CHAPTER 6
1608–09 ~ 1611 ~ 1628
NEVER AN EXPLORER BOUND TO HIS SHIPS, ALTHOUGH he claimed great happiness at sea, Samuel de Champlain was foremost a soldier, a geographer and a diarist. An avid adventurer, he was also devoted to sitting still for hours, imagining or writing. He appreciated the birchbark canoe and valued secrets discerned by a discourse with rivers, yet this daydreamer would become a political strategist whose actions determined the course of nations in the New World. To all appearances a peaceable man, on his own initiative he chose to commence the Indian wars.
His predecessor, Jacques Cartier, on a third and final voyage, had failed to progress beyond the rapids at Montreal. Thwarted in a quest for diamonds and gold, the French abandoned the vast lands of forest and snow for decades. Among the Indians, stories of white men with beards and giant canoes would become half-forgotten rumours, myths passed along by batty elders that were difficult to decipher or believe when, after seventy years, the fabled French returned. Henri IV had been gazing upon the Cartier Dagger, ruminating over reports that the English had plans to explore, and perhaps annex, the New World. The Dutch, those villains, were also up to something, and the Spanish had ambitions brewing. Henri IV always had to second-guess the Spanish. So he chose to dispatch Champlain across the sea, and obliged him to introduce sixty families a year into New France to gain a proper foothold there. Champlain was also expected to explore and map the river system, initiate commerce, and, while he was there, pursue the search for the fabled swift route to the Orient.
A man who had been at sea on his twentieth birthday, and now a handsome, charismatic sea captain in his thirties, Champlain conned the coastline north from the lands called Cape Cod and Maine before attempting an east coast community in the basin of an inlet off the Bay of Fundy, which he named Port Royale. Starvation and illness stymied that fledging effort, but like Cartier before him, he would grow more impressed by the spectacle and promise of the St. Lawrence River. In 1608, having forsaken the initial settlement, he established a second where the river narrowed at Cape Diamond, a place the Indians called Quebec.
The following summer, in the company of two French and sixty Algonquin, Champlain canoed south up the River of the Iroquois to an immense waterway, where he proved to be more pragmatic than his forbearer at naming landmarks. An island in the St. Lawrence had cleverly been called Île Ste. Hélène, for he had landed there on that saint’s day. Yet he noted in his diary that naming the island after a saint was really a coy subterfuge, for he had had in mind, as he so often did, his bride back in France, the pretty twelve-year-old Hélène. Now appreciative of the majesty of a long and narrow body of water bounded by mountains on either side, he promptly named the lake Champlain. Unlike Cartier, he would not depend upon others to christen an impressive waterway after himself, and his party canoed the lake that bore his name, south toward the Iroquois settlement at Ticonderoga.
Where they encountered more than two hundred warriors.
For Champlain, the New World had to exist not on the idle dreams of wealth promoted by Cartier, but on sound business practice. That meant trade with the Indians. The Algonquin had convinced him that they could not engage in trade while defending themselves against Iroquois raiders, for they and the Huron clearly feared the ferocious, adept fighters to the south. Needing a strategy, Champlain foresaw a dramatic way to win their favour. With a bold stroke, he could gain the allegiance of the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Huron, bolstering their confidence and delivering them from constant attrition in fights with the Iroquois. In doing so, he’d establish trading partnerships that could last for generations. In effect, by declaring to the Iroquois that they had to remain far south, that any incursion north would be met by deadly counterattack, he would establish trade with the northern natives and launch New France as a viable commercial entity independent of funding from any king reluctant to untie the drawstrings on his purse.
If the Dutch and the English were planning forays across the sea, it would be only a matter of time before they attempted colonies. He had to move quickly. He had already explored the lands of the Atlantic coast, but the river gave the French excellent inland access, where he could claim massive territory in the name of France. What he needed was military might, and that could only be achieved through a powerful alliance with loyal tribes.
Champlain spent considerable time just sitting, stewing, working out ideas. That he was creating the nascent border between future countries in the New World had occurred to him in a moment of visionary insight. The continent might not be too vast for France to claim, but to hold it all without greater help from the king seemed unlikely. And yet, using only limited resources, the opportunity was before him to create space for his own enterprise while decreeing to all opposing forces that they had to stay away. The New World could change quickly. Move quickly was his plan—stake a claim, and be properly allied.
He had enjoyed the hard paddle south. The surrounding mountains, the waters as clear as the king’s own crystal, invigorated him. Extraordinary physical specimens, the Algonquin paddled with great effort hour upon continuing hour, soundless and straining. As winds whipped down from mountains to the west, Champlain himself took up a paddle and did his best to keep up with their rhythm, until the labour exhausted him and the Indians carried on. Late in the afternoon, they made camp, a dapple of sunlight reddening through the leaves while he touched a quill into his ink and wrote in his diary. Soon he’d smell sweet venison roasting on the fire. The Indians were nervous, he knew, but he had promised them an impressive display of power wrought by their alliance, and as the days passed and they approached their destination, his heart quickened with the prospect of war.
Three French, sixty Algonquians. Two hundred Iroquois fighters.
When the scouts arrived with news of the band at Ticonderoga, Champlain smiled. Good. He had hoped to be outnumbered. He told his less-confident new friends, “Tomorrow you will see our power. Together we shall attack.”
The French carried with them three harquebusiers.
In the morning, the raiders from the north amassed across a cornfield farmed by the Iroquois. Surprised by the incursion, the proprietors were not dismayed. They raised their voices in ecstatic war whoops and lifted their tomahawks to the enemy and armed their bows with deadly arrows. This would be a wondrous fight, the inferior band killed and scalped. This would be a momentous event for the Iroquois, one worth many stories.
Then the three harquebusiers fired.
Three Iroquois fell.
One man was struck in the eye, killed instantly. Another gurgled on his knees for breath, blood spurting from his throat. The third man moaned in his misery as blood erupted from his belly, the pain more than he could endure as a man. His own brother slit his throat to spare him further shame.
Three more Iroquois fell in a torment of blood and suffering.
The sound of the three harquebusiers firing reached the survivors’ ears.
What was that sound? How did noise and smoke kill their brothers?
Another two Iroquois clutched themselves in agony and collapsed upon the ground. Then the sound that charged their nerves with fright followed.
They could fire no arrow upon their enemy, who was too far away. The Iroquois fled and the invaders gave chase. The rout was on, and the day belonged to the French and the Algonquin. That night, they ate from the stores of Iroquois food. Iroquois women aimlessly roaming in the forest were taken to be their slaves, and in the morning their canoes were made heavy with produce and meat and furs and women to take back to their people, and upon the bow of each canoe hung bloody Iroquois scalps.
Champlain did not paddle, not even when the winds whipped up. He had much to think about and dwell upon. He indulged in pleasant thoughts of his child-bride back home in France. He maintained a grip on the handle of the knife given to him by King Henri IV, the same knife bequeathed to successive kings, and initially acquired by Cartier. Champlain had examined the knives in the hands and belts of every dead Iroquois. None had handles of gold and diamonds, as did this one. That puzzled him. Nonetheless, the dagger had brought him good fortune, and the future of his enterprise, he believed, was now assured.
Champlain paid little more than cursory attention to the seafaring hands who had crossed the ocean with him. Seamen were adept in the rigging, brave and energetic in an ocean’s tempest, but nothing less had been expected. While he knew the name of every Frenchman in New France, including the few feral trappers who had settled way north on the river, at Tadoussac, before his own arrival, the youth who stood before him three years after his voyage was a puzzle. He recognized the name, but a thick beard, wild hair and an increase in muscle mass had changed him. Three years in New France had not only matured Étienne Brulé, but had also kindled in him a passionate spirit.
Onboard, the boy had been surly, unsure that he wanted to be cast upon the rolling waters on a voyage to the New World. Three years later, he bore little resemblance to that reluctant sailor. The New World had ignited his senses. He had despised only the dull grey ocean. He was now pleading with Champlain to grant him permission to take a canoe west with the Huron, to explore that unknown region where the lakes, they were told, were as broad as the sea. Determined to be the first European to map the waterways there, to discover the mines, he wanted to learn the Huron language and—or so he claimed, because he had studied Champlain’s ambitions and interpreted his actions—he would help to draw les sauvages into a closer military and trading partnership.
Champlain recognized in the youthful Brulé a version of himself at twenty. While the lad did not share his love for the sea, he did crave the indomitable quest. Whereas the older man had had his nature revealed to him on stormy waters, this young man had found his soul in the woods and on the rivers of New France. Still, Champlain needed to know that the youth could be entrusted with a task demanding so much fortitude, acumen and raw courage.
“The rapids around Montreal and around the Hochelaga islands,” Champlain proposed, then paused.
“The rapids, Captain?” Étienne Brulé inquired, curious.
“Let’s find our way through. Me and you, with our best men. If we survive, I will commission your journey to the land of the Huron.”
Brulé was so excited he clicked his heels and saluted.
Provoked to laughter, Champlain shooed him on his way.
Brulé took the stern of one canoe, Champlain the centre position in another, from which he could make quick navigational choices, and the slender vessels slipped onto the river. The Indians knew nothing of swimming, and so had declined to accompany the foolish white men on their escapade. After all, to reach their destination, they could simply walk. The canoes were manned by the strongest and most fearless of the French, for they would not be travelling down the rapids, but paddling upstream, against that relentless force.
Initially, they stuck to the shore where the current was weakest. Even here, they would be captured by a swirling eddy and one canoe would have to make it ashore and toss a rope to the other spinning craft and pull it from the spiral. In these surging waters, their boats felt fragile and small. Often, the canoes were turned back by the water’s propulsion, and the men portaged to a new location to try again. Still, they had not encountered the roughest water.
As the river intensified, Champlain coordinated the advance. He would select short jaunts, moving the boats from rock to rock, or from a promontory to a tree bending over the current, and the men, eight to each side of the canoe, would rest, then shout, then paddle with superhuman strength against the water’s force, and strap themselves tight to their destination, and rest again. Both canoes capsized often, Champlain’s once in front of Brulé, and it was the youth who dove into the current—not to rescue his flailing captain, but to save the canoe, swimming with it down the current until he could snag it to a rock. Then he intercepted the floating paddles and other rampant debris, and finally the men themselves as they whooshed down the current pell-mell and drunk on frenzy. Champlain stretched out a hand to an unknown arm, pulled to the safety of a midstream rock, and only after he’d coughed up gallons of river water did he see that it was Brulé who had snared him.
“Your help might have been more useful upstream,” Champlain carped, stranded and exhausted.
“First the canoe,” Brulé told him. “You can find another paddler. A good canoe in the wilderness is not so easy to find.”
“I am not,” Champlain informed him tersely, “just an ordinary paddler.”
But he was already thinking that the lad was up for the task he had set for himself, although he doubted that this first mission would be completed successfully, so it didn’t particularly matter. He wondered what his pretty wife might be doing back in France. Baking bread with women, skipping rope with girls?
The boy proved right. Canoes made survival possible. Having gathered their strength, the crew set out again, this time with both Brulé and Champlain in the same vessel. They eventually made it back to the first craft, and there, in the middle of the roaring river, strapped to rocks, they napped among their comrades.
And still, they had not reached the fiercest water.
At night, they made a fire on the rocks from driftwood and cooked perch trapped in a net.
“How much farther?” the young man asked.
“We’ll know that when we arrive there,” the older man responded.
“Tomorrow,” suggested the youth, “shorter advances. Longer rests. Rock by rock. Not only paddles. We must use the ropes. Some water we’ll traverse on foot, crawl along the shore if we have to, pull the canoes behind us.”
Champlain nodded. He said nothing further, but the young man’s advice, and his leadership qualities, were duly noted.
The river the next day had to be attacked. Often, they did as Brulé commanded, with men in the water pulling themselves towards rocks they’d lassoed, then stretching the rope for others to follow. Often, the canoes came last, and slowly, brutally, they struggled against the river and the river fought against their trespass. So loud was the raging torrent that they rarely spoke, and the company of men moved with an empirical grace, as though each step might be their last, one hand before the other, short, rhythmic paddle strokes, hanging on for their lives, then staggering forward. Wet and cold and beyond exhaustion, they were eventually victorious, for Champlain discerned a route somewhat free from the torrent, and from there only quiet water lay ahead.
“For this,” Champlain noted, lying on his back on a patch of sand beach, “you will visit the land of the Huron. Live among them. Become as they are—a sauvage, a man of the woods. Speak as they speak, do as they do, think as they think, but do not forget who you are. Do not forget your mission. Bring back to us the knowledge of the Huron’s lands and great lakes.”
“Yes, Captain.” Too tired to be happy, the boy’s celebration would wait.
“In the late autumn of this year, I will hold a trading fair at Hochelaga.”
“Captain?”
“As you travel, tell the Indians you meet to bring their furs in trade. If they come, then I will know you remain alive. That will tell me how far you’ve journeyed.”
“I might travel,” the boy said, turning only his head to face Champlain, unable to move any part of himself below his neck, “too far for the Huron to canoe to Hochelaga to trade.”
“Good,” Champlain said. “Then I will know that, too.” Slowly, he dragged a hand from where it had rested on the ground above his head down to his side. He pulled his other hand across his body to meet it. “Étienne, you will travel with the Cartier Dagger, for your good fortune.”
“But,” the boy objected, “I might die. The knife will be lost.”
“If you lose it, do not bother to come back. If you are killed, then the man who possesses the knife condemns himself—someday we will avenge your loss. But I believe the knife will see you safely home. As long as it is in your possession, expect to see us again. Make certain, Étienne, that you return Cartier’s dagger to me.”
He untied the sheath and the knife from his side. Though it demanded the last of his strength, he passed it across to Brulé. The young man knew what Champlain was really doing. He was commanding him to stay alive.
He received the dagger into his hands, then slept.
Tepees were erected on a waterfront clearing where Champlain waited for the Huron to arrive, canoes laden with furs. This was the first fur fair in the New World. Although Samuel de Champlain was not a particularly religious man, he went down to his knees to pray for its success. He needed to demonstrate the colony’s viability. Since the collapse of the first settlement at Port Royale, selling the idea of the New World to the king and to the French people had been difficult. He needed to prove that life could be prosperous here. Yet October had arrived, and still there were no Indians, only disenchanted French and empty tepees awaiting visitors.
Champlain was alone in believing that young Étienne Brulé might somehow survive. When the French spoke his name, they’d genuflect, as if over his grave, while Indians remained mute. He’ll never be heard from again, was the gist of general opinion, killed by distant Huron who had never heard of white men, or killed by the rough waters, or animals, or spirits, or starvation. If he survived all that, winter would consume him. He was a boy doing a man’s job, and Champlain had dispatched him to his death.
Champlain waited, and believed, and the days went by, without contact and with lessening hope.
They were now a week into October. An early winter howled in the night air. The French milled about during the day and discussed passage home to France on the ship Champlain had waiting upriver at Quebec. He had considered the name Cape Diamond ironic, and discouraged its use. Cartier’s men had received gold and diamonds there, yet upon reaching France they learned that the diamonds were quartz, and that the yellow metal they’d lugged along on their passage held no value—mere coloured rock. A disappointment, unlike the Cartier Dagger. Forevermore, that rock would be disparaged as fool’s gold. So Champlain brought the Indian name of the place, Quebec, into use, to dispel Cartier’s obsession with diamonds and to forget that sad comeuppance.
Now it was the second week of October, and the leaves were vivid in their dance of colours, while the winds carried cold air down from the north.
“They will arrive,” he told the traders.
“On the first canoe, look for Brulé’s scalp,” one replied.
“And hang on to your own,” suggested another.
The third week of October came and went. A few traders were beginning to pack their supplies to make the return trip to Quebec and passage home. One of these, up early to prepare his canoe, noticed movement on the river at first light.
He sounded the alarm, and the French reached for their harquebusiers. Champlain broke from his tent and scrambled down to the riverbank.
“Indians!” a man shouted.
“Are they Iroquois?” another asked.
“Not likely, from that direction,” Champlain noted quietly.
“Iroquois can come from anywhere.”
“That’s a lot of canoes.”
And Champlain smiled and said, “That’s a lot of furs. They’re loaded down to the gunwales. Gentlemen! Today, we trade. Tonight, we celebrate like kings!”
The fair became a party, with much food and no small amount of wine and brandy enjoyed by the Hurons, and the next day the Algonquians showed up with their canoes heavy-laden as well. The party continued for days with feasting and exchange and barter, and the French traders loaded their canoes for the journey north and each man mentioned that he’d never forget these five festive days, for they were the wonder of their lives.
Champlain was the last to leave, waving his hand from shore as the Indians departed. None had carried with him the Cartier Dagger, which would have signalled Brulé’s death. Champlain had listened to their stories and learned that his protégé had travelled deep into Huron territory. Brulé moved in the company of the young Hurons he’d befriended, and they had made it to the great inland waters and were bound south, exploring rivers below the Iroquois lands.
The inaugural fur fair had been a significant success. Traders were delighted with the furs they’d collected and would ship back to France, but they would also be returning to the maternal nation with words of enthusiasm and praise. Through them, an opinion would progress that the colony could be economically viable, that in New France, the courageous might find their fortune.
Even for the three Huron travelling with him—two his own age and one younger—the beauty of the Allegheny River, as it flowed south through rolling mountains in the majesty of their autumnal colours, moved the young men in ways that altered their appreciation of the world and their attitude towards themselves. In commencing their southbound trek, they’d been excited by the adventure. They had expected to fight, to be beset by wonders and to return with astonishing tales. They had not expected to be apprehended by nature’s lore. The rising, falling hills laced by the meandering stream. The wafting mists at dawn. Clear light on a crisp day. Songbirds gathering for the migration south. The soft gibber of water along the stony shore. They felt themselves becoming a part of the forest and the river and sky, as though their paddles could no more fail to break the surface of the water than the wind could refuse to create its ripples, as though they could no more avoid canoeing south than the birds could decline to fly in advance of their passage. So the four young men were united in a different communion than they had expected as they achieved the place where the Allegheny met the Monongahela River to form the Ohio, a place foretold by friendly natives upstream, and they were not in the proper frame of mind to respond quickly enough or wisely enough when they fell into the view of a party of wandering Iroquois who were also distant from their usual lands. Knowing that he had lost the advantage of time and surprise, Étienne Brulé slipped his harquebusier into the stream, to keep it out of Iroquois hands.
They tore at his flesh with knives and hammered his bones with tomahawks and burned his skin with stones roasted in the campfire. They scowled in his face and threatened worse: to tear out his eyes, to slice off his genitals, to roll boulders off an outcropping onto him spread-eagled below. This they did to each of his good friends, and made them suffer before slicing their throats. The youngest was the last to die, crying out as huge rocks fell upon him. In the end, his body was buried under a pile of rocks with only his head visible, and, dead or still alive, they scalped him.
They waved the three scalps before Brulé’s eyes.
What to do with the Frenchman? How to kill Brulé? This was a dilemma for the Iroquois. His death had to be fitting, for all the Iroquois had heard the story of Ticonderoga, of how the white man’s magic had slaughtered their brothers. When they told the story of this Frenchman’s death, they would need to satisfy the rage of all their brothers.
They cut three slices of flesh from above each nipple, using his own knife—an extraordinary instrument with bright stones in the handle and sharp bone for the blade—and, with his hands tied, they burned his feet, then made him run. They rammed his head into tree trunks, and he bled, and he wobbled on his burnt feet as the Iroquois laughed and discussed how they might choose to kill him.
They made him run along the rocky beach while they threw stones at him and talked about their predicament, and he ran this way and that to avoid the warriors who could throw best. The man who had rammed his head into trees grabbed him and pulled him up onto a low cliff and made him jump off into deep water, and the Iroquois laughed at this, and rushed to the ledge to see him thrash about and sink. They planned to catch him like a fish in their nets downstream, then humiliate him further while they devised their best killing method.
The Frenchman sank, but when his head popped back to the surface, they were confused. No Iroquois had ever swum in water—no native knew that that trick could be managed. The man whose hands were tied was kicking his feet and floating on his back like a tree, and then he would rest—he would appear to be resting!—in the middle of the stream, and he was speaking Huron to the Iroquois.
They all raced back down to the beach, each man frantically exclaiming about the wonders he had witnessed.
One man knew the language, but he was away with the others contemplating the best death for the white man. When he was summoned and returned on the run down to the shore, the white man still swam in the water, with his head up, and when he chose to do so, he’d kick his feet. This was a great magic the white man possessed, that he did not sink.
Did this mean that he could not die?
Was it true, then, that the white men were really only ghosts?
This was debated and discussed.
“What does he say?” the Iroquois chief wanted to know.
The man who spoke Huron asked that everyone be quiet, and he listened to what the Frenchman had to say in the Indian tongue.
“The white man who talks like a stupid Huron,” the Iroquois elder stated, “says to us that he is the only man on the earth who can save our people.”
This started up a great conflagration among the elders and the young men who wanted to kill him instantly, but they could not catch him without getting into their canoes. A few climbed into a canoe and pursued him in the river.
The white man dove below the surface of the water to avoid the canoe, and the Indians knew then that he was dead, for no man could live under the surface of the water, and this man had disappeared. The canoeists paddled back to shore. The people were disappointed, for they had not killed him very well. The death had been ordinary and did not make for a good story. Then Brulé stuck his head up and breathed the clear air, and the Iroquois were amazed, yet concerned, and the canoe turned back to catch the Frenchman.
While he had been underwater, Brulé had been sawing his restraints against a sharp rock, and with further struggle he was able to slip his hands free. As the canoe approached a second time, he dove beneath the surface and the men stopped paddling, not knowing where he had gone. The young man came up under the canoe and made it rock, then pulled it down hard so that the men panicked. One slipped over the side, trying to get at the man under the canoe, and the vessel tipped over. The four Iroquois hung on for their lives while Brulé swam in the stream and harangued the Iroquois on shore.
He had caused a grave consternation to ripple through the men, who disapproved of his magic and feared his ability to live where any Iroquois would die. The chief gave the order to pierce him with arrows and so the warriors retrieved their bows, but when they fired their arrows, Brulé dove to the bottom of the river again.
He had much to think about down there. He could swim to the opposite shore, although the Iroquois could cross the river quickly in their canoes. His predicament would remain dire if he chose to float downriver, and down the Ohio, for even if he eluded his enemies he would be left in the wilderness with neither weapons nor food, nor clothes, nor companions, nor a canoe. The Iroquois had clearly demonstrated their zeal to kill him properly. He had to negotiate a truce with them. Only in this strategy did hope lie. He was about to resurface when he became the world’s luckiest Frenchman at the bottom of a river.
Breaking the surface of the water, he held his right hand straight aloft, and in it his harquebusier. The Indians were suitably astounded, and two men fell over one another in their fright while several of the others stepped back.
“See what I have made from the stones of this river!” Brulé called out. His interpreter let his words be understood by the others, and the Iroquois were both suitably impressed and warily skeptical.
“Do I kill you today, and your children tomorrow, and all Iroquois people? Or do I save you and make a pact between the French and the Iroquois? Speak now!”
Trembling, the translator needed Brulé to repeat himself a few times before he could get the full message across, but once he had done so, the chief moved him aside to fully examine the youth floating freely in the water where any Iroquois man would drown, having devised a fire-spear out of the river’s stones. The chief considered carefully what his eyes did see before he spoke. The man possessed magic, and whether he could kill them and their children was a consideration but perhaps not the most important. For him, this white boy who could live like a fish, who could make weapons at the bottom of a river, who was brave and did not flee, but taunted the men who would kill him—such a boy deserved to have his life preserved. More than any white man, he deserved to live awhile.
“Tell the fish-man, who does not die in a river where a man should die,” he told the elder who could speak the language of the Huron, “to come to me. He will not be harmed this day or tomorrow.”
Hearing the message, Brulé put his rifle between his knees and swam ashore, his smooth, sure strokes an extraordinary spectacle to the Indians.
On the stone-covered beach, Étienne Brulé stood upon his burnt feet, his heaving chest bleeding, his stomach bloody as well, his joints bruised purple. His skin was goose-bumped from the cold water and his teeth chattered. He said, “The man who holds my knife will be killed by every Frenchmen who is alive today and by every Frenchmen who will ever be alive tomorrow, and his children and his children’s children will die also.”
The dagger was returned to him by the man who had bashed his head into trees. He received the knife and stuck it into its sheath, and although he knew that it could not fire, for he’d need a dry wick and he carried no gunpowder on his person, having been stripped of all his possessions, Brulé cradled his magic spear across his chest. “Now let us talk,” he said. “Let us make a great peace between the white man and the red.”
“Can you fly?” the Iroquois chief asked him first.
“What?” Brulé thought he had misunderstood the translation.
“You can live in the water like a fish. Can you live in the sky like a bird?”
The man was asking if he was a god. For Brulé, it was difficult to judge what his best tactical answer might be. He chose to be honest.
“I am a man like you,” he said.
In their prodigious labour, the centuries would pass, one time folded into another, and a city would rise in that place where the waters of the Allegheny flowed together with those of the Monongahela to cast the Ohio River upon its journey, but in that place on that day, only a camp of Iroquois and a single Frenchman sat still, and three Huron lay dead nearby. A small fire crackled where the men talked, and on the autumnal winds their voices were heard to speak in solemn tones.
Bound north the next day in the company of two Iroquois, including the man who had bashed his head against trees, Brulé paddled his own canoe, and he would cross safely through the Iroquois lands on his long winter’s journey home, taking shelter in Iroquois villages and learning their ways. After winter had slipped into spring and spring had yielded to summer, he taught his guides how to do the dog paddle. The young men loved to show the fellow Iroquois they met during their travels that a man could swim like a fish if he pretended to be a dog.
“What’s a dog?” those Indians asked. The travellers did their best to explain that a dog was a white man’s shabby wolf.
They had an inkling of what it must feel like to be gods, to be like fish, the young warriors did, afloat on the rivers.
Shortly before reaching the island of Montreal, the place the Iroquois called Hochelaga, Étienne Brulé swam with his guides in the morning, laughing with them as they emerged from the pool by a waterfall, then passed behind them as they squatted to evacuate their bowels, and, in memory of his Huron friends, slit their throats. So that the white man would not be blamed, he took both their scalps, for he was a man of the woods now, a sauvage, and paddled on home alone.
Samuel de Champlain received the Cartier Dagger back from Étienne Brulé with a sense of solemn occasion. The young man’s return had presaged a burst of optimism throughout the community, for he had proven that a man could endure in this country, travel the uncharted rivers in the company of Indians and come back alive. Their own survival now seemed remotely possible. The two men kneeled in a small, makeshift tent, a swath of canvas fitted between pine trees on one side and a boulder on the other. Here they were sheltered from wind and rain and from the eyes of the other French. Brulé bowed, holding the dagger before him with both hands. Champlain balanced it upon two fingers and lifted it away from the young man’s possession. He then kissed the centre diamond on the hilt and placed the knife in a small box alongside his right knee.
“I looked for this in the hands of others. When I did not see it, I believed that you remained alive. It gave us all hope. For you, and for ourselves.”
“With respect, sir, I’d rather not travel with that knife again. A man could get killed for that knife.”
“Ah. Yes. I see.”
Brulé had returned as an apparition emerging from the woods and yet, seemingly, a part of the woods, and for a second time Champlain had scarcely recognized the young adventurer. Wilderness life had changed him—his appearance, the way he carried himself, even the way he spoke, and perhaps not all the changes were for the better. An inner determination had supplanted the youth’s earlier impetuousness, and the romantic eagerness with which he had embarked had been augmented along the way by a seasoned fatalism. He no longer possessed the demeanour of a dislocated youth. In idle hours, Champlain had imagined that he would welcome the lad home in a manner befitting the return of a beloved son from a war, and he had done so. And yet, similar to any son arriving back from a conflict, the warrior was no longer the rambunctious, grinning boy who had departed, and the relationship between the two men had also been altered.
Champlain understood the change, gleaning insight as he listened to Brulé’s accounts of his escapades. He remained the leader of this mission, but no longer was Brulé a mere foot soldier at his command. The youth was the only one among them who possessed true and generous knowledge of the territory, the only one who had proven himself and developed the capacity to survive on his own in the wild woods, and he alone among the French comprehended the language and strategies of their friends and enemies both. Brulé understood Indian ways, and consequently the ways of this land. While he was much too young to be a rival to Champlain’s leadership, he nonetheless had become a person of influence and standing. He was considered courageous and insightful. The people revered and trusted him, so that it was now prudent for Champlain to consult him regarding a variety of crucial decisions. Laughing one night, meaning to make a joke, he dubbed Brulé the first Quebec man.
“What?” Brulé, somewhat inebriated with the last of the ship’s wine, responded.
“You were not born here,” Champlain expounded, and clamped an arm around the lad’s shoulders, “but you are the first Frenchman to belong to this land. You are, Étienne, the first Frenchman of the New World, for you are no longer a Frenchman of the old.”
“France,” Brulé muttered, taking his final swig, “can kiss my ass.”
Given the late hour, and their general state of drunkenness, the French around the campfire that night chuckled.
The next morning, Champlain was still thinking about Brulé as he pondered a new scheme, letting it settle into his head. Eternally at odds with powers guiding him from France, Champlain allowed himself to imagine a new man, a new people. One day, a few years later, he would take his ideas to the Algonquin, and suggest that they and the French form a new race. Indian and French would intermarry, binding their alliance through shared offspring and a unified purpose. The proposal was not without interest to the natives, and they considered the possibility at length, deciding in the end to respectfully decline. The French had brought over too few women to tempt their young men, and they feared that their young men might want for wives while Indian girls merrily ran off with the randy French. Yet both sides agreed, in the face of the idea’s defeat, that although intermarriage would not become a requirement, neither would it be discouraged in their communities. Love, then, would be permitted to take its course, wherever it might arise.
Love, for Champlain, who was bereft in the New World while his child-bride awaited his return to the old, had proven difficult to negotiate. While his sweet Hélène might be little more than a girl, she was strong-willed, and had defiantly proclaimed that she would never cross the Atlantic to the land of the Indians and of the bear and moose. “I’m such a small woman,” she had pointed out to her husband, “the mosquitoes you speak about might suck my blood dry.” Hoping to persuade her otherwise, Champlain had a home constructed at Quebec, a log cabin large enough not only for a wife but for the expansion of a family, and on voyages back to Paris he would again petition her to join him. She would have none of that idea, preferring to pine for him by the Seine than lie by his side, fearing that at any moment they might both be eaten by monstrous bears. Each time he returned to his beloved Quebec, Champlain remained alone.
“Sam,” Brulé whispered to him around the campfire one night, as he had done previously from time to time, “if you want a Huron or an Algonquin for your evening, inquire of me. I will speak to the young women. I know a few who are curious, even for someone like yourself.”
“Like myself?”
“Old.”
Brulé was initiating him into life beyond the island of Montreal. Champlain had seen Lake Huron, and like any European was astounded that such a body of fresh water could exist. An ocean! Of fresh water! With his help, Champlain further developed the fur trade, and Jesuit priests now dwelled among the Huron, converting them to Christianity and to the benefits of commerce. This was Brulé’s world, Champlain saw, and his excursions there confirmed that he himself was not the man for the task. The men, Indians and French both, were too rugged for him. They’d fight and debauch and paddle for days, kill a deer, cook it, eat it and paddle for days again, as though the physical effort was no more troublesome than breathing. The wilderness impressed the younger men, with their tempestuous natures, and also the serene priests, with their sage resolve and solitary devotion. Champlain, once the mariner, and warrior, and adventurer, would satisfy himself with building a community and developing the fiscal and social infrastructure to make the colony viable. The great adventuring, the fighting, the boundless exploring of a land that seemed only to grow the more it was mapped, all of that would be left to this new breed of man, the wild ones who were calling themselves coureurs de bois—runners of the woods—while he brought over men and women from France and saw that, while some joined the wild men of the woods, others formed the basis for a civilized community, devoted to the Church, to the planting of crops, to the raising of French families in the New World. The years went by in this way, and Champlain took pride in his success, and the small outposts at Montreal, Trois-Rivières and Quebec—and the northerly fur-trading post where so many of the woodsmen congregated, Tadoussac—prospered in their way.
Until the world abruptly changed.
Out of the mists on a chilly morning, while the campfires of Quebec quietly exhaled gentle smoke, a shipload of bold men from England, on their own initiative and in the service of no nation—pirates—sailed into the port and disembarked in a fury. They demanded the surrender of the hamlet. Brulé was not present, for he had gone north to carouse with the wild men of Tadoussac, as was his wont, and neither was Champlain, who was down at Montreal trading with the Indians, his usual habit. Not in the practice of defending themselves, the inhabitants saw no option other than to surrender, so Quebec fell to the group led by the notorious Kirke brothers. The brothers themselves moved into Champlain’s home and confiscated the remarkably valuable dagger they found there, a treasure unexpected in this frontier, embedded as it was with diamonds and gold.
Hearing the news, Champlain sailed from Montreal to Quebec, fearing that all was lost, but secretly hoping that Brulé and the Huron could mount an attack and chase the pirates off. When he arrived and walked the muddy track up to his home, he opened the door to find Thomas Kirke with his feet up on his dinner table. “This is my home!” the Frenchman insisted.
“Once. Not now. Everything belongs to me. Thanks for taking good care of it before I got here. Now, shove off back to France and take your pissed-over peasants with you. I’ve had enough of them.”
Champlain’s dream had reached its end. He fumed, he raged, but the counsel that he received from friends reiterated the same point of view. All he might do for the good of New France was to return to Paris and beseech the king to send an army. Otherwise, the Kirke brothers now ruled.
Champlain sailed north, first to Tadoussac to pick up Brulé.
“We must return to France, to speak to the king.”
“France?” Brulé responded. “King?”
“Yes! France. The king. Quebec has fallen to the pirates!”
The younger man pulled at his beard and threw the blade of his knife into the soil between his feet. He picked it up and tossed it into the ground again.
“Étienne,” Champlain implored him, dismayed by the man’s reluctance. “We must return to France. Most families from Quebec are with me. The others we’ll collect on a second voyage if we don’t return with an army. We’re going home.”
“Home?” Brulé inquired.
The woodsman pulled at his beard again. Around him were the trappers and traders who travelled the rivers and lived most of their lives in the forests among the Indians, or alone among the animals.
“In France, who will the king blame for this defeat?”
“I have my responsibilities here—”
“And I have mine. Who will be blamed?”
Champlain did not respond.
“I will not hang in France, Samuel. I will live out my days here. This is my country now. This is my world. Not France.”
Champlain stared at his old friend, who returned the gaze without relenting.
“You betray me.”
“The king will say that, too. Why should I owe the king the satisfaction of hanging me for not defending Quebec? I don’t know the king. I’m staying here.”
As though equal in consequence to the fall of Quebec to the brothers Kirke, Brulé’s betrayal tormented him on the anguishing voyage home. He was met in Paris by his long-suffering wife, who cheerfully showed him the country home she would now appreciate that he provide for them. In due course, he had an audience with the king. Champlain did not blame Brulé for the state of affairs, but the king himself asked about “our French woodsmen? Where were they when these English pirates sailed into our French harbour?”
“Absent,” Champlain admitted. “As was I.” He wanted to explain that the distances were great in the New World, that neighbours lived days, and often weeks, apart. He held his tongue, not knowing whether his own neck would be stretched as a result of this circumstance. In the end, he did survive to settle with Hélène, who was not so young now in 1629, for in the end the king just didn’t care so much that New France had been lost.
“One less problem,” the king had determined. “At least I’ll save money.”
Three years after that conversation, Champlain was planting his back garden when Réal de Montfort, an old friend who had been with him for five years in New France as a fur trader, rode a horse up to his country estate. “What news?” Champlain asked, for clearly the man was agitated.
“The dagger! Cartier’s! The king’s dowry!” Montfort cried, then slipped down from his nag.
“Make sense, monsieur. What are you saying?”
Montfort caught his breath, and did his best to calm himself. “The Kirke Brothers—!”
“Are they dead? Tell me they are dead! The Huron have their scalps!”
“No.”
“No?”
“No! The brothers, they gave the Cartier Dagger to Charles I of England. I have only learned of this now, but they did it, apparently, years ago, to curry the king’s favour, to ask for his protection in case you returned with soldiers.”
“I heard that rumour. It’s of no consequence. I’d rather have it in a king’s hands then in the grip of those pirates.”
“Well, it’s in a king’s hands now! The king of France!”
“What? How can this be?”
“The dowry, Sam! The dowry!”
Champlain was infuriated with the slow pace of information. He dropped his gardening spade to the earth and threatened to extract shears lying on a cart. “Explain yourself, man, or I’ll demonstrate how Iroquois take scalps!”
Montfort took a deep breath. “Charles I still owes half his wife’s dowry to our king. To pay the dowry, he returned the Cartier Dagger.”
“This is good news,” Champlain conceded. He would travel no more across the seas, but this exchange of gifts among royalty seemed to turn a page on his life.
“It was not the only payment made.”
“What else?”
“Charles I—”
“Yes.”
“—king of England—”
“Montfort, I know who he is! Go on!”
“Has bequeathed all of New France—Canada—”
“Yes?”
“—back to France. Canada belongs to France once more.”
Champlain reeled. This was a joy he had not expected in his impending old age. His friend caught him, and helped him sit upon the edge of the cart, to catch his balance. All his days in the New World seemed to run through his mind, the smell of the woods and the drift of the clouds upon mountainsides, the surge of the spring run-off on the rivers, a light fall of snow, the snapping cold in the dark of winter. He remembered so well the men and women there, native and French alike, and he knew the names of every man and woman who had remained behind, the scant few, most of them still waiting to be evacuated, yet they had been abandoned by their king. He remembered Étienne Brulé also, who would be hearing this news in a few months’ time, who would stand on the rock overlooking Quebec as the Kirke brothers departed with their last cache of furs, to sail away, back to England. He imagined that sight. Brulé had betrayed him, but he was glad now that Brulé was there to see that sight, to be his eyes.
Not for the first time, a wedding between royal families had altered the course of history. While one king did not comprehend what he had given away, and the other did not value what he had received, Samuel de Champlain, having never been an especially devout man, grasped that the hand of God had intervened on behalf of the French, on behalf of those who would struggle for the viability of the New World.
He made two fists, and pounded his chest, fiercely, three times, as if to beat the breath out of himself. “Yes,” he said quietly, intently, and he looked to the heavens, although his eyes were tightly closed. “Yes. Thank God.”