London, April to September 1822
THE CANADIANS are no longer such as they were described by Cartier, Champlain, Lahontan, Lescarbot, Laffiteau, Charlevoix, and the Lettres Édifiantes. The sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth were still a time of great imagination and naive customs; the wonder of the former reflected a virgin nature and the candor of the latter mimicked the simplicity of the savage. Champlain, at the end of his first voyage to Canada, in 1603, recounts that “close to the Bay des Chaleurs, to the south, is an island where a dreadful monster dwells that the savages call Gougou.” Thus Canada had its giant, the same as the Cape of Good Hope. Homer is the true father of all such inventions: there are always Cyclopes, Charybdis and Scylla, ogres and gougous.
The savage population of North America, not including the Mexicans or the Eskimos, numbers less than four hundred thousand souls today, and that includes both sides of the Rocky Mountains. Some travelers even put the number as low as one hundred and fifty thousand. The degradation of Indian customs has gone hand in hand with the depopulation of the tribes. Religious traditions have become confused; the instruction spread by Jesuits in Canada has mixed foreign ideas with the native ideas of the indigenes: one sees, in their rudimentary fables, disfigured Christian beliefs. Many savages wear crosses as though they were ornaments, and the Protestant merchants sell them what the Catholic missionaries give away. I will say, to the honor of our country and the glory of our religion, that the Indians are strongly attached to us, that they have never stopped regretting our absence, and that the black robe (the missionary’s cassock) is still an object of veneration in the American forests. The savage continues to love us beneath the trees where we were his first guests, on the land where we have left our footprints, and where we have entrusted him with our graves.
When the Indian was naked or dressed in skins, there was something great and noble about him; in our day, European rags attest to his wretchedness without covering his nakedness: he has become a beggar at the counting-house door and no longer a savage in his forest.
Lately, a group of half-bred people have formed, born of settlers and Indian women. These people, sometimes called “Burntwoods” because of the color of their skin, act as brokers between the two authors of their double origin. They speak the language of their fathers and their mothers, and they have the vices of both races too. These bastards of civilized nature and savage nature sell themselves by turns to the Americans and the English, promising to give them a monopoly on furs. They keep up the rivalries between the English Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Fur Company, and the American Columbian-American Fur Company, Missouri’s Fur Company, and others. They go hunting in the pay of individual traders and with other huntsmen in the pay of the companies.
Everyone remembers the great War of American Independence, but we forget about the blood that has flowed for the petty interests of a handful of merchants. In 1811, the Hudson’s Bay Company sold a tract of land on the banks of the Red River to Lord Selkirk, which was settled in 1812. The North West or Canada company took exception to this. The two companies, allied with different Indian tribes and backed by “Burntwoods,” came to blows. This domestic conflict, the details of which are horrible, took place in the icy wilds of the Hudson Bay. Lord Selkirk’s colony was destroyed in the month of June 1815, exactly the same moment as the Battle of Waterloo. In these two theaters, so different in their brilliance and obscurity, the sorrows of the human race were the same.
It is no use looking in America today for those artistically constructed political constitutions about which Charlevoix once wrote: the Huron monarchy and the Iroquois republic are no more. Something of this destruction has been accomplished and goes on being accomplished in Europe before our very eyes. A Prussian poet, at a banquet given by the Teutonic Order, around the year 1400, recited the heroic deeds of his country’s ancient warriors: no one understood him, and in payment they gave him one hundred empty nuts. Today, Bas Breton, Basque, and Gaelic are dying from cottage to cottage, as the goatherds and the farmers pass away. A fisherman told a traveler, “I hardly know four or five people who speak Breton, and they are all old folks like me, somewhere between sixty and eighty. The young no longer know a word of it.”
In the English county of Cornwall, the language of the indigenes became extinct around the year 1676. The clans of the Orinoco no longer exist: nothing remains of their dialect but a dozen words uttered in the treetops by parakeets set free, as Agrippina’s thrush once warbled a few Greek words on the balustrades of a Roman palace.[9]
Such will be the fate of our modern jargons, sooner or later: they too will become Greek and Latin rubble. Some crow, flown from the cage where the last French priest kept it, will perch atop a ruined steeple and cry to the strange peoples who have taken our place, “Accept these last efforts of a voice that you once knew well: now you shall put all such talking to an end.”[10]
Aspire to be like Bossuet then. In the end, perhaps your masterpiece will outlive your language and your memory in the minds of men, and survive in the memory of a bird!