IN THE AUTUMN OF 1612, Samuel de Champlain turned Nicolas de Vignau’s report into a new shelter from the vicissitudes of the free-market system by arranging another trade monopoly under a powerful protector. He had been a military and political ally, as well as a first cousin, of the late Henry IV: the governor of Normandy, Charles de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons. Approached by Champlain through one of the king’s councillors to front the venture, the count agreed to serve as Champlain’s protector. Champlain prepared the necessary paperwork on the count’s behalf, including the petition to be presented at Fontainebleau. Named lieutenant-general of the territory in late September, the count in turn made Champlain his lieutenant.
Champlain was preparing to have notices of the monopoly posted in French ports when he suffered an abrupt setback. An unspecified illness—it was probably smallpox—was sweeping the country and claimed the count. Champlain quickly had a replacement benefactor lined up: the dead count’s twenty-four-year-old nephew, Henri de Bourbon II, Prince de Condé, who was a second cousin of the dauphin, Louis XIII.
The letters patent spelling out the monopoly issued to the prince on November 13 granted him exclusive trade and mining rights on the St. Lawrence and its tributaries for twelve long years, making special mention of the trading posts at Tadoussac and Quebec. It called upon him to spread the Roman Catholic faith among the local people, proceed with colonization, and discover the “easiest route for reaching China” by the rivers and lands of his new domain, “with the assistance of the inhabitants of these lands.” On the same day, a notice was prepared for the admiralty officers in the coastal provinces of Normandy, Brittany, Picardy, and Guyenne (of which the prince was governor), warning off any independent traders who thought they might infringe on the prince’s new rights.
In late 1612 or early 1613, the merchants of St-Malo issued a vituperative response, which might have been expected from a group of people who had just seen their livelihoods cut off at the knees. They were also still embroiled in legal action with the Sieur de Monts. Henry IV had decreed that de Monts be compensated 6,000 livres by merchants who benefited from the earlier termination of his monopoly, but left it entirely up to him to figure out how to get the money out of them. Although it was unsigned, the published factum from St-Malo must have represented opinions of de Monts’ former partners. They took direct aim at Champlain in a scathing objection to his newly won privileges, considering the prince a mere front for a favour bestowed upon the former lieutenant of de Monts. The Malouins all but branded Champlain a liar and a parasite.
The factum began with a withering critique of the previous monopoly of de Monts, alleging he had lost close to 50,000écus through various misadventures and disadvantages, and that the late king had then properly opened trade. Unrestricted trade was pursued (and, it went without saying, cultivated) by the merchants of St-Malo and other parts of France until Champlain secured the latest monopoly. To this trade, the Malouins charged, Champlain and his “so-called partners have not contributed a single denier.” They compared Champlain to a stowaway, literally someone taking a free ride on their endeavours, and dismissed him as a mere “painter”—peintre being a profession that encompassed mapmaking. Champlain, they fumed, had been tempted by the “lucre” of seeing the said lands, “always with the help of the companies he led there, from which he on every occasion drew a grand salary, which he cannot deny.”
The Malouins scorned any idea that Champlain could claim credit for having discovered the lands for which he now enjoyed the exclusive right to exploit. The Normans and Bretons had discovered and fished these waters since 1505, they argued. And already, Sebastian Cabot had discovered part of it for the king of England in 1507, and Gaspar Corteréal had found the rest for Portugal, in resolving to prove a passage to China or the Moluccas. But as an atlas, or supplement, to Ptolemy, published at Douai in 1603 indicated to the Malouins, such a passage search was in vain.
The Malouins were especially galled by Champlain’s assertions of trailblazing discovery made in Des Sauvages. They heralded the achievements of their local hero, Jacques Cartier, who at his own expense and risk to his life, they asserted, and under the authority of the king of France, penetrated the St. Lawrence beyond Quebec and Lac St-Pierre. And after him, for thirty-five years or so, they argued, many Normans, Basques, and Bretons, along with the Sieurs de Pont-Gravé and Prévert, as well as the Basque captain Fabien de Meriscoiena (who records show was hired by de Monts to fish and hunt whales and trade in Canada in 1605), had been trading at Lac St-Pierre and beyond with the sauvages. And when, “ten or twelve years ago,” Champlain was taken to the main rapids by a Malouin, Pont-Gravé, he found himself among “an infinity of people from all regions of France, as many as nine or ten barks, all gathered and bargaining in this place.” One could find ample testimony, the Malouins argued, that this place at the time of Champlain’s 1603 visit was already discovered and being frequented by others: evidence enough to revoke his present commission.
And how had Champlain managed to secure the precious Canada trade with this new monopoly? By making his ridiculous claims about a route to the Orient awaiting discovery beyond the Great Rapid.
They belittled his evidence for such a passage. Referring to alleged claims by Champlain that he had discovered “four or five hundred leagues” into the country, “the truth,” they stated, was that in 1610, Champlain had sent a “boy” away with the sauvages. This was the interpreter-scout Étienne Brûlé, the first youth Champlain had sent to live among native allies. And this boy, the Malouins argued, did not report to Champlain anything “worthy of recollection or of enterprise.”
Furthermore, Champlain was not the only person who had arranged for young men to live with the natives. Rouen interests, they noted, had also sent in a servant who had returned to France in 1612. He was a youth remembered through Champlain’s writings only as Thomas, who was employed by the Rouen merchant and Champlain associate Daniel Boyer. When Thomas returned, the Malouins stated, he reported only on the “misery of the said country,” the rapids and falls on the entire river he travelled. This river, the Malouins had gathered, was navigable “only by small bark canoes capable of carrying only three or four people.” Lest anyone think that ships could reach the Orient by this route, the Malouins described how at the rapids one must, on foot, “carry on the shoulders the said canoes a long way in the woods.” In this way, one was supposed to “traverse about three or four hundred leagues of route, with labour intenable for the French, without having seen other discoveries of merit.”
As for the factual promises that Champlain said had been made to him by the sauvages, that in four days they could reach the Southern Ocean, about four hundred leagues distant, in order to then reach China, the Malouins argued “one could legitimately demand assurance from the said Champlain of the validity of such promises made by miscreants and infidels.”
There were more words to this effect, all of them contemptuous, all of them resentful of Champlain’s having made off with an exclusive right to the Canada trade for a dozen years. “For the execution of the plan proposed and researched for ten years,” Champlain would “engage and exhaust the treasury of a monarch,” depending on royal altruism “to acquire some vainglory” by “penetrating a desert eight hundred leagues,” while taking care not to risk “a single denier” of his own.
The Malouins, in their attack on Champlain’s passage-making ambitions, relied overwhelmingly on the evidence and arguments he had presented in Des Sauvages. And while they also knew about the hinterland travels of Brûlé and of the youth named Thomas, they were completely in the dark about de Vignau, and where the evidence he had returned with was actually leading Champlain in 1613.
Champlain had an ideal platform for rebutting the Malouin allegations: his manuscript for Les Voyages. On January 9, 1613, the Paris printer and bookseller Jean Berjon (doing business out of his shop, the Cheval volant, or Flying Horse) received the licence from Fontainebleau to publish it. Champlain may have included the diatribe against the merchants of St-Malo that appeared in its final pages as a last-minute rebuttal to the factum. But the main manuscript was probably completed by late summer 1612, as he had made no mention of the news from de Vignau or the new monopoly secured through the Prince de Condé. Even without an addition directly addressing the factum, the narrative, while undeniably self-serving, painted a harsh portrait of independent merchants like the Malouins who had been operating on the St. Lawrence without restraint since the de Monts monopoly expired for good in 1609.
Of the Malouins, Champlain complained in the concluding words of Les Voyages that “all they want is that men should expose themselves to a thousand dangers, to discover peoples and territories, that they themselves may have the profit and others the hardship. It is not reasonable that one should capture the lamb and another go off with the fleece. If they had been willing to participate in our discoveries, use their means, and risk their persons, they would have given evidence of their honor and nobleness, but on the contrary they show clearly that they are impelled by pure malice that they may enjoy the fruit of our labors equally with ourselves.” And on his last visit to the rapids, in 1611, Champlain wrote that he found the Huron fearful of the traders who had massed there. The natives complained to him of maltreatment, including beatings, and Champlain had to explain to them that these brutal men had nothing to do with him.
Champlain’s countercharges about abusive behaviour were probably true, as he took care in the agreement he would shortly draw up with his commercial partners to insist that the traders behave in a Christian manner in their dealings with the native peoples. Still, the factum was more than a little true where it charged that Champlain persisted in denying Jacques Cartier proper credit for his discoveries, which was key to their claim that Champlain had no right to monopolize the river’s trade. He stubbornly insisted in Les Voyages that Cartier had never been beyond Trois-Rivières, downstream from Lac St-Pierre, which was some ninety miles shy of the Great Rapid.
While Malouin agitation threatened his monopoly, Champlain rushed to round up the necessary participating merchants and their capital in order to exploit its privileges. To lose the monopoly now would mean the loss of Champlain’s main chance in life. Lost as well would be any hope of a Frenchman being bold enough to attempt to reach the Northern Sea by travelling up the Ottawa River, and of collecting an English boy from the Nebicerini.
On January 16, Champlain met with the La Rochelle merchant Mathieu Georges—Samuel’s nephew—in the presence of two Paris notaries, Germain Tronson and his stepson, Claude Dauvergne. They might have gathered at Champlain’s residence on rue Terravoche, a few blocks from the Seine and Île-de-la-Cité in the first arrondissement, the oldest part of Paris. They worked out an initial accord for a partnership to consist of merchants from La Rochelle and Rouen. A more elaborate agreement followed on February 5. Again Tronson and Dauvergne managed the paperwork, while Daniel Boyer now joined Champlain and Georges as a signatory, on behalf of the Rouen participants. The Malouins, not surprisingly, were nowhere to be seen—and Pont-Gravé by now had moved his base of operations to Normandy, commanding ships out of Dieppe and Honfleur.
The initial accord had imagined an enterprise with two ships, one from La Rochelle, the other from Rouen, each of 120 tons. The second agreement spelled out a four-ship operation—three from Rouen, one from La Rochelle. Champlain handed over passports for each ship from the Prince de Condé, authorizing trade in the monopoly territory. Two thirds of the company’s profits would go to the Rouen participants, one third to the Rochelais, and the prince would cream off five percent of the net proceeds. Other traders could be accommodated with additional passports signed by the prince and issued by the partners.
The Rouennaise members were well established in Champlain’s world, and drew on the ranks of expatriate merchants and financiers of the Low Countries. The largest Rouen ship, of one hundred tons, would be provided by the Sieur de Monts in association with the Rouen-based Fleming merchant Ludowica Vermeulen, who had already done business with Pont-Gravé in a 1611 fur-trading voyage that had been Dutch in all but name. Boyer agreed to provide a vessel of eighty-five tons, in association with his niece’s husband, the transplanted Dutch merchant Corneille de Bellois. And the third Rouen ship, of forty-five tons, would come from Lucas Legendre, who had been involved with the earlier de Monts monopoly as well as in leasing the Quebec habitation. An unnamed group of Rochelais merchants would provide the single largest ship, of 120 tons.
Champlain’s money men assuredly were less enamoured with finding a passage to China or a missing English boy than he was. Control of the fur supply was what they desired; a search for a route to the Orient was to them probably window dressing to justify the cartel’s existence. Champlain settled for terms less favourable than in the initial agreement, which had called for up to thirty men to be placed at his disposal, presumably for exploration and waging war alongside native allies. The merchants in the February 5 partnership agreed to provide Champlain with only four men from each ship, for a possible total of sixteen, to explore beyond the Great Rapid, and only after trading was concluded with the Algonquin. And he was to strive to be back with them at Tadoussac by August 20 so that pelts could be shipped to France without undue delay.
Champlain’s most important companions would be his own servant, Nicolas de Vignau, and the youth named Thomas. Champlain also fully expected to go to war alongside the Algonquin and Huron, to make amends for his absences in 1611 and 1612. To that end he invited along a nobleman adventurer, the Sieur de L’Ange, who was denied any financial interest under the February 5 agreement.
If the Malouins required further evidence of Champlain’s propensity for mounting expeditions “always at the expense of the companies which he led, from which he on every occasion drew a grand salary,” they would have found it in the terms of the new agreement. Champlain was promised, on his return to Honfleur at the end of the expedition, eight hundred livres. The fee was meant to “give courage” to him, and to ensure that he would “behave virtuously” and have the “means as well to maintain himself during said voyage.” By way of comparison, in 1604 de Monts hired a pilot to serve him in Acadia for sixty livres, and a surgeon and two sailors for twenty-four livres each.
There was an aggravating last-minute legal distraction: on February 9, the parlement, or parliamentary court, at Rouen recognized a petition by Malouin merchants and citizens opposing the Prince de Condé’s monopoly. The power of this court (also known as the parlement of Normandy), was exceeded only by that of the parlement of Paris and of the crown. The Malouin action meant that Champlain could not get his commission published in the ports of Normandy, or in St-Malo. “This greatly embarrassed me,” Champlain would write, “and obliged me to make three journeys to Rouen, with orders of his Majesty, in consideration of which the Court desisted from their inhibition, and the assumptions of the opponents were overruled.”
Only on March 4 did the Rouen parlement order the monopoly’s letters patent registered. According to Champlain, the Malouins simply were told that they were free to join the trade company he had formed under the monopoly. Champlain scarcely had time to publish his commission in the outstanding French ports, including St-Malo, before departing Honfleur on March 6 with Pont-Gravé, who was probably commanding the Rouen ship of de Monts and Vermeulen.
Champlain was moving at breakneck speed. The February 5 agreement had promised to produce the names of the La Rochelle participants in nine or ten days, but no list would survive. Since Champlain would write that signatory Mathieu Georges’ uncle, Samuel, had de Vignau swear out an affidavit at La Rochelle, Samuel Georges more than likely planned to be involved that season with his regular partner, Jean Macain. Nevertheless, the four-ship venture was described as “hors ceste année presente”—“except for” or “beyond” the present year. The plan was the ideal configuration, but the principals telling Tronson and Dauvergne what to write down were unsure whether Rochelais interests would be able to sail that spring. A paragraph was needed to address the thorny problem of how to divvy the proceeds should a large Rochelais vessel not materialize for 1613.
Champlain, who would be travelling with Pont-Gravé, had to get to Tadoussac without delay, even if it meant risking a 1613 season without the participation of the Georges-Macain partnership. It was critical that Champlain post the prince’s commission there and avoid a repeat of the traumatic beginning to the one-year extension de Monts had secured for his trade monopoly in October 1607.
Pont-Gravé had arrived aboard the Lièvre (the Hare) at Tadoussac just ahead of Champlain in May 1608, and found a French Basque ship under the command of a man named Darache already trading with the natives. Darache responded to Pont-Gravé’s effort to enforce the monopoly extension by opening fire on the Lièvre with cannon and musket, striking Pont-Gravé and three of his men, killing one.
The Basques then matter-of-factly boarded the Lièvre, confiscated all of her cannon and other arms, and informed the seriously wounded Pont-Gravé that they would continue their trade with the gathered natives. When their trading was done and they were ready to return to France, and Pont-Gravé was no longer a nuisance, they would be pleased to return Pont-Gravé’s weapons and ammunition to him.
Champlain, arriving soon after, had no real chance of liberating Pont-Gravé by force, or of evicting Darache. Champlain was rowed to the Basque ship for a lengthy negotiation. When he was done, Darache was free to continue trading, and Pont-Gravé and the Lièvre were allowed to retreat from the harbour, licking wounds.
It had been a feeble beginning to Champlain’s operations as de Monts’ lieutenant on the St. Lawrence. In the spring of 1613, neither Champlain nor Pont-Gravé wished to relive the experience.
On April 29, 1613, having endured a lengthy crossing and survived a violent gale in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Champlain and Pont-Gravé arrived at Tadoussac. Once again, there was already another ship in the harbour.