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LAND FOR THE TAKING

Battle between the Iroquois and the Algonquins with their French allies, 1609. This copper plate engraving is based on a drawing by Samuel Champlain.

 

The explorers of the sixteenth century traced the outline of the Americas, and the cartographers followed. The resulting maps showed a more or less firm coastline along the Atlantic and Pacific, with indentations for the Caribbean and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. To the north and west, the lines faded into imprecision and then fancy. The sea route to China, the Northwest Passage, still beckoned to the hopeful as the seventeenth century dawned.

The land was vast, and the possibility of error was high. Perhaps the first explorers had left something out, or hadn’t gone far enough. Could there not be a gap in the seacoast of Labrador? Might not the northern continent be little more than an isthmus, like Panama, with the Pacific just on the other side?

There was also the possibility that the land itself might actually be worth having. The Spaniards had found gold in Mexico and Peru. Couldn’t the French and the English do so as well? If the Northwest Passage lurked beyond the next bend of the coast, gold was just over the next hill. They would have to be; otherwise, what was the point? The northeastern shores of the continent were cold, rocky, and windswept— “the land God gave to Cain,” in Jacques Cartier’s memorable phrase. That land “is of no value,” a Spaniard advised King Carlos I in 1541. Let the French have it.

The advice was both sensible and short-sighted. The northern continent was indeed difficult and barren, and, worst of all, cold. Yet, as we have seen, some parts of North America were already turning a profit— especially the Newfoundland cod fishery. Sometimes the fishermen came ashore and fanned out in search of wood for fire or meat to vary their diet. Finding meat, they also found fur, and brought it home to Europe. At first North American fur was a curiosity, but it didn’t take long to become a profitable curiosity. Fur was a luxury commodity in Western Europe, trimming the robes of the rich. Transformed into felt, it supplied the hatters’ trade. Especially useful and especially prized was the fur of the North American beaver. It would be this unprepossessing rodent, with its orange teeth and scaly tail, that finally gave Europeans reason to come and trade in the territory that would become Canada, and then to stay there.

Had they relied on their own efforts, seasonal and sporadic, the Europeans would have made little of the fur trade. Trade required Native suppliers, and there began a partnership between European (mainly French) traders and indigenous hunters, who were happy to convert the apparently inexhaustible beaver into iron implements, steel knives, and guns. Natives living along the coast had the advantage, for they controlled access to the Europeans, who for their part did not venture into the interior.

It was an exchange that was profitable to both parties, if we exclude the cost of European diseases that the traders brought with them and communicated to the Natives. As far as the traders were concerned, most of the hard work was done by the Natives, universally called Indians because of the early mistaken belief that the Americas were outliers of the spice islands of Asia. Trade goods were relatively cheap, iron or brass or cloth or, increasingly, alcohol, for which many Natives discovered a fondness. Metal—copper—was not unknown to the Natives of eastern North America, but it was scarce and, in any case, soft. Brass, iron, and steel were much preferred, and those only the Europeans could supply.

In the valley of the St. Lawrence it was the French who predominated. Their interest in the lands explored and claimed for France by Jacques Cartier hadn’t ceased, but there was little they could do about it as long as France was riven by wars between Catholic and Protestant. Finally, in 1598, the wars came to an end, leaving a Catholic convert from Protestantism, Henri IV, on the throne, with toleration between Catholic and Protestant as his policy. French attention to America promptly increased.

European governments of the early seventeenth century had few resources and little capacity for colonization. Lacking large standing armies and navies and consistent administrative competence, they relied on private entrepreneurs equipped with royal charters and driven by the hope of profit. The charters conferred varying degrees of monopoly power on individuals, usually nobles, who were then free to make what they could of the vast territories of North America. In return, they were to respect the rights of other Christians while subduing and converting to Christianity anyone else.

Under the leadership of Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts, an expedition was mounted to North America in 1604. It fixed on the Bay of Fundy, between what would later become Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, as the place to establish a post where for the first time the French would winter. But the French chose unwisely, settling on an offshore island, Ste. Croix, where they built a scattering of huts and endured a bitter winter. They had no choice but to rely on such stores as they had brought from Europe, but this meant they had no fresh food and, consequently, succumbed to scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.

Remarkably, some Frenchmen (for they were all male) survived the winter. Knowing that if they stayed at Ste. Croix another winter they would surely perish, they sought another and more salubrious location— and found it on the south shore of the Bay of Fundy, in a place they named Port Royal.

Port Royal was better designed and built than Ste. Croix, a quadrangle rather than a scattering of huts. It was also better run, for the leadership of the little colony devolved onto a mapmaker and navigator named Samuel de Champlain.

Champlain may well have been born a Protestant, around 1570, but like many others of his faith he probably converted to Catholicism at some point in the 1590s. He came from a seafaring family, and was later a captain in the royal service. He became, in effect, a member of the lowest rank of the nobility, and added the noble “de” to his name, a frequent occurrence at the time. What distinguished Champlain, however, was a fierce singleness of purpose: to establish a permanent French settlement in northern North America.

He originally favoured Acadia, the Fundy basin, for his project. But Acadia was unfruitful, and first Ste. Croix and then Port Royal were abandoned. In 1608 Champlain tried again. Acting as de Monts’s lieutenant (a formal appointment), he sailed for the St. Lawrence in April 1608, arriving at the narrows of the river at Quebec on 3 July. There he built a fortified trading post, a habitation, surrounded by palisades and wide moats. He also planted wheat and rye, not that those crops could rescue his habitation from the inevitable scurvy that killed sixteen out of twenty-five in the party.

Life in the colony was dominated by the rhythm of its communications with France. The St. Lawrence was icebound between November and May, and the colony consequently isolated. Sea voyages were long, typically two to three months, meaning that orders placed in one year would be acted upon only in the next. Patience was more than a virtue under the circumstances, and morale a crucial consideration. Champlain acted ruthlessly when required to maintain discipline: in his first year at Quebec he uncovered a plot against his authority and promptly hanged its ringleader.

Champlain survived the weather, time, and conspiracy, and, resupplied from France, he set out for the interior in the summer of 1609. He proved an intrepid traveller, the first of hundreds of French voyageurs to explore the interior of the continent. Champlain did not travel unaided. He had two Frenchmen with him, but the bulk of his party was made up of Algonquins and Hurons, the latter an Iroquoian-speaking people who had worked out an alliance with the Algonquins and the French in pursuit of the fur trade. Encountering the rival Five-Nations Iroquois on the shores of what is now Lake Champlain, the Algonquins and Hurons prevailed in a brief battle. In that battle Champlain used a firearm, his clumsy arquebus, to intimidate the enemy, and it seems to have served its purpose.

After a trip to France in the winter of 1609–10 to report to King Henri IV as well as his superior, de Monts, Champlain returned for another expedition and another battle, in which he was wounded by the Iroquois. He again returned to France over the winter, this time to secure the economic and political backing that would preserve his little colony. In this he was successful, acquiring a variety of noble and politically powerful sponsors who could help him with the new king, Louis XIII. Just as important, in 1613 he published a narrative of his expeditions from 1604 to 1612, his Voyages, which established his reputation as a heroic explorer and helped shore up the fortunes of his colony as an emanation of France.

Champlain continued his interior explorations in the years that followed, mapping the Ottawa River and much of the Great Lakes basin. He also survived the vagaries of French politics. As one sponsor fell in royal favour, another rose; but always Champlain remained the “lieutenant” in charge of the Quebec colony, or New France. (The term “New France” dates back to 1529, as a mapmaker’s label for the territory discovered and claimed in the name of the king of France.)

New France was in many ways fortunate. Its location in the frigid north was admittedly an invitation to scurvy, but the severe winter preserved its inhabitants from other diseases, such as yellow fever.1 Although the number of actual settlers was low, the colony was buffered by its Native allies and so didn’t suffer the devastating Native wars that nearly destroyed the English Virginia colony.

European politics were a constant danger, however. Champlain proved remarkably adept at manoeuvring his colony through the perils of the royal court. He secured the favour of the king’s chief minister, Cardinal de Richelieu, who in 1627 organized the Compagnie des Cent Associés (Company of the Hundred Associates) to manage and, most important, to finance New France. Champlain became the cardinal’s personal representative, a fact that did not save him or the colony when a hostile English fleet sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1629. (England and France had gone to war in 1627.) Champlain was bundled off into captivity in England, and returned to Quebec only in 1633. Peace had actually been made before the English captured Quebec, though no one on the scene could have known it. The English found the fur trade profitable, and stayed on as long as they could.

The English interlude did not advance the colony’s fortunes, but it didn’t entirely kill them, and Champlain was able to rebuild what the English had destroyed. He didn’t live to see his colony flourish, however, dying at Quebec in December 1635.

Champlain’s achievement was nevertheless considerable. Following where Cartier had pointed, he obtained for France the St. Lawrence River, the only practicable water route into the heart of the continent, from the rocks of Gaspé to the prairies beyond the Great Lakes. Champlain’s place as a geographer and explorer is incontestable; equally important, he was a notable publicist and indefatigable promoter, qualities that helped him navigate the shoals of the French court and a succession of rich and powerful patrons. His colony, as he predicted, was suitable for agriculture; by the time of his death there were the feeble beginnings of farms, growing such crops as a cold climate would permit.

Yet Champlain’s colony remained utterly dependent on regular drafts of cash and favour from the French government. That government, in the 1620s and 1630s, was firmly Catholic and, as far as a powerful and rebellious nobility would allow, authoritarian. The only clergy permitted on the soil of New France after 1608 were Catholic, and indeed part of the attraction of the colony was that it afforded a field for the missionary efforts of the Catholic Church.

Trade and salvation were what the French consciously offered the Natives of North America, under both Champlain and his successors. To France the colony offered furs, profit, and souls, hoping in return for investors, soldiers, and settlers.

The government of France had other priorities, however. There was war between France and Spain, consuming money and soldiers. French politics were uncertain after the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642 and of Louis XIII in 1643, leaving the five-year- old Louis XIV an uneasy regency and restless nobility as his heritage.

And so the government was content to leave New France to the Company of a Hundred Associates, to nurture as best it could. The Company appointed a minor noble, Charles Huault de Montmagny, as governor—a title denied to Champlain—with the mandate to finance, populate, expand, and defend the colony. A new post, Trois-Rivières, had been founded upriver in 1634. Religion, as much as defence or trade, was the occasion for the foundation of Montreal in 1642 by the Sieur de Maisonneuve. And as an outer defence against Iroquois incursions, Montmagny established a fort at the confluence of the Richelieu and St. Lawrence rivers in 1641.

Finance was the least successful of Montmagny’s efforts. The Hundred Associates never saw a profit from their colony, and in 1645 effectively threw in the towel, conceding a monopoly over the fur trade to a group of local merchants, the Communauté des Habitants, in return for an annual rent. In other areas, however, the company was more successful. A small but steady stream of immigrants came to New France under its administration, pushing the population to three thousand—all Catholics, as the French government required—by 1663. Such a number wasn’t easy to displace or exterminate, and certainly to that extent the company must be rated a modest success.2

HURONIA AND THE IROQUOIS WARS

New France was more than a projection of Europe or France in America. It was also a factor in the balance of power, or force, in northern North America. Champlain’s appearance on a battlefield in 1609, in a conflict between Algonquins and Iroquois that he barely understood, showed clearly enough that having the French as an ally could make a real difference in war. Better yet, having the French as a trading partner conferred great material and also political advantage. The key was location: straddling the lake and river routes to Quebec, the Huron and Algonquins could be the intermediaries between the French and the beaver-rich lands to the north and west of the Great Lakes. Others would do the hunting, and receive what prices the Huron chose; the Hurons themselves would deal with the French.

The French weren’t the only Europeans in northern North America, however. The Dutch weren’t far behind; as Champlain approached from the north they were exploring from the south, up the Hudson River. They would found New Amsterdam (present-day New York) and then Fort Orange (Albany). Fort Orange lay close to the eastern gate of the Iroquois confederacy, the Five Nations, and soon enough the Iroquois too were armed with European weaponry.

The French did not aim to become enemies of the Five Nations, but inadvertently they fell into an arrangement with another Iroquoian-speaking people, the Huron. Champlain travelled with the Huron and wintered with them as he explored the Great Lakes in 1615–16. The Huron saw plainly the advantage of dealing with the French; and the French saw the advantage of keeping the Huron apart from the neighbouring Iroquois, for together they would present a serious, and possibly fatal, military challenge to New France. To these mundane considerations was added the calculus of souls, for the Jesuits saw in the Huron ideal subjects for conversion. So the French attached a spiritual condition to their trade: the Huron must receive the Jesuits, in their characteristic black robes, and the Jesuits must be free to proselytize.

The Jesuits (properly, the Society of Jesus) weren’t the first Catholic order to arrive in New France. That distinction belonged to the Récollets, who had come in 1615 and who by active vocation and austere inclination were rivals of the more worldly Jesuits, who landed only in 1625. It didn’t help relations between the two orders that the Jesuits took over a former Récollet mission among the Huron in 1634.

Clerical rivalry was a minor, though sour, note in the Jesuit mission in Canada. The Jesuit enterprise was carefully planned and thoughtfully executed. They were essentially a missionary order, and by the 1620s had seventy years’ experience in missions in Asia. The Jesuits naturally applied their experience to America. First learning the Native languages and studying the local culture, they lived among their prospective converts. There was no thought of conversion by force—the nearest French soldier was eight hundred kilometres away, at Quebec—but rather conversion by example, a painstaking and time-consuming enterprise.

Many Hurons resisted conversion. They had a well-established religious culture, and preferred their own shamans to the French priests. The French, however, had another argument, though a dangerous one: the diseases they (among others) had brought from Europe and which in the 1630s swept through the Iroquois peoples of the Great Lakes region. If the shamans were effective, the Jesuits argued, they surely could prevent the epidemics. Of course they could not—but then neither could the Jesuits.

Conversion, not universal but substantial, followed among the Huron as the Jesuit enterprise took shape. At one point fifteen priests worked in Huronia, while Ste. Marie Among the Hurons, the principal mission, was a palisaded fort enclosing church, houses, and longhouses for Huron converts.

The Jesuit approach to conversion was effective, as far as it went. Because they adapted to Native customs and spoke Native languages, the Jesuits set aside much of the sense of superiority that marred European attitudes toward Native Americans. Yet there were limits that, given the brief duration of the Huron mission, were not fully overcome. Converts, individually or as groups, became in a sense wards of the priests, to be cared for, certainly, and treated humanely, but expected to settle into Jesuit-directed agricultural communities. And except in Japan, the Jesuits did not advance their converts to the priesthood, tacitly demonstrating that they considered them to be less than equals of the priests.3

The palisades, meanwhile, weren’t enough to keep out the Iroquois. Ravaged by the same epidemics that decimated the Huron, the Iroquois population fell by at least half, disrupting society, emptying villages, and threatening the future of the Five Nations. It was an established practice among the Iroquois—Hurons included—that population could be replenished from captives taken in war, and the Iroquois set out to do just that. If the Huron wouldn’t join the Five Nations as a group, and voluntarily, they would join by force.

Clashes had already occurred between Huron and Iroquois, sometimes over furs, sometimes in the form of raids. What followed, however, was more than conflict over trade or captives. Between 1648 and 1650 the Iroquois systematically destroyed the Huron nation, killing Jesuits they could capture, along with many of their converts, by customary and gruesome tortures. But destroying the nation didn’t mean destroying its members, who as captives were marched back to the Iroquois homeland south of Lake Ontario and very often adopted or absorbed among their captors. Other Huron, accompanied by Jesuits, sought refuge near the French settlements on the St. Lawrence, while still others fled west, across Lake Michigan. There they were joined by the remnants of the Neutral, Petun, and other nations, also defeated and dispersed—or absorbed—by the Iroquois.

What would the future have been had the Iroquois not come and had Huronia survived under Jesuit tutelage? An answer may be found in the relatively more successful Jesuit colony among the Guarani in Spanish America—a sedentary, agricultural enclave, shielded by the priests as best they could from the depredations of the Spanish Empire and its subjects. But the colony was essentially static, with priests on top, converts below. Both priests and Guarani were eventually destroyed by the secular forces that had grown up outside, and almost as cruelly as the Iroquois had destroyed Huronia.

The French actually did set up refuges for Hurons and other Natives displaced by the Iroquois, one outside Quebec at Ancienne Lorette and another at Caughnawaga, across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. The Natives there were necessarily all converts to Catholicism, and lived under a loose form of religious tutelage. But these “praying Indians” were neither sedentary nor pacifist, and their style of life reflected a compromise between tradition and religion. It drew from both European and Native sources, and was neither European nor Native, but a dynamic blend of the two.

As the historian J.R. Miller has noted, the French did not cause the wars that destroyed Huronia, though they contributed to them in a variety of ways. There had been trade and there had been wars before the coming of the Europeans, and there would be after. The mere adoption of firearms or other trade goods did not fundamentally reshape Native society.4

THE SURVIVAL OF NEW FRANCE

The destruction of Huronia was only the first act in a sixty-year Iroquois war that raged along the frontiers of New France and in the fur-trading hinterland that supplied the colony. For a time in the early 1650s the Iroquois succeeded in blockading New France from the west, halting altogether the flow of furs from the upper lakes (called by the colonists le pays d’en haut), but over time the effort proved too much for the Iroquois to sustain.

Eventually Native traders got through to the French, and by the mid-1650s the fur trade was again flourishing. This time it was Algonquin tribes, especially the Ottawas, who conveyed the furs, but the French did more than wait passively for their delivery. Young men from the settlement travelled west with the Indians, choosing life in the woods and adaptation to Native ways as the best means to profit and, of course, adventure too. Such men were called coureurs de bois, runners of the woods. The authorities did not look kindly on their periodic departures, which no doubt deprived the colony of scarce labour and, worse, set a bad example for restless youth; perhaps in return the absence of the coureurs de bois made New France a more peaceful and orderly place, more suitable for the subjects of an authoritarian monarch.

Seventeenth-century authoritarianism could be—was—cruel and capricious, and derived much of its force from that fact. On the other hand, authority was distant, the Atlantic was wide, and travel even within New France was tedious and difficult. The king’s writ ended at the edge of the woods, as generations of Canadians would learn, and beyond was a very different world. Who actually had authority in New France? There was a governor, it was true, but the governor was appointed by the Company of a Hundred Associates, which wielded a shadowy jurisdiction over the colony. The colony was more than a fur company; there were the fur traders themselves, and some farmers. There was also the Church.

New France was intended to be a monument to exclusive Catholicism. There was some sense in the notion, given the religious wars that tore France apart in the sixteenth century and Germany in the seventeenth. Why look for trouble in religious difference when a simple restriction would keep the colony spiritually homogeneous?

But keeping New France strictly Catholic did not prevent religious dispute; it merely redefined it. There were rivalries between Catholic missionary orders—the Récollets, Sulpicians, and Jesuits. There were “secular” clergy—that is, ordinary priests living outside an order. There were the female religious, who contrived to live autonomously in a society otherwise dominated by males. And there were the questions of how the Church was to be governed, and how it would affect government.

French Catholicism was by no means subservient to the Pope in Rome, as Protestant legend had it. The French monarchy kept a jealous eye on the Church in France and had appropriated authority over it. Cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, and nuns were all subjects of the monarchy, and conformed to a greater or lesser degree to the royal will. Rome did not find the situation congenial, nor did all the French clergy.

Louis XIV, the grandson of a Protestant, was particularly insistent on having his way with the Catholic clergy, and yet he was in most respects an extravagantly devout Catholic anxious to secure and expand the Church in France and abroad. Louis’s expulsion of many (but not all) French Protestants supplied the English colonies and England itself with industrious workers, while his support of Catholic claimants to the throne of England would help embroil France in wars that would directly affect the future of New France.

The most direct representative of Catholicism in New France was François de Laval. Laval represented the part of Catholicism that preferred to keep the king at arm’s length or beyond, and that preferred a Church as independent of secular authority as possible. Laval’s appointment to Quebec in 1658 was not as a regular bishop, chosen by the king and subject to his authority, but as a vicar-general, appointed by the Pope, with the rank and status of bishop.5

To symbolize his authority, and his status, Laval insisted that in religious ceremonies he march ahead of the governor, greatly to the latter’s displeasure. The two eminences set to quarrelling and scheming; henceforth in colonial politics there were two poles, one religious and one secular, with the religious one looking beyond the monarch in Paris to a world across the Alps in Italy—and from this trans-mountain conception derives the term “ultramontane” to signify a relationship with the Pope. It was a notion that would prove handy when Quebec was no longer ruled by a king of France.

Laval did not stop at questions of precedence. As vicar-general and later as bishop (he got the title in 1674) he set about creating a seminary to train priests (the séminaire de Québec, the nucleus of the future Laval university) as well as new churches and hospitals (staffed by nuns). Laval placed the Church at the heart of colonial society, and he and his successors exercised an unusual degree of control over what was publicly and morally permissible. For instance, even private theatrics were subject to close scrutiny. In a tiny colony there could be no professional theatre, and so theatrics were confined to the educated elite; indeed there was no public theatre at all until after the fall of New France and the arrival of the British. In one famous case, in 1693–94, the Church intervened to prevent the performance of Molière’s play Tartuffe, whose target was censorious religious hypocrisy.⁶

ROYAL GOVERNMENT

Had the Company of a Hundred Associates performed according to its design, New France by 1660 would have had thirty thousand inhabitants, would have been a flourishing agricultural community capable of supplying its own food, and would have returned a steady stream of money to its owners and investors back in France. Instead, the colony had barely three thousand inhabitants, some scattered around the Bay of Fundy or in Newfoundland, but most in enclaves along the St. Lawrence. This total compared very badly with the fifty thousand English settlers in New England, or the thirty thousand in Virginia, or the ten thousand Dutch in New Netherlands.

The colony was abundant in one thing: politics. There were disputes between merchants and the authorities, the Church and merchants, the Church and governor, and within the Church. The religious authorities objected to the liquor trade with the Natives and convinced the governor to ban it, to the rage and distress of the merchants. But the next governor removed the ban, and the liquor trade flourished as never before.

All this took place against the background of the endless war with the Iroquois, which resumed after 1658, not only blockading New France but afflicting it with raiding parties who killed or kidnapped the inhabitants within sight of the three fortified posts of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal. Not even the Island of Orleans, off Quebec, was safe from Iroquois raids. The Iroquois roamed far to the north, toward Hudson Bay, and to the west, battling the distant Sioux to the west of the Great Lakes. As for Acadia, an expedition from New England had annexed it in 1654 and the English had no intention of giving it back—and would indeed only give it back in 1670.7 Beleaguered and diminished, New France needed help. There was only one possible source.

Back in France, the royal government was bestirring itself. Louis XIV, aged twenty-three, finally assumed control of his own administration in 1661. This was in the short term a good thing, for Louis understood that he had to bring order to and revenues from his government if he was to find the glory he craved for himself and his country. The benefits would spread as far as his commands would carry, and thus to New France, and there, too, Louis would bring order. In the longer term, however, Louis’s quest for glory contained the seeds of its own demise, for his ambitions entailed endless wars that would also involve New France and would, in their effects, long outlast his lifetime.

Louis decided to make New France a royal province, ruled, like all other French provinces, directly from Paris. At the king’s demand, the Hundred Associates gave up their rights to the colony in 1663 in return for unspecified and doubtless inadequate compensation. A governor was appointed. An advisory Sovereign Council was established. The bishop was, at least temporarily, appeased. Louis ordered a regiment of regular troops to the colony under an experienced and noble commander. And this, Louis promised, was just the beginning.

It was the end of the beginning. The first colonies in North America— French, English, and Dutch—were the fruit of public purpose and private enterprise. Weak European states relied on individuals and companies to claim, explore, and settle lands across the ocean. Lured by the prospect of immense wealth, first the treasures of the Orient and then the fortunes of fur, entrepreneurs risked and mostly lost their money in the attempt.

But New France was fortunate that its founder, Champlain, was more than a visionary. His careful choice of Quebec as the base and capital of New France afforded the colony a defensible fortress, a healthy if rugged climate, and isolation from the English colonies to the south. These facts would serve New France well for the next century.