NATIVE LAND
Montagnais family, early 1600s, as represented by Samuel de Champlain, 1612.
Canada, it’s been said, has been the victim of too much geography. The second largest country on earth, it stretches from the rainforest of Vancouver Island to the pebbled desert of the Arctic, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the latitude of northern California (though barely) to the Arctic Ocean. Canada’s extent, from sea (east) to sea (west) to sea (north), is a rhetorician’s dream and an administrator’s nightmare. Its prosperity, compared with most of the rest of the world, has saved many a politician the trouble of saying something original on occasions of public ceremony. Yet that prosperity, like the population, is unevenly distributed and heavily concentrated in certain favoured pockets. Fortunately, there aren’t too many people and there’s enough prosperity to go around. Perhaps only its sparse population has saved Canada from becoming a political impossibility.
Geography has certainly helped limit Canada’s population, but accidents of geology also played a part. The continents of North and South America took their current form millions of years ago, separated from Eurasia and Africa by thousands of kilometres of ocean except for a tiny stretch of shallow water, the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Crucially, the Strait wouldn’t always be covered in water, for as the climate cooled the northernmost regions of Eurasia and North America became forbiddingly cold. During the Pleistocene ice age most of the northern part of North America was covered in successive glaciations, further isolating the remaining habitable areas of the continent—south of what is now the latitude of Washington, D.C.—from the rest of the world. As water was absorbed into the huge glaciers, the sea level fell and the Bering land bridge grew very large.
The Americas in pre-glacial times boasted an impressive array of fauna, similar to those found in Eurasia and including horses, mastodons, and tigers. Many of these survived the ice age, the more so because no predators existed with the capacity to drive them to extinction. Yet there were differences from Eurasia too, in plant phyla and in the range of animals inhabiting the continent. One such difference was the absence of human ancestors.
The oldest traces of human ancestors have been found in Africa, dating back to long before the Pleistocene era. The first variety of modern humans, Homo sapiens, seems to have evolved around 150,000 years ago, also in Africa. Superseding other human varieties, Homo sapiens spread from Africa into Eurasia, reaching the northeastern corner of that vast land mass, eastern Siberia, about twenty thousand years ago. The climate was cold and the terrain icy, covered with an immense glacier just over three kilometres thick and spreading down from the North Pole. The seacoast was, however, considerably farther out than at present.
Not everything was covered with ice. In particular, the area between Siberia and Alaska (which scholars have dubbed “Beringia”) was dry, though cold and unpleasant. And even after crossing Beringia, early humans didn’t find ice everywhere. Between fifteen thousand and thirteen thousand years ago the ice cap began to retract, opening an ice-free north–south corridor along what is roughly the line of the Rocky Mountains. Scholars dispute how soon and how much this corridor opened, but certainly by about eleven thousand years ago it was possible to move from Alaska through the interior of northwestern North America, down to the grasslands of the Great Plains and beyond to the temperate climate of northern Mexico.1
People did move, but their movements (which may have included movement by sea as well as land) have been difficult to trace and even more difficult for archaeologists to agree upon. Using the most cautious and conservative interpretation, humans reached Alaska around twelve thousand years ago and the southwestern United States eleven thousand years ago. At that time an ice sheet still covered most of modern Canada, east and west, though it was beginning to melt along its southern edges. As the ice retreated, the land exposed became first tundra, then spruce scrub, and finally woodland. Animals followed the advancing forest, and humans followed the animals.
The earliest humans to inhabit North America lived by hunting and fishing. They appear to have hunted some of North America’s animals to extinction: mammoths, camels, mastodons, giant sloths, and horses, for example, disappeared. The two-metre giant beaver also passed out of existence. There was plenty of other game, deer, moose, bear, and beaver, enough to support a limited population.
The North American peoples of eleven thousand years ago, like other human groupings on other continents, used implements of stone and wood. But unlike the peoples of Asia and Europe they continued to do so right up to the era of “discovery,” or contact with European explorers, in the fifteenth century. And that wasn’t the only feature of human existence in the Americas that deviated from experience overseas.
In southwest Asia, in Mesopotamia, local societies domesticated both plants and animals. Practising agriculture, they were able to break away from hunting and gathering as the basis for existence. Agriculture required organization, but it would also support larger numbers of people. Villages arose, and then towns and then cities, and finally organized states, which appeared around 3700 BCE in Mesopotamia and slightly later in Egypt. Metal tools also appeared, first copper and bronze, and then, around 1000 BCE, iron. The invention of the wheel facilitated transport—transport based on the mastery of the horse. All these aspects of culture spread, making possible larger and larger states, culminating in the empires of Alexander the Great and then Rome, both of which were about five thousand kilometres wide at their greatest extent.2 At the other end of Eurasia, China produced a state structure by 2000 BCE and emerged as a unified empire around 200 BCE. (Unlike the realms of Alexander and Rome, the Chinese Empire lasted into the twentieth century.)
Why did the Americas not follow the same path? They had, to begin with, an unfavourable geography, divided by mountains and deserts, making communication difficult. Another part of the answer lies in the available plants and animals. Far fewer plants were suitable for cultivation, and diffusion of agriculture was slow. Without the horse and the wheel, and without boats above a certain size, large-scale movements, whether of people or of goods, were seriously inhibited. Domestic animals consisted of the dog and the llama, and the llama was confined to the peoples of the South American cordillera. True, there were canoes, either dugouts or wood frame, but they couldn’t compare to the larger ships of Eurasia.
Settlement of what is now Canada proceeded slowly, paced by the gradual disappearance of the ice sheet. Even as late as nine thousand years ago most of eastern Canada was covered by an ice cap centred in Ungava; it would take another thousand years to melt completely. Around the fringes of the ice cap were ice-fed lakes like Agassiz, in (or rather on) Manitoba, and Iroquois, more or less where the Great Lakes now sit. Fringing the ice cap was the advancing boreal forest, consisting of pine to the south, spruce to the west, and birch to the northwest and east. Behind the forest was the prairie, contracting in the west and shifting gradually to the east and north. Behind, or in, the forest were the people and the animals they hunted.
The geography changed. The melting of the ice cap raised the levels of the oceans. Beringia, the land bridge to Siberia, disappeared. The islands on the east coast—Newfoundland and the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence—took on their present-day dimensions. With the weight of the ice cap removed, the land rose. Finally, with the melting ice cap finished as a source of water, the great lakes in the interior of North America—Great Slave, Great Bear, Athabasca, Manitoba, and Winnipeg as well as the five “Great” lakes of eastern Canada—also assumed their present limits.
FIRST PEOPLES
Archaeologists have labelled the first inhabitants of North America the Paleo-Indians. The Paleo-Indians were simultaneously moving north and south, eventually to reach Tierra del Fuego in South America and the tree-line along the edge of the tundra to the north. These people hunted in bands of fifteen to fifty, equipped with spears tipped with a flaked stone point—called Clovis points after their point of discovery, near Clovis, New Mexico.
As the climate improved, the Clovis culture evolved into a more elaborate and more densely populated form, called Archaic by archaeologists. This time is regarded as a period of adaptation during which the peoples of North America became differentiated by locale and in which many languages and local cultures appeared. Populations now numbered in the hundreds, supported by a more sustained and more predictable hunt for food. Though diet remained basically meat or fish, in the eastern woodlands native plants like the Canada onion were eaten and apparently cultivated and sunflowers were exploited for their seeds and oil. Farther west, on the Great Plains, the climate fluctuated between extreme dryness and rainfall close to what now prevails; this had its effect on the big game (such as bison) and thus the food supply. Consequently, the population of the plains also rose and fell considerably. There appear to have been population migrations during this period, linking the Dene of northwest Canada to the Navajos and Apaches of the American southwest—all belong to the Athapascan language group. The Dene themselves may well have arrived later in North America than other language groups.
Finally, there was the northwest coast—the coast stretching from northern California up through the Alaska panhandle. Heavily forested, with a mild climate, abundant rainfall, and a never-ending supply of fish, the region has been called a “paradise for hunter-gatherers.”3 A reliable food supply and freedom from the climatic extremes of most of the rest of North America allowed the development of a rich and socially complex culture in coastal British Columbia. The key was salmon, abounding salmon. Access to salmon and control over the best fishing grounds became the basis of wealth. One archaeologist characterizes the northwest coast culture as comprising “social stratification with hereditary slavery,” while another points to “hereditary social inequality” and “semi-sedentary settlement with permanent winter villages.”4 These characteristics were in place by roughly two thousand years ago.
There remained the High Arctic, the frigid semi-desert found north of the treeline on the North American mainland and in the Arctic archipelago. In this region there was never any question of agriculture: food had to be hunted on the ice floes or in the barren lands. The Paleo-Eskimos spread from Alaska to Greenland and down the coast of Labrador as far as Newfoundland. (Use of the term Eskimo differs by location and date. In Canada and Greenland since about 1970 Inuit has superseded the older term Eskimo. In Alaska, however, Eskimo is still used.) The Dorset culture, which predominated from about two thousand to one thousand years ago, had most of the characteristics of the later Inuit; it was probably the Dorset people who made the first contact with Europeans along the Atlantic coast.
The Native peoples of the Americas had moved across the continent, north to south, south to north, west to east, mostly on foot to begin with, although small watercraft, canoes and kayaks, had come into existence by at least two thousand years ago. In Eurasia, however, larger ships were developed to sail the coastal waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, and intrepid mariners sometimes ventured into the unknown.
There seemed to be no point and certainly no profit in travelling far from the sight of land, especially into the cold Atlantic Ocean, and the chaos and impoverishment of European society after about CE 500 made adventuring west more a matter of chance than deliberate design. Nevertheless, there was a way to cross the Atlantic without getting too far from land: by hopping from Scandinavia via various groups of small islands to the larger islands of Iceland and Greenland. And in the ninth and tenth centuries small bands of Norse seafarers did just that, landing in Iceland in 874 and in Greenland a century later, in 986. (The Norse are better known under the name Vikings.) Having established permanent settlements on both islands, around 1000 the Norse ventured farther, to “Vinland” on the coast of northeastern North America, under the leadership of the first historically named individual in Canadian history, Leif Ericsson. In 1960 the probable site of the settlement was uncovered on the north coast of Newfoundland, at L’Anse-aux-Meadows. It was certainly a Norse site; whether it was also Vinland is still disputed by some.
The Norse discovered that Vinland, or the land about it, was not uninhabited. They had several fierce encounters with Natives, whom they called Skraelings, and when the Norse sailed away the Skraelings held the field.
The Skraelings are generally assumed to have been Dorset Eskimos, who lived by hunting whales, seals, and other marine mammals along the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. (The Dorset were the only Eskimo people to live south of the treeline, as their sites in Newfoundland attest.) The Dorset people gave way to the more technologically advanced Thule culture, with better weapons and better boats. It was the Inuit of the Thule culture who would occupy all the coastal Arctic into historic times.
To the south, the character of the woodland societies of the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes regions had also been changing. Farther south, in Mexico, agriculture developed to the point that city states became possible, creating large urban centres of wealth and power. This wealth and power derived from corn, or maize, domesticated and cultivated in Mexico, from which it spread very gradually northward to the southern United States by about CE 200. It continued to move northward, encouraged by the favourable climate of the period—the Medieval Maximum, as it’s known, that also drew the Norse across the Atlantic. Corn became a major crop in what is now southern Canada only hundreds of years later, around CE 900, and even then it was much smaller and presumably less easy to cultivate than corn of the present day. It could only be grown at all because of the development of a variety that took less time to plant and harvest in the shorter growing seasons.
Agriculture altered the culture of the peoples of the Great Lakes and Atlantic regions, creating, in parallel to British Columbia, the basis for a larger population, a more permanent settlement, and a more hierarchical society. It drew in the ancestors of the Iroquois, who moved north up the Susquehanna, driving out the ancestors of the Algonquins, who moved farther east and north to the Atlantic coast, Ungava, and the Canadian Shield, and who remained predominantly hunter-gatherers. These were the societies that the Europeans found, and described, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. South of the Great Lakes, though extending at a few points into modern Ontario, were the Mound Builders, whose largest centre, at Cahokia in Indiana, probably housed a population as large as many contemporary European cities. Cahokia also demonstrated the limitations of North American horticulture, for the crops its inhabitants cultivated depleted the soil. As food dwindled, so did the town. Cahokia was abandoned before 1500, and by 1600 the Mound Builders and their towns weren’t much more than a memory.
The absence of any large towns or cities in northern and central North America didn’t mean that the population of the continent was insignificant, merely that it was widely dispersed. It was subject, too, to disease and to the misfortunes of war. Though North Americans of the fifteenth century lived free of the scourges of Eurasian diseases, such as smallpox, their lives lasted no longer than those of contemporary Europeans. (The existence of some diseases such as malaria or syphilis in pre-contact America is also the subject of dispute among scholars.) The average life expectancy for men in North America has been estimated at twenty-five to thirty years—roughly what it had been in Europe. As to the total population, as a recent survey put it, “controversies abound.” At the low end, the population of North America above the Rio Grande has been placed at 900,000, and at the high end, at 200,000,000. Both figures seem unlikely, and scholarly speculation has tended to cluster around figures ranging from two million to seven million.5
What these large figures meant in detail may be seen from the example of the Iroquois. The Iroquoian language group is divided into two— southern (Cherokee) and northern (Iroquois, Huron, Petun, Neutral, Susquehannock, and Wenro). The northern Iroquois lived north and south of the lower Great Lakes; another group of Iroquois, who lived in the St. Lawrence Valley, disappeared at some point in the sixteenth century. According to the archaeologist Dean Snow, the northern Iroquois collectively numbered ninety-five thousand at the beginning of the seventeenth century, before the Europeans made any substantial impact on them. The figure was a historic high. The omens of catastrophe were all around the Iroquois, but no one could read them.6
FIRST ENCOUNTERS
The catastrophe that befell the peoples of the Americas came from Europe. With the exception of the brief Norse settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland, the peoples of Europe were generally unaware of the existence of the Americas until the very end of the fifteenth century. Suddenly, in 1492, news circulated from the Spanish court that a Spanish expedition led by a Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, had found land far to the west. Columbus believed he had found Asia, and with it the sea route to the riches of China and India.
In fact Columbus, in October 1492, had landed in the Bahamas. The Spanish dubbed the inhabitants Indians, believing them to be natives of India. This classic misnomer endured, though of course the Native inhabitants of the Americas had nothing to do with the inhabitants of India, ethnically or culturally or linguistically.
If the Natives of the Americas were a surprise to the Europeans, the Europeans were a wonder to the newly dubbed Indians. The Stone Age was meeting the Iron Age, juxtaposing two cultures so different that in some places the Europeans were thought to be supernatural. The impression did not last.
Initially, the Europeans were few. The resources required to project a ship and its crew across the Atlantic were at first considerable, and so was the mental stamina required for a voyage into the utterly unknown. At least, that was the case for official voyages like those of Columbus and his Spanish successors. Unofficially, there is ample evidence that some Europeans—mariners from the Basque provinces of Spain and fishermen from the west of England—had been crossing the Atlantic for quite a while. They were seeking the cod, at first around Norway, then off Iceland (greatly to the irritation of the kings of Denmark), and finally to the west of Iceland. Fishing was an established industry, with an established market in the towns and cities of Western Europe. That industry now extended itself across the Atlantic in search of a reliable supply.
The great port of the English West Country was Bristol, and out of Bristol, in May 1497, sailed another Genoese, Giovanni Caboto, known to his English hosts as John Cabot. Cabot was sponsored by the English king, Henry VII. Henry was a prudent monarch and did not risk much. By that time Columbus had made not one but two voyages to the New World, and it was clear that a sailor with a good compass and a certain amount of skill could sail west and encounter land—possibly China or India, which Columbus had so far failed to locate.
Cabot didn’t find China, but he did find land, probably Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and he claimed it for his patron, King Henry. Yet Cabot’s discovery of land had far less immediate significance than his discoveries at sea. As the ambassador of the Duke of Milan reported home, Cabot’s English companions described an ocean alive with fish, the northern cod, and claimed that “they took so many fish that this kingdom will no longer have need of Iceland, from which country there is an immense trade in the fish they call stock-fish.”
Still, it was the hope of finding India or China, not fish, that stimulated monarchs like Henry VII. He outfitted a second expedition for Cabot in 1498, but thereafter Cabot passed into oblivion, and out of history, and with him any possibility that Henry VII might imitate his rivals in Spain and Portugal and found an empire beyond the seas.
Indeed, the next expedition to pass by was Portuguese, captained by Gaspar Corte Real, a native of the Azores. Corte Real skirted Newfoundland and Labrador in 1500 and 1501, though exactly where is unclear. Unclear too is Corte Real’s fate: like Cabot, he vanishes from history at this point. With Corte Real, however, Portugal abandoned any official interest in an area beset with cold and fog—and of course fish.
The fish remained, and fleets of fishermen to harvest them. Conditions in the continental shelf off Newfoundland were almost perfect for the northern cod and many other fish species, either close to shore or on the Grand Banks: a large, shallow oceanic plateau—often less than a hundred metres deep—south and southeast of Newfoundland, dominated by the cold waters of the Labrador Current. Nowhere was it easier to harvest fish, especially such a useful fish as cod. The cod could easily be dried or cured in salt, and once cured it was comparatively light and thus easily transported.
Once its location was known the Newfoundland cod fishery proved an irresistible magnet for Western European fishermen, at first mainly from Portugal and the Basque provinces of northern Spain but later also from the west coast of France, especially Brittany. The English, curiously, mainly seem to have stuck closer to home, continuing to fish off Iceland until a decree from Iceland’s overlord, the king of Denmark, raised the cost of fishing licences to the point where Newfoundland seemed a desirable substitute.
That would be many years later. In the meantime, the exploration of the east coast of North America was the province of others. By then the continent had a name, “America,” after yet another Italian sailor, Amerigo Vespucci, whose descriptions of his voyages proved so popular in Europe that his name and not that of Columbus entered common usage. In 1523 the French monarch, François I, hired a Florentine navigator, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to find the route to Asia. Verrazzano didn’t find the route, but he did discover New York and its deep protected harbour, and explored the coast as far north as Newfoundland. The route to Asia was evidently not easily found: Verrazzano’s explorations seemed to point to a location farther north. He liked what he saw, comparing the land to the pleasant ancient Greek region of Arcadia. Suitably adapted, and moved north from Delaware where he had located it, “Acadia” became the common name for what later became the Maritime provinces of Canada.
Possibly along on the voyage with Verrazzano was a French sailor from the Breton port of St. Malo, Jacques Cartier. St. Malo was home to many of the French fishermen sailing to Newfoundland, and so it’s possible that Cartier had already sailed west when he proposed to François I that he lead another expedition in search of the passage to Asia. The proposition was enticing, not merely because of the possibilities of trade with China but because the Spanish had by then conquered and looted the fabulously wealthy Aztec and Inca realms in Mexico and Peru. A Spanish explorer had discovered that another ocean, the Pacific, did indeed lie beyond America; in 1520 a Spanish expedition succeeded in crossing the Pacific and circumnavigating the globe, passing by the rich and culturally advanced markets of Asia en route. It was therefore natural for François to instruct Cartier to search for and bring back a “great quantity of gold, and other precious things.”
Cartier made three voyages to the New World, in 1534, 1535–36, and 1541–42. As a result he helped define the map of eastern North America, identifying Newfoundland as an island and discovering the great St. Lawrence River, which he followed as far as his ships could go, to the rapids around Montreal. He named the large mountain in the middle of the island of Montreal “Mont Royal,” and the name stuck—and gave rise to the name of the eventual French settlement there.
Cartier also made the first extensive contact by any European with the inhabitants of the continent, those who lived along the St. Lawrence from Gaspé in the east to Montreal in the west. Accounts from Spain made it clear that the Natives of America differed radically, not only from Europeans but among themselves. The accounts made another, crucial point: the peoples of the New World weren’t Christians.
Roman Catholic Europeans had dealt with non-Christians before. In ancient times pagans had persecuted Christians, and when Christians came to power they returned the favour. Non-Christians were assumed to be hostile, though their fate varied according to the degree of power Christians possessed. Some pagans they converted, like Cartier’s own Roman or German ancestors, the Norse in Scandinavia and Iceland, and the Slavs of Poland and Bohemia. Others they conquered and then converted, like the pagan tribes in eastern Germany and the Baltic. Some they enslaved, like the unfortunate inhabitants of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. And some they fought, like the Muslim powers of Asia and North Africa—a desperate fight, in which the most aggressive Muslim power, Turkey, was conquering and converting the Christian peoples of southeast Europe and advancing to the gates of Vienna. There was no such formidable opposition in the Americas—and so the Spanish tended to apply their experience in the Canaries, first in the West Indies and then in Mexico and South America.
The first assumption made by Christian Europeans (but not alone by Europeans, or by Christians) was that their own religion and practices took precedence over (or even negated) those of non-Christians. Theologians and politicians differed as to the proper treatment of non-Christians—but philosophy and statesmanlike restraint were in short supply among explorers and their sponsors, the profit-seeking speculators on the future of the New World. Resistance to European encroachment allowed Europeans to go to war—of course in self-defence—and, having defeated their enemies, to enslave them.
Christianity had developed in a world of menace, from pagans, from Jews, from Muslims. It continued so. In the sixteenth century Christianity was beset from without—by the Turks—and divided from within. As Cartier sailed to America, Christianity was dividing into Roman Catholic and Protestant parts, and the princes of Europe were taking sides for one or the other. Wars among Protestants and Catholics were already breaking out in the 1530s, and they would continue, almost unabated, for over a hundred years. It was, as the historian J.R. Miller puts it, “a historically important coincidence that much of the early period of European exploration and penetration of North America was a period of intense religious feeling.”7
The sense of a religion under threat added a new urgency to the notion of conversion and to a disregard for the abstract rights of those who ignored Christian doctrine, wilfully or not. To that must be added the perception that the village-based societies of northern North America weren’t political entities as the Europeans understood them. They had no real monarchs, and very little in the way of formal governing bodies. It was easy (and profitable) to argue that America was “terra nullius,” a land belonging to no one. It could therefore be claimed by the explorers on the basis of discovery, and claimed, naturally, in the interest of the monarch who had authorized and likely paid for the explorer’s trip to America. When Cartier raised a cross to mark his first landfall on the American mainland, in Gaspé in 1534, he was claiming the territory for Christ, but also for King François. The land itself he dubbed New France, as Mexico had been labelled New Spain by its conquerors. This didn’t mean that the Natives either understood or accepted what Cartier was doing, though its implications, as the Spaniards showed farther south, could be quite drastic.
Of course, the Spaniards in Mexico in 1520 and Peru in 1532 had a predominance of power, and Cartier did not. This may seem strange, for the French expeditions to the St. Lawrence were not less numerous than those of some successful Spanish adventurers. (Indeed, on his third voyage, in 1541, Cartier had fifteen hundred men, far more than the Spanish armies that conquered Mexico or Peru.) Moreover, the Spanish faced rich and highly organized societies, which the French did not. But Cartier was essentially a sailor, however ruthless and greedy, and his company had a background similar to his own. His weapons were few, and his sailors were not a disciplined force. The Spanish leadership, on the other hand, was military, and its members were soldiers, and used to discipline. They brought with them horses and steel armour and guns, even cannon, and thus had marked superiority in technology over their Native opponents. Their leaders had the right stimulus—gold—and, seeing an opportunity, took it. The rewards were great, and not difficult to imagine.
The St. Lawrence Valley in 1534 and 1535 was an entirely different matter. Cartier met Natives on his first voyage and kidnapped two of them, taking them back to France as visible proof of his achievement. He had little else to show. There were furs, but these excited little interest compared with gold. Still, furs were better than nothing. There were rocks, but they were worthless. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was also king of Spain, was at one point urged to block French colonization of the St. Lawrence. Certainly not, Charles replied, for the land was “of no value, and if the French take it, necessity will compel them to abandon it.”
From that point of view, Cartier’s second and third expeditions represented the triumph of hope over experience. He had at least managed to survive, and return to France, and that said something. Granted, he could not have survived without help. He had fortunately encountered two Iroquois villages: Stadacona, where Quebec City now stands, and Hochelaga, on the site of modern Montreal. Cartier and his men were visitors and, importantly, guests. Wintering in 1535–36, they were dependent on their Iroquois hosts. The alternative, in the Canadian climate, was misery and likely death. Deprived of fresh produce and suffering from scurvy, the French had to be instructed in boiling bark to provide the necessary anti-scorbutics to restore their health. Even so, twenty-five (out of 110) of Cartier’s men died.
Cartier assumed he’d found a stable and permanent—if barbaric— society at Hochelaga and Stadacona, but that was not so. At some point before 1580 the Iroquois settlements disappeared, probably in war with another Iroquois people farther west, and their inhabitants were dispersed and absorbed by their conquerors. Those conquerors, the Hurons, would greet Cartier’s eventual successors. They would be a long time coming. From what Cartier had shown, the St. Lawrence held little promise, merely bad weather, uncooperative Natives, and fool’s gold in place of the real article.
The fishery, on the other hand, was big business. At least, it was big business in the aggregate, for its participants represented only themselves and needed to invest only enough capital to build and crew a boat. Yet by the late sixteenth century there were four hundred boats and an estimated twelve thousand fishermen, mostly French and English.
The English fished close to the coast, and dried their catch—cod—on racks on the shore. The French, with better access to salt at home, fished on the Grand Banks, hauled in their catch, and cured it on board, packing it in barrels. The English thus had an advantage as far as land was concerned, for their method of fishing made them at least seasonal settlers along the shore, from May to September every year.
Fish weren’t the only desirable commodity to be found in North American waters. The fishermen discovered the walrus, plentiful along the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. From the walrus they could get ivory from its tusks, oil from its blubber, and leather from its skin. The fruits of walrus-hunting could be supplemented by furs brought to the shores by the local Algonquin tribes and exchanged for desirable European goods. There proved to be enough walrus to withstand almost three centuries of exploitation, but exploitation eventually proved to be extermination: the last walrus in the Gulf was reported around 1800.
If there was a pattern to sixteenth-century exploration of the east coast of North America, it was its steady displacement toward the north. This was testament to the magnetic effect of the presumptive route to China. Verrazzano and Cartier showed that if there was such a route it probably lay north of the St. Lawrence, somewhere beyond Labrador. This route, variously called the Straits of Anian and the Northwest Passage, attracted explorers well into the twentieth century and was a major factor in raising funds and official support for exploration.
Ignorance was the other precondition for northern expeditions. Europeans knew very little about the north. What their maps told them was often if not usually fanciful—imaginary lands scattered almost as decoration around seas filled with conjectural but fearsome monsters. Experience was no guide either, for the lands of even northern Europe were relatively temperate compared with the continent of ice and snow that lurked beyond Labrador.
The result was a virtually open field for savants and speculators, a lethal combination for gullible investors, of whom there seems to have been a considerable supply. The centre of the resulting ferment was England, whose merchants were anxious to establish a stable and profitable connection with the usual target, the riches of Asia. Basing themselves on inaccurate maps and dubious texts, learned scholars “proved” that there was indeed such a thing as a Northwest Passage. Speculators then took the bit in their teeth, raising hopes and money in about equal proportions.
England in the later sixteenth century was ruled by an intelligent and reasonably cautious queen. Elizabeth I was a Protestant, and thus doomed to enter into conflict with the various Catholic powers and principalities that surrounded her island kingdom. She also had a surplus of adventurous gentlemen who were only too willing to go to sea in search of profit— Spanish treasure by way of piracy, or the gold of America and, after America, China, by way of exploration and discovery.
In the 1570s and 1580s a series of Englishmen mounted expeditions to assert England’s interest across the northern Atlantic. (There was also a spectacular voyage to the Pacific led by the intrepid Sir Francis Drake; Drake came close to, though he probably didn’t reach, Canada’s western shores.) There were two attempts at colonization, in Newfoundland and Virginia, which received its name in honour of England’s “virgin queen.” There were, as well, voyages directly in search of the Northwest Passage (though even the Virginian expedition was fraught with fantasies about it).
These projects came to naught, and left behind little more than an aggregation of place names—Frobisher Bay, Davis Strait, and so forth. There was, it turned out, such a thing as too far north, because the severe climate of the Arctic and the short navigation season proved insuperable obstacles to a passage to the Pacific. This was discouraging news, though the discouragement wouldn’t last forever.
Preoccupation in the religious wars of Europe did the rest. England and Spain fought for almost twenty years, on land and sea. Ireland was in a perpetual state of rebellion. France and the Netherlands were convulsed by rebellions and civil wars. European energies were concentrated at home, and what little remained focused on the well-known and well-understood North Atlantic fishery, and on minor exchanges in trade with the Algonquin peoples surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Objectively, the Native peoples of Canada were little touched by the peripheral activities of explorers and speculators in the sixteenth century. They didn’t know that in the minds of the kings of England and France they had become “subjects”—inhabitants of land claimed by one kingdom or the other. Neither country could in the sixteenth century make good on its claims to the North American wilderness, which had the beneficial side effect that neither was as yet ready to go to war over them. And North America was still viewed as too uncomfortable, too undesirable, too lacking in profit for a sustained and expensive effort at possession and settlement. That fate was, for the time being, reserved for Ireland, where Elizabeth I and her successors aimed to “plant” colonists. The grim experience of Ireland was an unlucky model for the New World.