After dispatching theGriffinhomeward, La Salle pushed on in canoes to the south-eastern end of Lake Michigan. There, at the mouth of the St. Joseph river, which he called the Miami, he built a fort. December came on, but forward he went, up the St. Joseph, across to the Kankakee, a tributary of the Illinois, and down that stream and the Illinois river to where the Illinois Indians were encamped for the time near the present town of Peoria. His plan had been to build another ship on the Illinois, and sail down that river and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
The new year, 1680, opened badly for his enterprise. The Indians were suspicious, his men were deserting, no news had come of the ill-fatedGriffin. Yet he held staunchly to his purpose. Again he reared a fort—Fort Crèvecoeur—a little lower down the Illinois than the Indian camp, and again in the far-off wilds, in dead of winter, he turned his men to shipbuilding. Without fittings and supplies it was impossible to proceed, and, accordingly, he determined to go back himself and bring the needed stores. Leaving Tonty in charge of the fort, he retraced his steps to Lake Michigan. At Fort Miami he learnt beyond question the loss of theGriffin. Across the then unknown peninsula of Michigan he took his way, reached the Detroit river, struck Lake Erie, and, passing by way of Niagara, arrived at Fort Frontenac in sixty-five days from leaving the Illinois, having in March and April achieved a feat of travel almost unparalleled even in the early history of Canada. Going down to Montreal, he obtained supplies, and again set his face undaunted to the West.
As he came and went, he heard of nothing but disaster. The men left at Fort Crèvecoeur under Tonty's command broke out in open mutiny, and some of them were intercepted on their way back to Fort Frontenac, having destroyed the forts on the Illinois and St. Joseph, looted their employer's property at Michillimackinac and Niagara, and being mindedto crown their villainy by killing La Salle himself. They met their fate—were shot or imprisoned—and La Salle pushed on to Tonty's succour. Towards the close of the year he was back on the Illinois river, only to find a scene of utter desolation. In his absence, the Iroquois had invaded the land and swept all before them. Skeletons of men and women, empty huts, an abandoned fort, the hull of a half-built ship, all told a tale of brutish warfare and a ruined enterprise. Tonty was not to be found; and, after following the Illinois down to its confluence with the Mississippi, La Salle returned to Lake Michigan, and wintered on the St. Joseph river at Fort Miami, which had been destroyed by the mutineers but was again rebuilt.
With the spring of 1681 there came a gleam of hope. The western Indians, terror-stricken by the Iroquois—and Indian immigrants from the east, driven out by the English colonists—gathered for protection to the brave, enduring Frenchman, took him for their leader, and hearkened to his word. News came that Tonty was in safety at Green Bay; and at length, about the end of May, La Salle and he joined hands again at Michillimackinac. Tonty had a tale of heroism to tell. Left in charge of the garrison at Fort Crèvecoeur, he had gone, according to his leader's instructions, to prospect a site for a fort a little higher up the river. When his back was turned, his followers destroyed the fort, carried off the stores, and left him with five other Frenchmen, two of whom were Recollet friars, among the Illinois Indians. True to his trust, he stayed among them, when the hordes of the Five Nations broke in, bent on destruction. Between the contending forces he held his life in the balance, vainly striving to stem the tide of massacre; and, having done all that man could do, found his way back to the lakes, saved by his own fearless honesty and by respect for the French name.
Of the expedition which started in the ill-fatedGriffin,there was still another prominent member to be accountedfor. This was Father Hennepin. Before La Salle turned home from Fort Crèvecoeur in the spring of 1680, he sent two Frenchmen of his company, and with them Father Hennepin, to explore and to trade on the upper Mississippi. Hennepin and his companions went down the Illinois; and, ascending the Mississippi, fell among the Sioux or Dakota Indians. Carried off to the Sioux lodges, in the present State of Minnesota, the Frenchmen sojourned among them for some months, half captives and half guests, until they were found by Du Luth, fur-trader andcoureur de bois,who had already explored these regions, and had crossed from Lake Superior to the Mississippi by the line of the St. Croix river. In his company, Hennepin returned up the Wisconsin; and, before the year 1680 ended, was safe at Michillimackinac. In the following year he went back to Montreal; and soon afterwards, returning to Europe, published the book to which reference has already been made. He was the first European to describe the upper Mississippi and its tributaries, and the Falls of St. Anthony preserve the name of his patron saint—St. Anthony of Padua.
The descent to the sea, which in after years he falsely claimed to have made, was soon afterwards achieved by La Salle. After rejoining Tonty at Michillimackinac, he went back with him to Fort Frontenac and Montreal, and once more procured men and money to renew his enterprise. Again turning west, he reached Fort Miami late in the autumn of 1681, and on the shortest day his expedition left Lake Michigan. Crossing from the St. Joseph to the Chicago creek, and from the latter to the Des Plaines river, the northern tributary of the Illinois, they embarked—fifty-four Frenchmen and Indians, including thirteen women and children—in six canoes, and took their way steadily down stream. They joined the Mississippi, they passed the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio. Halfway between the Ohio and the Arkansas,on the east bank of the Mississippi, they built and manned a small wooden fort, naming it Fort Prudhomme after one of their number who for a while lost himself in the woods. Again holding on their course, under softer skies than those of Canada, they reached the mouth of the Arkansas river, whence Joliet and Marquette had turned back; and there, among friendly and wondering Indians, they proclaimed the French King lord of the land. Below the Arkansas they came to other Indian tribes, such as the Spaniards had known, who, under dome-shaped roofs, worshipped the sun. At length the river parted into three channels, as it neared the sea; and, dividing into three parties, the bold voyagers soon met again on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.
It was April 9, 1682, when, on the southernmost edge of the new domain, a column was reared inscribed with the arms of France and with the name ofLouis le Grand. The secret of the great river was won at last, from its source to its mouth; and, claiming all the lands which it watered for the Crown of France,8La Salle called them by the name 'Louisiana.'
8In La Salle's proclamation the basin of the Ohio was excluded from Louisiana, as the words are 'from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio' (Parkman'sLa Salle, 12th ed., p. 286).
His canoes could not face the open sea, so the explorers retraced their course up stream. They suffered from want of food, the natives attacked them, and La Salle himself was sorely stricken by fever, which kept him many weeks at Fort Prudhomme. It was not till September that he reached Michillimackinac, and rejoined Tonty, who had gone on before him. The winter of 1682-3 was spent in establishing a colony of French and Indians on the Illinois. The place selected for the purpose was on the southern bank of the river, some distance above the site of Fort Crèvecoeur, where a high precipitous cliff towered over wood and stream. The rock had been marked by La Salle in his former sojourn onthe river, and it was during Tonty's visit to the spot9that Fort Crèvecoeur was looted and left. Had the Illinois river been the Rhine, the rock would in mediaeval times have been crowned by the castle of a border noble; and on its summit was now built a wooden fort, Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Round the fort the Indians gathered for protection and for trade, the peasantry as it were of the western wilderness, clustering under the shelter of a feudal stronghold; for in virtue of the royal patent, La Salle was the Seignior of the place. It promised to be a strong outpost of French dominion, if its connexion with Canada was kept intact.
9Seeabove. A full description of the rock, known afterwards as 'Starved Rock,' is given in Parkman'sLa Salle(12th ed.), pp. 293-4, and note.
New France was made by a few individual men, of whom La Salle was one. Their work was perpetually undone by want of efficient co-operation, or rather by efficient antagonism, on the part of their fellow countrymen. Fort Frontenac, Niagara, armed and trading vessels on the upper lakes, Fort Miami, where the lakes end, a fort on the Illinois—constituted the basis of a scheme worthy of support, but support was wanting. Frontenac had been recalled in 1682; and his successor, La Barre, leagued with the enemies of La Salle, cut off his supplies, detained his men, maligned him to the King, seized his Seigniory at Fort Frontenac, and sent an officer to take possession of the fort on the Illinois. La Salle had but one remedy left, to appeal to the King in person; and with that object he sailed for France in 1683, never to see Canada again. His troubled fighting life was soon to end, and its closing scenes were crowded with disaster. He seems to some extent to have lost his balance, to have acted with insufficient knowledge, and to have changed hardihood into recklessness. Yet in all that he attempted there was continuity of aim from first to last, and his final wild adventure, as it seemed to be, had its bearing on the story of the Canadian Dominion.
The patent, which had been given to him in 1678, authorized discovery, trade, and the building of forts, but said nothing of founding colonies. The policy of the French Government was always in the main a forward policy; but the French King and his ministers had the good sense to discourage proposals for colonizing the backwoods, because they saw the obvious danger of dispersing through a large area the scanty population of New France. It was therefore easy for La Salle's enemies to denounce his schemes as opposed to the royal will, as drawing off colonists from the St. Lawrence, where they were sorely needed, and teaching the able-bodied men of Canada to become nothabitansbutcoureurs de bois. These were the charges which La Salle had to rebut. He met them by propounding a still bolder plan than his former ventures, and he induced the King to give his sanction to an enterprise for French colonization on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
It happened that, at the date when he arrived in Paris, there was bad blood between France and Spain, resulting for a short space in open war. The Spaniards claimed to exclude French ships from the Gulf of Mexico, and King Louis, with his minister Seignelay, Colbert's son, contemplated meeting these claims by taking and holding a post on the Gulf. Some scheme of the kind had already been submitted to them by a Spanish refugee from Peru, Count Penalossa by name; and when La Salle advanced similar proposals, suggesting the establishment of a French colony on or near the mouth of the Mississippi, to be connected with Canada, and to be the basis for attacking and conquering the northern province of Mexico, New Biscay, his words fell on willing ears. He spoke with authority. Alone among Frenchmen at the Court of France, he had reached the mouth of the great river, and could tell to a King, with lust of conquest, a story of lands to be won for France, and of peoples ready to follow her lead.
The result was that La Salle's rivals in Canada were discomfited, and peremptory orders were sent to La Barre to restore his Seigniory at Fort Frontenac and his station on the Illinois; while an expedition, destined for the Gulf of Mexico, was fitted out at La Rochelle, and eventually sailed on July 24, 1684.
What was in La Salle's mind in suggesting this southern adventure can only be conjectured. Was it the last desperate stake of a ruined gambler? Or was it an over-sanguine attempt to realize the great object of his life, to master the far West by moving up instead of down its waterways, by entering not through Canada, where every step would be dogged by jealousy and intrigue, but through the mouths of the Mississippi, where climate and natives would be less formidable foes than the Governor of Canada and his unscrupulous clique of confederates? If, as it is reasonable to suppose, he still clung with the determination of his character to the western enterprise, in which he had already achieved so much, he added to it a highly-coloured picture of conquest in Mexico; and he drew his map of Mexico as adjoining the lands on the Mississippi, omitting in ignorance most of the wide area of intervening territory, now included in the State of Texas.
Four vessels set sail, freighted with all things necessary to found a colony, carrying soldiers, artisans, married women, and young girls. They were a doomed company; from first to last all went wrong. There was divided command, and Beaujeu, the admiral of the ships, a Norman like La Salle, had with some reason little confidence in the expedition or its leader. They made in the first instance for St. Domingo, but one of the four ships which was carrying the stores was cut off by Spanish buccaneers before reaching the island. At St. Domingo, La Salle was laid low with fever; and, while he was between life and death, his followers rioted and sickened on shore. After a delay of two months, theexpedition started again, weakened by desertion and disease. The ships entered the Gulf of Mexico, passed—without knowing it—the mouths of the Mississippi, and on New Year's Day, 1685, anchored off the coast of Texas. Somewhere on this coast, in the vicinity either of Matagorda Bay or of Galveston Bay, La Salle effected a landing, where a series of lagoons that lined the shore concealed, as he thought, the main outlet of the Mississippi. Disaster still attended the enterprise: one of the ships was wrecked on the reefs, the natives of the land proved unfriendly; and when Beaujeu, the admiral, having given what help he could, sailed away in the middle of March, he left behind on desolate shores a despondent band of French men and women groping for a river which could not be found, in present trouble and without clear guidance for the future.
Skirting the sea-line, the would-be colonists had reached a large bay, into the head of which a river ran; and on the banks of this stream La Salle formed a settlement, to which, as to his colony on the Illinois, he gave the name of Fort St. Louis. Gathered within palisades, the settlers worked and waited, dwindling in numbers, while their leader explored, but explored in vain. Setting out at the end of October, 1685, La Salle returned in the following March, having accomplished nothing and having lost his last vessel, a small frigate, theBelle. Again in a month's time, towards the end of April, 1686, he set out to make his way to Canada; once more, in October, he returned to the fort, baffled and disappointed. His followers were sadly reduced in numbers: of some 180, no more than forty-five were left; and of them he could trust but few. Return to France was cut off, and from France time had shown that no help was forthcoming. There was no alternative but to make one more attempt to reach Canada, and thence to bring rescue to the fort in Texas.
It was a forlorn hope at best, but the attempt was made.Half of the company remained at the fort. The others, including La Salle's brother, the Abbé Cavelier, and two young nephews, followed La Salle himself on his northward journey. It was on January 7, 1687, that the party set out to make their way painfully over prairies, across rivers, through forest, thicket, and scrub. On March 19, near the Trinity river, La Salle fell dead, ambushed and shot by his own men. No career ever had a more squalid or pitiable ending. It ended in commonplace mutiny and murder. Three or four scoundrels, discontented and badly handled, nursed their personal grudges against a severe and domineering leader, until, in an outbreak of irritation, they killed three of his immediate following and the leader himself.
The brother escaped; so did one of the nephews, and Joutel, a gardener's son from Rouen—the most honest and capable of the band—who afterwards told the unvarnished tale. They companied for a while with the murderers, roaming among the Indians of the west, until one and another of the guilty men fell by each other's hands or strayed into savagery. In the end seven Frenchmen, with the help of Indian guides, reached the Arkansas river, found an outpost established there by Tonty, made their way thence to the Illinois, and so to Canada and France. On the Illinois and in Canada they concealed, from policy or fear, the fact of La Salle's death. In the dead man's name his brother, the coward priest, obtained from Tonty advances for his home journey; and it was not till after he was safe in Europe, in the autumn of 1688, that the tragedy came to light.
Few seemed to care. A man had gone, who by the age of forty-three had achieved great deeds, had dared and suffered much; but he was a man who had few friends and many enemies, and he served a Government in whose eyes failure was a crime, and to which gratitude was unknown.An order was given that, if the murderers reappeared in Canada, they should be arrested, and with that order the name of La Salle passed out of official ken.
The Government made no attempt to relieve the hapless exiles in Texas. They were left to perish, just as, many years before, the Huguenot settlers in Florida had been abandoned and betrayed. Tonty alone was mindful of his friend. Already, in 1686, before La Salle had started on his last march, he had descended the Mississippi to its mouth, and had searched the coast in vain, hoping to bring succour and relief; and when, in the autumn of 1688, he knew the full truth, again he started, to save if possible the remnant of the expedition. He penetrated to the Red river and beyond, but could not reach the fort in Texas; and it was from Spanish sources that the fate of the last settlers was afterwards known. An expedition from Mexico, sent to root out the intruders, found the fort a desolate ruin. The Indians had been beforehand in the work of destruction, and had butchered or carried off the inmates, two or three of whom exchanged captivity among savages for Spanish prisons.
Such was the end of La Salle's last venture—misery, ruin, death, and, for the time, comparative oblivion. Yet his name lives in history and deserves to live, and his work was not all undone. We look back not merely on his hardihood and his sufferings. We see in him not only an explorer of the boldest type; but he stands out pre-eminently as the man, who, above all others, grasped the conception of a North American dominion, which should be from sea to sea—based on the great geographical factor in North America, its nearly continuous water communication—and in which the natives of North America should be banded together in war and peace, under the leadership of France. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, by river and lake, his vision was that Frenchmen and their native subjects should come and go, carrying from fort tofort, from settlement to settlement, the produce of forest and prairie, the wealth of the West.
It was a great conception, too great to be realized; but it harmonized with the genius of the French people. Their gift was to be ever moving, their strength was not to sit still. What success they won was on the lines that La Salle marked out. With all his failures, he knew the land and he knew his race.
The eighteenth century had not ended before the colonization of Louisiana became more than a dream. Tonty continued to urge it. The English threatened to take it in hand; Spain was reasserting her claim to the ownership of the Gulf of Mexico; and, lest the French should be excluded altogether, Le Moyne d'Iberville, best of Canadian leaders, obtained permission to sail for the Mississippi. More skilful than La Salle, or better informed, he reached its mouth in March, 1699; but the first settlements were made to the east of the river, at Biloxi in the present State of Mississippi, and on Mobile Bay. It was not till the year 1718 that the city of New Orleans was first founded by Bienville, Iberville's brother, who at intervals governed Louisiana for many years. Bandied about from Crown to company, and from company to Crown, the prey of speculators, the scene, like Canada itself, of artificial settlement and regulated colonization, Louisiana made but slow progress. Yet in time it became a factor to be reckoned with in North American history, and to connect it with Canada was in the eighteenth century the aim of the rulers of New France.
In 1702, Tonty left Fort St. Louis on the Illinois to join Iberville in the south, and, except for a few years at a little later date, that fort was abandoned. The Indians, too, who had gathered round it, dispersed; some of them moved down to the Mississippi; and connexion between Canada and Louisiana was afterwards sought not so much by the Illinois river, as by the line of the Ohio, the earliest scene of La Salle's discoveries.
ACADIA ANDHUDSONBAY
ACADIA ANDHUDSONBAY
In the last chapter the main stream of Canadian history has been followed down to the Treaty of Utrecht. New France was essentially the colony on the St. Lawrence; but with the story of Canada proper the story of Acadia is interwoven, and Acadia under another name now forms part of the Canadian Dominion. To complete the tale to 1713, it is necessary to go back to the early days of settlement in the present Maritime Provinces of the Dominion. Some notice must also be made of English commercial enterprise on the northern side of Canada, the shores of Hudson Bay.
Acadia, Acadie—a name which the French took from the Indians1—included an ill-defined region. Whoever held it, at any given time, naturally claimed as large an area as possible, and, after it was ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, the question of the boundary was a fruitful source of trouble. Under the French, Acadia was roughly coterminous with the present provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and part of the State of Maine; but Acadia proper was the peninsula of Nova Scotia. There, and on the immediately adjoining coast of the mainland, the fighting and the raids took place. It was not until after the Peace of Utrecht was signed that Cape Breton Island, whose name recalls the nationality of early voyagers to North America, became, under the new title of Île Royale, a renowned stronghold of France; while Prince Edward Island, the Île deSt. Jean, played little part in the early history of North America.
1Seeabove, note.
Linked to the continent by the isthmus of Chignecto, sixteen miles in breadth, the peninsula of Nova Scotia runs for some 300 miles north-east and south-west, parallel to the North American coast. From that coast it is separated on the southern side of the isthmus by the Bay of Fundy—the Baie Françoise as it was called in old days—a bay into which the sea runs strong and which divides at the head, forming on the left, the mainland side, Chignecto Bay, on the right the Basin of Mines. The shores of this latter land-locked basin were in the eighteenth century a well-known scene of Acadian settlement, and here stood the village of Grand Pré. On the same side of Nova Scotia, lower down than the Basin of Mines, is Annapolis harbour, better known in old days as Port Royal. The opposite sides of New Brunswick and Maine are deeply indented by the estuaries of various rivers—the St. John, the St. Croix, now the border stream between Canada and the United States, and, further south, the Penobscot and the Kennebec, names that constantly occur in the story of Acadian and New England warfare. Cape Sable—the sand cape—is the southernmost point of Nova Scotia: midway on the Atlantic side of the peninsula is Halifax harbour, formerly known as Chebucto; and on the north the narrow strait known as the Gut of Canso divides Nova Scotia proper from Cape Breton Island. Cape Breton Island on the south, Newfoundland on the north, mark the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They are the buttresses of the main gateway of Canada.
Sea-girt and sea-beaten was and is Acadia, with broken shores and many bays, where fishermen and freebooters came and went: a land to nurse a hardy race in small and scattered settlements, nestling in nooks and corners by inlets of the sea. Its importance did not lie in natural riches, but in its geographical position. It was the borderland of French andEnglish colonization. Whoever held in strength Acadia and Cape Breton on the one side, and Newfoundland on the other, could command the river of Canada.
Taking the two spheres of colonization, the seaboard settlements of the English on the one hand, the inland river settlements of the French on the other, it is clear that Acadia naturally belonged to the former; it was within the sphere of which Boston was the centre, not within that which was ruled by Quebec. The coasts of Maine, of New Brunswick, and of Nova Scotia prolong the shores of New England: any dividing line has been made by man not by nature. The Boston fishermen went faring north, not into strange waters or by foreign coasts, for land and sea were as their own. Between Quebec and Port Royal, on the other hand, there was no natural connexion, yet the possession of Acadia was of more vital importance to France than to England. With Acadia in French hands the New England colonies could still grow in strength; but English occupation of Acadia, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland meant the beginning of the end for New France, the closing of the St. Lawrence, if England kept command of the sea. Thus it was that in the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of Utrecht the French King fought hard to keep Acadia, and, thwarted in this endeavour, made the most of Cape Breton Island, rearing in it the strong fortress of Louisbourg.
Acadia then was a borderland, and its history resembled that of other borderlands. Its first settlers were French, and the majority of the scanty population remained French in language, in tradition, in religion, in sympathy; but for years rival adventurers squabbled and fought, with doubtful allegiance to England or France.
We have seen how in 1613 the freebooter Argall,2sailing up from Virginia, destroyed Poutrincourt's settlement at Port Royal. In spite of this disaster, Biencourt,Poutrincourt's son, with a handful of Frenchmen, few but sturdy, still held fast to the shores of Acadia. Among them was a French Huguenot, Claude Étienne de la Tour, who with his son, Charles de la Tour, had come out from France in or about the year 1609. When the Port Royal settlement was broken up, he crossed over to the mouth of the Penobscot, and held a station there until the year 1626, when he was driven out by an expedition from New England. Biencourt appears to have died either in Acadia or in France about the year 1623, and the younger La Tour became the foremost man among the French settlers, holding a small fort near Cape Sable, which seems to have been known by various names—Fort Louis, Fort l'Omeroy or Lomeron, and Fort or Port Latour. In 1627, according to the ordinary account, the father went to France to interest the French Government in the fortunes of Acadia, and to secure the position and title of Governor for his son. It was the year in which Richelieu founded the company of the One Hundred Associates, and in 1628 a French squadron was sent out to America. The ships were intercepted by David Kirke, and Claude de la Tour, who was on board, was carried a prisoner to England.
2Seeabove.
Acadia had by this time acquired a second name, its present name of Nova Scotia. A Scotch scholar of some repute, William Alexander, born near Stirling, became tutor to Prince Henry, son of James VI of Scotland and I of England, and rose to high favour at Court. He was a prolific writer, composed tragedies and sonnets, and after the King's death completed a metrical version of the Psalms which James had begun. In 1621 Sir William Alexander, as he then was, obtained from the King a grant of the Acadian peninsula, Cape Breton Island, and all the mainland from the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence, the whole territory within these wide limits being given the name of New Scotland or Nova Scotia.
The terms of the charter were of the most liberal kind, andAlexander was constituted Lieutenant-General for the King, with practically sovereign powers. The grant was made as an appanage of the kingdom of Scotland; and, in seeking for and obtaining it, Alexander seems to have been stimulated by the fact that an English charter had lately been given to Fernando Gorges in the region of New England. In other words, the patent represented the effort of an energetic Scotchman to bring his country and his people into line with the English in the field of western adventure.
Cape Breton Island he made over to another Scotchman, Sir Robert Gordon, of Lochinvar, and went to work to find settlers for the rest of his domain. His scheme was not taken up warmly; two ships were sent out in 1622 and 1623, but no settlement was formed, and he found himself involved in a debt of £6,000. He tried to rouse enthusiasm for the colonization of New Scotland by publishing a pamphlet entitledAn Encouragement to Colonies;and, finding that it met with little response, he hit upon the device of inducing the King, who a few years before had created baronets of Ulster, to establish also an order of baronets of New Scotland. The recipients of the honour were to have grants of land on the other side of the Atlantic, and the fees which they paid would, it was hoped, recoup past losses and provide funds for future colonization.
King James having died, his successor Charles I, in 1625, renewed Alexander's patent, and formally ratified the creation of the Nova Scotian order, the honours being to a certain extent taken up under pressure from the King. A new expedition was now set on foot, but in the meantime news came that Richelieu had formed a rival company, and that the French were preparing to make good their old title to Acadia. The prospect of foreign competition gave fresh vigour to the enterprise; Kirke offered his services to Alexander, and in 1628 captured Richelieu's squadron; while earlier in the same year four ships in charge ofAlexander's son landed a party of settlers safely at Port Royal, who established themselves on the site of the old French settlement. In the following year Kirke took Quebec.
The elder La Tour, we have seen, was brought a prisoner to England. There he seems to have transferred his allegiance to Great Britain, in the words of an old record to have 'turned tenant'3to the English King. According to one account, he married a maid of honour to the Queen. At any rate, he threw in his lot with Alexander, was created a baronet of Nova Scotia, and in 1630 received for himself and his son—also created a baronet—two baronies in the Nova Scotian peninsula. In the same year he seems to have returned to Acadia with some more Scotch colonists, and vainly attempted to induce his son, who was still holding the fort near Cape Sable, to come over to the British cause, and take up the grant and honours which had been conferred upon him. The son, we read, would yield neither to persuasion nor to force, and the elder La Tour apparently went on to the Scotch settlement at Port Royal.
3Calendar of State Papers,Colonial, 1574-1660, pp. 119-20.
Already, in 1629, the Convention of Susa had been signed between the Kings of England and France. Charles La Tour received a message of encouragement from France; and, coming to terms with his father, crossed over to the mainland, where he built Fort Latour at the mouth of the river St. John.4In 1631 he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor by the French King; and in 1632 the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye restored to France 'all the places occupied in New France, Acadia, and Canada' by British subjects.
4The exact date at which the La Tours founded the fort is very uncertain.
This treaty put an end to Scotch colonization of Acadia, and nothing is now left to tell of Alexander's enterprise beyond the name of Nova Scotia. The Scotch emigrants returnedhome, or were lost among the outnumbering French, and the old station of Port Royal was either at the time or a few years afterwards entirely deserted. The site on the northern or western side of Annapolis Basin was subsequently known as Scots Fort; but the later Port Royal, which Phipps and Nicholson took, was situated five miles away, on the other side of the estuary, and is now the town of Annapolis.
Alexander never made good his losses. He died in 1640, in high honour and position, having been Secretary of State for Scotland and ennobled as Earl of Stirling and Viscount Canada; but he must have learnt, as all who had dealings with the Stuarts learnt, not to put his trust in princes; for his well-meant scheme to make a New Scotland, which should rival New France, ended, through the tortuous policy of the King whom he served, in utter failure.
Isaac de Razilly was sent by Richelieu to receive Acadia back from Alexander's representatives, upon the conclusion of the Treaty of 1632, and to be Governor of the country. With him went out, among other settlers, Nicholas Denys, a native of Tours, and Charles de Menou de Charnizay, known also as the Chevalier d'Aunay. Acadia now became the scene of intestine feuds between Frenchmen with rival claims and interests.
It is exceedingly difficult to trace the relations between the various adventurers, where they went and what they did. Razilly, who was Governor-in-chief, settled at La Héve on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. D'Aunay seems to have driven out the New Englanders from the Penobscot, and taken possession of Pentegoet at its mouth. Charles La Tour held his fort on the estuary of the St. John, his father having died or disappeared from the story, and raided, in or about 1633, an outpost established by the Plymouth settlers at Machias, north of the Penobscot. Denys formed trading stations at Chedabucto, now Guysboro, at the eastern end of the Nova Scotian peninsula, and in Cape Breton Island,leaving to posterity an account of Acadia and Cape Breton, in his book entitledDescription des Costes de l'Amérique Septentrionale.5
5Charlevoix's account is that Acadia was divided into three provinces, both for government and for ownership. Razilly had the superior command over all, and was given Port Royal and the mainland south to New England; Charles La Tour had the Acadian peninsula, excluding Port Royal; and Denys had the northern district from Canso to Gaspé, including Cape Breton Island. This leaves out D'Aunay, and the arrangement, if it existed, was modified, inasmuch as Razilly settled at La Héve, and Charles La Tour was on the river of St. John.
Razilly died in 1635 or 1636; his brother, Claude de Razilly, assigned his rights in Acadia to D'Aunay, and between the latter and Charles La Tour a deadly quarrel ensued. D'Aunay, it would seem, re-established Port Royal on the present site of Annapolis, making it the principal settlement of Acadia instead of La Héve. His rival, La Tour, had strong claims both on France and on Acadia. He had been far longer in the country than D'Aunay, he had in trying circumstances retained his allegiance to the Crown of France, he had been given a commission by the King, and moreover something was owing to him in virtue of the grants which Alexander had made in 1630 to his father and himself, which grants appear to have been subsequently construed into a transfer of the whole of Alexander's patent. However, D'Aunay had the ear of the French Court.
It is stated6that, in 1638, the King prescribed certain boundaries between the two rivals, but the delimitation had no effect; for in 1640 La Tour seems to have attacked Port Royal, with the result that he was taken prisoner with his wife, both being released at the intercession of French priests. In the next year, 1641, D'Aunay obtained an order from home which revoked La Tour's commission and empowered his enemy to seize him, if he refused to submit, and send him prisoner to France. La Tour now turned for help to New England, and, in 1643, after long and scripturaldebates by the Puritans as to the lawfulness of aiding 'idolaters,'7succeeded in hiring four ships at Boston to join him in raiding D'Aunay's property. In the following year, however, an emissary from D'Aunay came to Boston to protest against English interference; and in October, 1644, a convention was concluded between the New Englanders and D'Aunay, providing for mutual peace and free trade.
6By Haliburton in hisHistory of Nova Scotia,vol. i, p. 53.
7The younger La Tour was not, like his father, a Huguenot.
D'Aunay had now the upper hand, and Madame La Tour becomes the heroine of the story. She had followed her husband's fortunes with undaunted courage, and had been to France to plead his cause. Going on to London, she took passage on board ship, the master contracting to take her to Fort Latour. Instead of carrying out his contract, he wasted time in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and finally landed her at Boston, where she brought an action against him and was awarded damages of £2,000. Reaching Fort Latour, she was attacked there by D'Aunay in 1645,8while her husband was absent, and the garrison reduced to a very few men. She held the fort, notwithstanding, with so much determination, and in spite of treachery within the walls, that D'Aunay agreed to a capitulation, by which all the lives of the defenders were to be spared. The terms were broken as soon as he obtained possession of the fort, and the whole of the garrison was put to death, with the exception of Madame La Tour and one man who was spared to act as hangman to the rest. Madame La Tour herself was compelled to witness the execution with a rope round her neck, and three weeks afterwards she died.
8According to Haliburton, D'Aunay besieged Madame La Tour in the fort twice, being beaten off the first time. Kingsford gives the date of the siege as 1647.
Ruined and an outlaw, La Tour found his way to Newfoundland, where he tried in vain to enlist the aid of theEnglish governor, Sir David Kirke. He is said also to have visited Quebec and Hudson Bay, and in his distress to have made an ill return for the kindness which had been shown to him at Boston, by raiding a ship from that port and ejecting her crew on to the Nova Scotian coast in the middle of winter. Ultimately, in 1650, D'Aunay died, and La Tour, who must have had a keen eye to business, some little time after married the widow. New complications now arose. A creditor of D'Aunay, Le Borgne by name, came out from France to enforce his claims against D'Aunay's property, and in virtue of those claims to take possession of Acadia. He first attacked Denys9at Chedabucto, and took him prisoner. He was next preparing to attack La Tour, when events took a wholly different turn, and the English again became masters of Acadia.
9Denys went to France and secured, in 1654, the restitution of his property, together with a commission as Governor from Cape Canso to Cape Rosiers or Race, i.e. of Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. He was then raided by another Frenchman, Giraudière. He seems to have eventually given up his stations in Cape Breton, and in 1679 was at Quebec, old and blind.
Cromwell, in 1654, sent out an expedition to take Manhattan Island from the Dutch, Major-General Sedgwick being in command. Peace being made with the Netherlands, the force intended to drive the Dutch out of Manhattan was turned against the French in Acadia; and in quick succession, Sedgwick reduced the fort at Penobscot, La Tour's station on the St. John, and Port Royal, where Le Borgne was at the time.10Mazarin attempted to recover these posts under the twenty-fifth article of the Treaty of Westminster of November 3, 1655; but, less complaisant than the Kings whopreceded or who followed him, Cromwell refused to entertain the proposals for a transfer.
10Sedgwick was shortly afterwards sent to Jamaica, where he died in June, 1656. In Appendix xxviii to Carlyle'sOliver Cromwell,reference is made to the taking of the French forts in Acadia, with the following characteristic but not very accurate note: 'Oliver kept his forts and his Acadie through all French treaties for behoof of his New Englanders. Not till after the Restoration did the country become French again, and continue such for a century or so.'
La Tour now turned to account the fact that he had been created a Nova Scotian baronet and received a grant from Alexander; he became a British subject; and on August 10, 1656, letters patent were issued by which he became, under the name of Sir Charles La Tour, joint owner of Acadia with Sir Thomas Temple and William Crowne. Very shortly afterwards he sold his interest to Temple, but appears to have remained in Acadia, where he died in 1666.
Temple, who received a commission from Cromwell as Governor of Acadia, and went out there in 1657, laid out money in the country and carried on trade with energy and success. He maintained the existing stations, planted a new settlement at Jemseg on the St. John river, higher up than Fort Latour, and drove out a son of Le Borgne, who attempted to reoccupy La Héve; but, like Alexander before him, he suffered at the hands of the Stuarts, for Charles II, after renewing his commission as Governor and creating him a baronet of Nova Scotia, subsequently, in spite of remonstrances from Massachusetts, restored Acadia to France by the Treaty of Breda, in 1667, in return for French concessions in the West Indies. Temple attempted to dispute the extent covered by the treaty, but with no effect; and, in 1670, the whole area became again a French possession. Temple retired to Boston with a promise of £16,200 which he never received, and finally died in London in 1674.
The above is a bare recital of early days in Acadia, when it was, in effect, no man's land. The story might be made picturesque, with La Tour and his first wife for hero and heroine, with some embellishment of Alexander's scheme, and a little dressing of D'Aunay, Denys, and the other adventurers who come on the scene; but in truth it is a very slender record of two or three Frenchmen and Englishmen, who did a little trade or a little fishing on desolateshores, and who plundered each other in rather squalid fashion—left to themselves by their rulers, except when their acts or their claims had a bearing on international questions.
When Temple retired in 1670 in favour of a new French commander, De Grandfontaine, the total number of settlers in Acadia did not exceed 400. Some new French colonists now came in: the beginning of settlement was made at Chignecto and the Basin of Mines, and communication was for a time opened by land between Acadia and Quebec. The great majority of the French inhabitants were at Port Royal; but Pentegoet on the Penobscot was the seat of government, until, in 1674, it was taken and plundered by a Dutch privateering vessel, the same fate befalling the fort of Jemseg on the St. John river. Chambly, who had succeeded Grandfontaine as Commander in Acadia, was carried off a prisoner to Boston, and Pentegoet was for the time abandoned by the French. Two years later, in 1676, it was occupied by the Dutch; but the latter were in their turn driven out by the New Englanders,11and the place passed into the hands of a Frenchman notable in Acadian border warfare, the Baron de St. Castin.
11In the Government records at The Hague, under date Oct. 27, 1678, there is a claim of the Netherlands West India Company against Great Britain to the forts of Penobscot and St. John in Acadie and Nova Scotia, and a request that they may be allowed to remain in quiet and peaceable possession thereof.
He was a Béarnese, and had come out to Canada as an officer in the Carignan Regiment. Finding, like other Frenchmen, a charm in forest life, he drifted off to Acadia and lived as an Indian among Indians, a devout Roman Catholic, but in other respects a native chief, with his squaws and following of savage warriors. He established himself at Pentegoet, on or near the site of the old fort, where Castine now stands; he raided and was raided; in time of peace making money by trade, in time of war joining in the border forays. For Pentegoet was the southernmoststation of the French, standing on soil claimed by the English, and granted by Charles II to the Duke of York. Similarly, Pemaquid, near the Kennebec, established in 1677, was the northernmost post of the English; and, if there was a line between the two nations, it was between Pentegoet and Pemaquid. But French influence extended to the Kennebec river, and Indian converts of French priests were to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Pemaquid.
In 1676, the war between the New Englanders and the neighbouring Indians, known as Philip's war, came to an end, leaving bitterness between the conquered natives and victorious colonists. Hatred of the English meant love of the French; and the Abenaki Indians of Acadia and Maine, under the tutelage of fanatical and unscrupulous French priests, became trained to enmity with the heretics; many of them migrated to mission stations in Canada; while those who remained behind were ever ready to obey the call to murder and pillage. In Acadia, even more than in Canada proper, the Indian as a convert became the tool of the Frenchman, and the Frenchman lent himself to the barbarism of the Indian. The full effects of the unnatural blend were seen and felt a little later on; but for twenty years after the Treaty of Breda and the restoration of Acadia to France, there was more often peace than war between the English and the French; and the Boston fishermen were, about 1678, licensed for the time being by the French Commandant, La Vallière, to ply their trade on the Acadian coasts.
With some trading of this kind and with a good deal of privateering, the years passed by. Perrot, who had been Governor of Montreal and had distinguished himself even among French officials of the time for corrupt practices, succeeded La Vallière in 1684, with a commission as Governor of Acadia. Still intent on enriching himself by illicit trade, he was recalled in 1687, and his place was taken by Meneval. The latter, like Perrot, was subordinate to theGovernor-General of Canada, and the number of colonists whom he ruled was, according to a census held in 1686, 858, 600 of whom lived at or near Port Royal, and the remainder chiefly at Beaubassin at the head of Chignecto Bay, and on the Basin of Mines.
In 1688, Andros, then Governor of the New England colonies, plundered St. Castin's station at Pentegoet; the French and Indians retaliated, taking the fort of Pemaquid in the following year; and there followed a long series of butcheries and reprisals, of which an account has already been given in a preceding chapter, the taking of Fort Royal by Phipps in 1690, and, in 1710, its final surrender to Nicholson. In the end, the Treaty of Utrecht provided in its twelfth article that 'all Nova Scotia or Accadie with its ancient boundaries' should be 'yielded and made over to the Queen of Great Britain and to her Crown for ever.'
We have seen12that, in 1609, Henry Hudson led Dutchmen into the present State of New York, and left his name to the river on which the city of New York stands. In the following year, he took service under an English syndicate, to make a further attempt to find a North-West Passage to the Indies. In April, 1610, he started in a small ship, theDiscovery,found his way through Hudson Straits into Hudson Bay, wintered at the extreme south-eastern end of James' Bay, and, cast adrift by his mutinous followers in the following summer, never saw home again, 'dearly purchasing the honour of having this large Strait and Bay called after his name.'13The Arctic seas, where he met his death, and where his name has lived through the centuries, were visited again and again by English explorers, still seeking for the North-West Passage. One voyager after another went out, hoping to return by China and the East. In April, 1612, Captain Button set forth with two ships, one of which wasHudson's old vessel, theDiscovery,reached the western coast of Hudson Bay—which was long called after him, Button's Bay—wintered at Port Nelson, at the mouth of the Nelson river, and returned in the autumn of 1613.
12Seeabove.
13Oldmixon'sBritish Empire in America(1741 ed.), vol. i, p. 543.
His instructions had been drawn up by the young Prince of Wales, Prince Henry, who died not long afterwards; and three months after Button started, the merchants at whose expense both his expedition and Hudson's had been fitted out, were incorporated under royal charter as the 'Company of the Merchants of London Discoverers of the North-West Passage,' having the Prince of Wales as governor or 'Supreme Protector,' and including among many well-known names that of Richard Hakluyt.
In 1614, theDiscoverywas sent out again under the command of Captain Gibbons, but returned in the same year, having penetrated no further than Hudson Strait. In 1615, Bylot and Baffin set sail for the North, again taking with them theDiscovery;they too returned in the same year, concluding that the North-West Passage was not to be found by the way of Hudson Straits. Once more, in the next year, 1616, the same men went out, and once more the stout old ship, theDiscovery,carried them, the voyage resulting in the exploration of Baffin Bay. For two years after their return there was a respite from Arctic voyages, but in 1619 Captain Hawkridge led a fresh expedition, which proved a failure.
Much money had now been spent in the attempt to find a North-West Passage, and little had been achieved; but after an interval of twelve years, in 1631, two more Arctic voyages took place. One expedition was commanded by a Yorkshireman, Luke Foxe, the other by Captain Thomas James, who was connected with Bristol. The former was backed by London merchants, the latter was a Bristol venture; but both received sanction and encouragement from the King. James' voyage was unfortunate and barren of result; but Foxe,though he did not find the Passage, which was the one aim and object of all these early attempts, completed the exploration of Hudson Bay, and penetrated further north than previous sailors by the way of what is still known as Fox Channel.
With these two voyages the first chapter in Arctic discovery comes to an end. As in the record of English colonization we have a distinct break between the time of discovery and adventure on the one hand, and the time of trade and settlement on the other, so even in the far North there was a time of exploration, followed after an interval by a time of trade. All the early voyages, which have been recounted above, were voyages of discovery, and, though they were fitted out for the most part by syndicates of merchants, their object was not to bring back furs, or to establish trading stations, but to search for a new route to the East.14
14A most excellent account of the early voyages in search of a North-West Passage is given in Mr. Miller Christy's Introduction to theVoyages of Foxe and James to the North-West(Hakluyt Society, 1894).
Forty years passed away and, in the year 1668, an English ship once more found its way into Hudson Bay. The ship was named theNonsuch,her commander was Captain Zachariah Gillam, and Prince Rupert seems to have had a hand in sending her out. The expedition was designed to establish trade with the Indians, and Gillam wintered in James Bay, near where Hudson had wintered in 1610, building a fort called Charles Fort at the mouth of a river which was named Rupert river. The fort was subsequently known as Fort Rupert or Rupert House. It is stated that this new enterprise was undertaken in consequence of information received from two French settlers in Canada named Radisson and Des Groseilliers, and that the latter was on board Gillam's ship, while Radisson had embarked on another vessel which started from England with Gillam, but put back on account of stress of weather.