About this date Sebastian Cabot again appears upon the scene. In 1512 he had entered the Spanish service; and, after a visit to England, had returned to Spain, where, from 1518 to 1547, he held the appointment of Pilot-Major to the King and Emperor Charles V.41At the end of 1547 or the beginning of 1548, he was induced in his old age to come back to the land, for and from which, more than half a centurybefore, his or his father's great discovery had been made; and King Edward VI rewarded his services by appointing him Grand Pilot in England. His mind was still set on finding a way to the Indies by the Northern Sea. He became governor of 'the mystery and company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands, and places unknown'; and in Hakluyt's pages42may be found his instructions 'for the direction of the intended voyage for Cathay.'
41SeeThe Dictionary of National Biography,s. v.
42Vol. i, p. 251.
The company was not finally incorporated by royal charter till 1554-5, but in the preceding year, 1553, they sent out an expedition of three ships to try for a North-East Passage. The leader of the expedition, Sir Hugh Willoughby, was, with the crews of two ships, frozen to death on the coast of Lapland; but Richard Chancellor, the captain of the third ship, reached the port on which the town of Archangel now stands, and made his way overland to Moscow. This was the beginning of British trade with Russia. The Merchant Adventurers became known as the Muscovy Company, and their efforts were directed to the overland traffic between Asia and Europe, which came by Bokhara, Astrakhan, and the Volga, to the meeting of the east and west at Novgorod.
But, important as was this new development of trade, the British explorers, whose names have lived, still took their way for the most part over the Atlantic, making ever for the West. In June, 1576, Martin Frobisher sailed from Blackwall to the north-west 'for the search of the straight or passage to China.'43He sighted Greenland; and, sailing west, came to the inlet in the American coast, north of the Hudson Straits, which, after him, was called Frobisher Bay. This arm of the sea he took to be a passage between the two continents, the right-hand coast, as he went west, seeming to be Asia, the left-hand coast America. He came backto Harwich in October, bringing with him a sample of black stone supposed to contain gold; and thus, to the vain hope of a short passage to the Indies, he added the more dangerous attraction of possible mineral wealth in the Arctic regions. Men's hopes were raised; a company of Cathay was formed, with Michael Lok for governor; and, as their Captain-General, Frobisher sailed again in May, 1577, 'for the further discovering of the passage to Cathay.'44Again he sighted Greenland. Again he reached the bay which had been the turning-point of his former voyage. He took possession of the barren northern land in his Queen's name; and, when he came back in September, 'Her Majesty named it very properly Meta Incognita, as a mark and bound utterly hitherto unknown.'45The voyage was fruitless, but the stones brought home were still thought to promise gold, and so, in the following May, Frobisher started once more on a third voyage to the north. Fifteen ships went with him from Harwich, bearing 'a strong fort or house of timber'46to be set up on arrival in the Arctic regions, and intended to shelter one hundred men through the coming winter. The hundred men included miners, goldfiners, gentlemen, artisans, 'and all necessary persons'46—as though this desolate region were to become the scene of a thriving colony. They set sail, reached the coast of Greenland, and claimed it in the Queen's name. They fell in with the Esquimaux; they crossed the channel now known as Davis Strait to the Meta Incognita; and they came back in the autumn with no result beyond the report of a new imaginary island. This was the end of Frobisher's enterprise, but in the next forty years other English sailors followed where he had gone before, and opened up to geographical knowledge fresh stretches of icebound coast and wintry sea. Davis, Hudson, Baffin, and others, gave their names to straits and bays, but it is impossible here to trace the record of their courage and endurance.No quest has ever been so fruitful of daring, patient seamanship, none has ever been so barren of practical results, as that for the North-West Passage. What Frobisher went to find in the sixteenth century, Franklin still sought in the nineteenth: and through all the ages of British exploration has run the ever receding hope of finding a short way through ice and snow to the sunny lands of the East.
43Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 52.
44Ibid. p. 56.
45Ibid. p. 104.
46Ibid. p. 105.
In Great Britain the sixteenth century was the age of adventurers, casting about for ways to other worlds, or freebooting where Spain and Portugal claimed ownership of land and sea; but in that time two men stand out as having had definite views of settlement, and as having been colonizers in advance of their age. They are Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh. Edward Hayes, the author of a narrative of Gilbert's attempt to found a colony in Newfoundland, speaks of him as 'the first of our nation that carried people to erect an habitation and government in those northerly countries of America,'47and no nobler Englishman could well be found to head the list of English colonizers of the New World. Chivalrous in nature, bold in action, he was at the same time 'famous for his knowledge both by sea and land';48and it was hisDiscourse to prove a passage by the north-west to Cathaia and the East Indies,which is said to have determined Frobisher to explore the north.
47Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 185.
48From Fuller'sWorthies of Devonshire.
In June, 1578, Gilbert obtained from Queen Elizabeth his celebrated patent 'for the inhabiting and planting of our people in America.'49The grant was a wide one. It gave him full liberty to explore and settle in any 'remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people'; and it constituted him full owner of the land where he settled, withina radius of two hundred leagues from the place of settlement. It was subject only to a reservation to the Crown of one-fifth of the gold and silver found, and to a condition that advantage should be taken of the grant within six years. For three or four years Gilbert's efforts to colonize under this patent were fruitless; he organized an expedition which came to nothing, and other men, to whom he temporarily resigned his rights, were equally unsuccessful.
49Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 174.
At length, on June 11, 1583, he set sail from Cawsand Bay, near Plymouth, to try his luck for the last time in the western world. There were five ships, one of which was fitted out by Ralegh,50and one, theGolden Hind,had for its captain and owner, Edward Hayes, the chronicler of the voyage. The company numbered 260 men all told, including shipwrights, carpenters, and other artisans, 'mineral men and refiners,' 'morris dancers' and other caterers of amusement 'for solace of our people and allurement of the savages.'51These last were evidence that more was projected than mere temporary exploration. It was intended, writes Hayes, 'to win' the savages 'by all fair means possible'; and with this end in view the freight of the ships included 'petty haberdashery wares to barter with those simple people.' On the third of August the little fleet entered the harbour of St. John's in Newfoundland, where they found thirty-six ships of all nations. They came expecting resistance, but met with none. When Gilbert made known his intention to proclaim British sovereignty over the island, the sailors and fishermen present seem to have willingly acquiesced; and when he wanted to revictual and refit his ships, the necessary supplies were readily forthcoming.52
50This ship deserted soon after starting.
51Hakluyt, vol. iii, pp. 189, 190.
52Hayes says, 'The Portugals (above other nations) did most willingly and liberally contribute' (Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 192). Seeabove.
The want of a settled authority, of some guarantee for lawand order, in the harbours and on the coasts of Newfoundland, was no doubt felt by those who came year by year to the fisheries, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert's name and high repute may well have been known to others than his own countrymen. Two days after his arrival he took formal possession of the land, with ceremony of rod and turf, in the name of his sovereign; the arms of England were set up; three simple laws were enacted—providing that the recognized religion should be in accordance with the forms of the Church of England, safeguarding the sovereign rights of the Queen of England, and enjoining due respect for her name; and then Gilbert issued land grants as proprietor of the soil. In the words of one of the accounts which Hakluyt has preserved,53'he did let, set, give, and dispose of many things as absolute Governor there, by virtue of Her Majesty's letters patents.'
53Peckham's account, Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 209.
Thus was Newfoundland declared to be a British possession, and such are its claims to be our oldest colony. The annexation was complete in form and substance; no protest was entered against it by those whom it concerned; land was granted by the recognized proprietor, and nothing was wanting to constitute a claim which should last, and has lasted, to all time. Frobisher proclaimed the sovereignty of England over Arctic lands, but his proclamation was as barren as the shores over which it extended. Gilbert, on the contrary, went to a place where European sailors had long foregathered; he went there as an English Governor; his authority was unquestioned, his grants were accepted, and when he read his commission and set up the arms of England at the harbour of St. John, he took the first step, and a very long step, towards British dominion in the New World.
Gilbert had great hopes of finding precious metal in Newfoundland; and his principal mining expert, a Saxon,promised him a rich yield of silver from the ore which was collected in the island. That ore, however, was lost early on the voyage home, and the miner himself was lost with it in the wreck of the largest ship—theDelight. A far greater loss, however, was in store for the ill-fated expedition. They left St. John's on August 20, making for Sable Island, which had been stocked years before by the Portuguese.54In a few days theDelightfoundered on a rock; and the weather became so bad that, at the end of the month, Gilbert consented to make for home. He was in the smallest ship, theSquirrel,a little ten-ton vessel, as being the best suited to explore the creeks and inlets of the American coast; and, in spite of the remonstrances of his companions, he would not leave her on the return voyage. 'We are as near heaven by sea as by land,' were his last words, before the ship went down in the middle of the Atlantic with all on board; and thus, fearless and faithful unto death, he found his resting-place in the sea. The story is one which stands out to all time in the annals of English adventure and English colonization. It was meet and right that the founder of the first English colony should be a Devonshire sailor of high repute, of stainless name, chivalrous, unselfish, strong in the fear of God. It was no less meet that his grave should be in the stormy Atlantic, midway between the Old World and the New. Thus those who came after had a forerunner of the noblest type; and the ships, which from that time to this have carried Englishmen to America, may ever have been passing by where Humphrey Gilbert went to his rest.
54Seeabove.
Gilbert's half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, was cast in the same mould, but the record of his doings lies in the main beyond the range of this book. Virginia and Guiana were the scenes of his attempts at colonization, not Newfoundland or the coasts and rivers of Canada. In 1584, the year afterGilbert had been lost at sea, Ralegh obtained from Queen Elizabeth a patent which was practically the same as Gilbert's grant of 1578; and, at the end of April, he sent out two ships, commanded by two captains named Amidas and Barlow, to explore and report upon a likely place for an English settlement.55
55Accounts of this and the following voyages are given in the third volume of Hakluyt. See also the first book of John Smith's general history of Virginia,The English Voyages to the Old Virginia,in Mr. Arber's edition,The English Scholar's Library.
They sailed more towards the south than previous English explorers, and eventually reached the island of Roanoke, which is now within the limits of North Carolina. Everything seemed bright and sweet and healthful, and the natives of the country were friendly and hospitable, 'such as live after the manner of the golden age.'56So they came back in the autumn with a story full of hope for the future, and the virgin Queen christened the land of promise Virginia.
56Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 304.
Ralegh lost no time in sending out settlers. In the next year, 1585, seven ships started with 108 colonists on board. The expedition was commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, and among other captains with him was Thomas Cavendish, afterwards celebrated, like Drake, for sailing round the world. Ralph Lane, a soldier of fortune, was chosen to remain in charge of the colony, and with him was Amidas, the explorer of the previous year, who was styled 'Admiral of the country.' They went by the West Indies, touching at the Spanish islands of Porto Rico and Hispaniola, and, at the end of June, they reached Roanoke. Here they formed their settlement, and, when Grenville and his ships left in August and September, they brought back as bright a report as Amidas and Barlow had given the year before.
Already, however, before Grenville's departure, there had been friction between the Indians and the new-comers; and, as months went on, the new-born colony became in constantdanger of extermination. Still Lane contrived to hold his own, exploring north and west, gleaning reports of pearls and mines, and a possible passage to the south sea, until the winter and spring were past and the month of June had come again. A fleet of twenty-three ships was then seen out at sea, and, to the joy of the settlers, proved to be an English expedition under Sir Francis Drake, who was returning home laden with spoils from the Spanish main. Drake, at Lane's request, placed one of his ships with seamen and supplies at the disposal of the colony; but a storm arose, and the ship was blown out to sea. Daunted by this fresh trouble, the settlers determined to give up their enterprise and return home. They asked for passages on board Drake's vessels: the request was granted; and they abandoned Roanoke only a fortnight before Grenville arrived with relief, long expected and long delayed. Finding the island deserted, Grenville left fifteen men in possession and himself came home.
So far, Ralegh's scheme had failed; but the failure was due to untoward circumstances, not to the nature of the country, and he still persevered in his efforts. The very next year, in 1587, he sent out a fresh band of settlers, 150 in number; giving them for a leader John White, who had taken part in the former expedition. The arrangements for forming a colony were more fully organized than before; and to White and twelve Assistants Ralegh 'gave a charter and incorporated them by the name of Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia.'57When the colonists reached Roanoke, they found that the fifteen men left by Grenville had disappeared, driven out, as they learnt, by the Indians. Notwithstanding, they renewed the old settlement; and, in the face of native enmity, began again the work of colonizing America. Before the end of the summer, White sailed for England, to give an account of what had been done; and, on his return home, Ralegh prepared to sendrelief to the colony. But war with Spain was now on hand, freebooting was more attractive than colonizing, one attempt and another to send ships to Virginia miscarried; and when at length, late in 1589, White reached the scene of his settlement, he found it dismantled and deserted. So ended the first attempt to colonize Virginia. Success was not to come for a few more years, until the sixteenth century had passed and gone.
57Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 341.
Before 1600, Newfoundland had been annexed by Great Britain, but not one single English or French colony had as yet taken root in America. Nevertheless the century was far from barren of results. The way had been made plain, the ground had been cleared, the wild oats of adventure and knight-errantry had been sown, and the peoples were sobering down to steadier and more prudent enterprise. Beaten on the sea, raided and plundered in their own tropical domain, the Spaniards were ceasing to be a terror and a hindrance to the nations of Northern Europe; and, as the latter grew from youth to lusty manhood, the map of the great North American continent unfolded itself before their eyes. Then Champlain went to work in Canada, and John Smith in Virginia; Jesuits on the St. Lawrence, and Puritans in the New England states; and so the grain of mustard-seed, cast into American soil, grew into a great tree, which already, before three centuries have ended, bids fair to overshadow the earth.
N.B.—The references to Hakluyt made in the notes above are to the 1810 edition.
Among modern books most use has been made in this chapter of:—PARKMAN'SPioneers of France in the New World;DOYLE'SHistory of the English in America,vol. i; andJUSTINWINSOR'SNarrative and Critical History of America.
Reference should also be made to Sir J. BOURINOT'Smonograph on 'Cape Breton,' first published in theProceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada,vol. ix, 1891, and since published separately.
SAMUELCHAMPLAIN AND THEFOUNDING OFQUEBEC
SAMUELCHAMPLAIN AND THEFOUNDING OFQUEBEC
The history of Canada has been so often and so well told, that an attempt simply to reproduce the narrative would be worse than superfluous. The scheme of the present series is, in the field of colonization and within the present limits of the British Empire, to trace the connexion between history and geography; and from this point of view more especially the story of New France will be recorded.
Various parts of the world, now British possessions, were once owned by other European nations, notably by the Dutch or French. The last volume of the series dealt with what was in past times a dependency of the Netherlands, the Cape Colony, the mother colony of South Africa. The present volume deals with a land which the French made peculiarly their own; where, as hardly anywhere else, they settled, though not in large numbers; not merely conquering or ruling the conquered, not only leaving a permanent impress of manners, law, and religion, but slowly and partially colonizing a country and forming a nation.
Lower Canada, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was rightly included under the wider name of New France, for here France and the French were reproduced in weakness and in strength. It was a land well suited to the French character and physique. Much depended on tactful dealings with the North American Indians, a species of diplomacy in which Frenchmen excelled. The commercial value of Canada consisted mainly in the fur trade, an adventurous kind of traffic more attractive to theFrenchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than plodding agriculture or the life of a counting-house. On the rivers and lakes, coming and going was comparatively easy; the short bright summers and the long winters made the country one of strong contrasts. To a bold, imaginative, somewhat restless people there was much to charm in Canada.
But Canada meant far less in earlier days than now it means. It meant the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and of the lakes from which it flows. The Maritime Provinces of the present Dominion, or at any rate Nova Scotia, were not in Canada properly so called, but bore the name of La Cadie or Acadia,1and the great North-West was an unknown land.
1For the derivation of the name 'Acadia,' see Parkman'sPioneers of France in the New World,p. 243, note.Cadieis an Indian word meaning place or region. 'It is obviously a Micmac or Souriquois affix used in connexion with other words to describe the natural characteristics of a place or locality' (Bourinot's monograph on 'Cape Breton,'Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada,vol. ix, sec. 2, p. 185). For the name 'Canada,' see above,note 37.
By the end of the seventeenth century the French had three spheres of influence and colonization in North America—the country of the St. Lawrence, the seaboard between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the New England colonies, and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi. To join them and encircle the English colonies was the aim of French statesmanship. It was an impossible aim, inevitably frustrated by geographical conditions and by want of colonists; but the conception was a great one, large as the new continent in which it was framed, and able men tried to work it out, but tried in vain.
Much has been written of French methods of colonization; writers have been at pains to enumerate the shortcomings of the French, and have carefully explained whence those mistakes arose. But there is less to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes to be credited to France. Beingpart of the continent of Europe, and ever embroiled in continental politics, when she competed with England as a colonizing power, she competed with one hand tied.2Changeable, it is said, were the French and their policy; their kings and courtiers may have been changeable, but the charge does not lie against the French nation.
2This is pointed out in Professor Seeley'sExpansion of England,course i, lecture 5.
They were trading up the Senegal early in the seventeenth century, and there they are at the present day. From the dawn of their colonial enterprise they tried to obtain possession of Madagascar; they have their object now. Nearly four centuries ago they fished off the coasts of Newfoundland, and England has good cause to know that they fish there still. To the St. Lawrence went Cartier from St. Malo, and by the same route generations of Frenchmen entered steadily into America, until Quebec had fallen and the St. Lawrence was theirs no more. The French were versatile in their colonial dealings; they were quickly moving and constantly moving; but they saw clearly and they followed tenaciously; they were strong and staunch, and they proved themselves to be a wonderful people.
Yet there must have been some element of weakness in the French character, in that they bred and obeyed bad rulers who did not live for France, but for whom France was sacrificed; who crushed liberty, political and religious, who drove out industry with the Huguenots, and squandered the heritage of the nation. Englishmen, comparatively early in their history, reckoned with priests first and with kings afterwards. They did most of their work at home before they made their colonial empire; they colonized new worlds as a reformed people; the French tried to colonize under absolutism and priestcraft. It might not have been so, it probably would not have been so, if the religious policy of the French Government had been other than it was.The Huguenots, if not persecuted and eventually in great measure driven out, would have given France the one thing wanting to make her colonization successful, the spirit of private enterprise independent of court favour, the child and the parent of freedom, the determined foe of a deadening religious despotism.
In the sixteenth century, after Cartier's voyages to the St. Lawrence, we hear little of the French in North America. The Breton fishermen followed their calling, crossed the Atlantic year after year, and came back with cargoes of fish and with furs procured by barter with the Indians; but no French settlement was founded either in Canada or in Acadia. In France itself the last half of the century was a time of civil war; the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place, the house of Valois came to an end, and in 1589 Henry of Navarre became King of France. Before his accession to the Crown, two attempts at French colonization were made, in Brazil and in Florida. The colonists were mainly Huguenots, and their enterprise was backed by the great Protestant leader Coligny. The earlier attempt, designed to plant a settlement on the harbour of Rio Janeiro, was short-lived, because ill led by a violent tyrannical man, Villegagnon. The first settlers arrived in 1555; by the end of 1558 they had all disappeared. Still more tragical was the outcome of the venture in Florida. In 1562 a band of would-be colonists sailed from Dieppe, under the command of Jean Ribault. They reached Florida in safety, and built a small fort towards the northern end of the peninsula, in which thirty men were left behind while Ribault returned to France. In the following year, the survivors of the thirty came back to Europe, having abandoned the fort and experienced every extremity of thirst and hunger while crossing the Atlantic in a ship of their own making. Again in 1564, a Huguenot expedition, under René de Laudonnière, sailed for Florida, and the settlers planted themselves on theSt. John's river, then known as the river of May. In 1565 Ribault joined them with reinforcements and supplies. Well known from its surpassing horror is the story of the French settlement. A Spanish force under Menendez, a fanatic as treacherous and as savage as Philip II himself, took up a position to the south where the town of St. Augustine now stands, and overpowering the Frenchmen in detachments, butchered them with every accompaniment of cruelty and guile. The French fort passed into Spanish hands, but within three years time an avenging freebooter came from France, Domenic de Gourgues; the Spaniards in their turn were shot and hung, and the banks of the St. John's river were left desolate.
Ill managed, badly supported were these French ventures to Brazil and Florida. Had they been well led and given some little encouragement and assistance, the result might have been far different. Protestants might have gained a firm foothold in Central and Southern America. France might have won from Spain and Portugal a great domain. As it was, the attempts resulted in utter failure, and great opportunities were lost never to be regained.
As the sixteenth century drew to a close, a patent was issued by the French King to a Breton nobleman, the Marquis de la Roche, to colonize in North America. The terms of the patent were preposterously wide, conferring sovereignty over Canada, together with a monopoly of trade. The results were proportionately small. La Roche set sail in 1598, in a single ship with a cargo of convicts. He landed them at Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and sailed back to France, leaving them to their fate. Five years later, in 1603, eleven of the number, who had survived, were rescued and brought home again.
About a year after La Roche's fruitless voyage, in 1599 or 1600, two other Frenchmen, Chauvin, a sea captain, and Pontgravé, a St. Malo merchant, also obtained a patent tocolonize in Canada. Their object was to monopolize the fur trade, and they attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, where the Saguenay river flows into the St. Lawrence. During a whole winter a small party was left at the station, but no permanent colony was formed; and a second and third voyage had no lasting results. Chauvin died, and in 1602 or 1603 a new patent was granted to De Chastes, a man of rank and station, who associated with himself Pontgravé, and secured the services of Samuel Champlain.
In order of time, Champlain's name stands second in the list of the men to whom New France in America was due. It stands second in time to the name of Cartier; in order of merit it heads the list. Cartier was a great explorer, but his work ended with discovery; Champlain founded a colony. The history of Canada as a French possession has gained in attractiveness, in that it began and ended with a high-minded, chivalrous leader. It began with Champlain, it ended with Montcalm. Born on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, the adventurous son of a seafaring father, Champlain fought for the King in Brittany, and was given by him a retainer in the shape of a small pension. The war over, he travelled for two years in the Spanish Indies, and, visiting Panama, conceived the idea of a ship canal across the isthmus. After his return home, he took service under De Chastes' company, and in 1603 sailed with Pontgravé for the St. Lawrence. The voyage was one of exploration only. Champlain ascended the river as far as Montreal, gathering geographical information from the Indians, but attempting no settlement; and when he returned to France in a few months' time, he found that his employer, De Chastes, was dead.
Yet another royal patent was granted, in 1603, to De Monts, a Huguenot gentleman of the French court, its object being the colonization of Acadia, and Acadia being defined as extending from the fortieth degree of north latitude, which runsthrough3Philadelphia, to the forty-sixth degree, which is north of Montreal. De Monts took into partnership the members of De Chastes' company, and in 1604 two vessels sailed for America. They carried a mixed freight, Huguenots and Roman Catholics, gentlemen of fortune, and vagrants impressed under the King's commission. De Monts and Champlain were on board the first ship, Pontgravé followed in the second, with supplies for the future colony. They steered not for the St. Lawrence, but for the coast of Nova Scotia; and entering the Bay of Fundy they discovered Annapolis harbour, which was given the name of Port Royal. The first settlement, however, was made on an islet off the mouth of the St. Croix river, which now forms the boundary between New Brunswick and the state of Maine; and there through the winter De Monts and Champlain stayed with a scurvy-stricken company, numbering seventy-nine in all, of whom nearly half died. On the return of spring and the advent of relief from France, the leaders coasted south along the shores of Maine, and of what were in after years the New England states; and coming back to their station in August, they moved the settlement across the Bay of Fundy, and established themselves on the inlet of Annapolis harbour. De Monts then returned to France, leaving Pontgravé and Champlain to hold the post through the winter of 1605.
3For De Monts' patent see theCalendar of State Papers,Colonial, 1574-1660, p. 4, entry 10, Nov. 8, 1603. It was a patent 'for inhabiting Acadia, Canada, and other places in New France,' and De Monts was appointed the French King's Lieutenant-General 'for to represent our person in the countries, territories, coasts, and confines of La Cadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degree.'
In the following summer, ships came back from France just in time to prevent the settlement at Port Royal from being broken up in despair. They brought with them the advocate Lescarbot, the historian of New France. Again there was exploring down the American coast, and again Champlain and his associates held their own through the winter. Theoutlook of the little colony was promising. The season was mild, the natives were friendly, supplies were plentiful, gardens were laid out and corn was sown. But in the late spring of 1607 news came from home that the patent had been cancelled, and before the summer ended Port Royal was abandoned.
For nearly three years the place was left desolate, and then, in 1610, one of De Monts' associates came back again. It was the Baron de Poutrincourt, to whom the harbour, when first discovered, had been granted by De Monts. The Jesuits were at the time strong at the French court, stronger still after the assassination of King Henry IV in this same year. They, or the ladies of the court, who were their tools, bought shares in the venture, and Jesuit priests went out to Acadia, thwarting and quarrelling with Poutrincourt and his son. Both the two great dangers which always threatened and finally ruined the French power in North America came into being at this date, the exclusive influence of the Jesuits and English competition.
In 1606 the Virginia company was incorporated, and in the following year British colonization on the mainland of North America began with the founding of Jamestown. There are many miles of coast between Acadia and Virginia, between the Bay of Fundy and Chesapeake Bay, but French and English soon crossed each other's paths. In 1613 a ship sailed from France, sent out under Jesuit influence, with a view to founding a settlement on the North American coast. After touching at Port Royal, the party sailed southwards to the coast of Maine, and landed in the region of the Penobscot river. Hardly had their tents been set up on the shore, when an English ship came in sight, captured the French vessel, which was lying at anchor, uprooted the would-be colony, and took all the Frenchmen prisoners. The invaders hailed from Jamestown; they were commanded by Samuel Argall, an unscrupulous freebooter.His pretext was that the Frenchmen were taking up ground within the limits of the patents granted by the English King to his subjects, but his act was little more than piracy. Some of the Frenchmen were set adrift in an open boat, and eventually reached France in safety; the rest were carried prisoners to Jamestown, whence Argall set sail again, commissioned by the governor of Virginia to attack Port Royal. He reached, plundered, and burnt the fort, its commander, Biencourt, with the rest of the settlers, being absent in the fields, for it was harvest time; but the colony was not finally blotted out, and the French still kept a foothold in Acadia.
Champlain's first voyage to North America in 1603 had taken him to the St. Lawrence. From 1604-7 Acadia had been the scene of his labours, until De Monts' patent had been revoked. In 1608 he returned to the river of Canada. On the line of the St. Lawrence he carried out the work of his life, and by its banks he died. In the course which French colonization in America and its first great leader took, may be traced the influence on history of geography and race.
In English colonial history, as writers on the subject have pointed out,4the age of adventure was distinct from the age of settlement. Ralegh was the latest product of the times of romance, an his attempts at colonization were premature and unsuccessful. To some extent a similar distinction may be made in French colonial history: Cartier may be taken as a representative of the earlier age, Champlain of the later; but the line of demarcation is much fainter, much less real, in the case of the French than in that of the English. To English and French alike adventure had meant private enterprise, usually but not always countenanced by kings, generally carried out under cover of royal licences or patents, so vague as to be almost meaningless, granted one day, liable to becancelled the next. When the age of romance passed away in England with the passing of the sixteenth century, adventurers in the ordinary sense in great measure disappeared, with the exception of the Arctic explorers, who, like Hudson and Baffin, still sailed to the desolate North. Private enterprise, on the other hand, not only survived, but it grew stronger, more business-like, more independent of court favour. It was private enterprise still, but under new forms, the enterprise not of individual freebooters, or of knights errant, but of associations of citizens, some of the associations being chartered commercial companies, while others were bands of colonizers and colonists united by a common antagonism and a common creed. Their objects were not in the air, they did not live in dreamland, they went out or sent out others, not so much to discover new lands, as to occupy and appropriate lands which had already been found, to make new English homes on the other side of the Atlantic.
4See e.g. Doyle'sHistory of the English in America,vol. i, chap. vi.
In theory the commercial companies were, like the individual patentees of the former generation, working under the authority of the Crown. Indeed that authority was far more strongly proclaimed than before, and for vague generalities were substituted very definite restrictions; but this was only a sign of a new time. It indicated that a stage had been reached when more was known, when practical business was being taken in hand, and when, therefore, the slipshod patents, which had hitherto sufficed, would no longer avail. Because private enterprise really meant more, therefore the Government said more, and the very defining of the work and circumscribing of its sphere made the results sounder, more lasting, and more substantial. It was not the lust of conquest, it was not the glamour of adventure, it was not a wish to proselytize in religion or to add new provinces to the domain of a European kingdom which made the English colonize North America. There were twomain motives at work. One was the desire to find or to do something which would pay, the other was a longing to live under more independent conditions than existed in the mother country. The settlers went to lands where natives dwelt, and, therefore, dealings with the North American Indians in war and peace ensued; but the English did not go to the New World in the main to conquer or to convert the Indians, they went to live and to make their living pay. Instinct was at work in English colonization, the instinct of self-preservation, of extension, of always moving a little further and winning a little more; but there was no high scheme of universal dominion for the English King or the English creed. Against any such views the New England colonies were a living protest, and in Virginia, Maryland, or Carolina they found no place. All of these colonies were prosaic, unromantic communities: they were groups of Englishmen, living, grumbling, working and squabbling, with varieties of opinions and differences of outward forms, half protected, half worried by the home Government, building up unconsciously, illogically, amid much that was mean and small, what was to be in the end a mighty nation. Instinct, too, kept the colonists for the most part near to the sea. They fringed the Atlantic over which they had come, and ever renewed their strength as more emigrants came in; they strayed no doubt to some extent as years went on, taking up farms inland and clearing the backwoods; but, on the whole, there was continuity of colonization, a gradual widening of the belt of settlement, expansion on the part of the settlers themselves, as opposed to planting in the heart of the continent military outposts, or isolated mission stations.
With the French in Canada the case was different. Except in Acadia and Cape Breton Island, and to a limited extent in Newfoundland, they had no hold on the sea coast: and Acadia had for many years little connexion with theland of the St. Lawrence. Canada, as a sphere of colonization, began when the open sea had been left far behind. It was an inland territory with a great river and great lakes. No two parts of the world are more unlike than Canada and South Africa. Canada has a river highway into it, excellent water communication by lake and stream, and, until the Rocky mountains are reached, no mountain barriers are interposed to cut off the interior from the coast regions or one district from another. South Africa is almost devoid of natural harbours, its rivers are valueless for purposes of navigation. Its ranges of hills or mountains rise one behind the other, barring the way from the coast to the interior, severing one section of the territory from another. Yet, curiously enough, somewhat similar results followed from diametrically opposite geographical conditions. No two races in the world were and are more unlike each other than the Dutch and the French, unlike in character, in tradition, in political and religious training. But the Dutch in South Africa and the French in Canada resembled each other in this, that they were and remained very few in number, planted in an unlimited area, and that men lived in either case under a rigid system. The restrictive rule of the Netherlands East India Company in South Africa led to trekking, to wandering in the wilderness, and the difficulties of communication increased the wandering tendency, because the wanderers, who wished no longer to be controlled by the government at Cape Town, could not easily be followed up. The French rule in Canada was restrictive too, restrictive in matters of politics, of commerce, and of religion. It was a despotism which allowed no vestige of freedom or self-government; but it was a far stronger and more active despotism than that of the Netherlands Company. The Dutch sought a trade monopoly, the French a territorial dominion. The Dutch were at pains to minimize their responsibilities. The French policy wasone of conquest and conversion; they looked to holding in subjection the lands and the peoples of the New World. They worked under a government which was absolute, but whose absolutism, in the main, encouraged perpetual moving forward, and they worked in a land where moving forward was comparatively easy. Thus dispersion ensued on a greater scale than in South Africa. The negative force which promoted trekking in the Cape Colony was present also in Canada—antipathy to a rigid system, to hard and fast rules; and the counterpart of the Dutch voortrekkers, though under very different conditions, was to be found in the Canadian fur-traders andcoureurs de bois. But in South Africa the positive force was wanting which shaped Canadian history, the forward policy of an ambitious state. The agents of the French Government in Canada, military and religious, went far afield—adventurous and enterprising, intriguing with savage races, establishing outposts in the interior, strong to carry out a preconceived plan of a great French dominion. The malcontent Dutchmen in South Africa moved slowly and sleepily away in their wagons to be out of reach; the country aided their intent by being difficult of access. Along the rivers and the lakes of Canada the Frenchmen lightly passed, those who worked the will of the Government as well as those who were impatient of control.
The rivalry then between the two European nations who colonized North America, the English and the French, was rivalry at every point. It was a conflict of race, of religion, of geographical conditions, of new and old, of European government and American colonists. On the one side were seaboard settlements, comparatively continuous, in which there was much instinct and little policy, much freedom and little system; where the population steadily grew by natural causes and by immigration, democratic communities in which the real work was done from below, the products ofa wholly different era from that which preceded it, and in which picturesque adventurers had failed to colonize. On the other side were the beginnings of continental colonization along the natural lines of communication. The dispersion was great, the settlers were few, the settlements were weak. All was done from above, except where unlicensed adventurers roamed the woods. The elements of an older day were preserved and stereotyped, attractive but unprogressive. Old forms transplanted to a New World did not lose their life, but renewed it. Feudal customs took root in the soil. Despotism, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, did not survive merely, but grew stronger. The adventurer remained an adventurer, and did not turn into a businesslike colonist. There was much that was great, there was more that was uniform, but there was little or no growth.
The ultimate outcome of such a contest must necessarily have been, in the course of generations, the triumph of the side on which were the forces and the views of the coming time. But, while the struggle lasted, the French gained not a little from being less vulnerable than the English, as being more dispersed; from being better situated for purposes of attack; from being organized, so far as there was organization, under one government and one system instead of many; from the extraordinary energy and quickness of some of the French leaders in Canada; from the strong military element in the population; from the fanatical devotion of the French missionaries; and last, but not least, from the Frenchmen's better handling of the natives.
The sources of the Mississippi are close to the western end of Lake Superior, and the eastern half of North America is therefore nearly an island, created by the Mississippi, the great lakes, the St. Lawrence, and the sea. An inner circle is formed by the Mississippi, the Ohio, Lakes Erie, Ontario, and the St. Lawrence, the head waters of the Ohio river being within easy distance of Lake Erie. The course of the Ohiois from north-east to north-west. It flows, very roughly, parallel to the Alleghany mountains, and drains their western sides. The Alleghanies in their turn are parallel to the Atlantic, and between them and the sea is a coast belt from north to south. Here was the scene of the English settlements. Here, cut off by mountain ranges from the Mississippi valley and from the inland plains, the Virginians and the New Englanders made their home. 'The New England man,' writes Parkman, 'had very little forest experience. His geographical position cut him off completely from the great wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action.'5
5The Old Régime in Canada,chap. xxi, p. 399 (14th ed., 1885).
But there is one direct route, with nearly continuous waterways, from the Atlantic seaboard to the St. Lawrence. It runs due north up the Hudson river, is continued by Lakes George and Champlain between the Adirondack mountains on the west, and on the east the Green mountains of Vermont; and from the northern end of Lake Champlain it follows the outlet of that lake, the Richelieu river, for seventy to eighty miles into the St. Lawrence. The head waters of the Hudson are hard by Lake George, but at the present day navigation ceases at Troy, 151 miles from the sea, where is the confluence of the Mohawk river, and from whence the Champlain canal runs direct to Lake Champlain. The distance from Troy to Lake George is in straight line about fifty miles. This route was all-important for attack and defence in the wars between England and France, and it was well for Great Britain that, at a comparatively early stage in the colonization of America, she took over the Dutch settlements in the valley of the Hudson, gaining control of that river and linking New England to the southern colonies.
From the mouth of the Hudson at New York to where the Richelieu joins the St. Lawrence, a straight line drawn onthe map from south to north measures rather under 400 miles. It is much the same distance, on a very rough estimate, from the confluence of the Richelieu and the St. Lawrence to the point where the St. Lawrence opens into the sea. This point is generally taken to be the Point de Monts, which is on the northern bank of the river, in north latitude 49° 15', and west longitude 67° 30', though the Gaspé peninsula, on the southern side of the estuary, extends much further to the east. Thus the centre of the St. Lawrence basin is equidistant from the mouth of that river and from the mouth of the Hudson,6and between these two points, before the days of railways, there was no easily accessible route from the sea to Montreal.
6Hennepin inA New Discovery of a vast Country in America(English ed., London, 1698, pt. 2, p. 129), speaking of the St. Lawrence, says: 'The middle of the river is nearer to New York than to Quebec, the capital town of Canada.' This is of course incorrect, but it shows appreciation of the directness of the route to the St. Lawrence by the Hudson river.
Following up the St. Lawrence from the Point de Monts, at about a distance of 140 miles, the mouth of the Saguenay is reached on the northern side. There stood and stands Tadoussac, in old days a great centre of the fur trade, and the earliest foothold of the French in Canada. From the mouth of the Saguenay to Quebec is about 120 miles, and from Quebec to Montreal is rather over 160. Nearly halfway between Quebec and Montreal, over seventy miles from the former and over ninety from the latter, is the town of Three Rivers, situated on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, at its confluence with the St. Maurice river, one of the oldest and one of the most important French settlements in Canada. Here is the limit of the tideway, and above this point the St. Lawrence expands for some thirty miles into Lake St. Peter. At the upper end of this lake or expanse of river, on the southern side, the Richelieu joins the St. Lawrence, with the town of Sorel atits mouth, and forty-five miles higher up is Montreal. From Montreal to Kingston, where the St. Lawrence issues from Lake Ontario, is a distance of 180 to 190 miles by river, past rapids well known to readers and to tourists, and past the Thousand islands. Thus the total length of the St. Lawrence, from the lakes to the opening into the gulf, is rather over 600 miles.
The great lakes of the St. Lawrence basin cover a surface of nearly 100,000 square miles—an area larger than that of Great Britain. Lakes Ontario and Erie, connected by the Niagara river, continue the direct line of the St. Lawrence, Lake Erie more especially lying due south-west and north-east; but from the extreme end of this last-named lake the channel of communication takes a sharp curve to the north in the Detroit river, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair river, which link together Lakes Erie and Huron. Lake Huron, the centre of the whole group, stretches back towards the east and south-east in Georgian Bay, while on the north-west it is connected with Lake Michigan by the straits of Michillimackinac or Mackinac, and with Lake Superior by St. Mary's straits and rapids, the Sault St. Marie. The rivers which feed Lake Superior are the head waters of the St. Lawrence, and one of them, the St. Louis, which enters the lake at its extreme western end, has its source hard by the source of the Mississippi. The total length of lake and river on the line of the St. Lawrence is over 2,000 miles.
It has been said that Lakes Ontario and Erie continue the main course of the St. Lawrence in its south-westerly and north-easterly direction, that the channel which feeds Lake Erie at its western end comes down from the north, and that the central lake which is then reached—Lake Huron—breaks back towards the east. Thus the direct line from Montreal to the centre of the lake system is not up the St. Lawrence, but along one of its largest tributaries, which enters the main river at Montreal. This tributary is the Ottawa, flowingfrom the north-west in a course broken by falls and rapids. One hundred and thirty miles from its confluence with the St. Lawrence, just below the Chaudière falls, now stands the city of Ottawa, the capital of the Canadian Dominion, connected with Lake Ontario by the Rideau canal; and rather under 200 miles above Ottawa, where the Mattawa river enters from the west, there is nearly continuous water communication in a due westerly direction with Lake Nipissing, which lake is in turn connected by the French river with the great inlet of Lake Huron known as Georgian Bay. Champlain early explored this route—the direct route to the west, and along it as far as Lake Nipissing now runs the Canadian Pacific Railway. French river flows into the northern end of Georgian Bay. At its south-easternmost end, that bay runs into the land in the direction of Lake Ontario; and in the middle of the broad isthmus between the two lakes lies Lake Simcoe.
Such in rough outline is the basin of the St. Lawrence. It is a network of lakes and rivers which finds no parallel, unless it be in Central Africa. The present Dominion of Canada is not merely a political federation; it is a federation of regions which are geographically separate from each other. There is the eastern seaboard, the old Acadia; there is the basin of the St. Lawrence; there are the plains of the North-West and the regions of the Hudson Bay; and there are the lands of the Pacific coast. Only one of these four regions, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was the main scene of early Canadian history. Acadia comes into the story, it is true, but until the eighteenth century only indirectly, in connexion with the English colonies on the Atlantic coast rather than with the French in Canada. English and French collided on the shores of Hudson Bay; they collided also in Newfoundland; but Hudson Bay and Newfoundland alike were outside the sphere of Canada. The great prairies of the North-West were a possibility of the distant future; but nottill the days of railways did the western half of the present Dominion come within the range of practical politics. Along the St. Lawrence and its tributaries the drama of Canadian history was played; the furthest horizon was the Mississippi and the whole line of the lakes; a nearer view was bounded by the Ohio valley; while the immediate foreground was formed by the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Lake Ontario, the centremost point being the confluence of the Richelieu with the main river.
Movement, constant movement, these waterways suggested; exploration, adventure, and ultimately conquest; pressing onward by strength or skill through a boundless area, with something unknown always beyond; making portages round impossible rapids, forcing paths through interminable forests, dealing with half-hidden foes. The land was one for the traveller, the explorer, the missionary, the soldier, the hunter, the fur-trader, but not so much for the settler and the agriculturist. Thus it was that the age of adventurers was perpetuated along the St. Lawrence, while the English colonists between the Alleghanies and the sea were living steady lives attached to the soil.
The great motive force of modern adventure was, as has been seen, the search for a direct route to the East. Engaged in this search Henry Hudson, in 1609, piloted the Dutch into the Hudson river.7Champlain's first expedition up the Ottawa was due to a lying tale that along that river had been found a way to the sea. La Salle, the explorer of the Mississippi, had his mind ever set on the East, and his Seigniory above Montreal was named La Chine; for, 'likeChamplain and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the south sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and Japan.'8Many long years passed before the geography of North America was known with any accuracy, and in the meantime the recesses of the continent, from which the rivers flowed, seemed to hide the secret of a thoroughfare by the West to the East. Similarly, from the time when Columbus sought for and thought he had found the Indies in the New World, down to our own day, the natives of America have been known as Indians.
7Hudson in 1609 sought for a North-West Passage about the fortieth degree of latitude. 'This idea had been suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the western ocean by the north of Virginia.' SeeA Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland,by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam, Frederick Müller, 1868), Introd. pp. xxv, xxvi.
8Parkman'sLa Salle and the Discovery of the Great West(1885 ed.), p. 8.
The two native races, with which the history of Canada is mainly concerned, are the Algonquins and the Huron Iroquois. The former were far the more numerous of the two, and were spread over a much larger area. They included under different names the Indians of the lower St. Lawrence, of Acadia, New England, and the Atlantic states as far as the Carolinas—the Montagnais, the Abenakis, the Micmacs, the Narragansetts, the Pequods, and others. The Delawares, too, were members of the race, and Algonquin tribes were to be found on the Ottawa, at Lake Nipissing, on the further shores of the great lakes, in Michigan and Illinois. From the day when Champlain joined forces with them against their hereditary foes the Iroquois, they ranged themselves for the most part on the side of the French.
The Hurons or Wyandots and the Iroquois were distinct from the Algonquins and akin to each other. When Cartier visited the St. Lawrence, the native towns which he found on the sites of Quebec and Montreal seem to have been inhabited by Indians of this race; but by Champlain's time the towns had disappeared, and those who dwelt in them had sought other strongholds. Though related in blood and speech, these two groups of tribes were deadly foes of each other. The Hurons, like the Algonquins, were allied to theFrench; the Iroquois, guided partly by policy and partly by antipathy to the European intruders into Canada and their Indian friends, were as a rule to be found in amity with the English. The region of the upper St. Lawrence and of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, was the home of the Huron Iroquois race. The Huron country lay between Georgian Bay of Lake Huron and Lake Simcoe. South of the Hurons, the northern shore of Lake Erie and both sides of the Niagara river were held by the Neutral Nation, neutral as between the Iroquois and the Hurons, and akin to both. The Eries on the southern side of Lake Erie, and the Andastes on the lower Susquehanna, were also of Huron Iroquois stock; but the foremost group of the race, the strongest by far, though not the most numerous, of all the North American Indians, were the Iroquois themselves, the celebrated Five Nations of Canadian story.
The Erie canal, which, in its 352 miles of length, connects Lake Erie at Buffalo with the Hudson river at West Troy and Albany, runs through the country of the Five Nations. That country extended along the southern side of Lake Ontario from the Genesee river on the west to the Hudson on the east, while due north of the Hudson, the outlet of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, the Richelieu river, was in old days known as the river of the Iroquois. The Mohawk river, along which the Erie canal is now carried, was, on the Atlantic side, the highway to the land of the Iroquois, and it bore the name of the best known of the Five Nations, the whole confederacy being sometimes spoken or written of as Mohawks.9The route up the river provided nearly continuous communication by water between the Hudson and Lake Ontario. From its confluence with the Hudson the Mohawk was followed to the head of its navigation, whence there was a short portage of about four milesto Wood Creek, a stream running into the Oneida lake, and the Oneida lake was linked to Lake Ontario by the Oswego river. All this line was under Iroquois control; and the westernmost of the Five Nations, the Senecas, commanded also the trade route to Lake Erie.
9The Mohawks, however, were not the strongest of the five in number. They were outnumbered by the Senecas.
The name 'Iroquois' is said to be of French origin: the true title of the Five Nations was an Indian word,10signifying 'people of the long house.' Their dwellings were oblong in form, often of great length; and, as were their dwellings, so also was their dwelling-place. Side by side the Five Nations stretched in line from west to east, as may be told by lakes and rivers in New York State, which to this day bear their names. Farthest to the west were the Senecas; next came the Cayugas, the people of the marsh. The third in line, the central people of the league, within whose borders was the federal Council house, were the Onondagas, the mountaineers; the Oneidas followed; and easternmost of all were the Mohawks.11
10Hodenosaunee.
11In a report of a committee of the Council held at New York, Nov. 6, 1724, on the subject of a petition of the London merchants against the Act of 1720, given in Colden'sHistory of the Five Indian Nations of Canada(3rd ed., London, 1755), p. 226, the Five Nations are placed as follows: the Mohawks but 40 miles due west of Albany, and within the English settlements; the Oneidas about 100 miles west of Albany, and near the head of the Mohawk river; the Onondagas about 130 miles west of Albany; the Cayugas 160; and the Senecas 240.
In all the history of European colonization no group of savages, perhaps, ever played so prominent a part as the Iroquois; none were so courted and feared; none made themselves felt so heavily for a long period of years together. This fact was not due to their numbers, for they were comparatively few, and Parkman estimates that 'In the days of their greatest triumphs their united cantons could not have mustered four thousand warriors.'12Yet they attacked andblotted out other Indian races equal to or outnumbering themselves. They nearly destroyed the French settlements in Canada; and all through the contest between Great Britain and France in America, they were a force to be reckoned with by either side. Their alliance was sought, their enmity was dreaded. Their strength was due to the geographical position which they held, and to their national characteristics; while their policy was influenced by the differing conditions of the white people with whom they had to deal. Their home has been described. It was the southern frontier of central Canada, the borderland between the French and English spheres of trade and settlement. Here they lived, in a position where a weak race would have been ground in pieces between opposing forces, but where a strong race, conscious of its advantages and able to use them, could more than hold its own. 'Nothing,' wrote Charlevoix, 'has contributed more to render them formidable than the advantage of their situation, which they soon discovered, and know very well how to take advantage of it. Placed between us and the English, they soon conceived that both nations would be obliged to court them; and it is certain that the principal attention of both colonies, since their settlement, has been to gain them or at least to engage them to remain neuter.'13
12Conspiracy of Pontiac(1885 ed.), vol. i, chap. i, p. 21. Charlevoix says: 'All their forces joined together have never amounted to more than 5,000 or 6,000 fighting men' (Letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguières,Engl. tr., London, 1763, p. 185). On the other hand, inA Concise Account of North America,by Major Robert Rogers (London, 1765), p. 206, it is stated that 'when the English first settled in America they (the Iroquois) could raise 15,000 fighting men.'
13Charlevoix, as above, pp. 184-5.