson Bay on the north. And the population of New France does not yet number 60,000 people. Is it any wonder French Canadians look back on these days as the Golden Age?

And while the bushrovers of Canada are pushing their way through the wilderness westward, there come slashing, tramping, swearing, stamping through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on discovery to the west coast of America. La Vérendrye's men have crossed only half a continent. Bering's Russians cross the width of two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked ships over unknown northern seas for America. From 1729 to August of 1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers. Their story is not part of Canada's history. Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now known as the Commander Islands. Half the crew of seventy-seven perish of starvation and scurvy. Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with the earth spread over him for warmth. Outside the sand holes, {213} where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and myriad sea birds. The ships have been wrecked. The Russians are on an unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand, Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward. Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will meet and clash at a later era.

The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of Massachusetts, of New York. The story of one raid is the story of all, and several have already been related. Now comes a half century of petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield to Maine and New Brunswick. The story of these "little wars," as the French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States than Canada.

Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant Indians as pawns in the game of statecraft.

"Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly fostered," commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia had been deeded over to England. "The King is pleased with the efforts of Père Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle on their lands," runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border massacres of Maine. "Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the English," command the royal instructions of 1744. "The Indians," writes the Canadian Governor, "can be depended on to bring in the scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition. This is the opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre." Again, from the Governor of New France: "If the settlers of {214} Acadia hesitate to rise against their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force. It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people. Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted dispatches of the English officers. M. Le Loutre will keep us informed of everything in Acadia. We have furnished him with secret signals to our ships, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the enemy."

Of all the hotbeds of intrigue, Acadia, from its position, had become the worst. Here was a population of French farmers, which in half a century had increased to 12,000, held in subjection by an English garrison at Annapolis of less than two hundred soldiers so destitute they had neither shoes nor stockings, coats nor bedding. The French were guaranteed in the Treaty of Utrecht the freedom and privileges of their religion by the English; but in matters temporal as well as spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for the Quebec plotters.

France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose,—to command the sea towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River St. Lawrence.

The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in the sea. The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the strongest in all America. On three sides were the sea, with outlying islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was both narrow and deep. To the rear was impassable muskeg—quaking moss above water-soaked bog. Two weaknesses only had the fort. There were hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of these hills. By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled {215} an area of over one hundred acres. Outside the rear wall had been excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide. Bristling from the six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy cannon. Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the water from the fort, on the next finger of the island. Twenty years was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an enormous sum of money,—equal to $10,000,000. Such was Louisburg, impregnable as far as human foresight could judge,—the refuge of corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.

"It would be well," wrote the King the very next year after the treaty was signed, "to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with caution." And now twenty years had passed. Some Acadians had gone to Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was,—on the spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of Louisburg a chance to invade.

Late in 1744 Europe breaks into that flame of war known as the Austrian Succession. Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war, Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal). Port Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown old in service. The French bid him save himself by surrender before their fleet comes. Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the weather is in his favor. It is September. Winter will drive the invaders home, so he sends back word that he will bide his time till the hostile fleet comes. As for the Abbé Le Loutre, let the treacherous priest beware how he brings his murderous Indians within range of the fort guns! Meanwhile the Acadian habitants are threatened with death if they do not rise to aid the {216} French, but they too bide their time, for if they rebel and fail, that too means death; and "the Neutrals" refuse to stir till the invaders, from lack of provisions, are forced to decamp, and the Abbé Le Loutre, with his black hat drawn down over his eyes, vanishes into forest with his crew of painted warriors.

News of the war and of the ravaging of Acadian fishing towns set Massachusetts in flame. To Boston, above all New England towns, was Louisburg a constant danger. The thing seemed absolute stark madness,—the thoughtless daring of foolhardy enthusiasts,—but it is ever enthusiasm which accomplishes the impossible; and April 30, 1745, after only seven weeks of preparation, an English fleet of sixty-eight ships—some accounts say ninety, including the whalers and transports gathered along the coast towns—sails into Gabarus Bay, behind Louisburg, where the waters have barely cleared of ice. William Pepperrell, a merchant, commands the four thousand raw levies of provincial troops, the most of whom have never stepped to martial music before in their lives. Admiral Warren has come up from West India waters with his men-of-war to command the united fleets. Early Monday morning, against a shore wind, the boats are tacking to land, when the alarm bells begin ringing and ringing at Louisburg and a force of one hundred and fifty men dashes downshore for Flat Cove to prevent the landing. Pepperrell out-tricks the enemy by leaving only a few boats to make a feint of landing at the Cove, while he swings his main fleet inshore round a bend in the coast a mile away. Here, with a prodigious rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore. By nightfall the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New Hampshire boys—raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they march—swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort, and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding. It will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on this side. The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the bonfire for the {218} English attacking forces, and under cover of darkness abandoned the position,—battery, guns, powder and all,—which the English promptly seized. This was the Royal Battery, which commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.

WILLIAM PEPPERRELL

The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore through a rolling surf of ice-cold water. For two weeks the men stood by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their difficulties. The question was how to get their cannon across the marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions. It was cold, damp spring weather. The men who were not soaked to their necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in their boots. Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell's force became deadly ill. At this time, within two days, occurred both a cheering success and a disheartening rebuff. A French man-of-war with seventy cannon and six hundred men was seen entering Louisburg. As if in panic fright, one of the small English ships fled. The French ship pursued. In a trice she was surrounded by the English fleet and captured. The flight of the little vessel had been a trick. A few days later four hundred English in whaleboats attempted the mad project of attacking the Island Battery at the harbor entrance. The boats set out about midnight with muffled oars, but a wind rose, setting a tremendous surf lashing the rocks, and yet the invaders might have succeeded but for a piece of rashness. A hundred men had gained the shore when, with the thoughtlessness of schoolboys, they uttered a jubilant yell. {219} Instantly, porthole, platform, gallery, belched death through the darkness. The story is told that a raw New England lad was in the act of climbing the French flagstaff to hang out his own red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces. The boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon. A few escaped back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been captured. Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the hills. In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for reënforcements from Canada. Convent, hospital, barracks, all the houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof intact in the place. The soldiers, of whom there were barely two thousand, were ready to mutiny. The citizens besought Duchambon to surrender. Provisions ran out. Looking down from the tops of the walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind which the English sharpshooters crouched. It had just been arranged between Warren and Pepperrell that the {220} former should attack by sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French capitulated. How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the abandoned French fort need not be told. How Parson Moody, famous for his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord, we have so much to thank Thee for