Many of the men are in ill health. Gilbert decides to send the invalids home in the Swallow; but he transfers the bold pirate crew of that frigate to the big ship Delight, which carries provisions for the colony. While planning to make St. John's the headquarters of his new kingdom, Sir Humphrey wishes to explore those regions where Cartier had gone and whence the fishing schooners bring such wealth in furs.

August 20 the remainder of his fleet rounds out of St. John's south west for the Gulf of St. Lawrence,—the Delight with the provisions, the Golden Hinde with the majority of the people, the little frigate Squirrel weighted down by artillery stores but under command of Gilbert himself, because the smaller ship can run close ashore to explore. To keep up the spirits of the men, there is much merrymaking. Becalmed off Cape Breton, Sir Humphrey visits the big ship Delight, where the trumpets and the drums and the pipes and the cornets reel off wild sailor jigs. "There was," says the old record, "little watching for danger." Wednesday, August 26, the sounding line forewarned the reefs of Sable Island. Breakers were sighted. The Delight signaled that her captain wanted to shift southwest to deeper water, but Gilbert wanted to enter the St. Lawrence and signaled back to go on northwest. That night a storm raged. The provision ship ran full tilt into the sand banks of Sable Island, and was battered into chips before the other ships could come to rescue. All supplies were lost and all the pirate crew perished but sixteen, who jumped into the pinnace dragging astern, and, with only one oar, half punted, half drifted for seven days till the wave wash carried them to the shores of Newfoundland. There they were picked up by a fishing vessel.

With provisions gone, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colony was doomed. He must turn back. Saturday, August 31, they reversed the course. When halfway across the Atlantic the admiral rowed from the little Squirrel across to the Golden Hinde to have a lame foot treated by the surgeon. "Cheer {29} up," he urged the men. "Next year her Majesty will loan me 1000 pounds, and we shall come again."



As storm was gathering, the men begged him to remain on the larger ship, but Gilbert refused to leave the sailors of the Squirrel. The frigate was as safe for him as for them, he said. Some one called his attention to the fact that the frigate was overweighted with cannon. Gilbert laughed all danger to scorn. Soon afterwards the waves began to break short and high—a dangerous sea for a small, overweighted ship. It had been arranged that both ships should swing lanterns fore and aft to keep each other in sight at night. On the night of September 9 a phosphorescent light was seen to gleam above the mainmast of the Squirrel,—certain sign to the superstitious sailors of dire disaster; but when the Hinde slackened speed, and the great waves threw the vessels almost together, there was Sir Humphrey sitting aloft, book in hand, shouting out, "We are as near Heaven by sea as by land." The Hinde fell to the rear. The Squirrel led away, her stern lanterns lighting a trail across the shiny dark of the tempestuous billows. Suddenly, at midnight, the guiding {30} light was lost. The Squirrel's stern lanterns were seen to descend the pitching trough of a mountain wave, and when the wall of water fell, no light came up. Down into the abyss the little craft had plunged, never to rise again, carrying explorer, treasure hunters, colonists, to a watery grave.

It may be added that the disaster took place halfway across the ocean, and not off Newfoundland, as the ballad relates.

But for all this misfortune, England did not desist. The very next year Raleigh, who had played on the sands with Humphrey Gilbert, sends out his colonists to the Roanoke, and lays the foundations for the beginning of empire in the Southern States. English sailors explore Cape Cod. Ten years after Frobisher had brought home his cargo of worthless stones from Labrador, Davis, the master mariner, is out exploring the waters west of Greenland; and Henry Hudson, the English pilot who had discovered Hudson River, New York, for the Dutch, is retained by the English in 1610 to explore those waters west of Greenland where both Frobisher and Davis reported open passage.

It is midsummer of 1610 when Hudson enters Hudson Straits. The ice jam of Ungava Bay, Labrador, has almost torn his ships' timbers apart and has set fear shivering like an aspen leaf among the crew. Old Juett, the mate, rages openly at Hudson for venturing such a frail ship on such a sea; but when the ship anchors at the west end of Hudson Straits, five hundred miles from the Atlantic, there opens to view another sea,—a sea large as the Mediterranean, that, like the Mediterranean, may lead to another world. It is as dangerous to go back as forward; and forward Hudson sails, southwestward for that sea Drake had cruised off California, the old mate's mutiny rumbling beneath decks like a volcano. South, southwestward, seven hundred miles sails Hudson, past the high rocks and airy cataracts of Richmond Gulf, past silence like the realms of death, on down where Hudson Bay rounds into James Bay and the shallows plainly show this is no way to a western sea, but a blind inlet, bowlder-strewn and muddy as swamps.

{31}



When the ship runs aground and all hands must out to waist in ice water to pull her ashore as the tide comes in, Juett's rage bursts all bounds. As they toil, snow begins to fall. They are winter bound and storm bound in an unknown land. Half the crew are in open mutiny; the other half build winter quarters and range the woods of James Bay for game. Of game there is plenty, but the rebels refuse to hunt. A worthless lad named Green, whom Hudson had picked off the streets of London, turns traitor and talebearer, fomenting open quarrels till the commander threatens he will hang to the yardarm the first man guilty of disobedience. So passes the sullen winter. Provisions are short when the ship weighs anchor for England in June of 1611. With tears in his eyes, Hudson hands out the last rations. Ice blocks the way. Delay means starvation. If the crew were only half as large, Henry Green whispers to the mutineers, there would be food enough for passage home. The ice floes clear, the sails swing rattling to the breeze, but as Hudson steps on deck, the mutineers leap upon him like wolves. He is bound and thrown into the rowboat. With him are thrust his son and {32} eight others of the crew. The rope is cut, the rowboat jerks back adrift, and Hudson's vessel, manned by mutineers, drives before the wind. A few miles out, the mutineers lower sails to rummage for food. The little boat with the castaways is seen coming in pursuit. Guilt-haunted, the crew out with all sails and flee as from avenging ghosts. So passes Henry Hudson from the ken of all men, though Indian legend on the shores of Hudson Bay to this day maintains that the castaways landed north of Rupert and lived among the savages.



Not less disastrous were English efforts than French to colonize the New World. Up to 1610 Canada's story is, in the main, a record of blind heroism, dogged courage, death that refused to acknowledge defeat.

Four hundred French vessels now yearly come to reap the harvest of the sea; in and out among the fantastic rocks of Gaspe, pierced and pillared and scooped into caves by the wave wash, where fisher boats reap other kind of harvest, richer than the silver harvest of the sea,—harvest of beaver, and otter, and marten; up the dim amber waters of the Saguenay, within the shadow of the somber gorge, trafficking baubles of bead and red print for furs, precious furs. Pontgrave, merchant prince, comes out with fifty men in 1600, and leaves sixteen at Tadoussac, ostensibly as colonists, really as wood lopers to scatter through the forests and learn the haunts of the Indians. Pontgrave comes back for men and furs in 1601, and comes again in 1603 with two vessels, accompanied by a soldier of fortune from the French court, who acts as geographer,—Samuel Champlain, now in his thirty-sixth year, with service in war to his credit and a journey across Spanish America.

{33} The two vessels are barely as large as coastal schooners; but shallow draft enables them to essay the Upper St. Lawrence far as Mount Royal, where Cartier had voyaged. Of the palisaded Indian fort not a vestige remains. War or plague has driven the tribe westward, but it is plain to the court geographer that, in spite of former failures, this land of rivers like lakes, and valleys large as European kingdoms, is fit for French colonists.



When Champlain returns to France the King readily grants to Sieur de Monts a region roughly defined as anywhere between Pennsylvania and Labrador, designated Acadia. This region Sieur de Monts is to colonize in return for a monopoly of the fur trade. When other traders complain, De Monts quiets them by letting them all buy shares in the venture. With him are associated as motley a throng of treasure seekers as ever stampeded for gold. There is Samuel Champlain, the court geographer; there is Pontgrave, the merchant prince, on a separate {34} vessel with stores for the colonists. Pontgrave is to attend especially to the fur trading. There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son, Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons. Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with tongues and fists that the sailors threaten to bury them in the same grave to see if they can lie at peace in death.



Before the boats sight Acadia, it is early summer of 1604. Pontgrave leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac. De Monts enters the little bay of St. Mary's, off the northwest corner of Nova Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.

Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill. Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that he is hopelessly lost. The last shafts of {35} sunlight disappear. The chill of night settles on the darkening woods. The priest shouts till he is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl. Aubry wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless ages, . . . on and on, . . . till gray dawn steals through the forest and midday wears to a second night.

Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions. Could the Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him? De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite of fiercest denials. All night cannon were fired from the vessel and bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the priest did not come.

De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay, and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line of wooded meadows like home-land parks. Poutrincourt is so delighted, he at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.

On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks, making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St. John's Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking vainly for more minerals. Westward is another river, known to-day as the Ste. Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. Dochet Island at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site. A fort here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians say leads back to the St. Lawrence. Thinking more of fort than farms, De Monts plants his colony on Ste. Croix River, on an island composed mainly of sand and rock.

While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals. As {36} the vessel coasts near St. Mary's Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the shore. Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement. A hat on the end of a pole is waved weakly from the beach. The men can scarcely believe their senses. It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he disappeared. For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and roots, before he found his way back to the sea.



Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgrave has taken one vessel up the St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the other for supplies. A worse beginning could hardly have been made. The island was little better than a sand heap. No hills shut out the cold winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried in ice jam from the south. As the snow began to fall, padding the stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness of winter in a forest chill their hearts. {37} Cooped up on the island by the ice, they did little hunting. Idleness gives time for repinings. Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little cemetery outside the palisades. De Monts has had enough of Ste. Croix. When Pontgrave comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares to move. Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod, looking for a place to plant the capital of New France. It is amusing to speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste. Croix in August, to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia. While Champlain and Pontgrave volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.

What had De Monts to show for his two years' labor? His company had spent what would be $20,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony. While Champlain hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgrave bartered furs during the winter of 1605-1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits. De Monts remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt and Lescarbot sail on the Jonas with more colonists and supplies for Port Royal.

Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis. To Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland—the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness. {38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The Jonas runs up the French ensign. Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled by the old chief Membertou. He signals back to the watchers behind the gates. Musketry shots ring out welcome. The ship's cannon answer, setting the waters churning. Trumpets blare. The gates fly wide and out marches the garrison—two lone Frenchmen. The rest, despairing of a ship that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgrave and Champlain, overjoyed to find the ship from France. Poutrincourt has a hogshead of wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.



When Pontgrave carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the colonists in Acadia. Poutrincourt and his son {39} attend to trade. Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand pranks of the Paris advocate. First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening, and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his noblesse long enough to wield the hoe. Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond. The weather is almost mild as summer until January. The woods ring to many a merry picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of nobility—the Order of Good Times. Each day one of the number must cater to the messroom table of the fort. This means keen hunting, keen rivalry for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts. And all is done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet. When the chapel bell rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck, truncheon in his hand. The gavel strikes, and there enter the Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand,—moose hump, beaver tail, bears' paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only to out-of-doors men. Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites. Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.

At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master. It is all child's play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.

Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper,—a handwritten sheet giving the doings of the day,—perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing. At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance. As all the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy, Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green. The lawyer's good spirits proved contagious. The French songs that rang through the woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper's {40} labors, were the best antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last. While L'Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell from the blue. Instead of De Monts' vessel there came in spring a fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded. No more money would be advanced. Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt, resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the present all took sad leave of the little settlement—Poutrincourt, Champlain, L'Escarbot—and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for France, where they landed in October, 1607.

Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts—all had failed to establish France in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey's colonists lay bleaching skeletons at the bottom of the sea.



{41}

CHAPTER III

FROM 1607 TO 1635

Argall of Virginia attacks the French—Champlain on the St. Lawrence—Champlain and the Iroquois—Champlain explores the Ottawa—Champlain with the Indians—Discovery of the Great Lakes—War with the Iroquois—Conflicting interests in New France—The English take Quebec

Though the monopoly had been rescinded, Poutrincourt set himself to interesting merchants in the fur trade of Acadia, and the French king confirmed to him the grant of Port Royal. Yet it was 1610 before Baron Poutrincourt had gathered supplies to reestablish the colony, and an ominous cloud rose on the horizon, threatening his supremacy in the New World. Nearly all the merchants supporting him were either Huguenots or moderate Catholics. The Jesuits were all powerful at court, and were pressing for a part in his scheme. The Jesuit, Father Biard, was waiting at Bordeaux to join the ship. Poutrincourt evaded issues with such powerful opponents. He took on board Father La Fleche, a moderate, and gave the Jesuit the slip by sailing from Dieppe in February.

To this quarrel there are two sides, as to all quarrels. The colony must now be supported by the fur trade; and fur traders, world over, easily add to their profits by deeds which will not bear the censure of missionaries. On the other hand, to Poutrincourt, the Jesuits meant divided authority; and the most lawless scoundrel that ever perpetrated crimes in the fur trade could win over the favor of the priests by a hypocritical semblance of contrition at the confessional. Contrition never yet undid a crime; and civil courts can take no cognizance of repentance.

When the ships sailed in to Port Royal the little fort was found precisely as it had been left. Not even the furniture had been disturbed, and old Membertou, the Indian chief, welcomed the white men back with taciturn joy. Pere La Fleche assembles the savages, tells them the story of the Christian faith, then to the beat of drum and chant of "Te Deum" receives, one {42} afternoon, twenty naked converts into the folds of the church. Membertou is baptized Henry, after the King, and all his frowsy squaws renamed after ladies of the most dissolute court in Christendom.

Young Biencourt is to convey the ship back to France. He finds that the Queen Dowager has taken the Jesuits under her especial protection. Money enough to buy out the interests of the Huguenot merchants for the Jesuits has been advanced. Fathers Biard and Masse embark on The Grace of God with young Biencourt in January, 1611, for Port Royal. Almost at once the divided authority results in trouble. Coasting the Bay of Fundy, Biencourt discovers that Pontgrave's son has roused the hostility of the Indians by some shameless act. Young Biencourt is for hanging the miscreant to the yardarm, but the sinner gains the ear of the saints by woeful tale of penitence, and Father Biard sides with young Pontgrave. Instead of the gayety that reigned at Port Royal in L'Escarbot's day, now is sullen mistrust.

The Jesuits threaten young Biencourt with excommunication. Biencourt retaliates by threatening them with expulsion. For three months no religious services are held. The boat of 1612 brings out another Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet; and the Jonas, which comes in 1613 with fifty more men,—La Saussaye, commander, Fleury, captain,—has been entirely outfitted by friends of the Jesuits. By this time Baron de Poutrincourt, in France, was involved in debt beyond hope; but his right to Port Royal was unshaken, and the Jesuits decided to steer south to seek a new site for their colony.



Zigzagging along the coast of Maine, Captain Fleury cast anchor off Mount Desert at Frenchman's Bay. A cross was erected, mass celebrated, and four white tents pitched to house the people; but the clash between civil and religious authority broke out again. The sailors would not obey the priests. Fleury feared mutiny. Saussaye, the commander, lost his head, and disorder was ripening to disaster when there appeared over the sea the peak of a sail,—a sail topped by a little red ensign, the {43} flag of the English, who claimed all this coast. And the sail was succeeded by decks with sixty mariners, and hulls through whose ports bristled fourteen cannon. The newcomer was Samuel Argall of Virginia, whom the Indians had told of the French, now bearing down full sail, cannon leveled, to expel these aliens from the domain of England's King. Drums were beating, trumpets blowing, fifes shrieking—there was no mistaking the purpose of the English ship. Saussaye, the French commander, dashed for hiding in the woods. Captain Fleury screamed for some one, every one, any one, "to fire—fire"; but the French sailors had imitated their commander and fled to the woods, while the poor Jesuit, Gilbert du Thet, fell weltering in blood from an English cannonade that swept the French decks bare and set all sails in flame. In the twinkling of an eye, Argall had captured men and craft. Fifteen of the French prisoners he set adrift in open boat, on the chance of their joining the French fishing fleet off Cape Breton. They were ultimately carried to St. Malo. {44} The rest of the prisoners, including Father Biard, he took back to Virginia, where the commission held from the French King assured them honorable treatment in time of peace; but Argall was promptly sent north again with his prisoners, and three frigates to lay waste every vestige of French settlement from Maine to St. John. Mount Desert, the ruins of Ste. Croix, the fortress beloved by Poutrincourt at Port Royal, the ripening wheat of Annapolis Basin—all fed the flames of Argall's zeal; and young Biencourt's wood runners, watching from the forests the destruction of all their hopes, the ruin of all their plans, ardently begged their young commander to parley with Argall that they might obtain the Jesuit Biard and hang him to the highest tree. To his coming they attributed all the woes. It was as easy for them to believe that the Jesuit had piloted the English destroyer to Port Royal, as it had been ten years before for the Catholics to accuse the Huguenots of murdering the lost priest Aubry; and there was probably as much truth in one charge as the other.

So fell Port Royal; but out round the ruins of Port Royal, where the little river runs down to the sea past Goat Island, young Biencourt and his followers took to the woods—the first of that race of bush lopers, half savages, half noblemen, to render France such glorious service in the New World.

When De Monts lost the monopoly of furs in Acadia, Champlain, the court geographer, had gone home from Port Royal to France. De Monts now succeeds in obtaining a fresh monopoly for one year on the St. Lawrence, and sends out two ships in 1608 under his old friends, Pontgrave, who is to attend to the bartering, Champlain, who is to explore. With them come some of the colonists from Port Royal, among others Louis Hebert, the chemist, first colonist to become farmer at Quebec, and Abraham Martin, whose name was given to the famous plains where Wolfe and Montcalm later fought.

Pontgrave arrived at the rendezvous of Tadoussac early in June. Here he found Basque fishermen engaged in the peltry {45} traffic with Indians from Labrador. When Pontgrave read his commission interdicting all ships but those of De Monts from trade, the Basques poured a fusillade of musketry across his decks, killed one man, wounded two, then boarded his vessel and trundled his cannon ashore. So much for royal commissions and monopoly!



At this stage came Champlain on the second boat. Two vessels were overstrong for the Basques. They quickly came to terms and decamped. Champlain steered his tiny craft on up the silver flood of the St. Lawrence to that Cape Diamond where Cartier's men had gathered worthless stones. Between the high cliff and the river front, not far from the market place of Quebec City to-day, workmen began clearing the woods for the site of the French habitation. The little fort was palisaded, of course, with a moat outside and cannon commanding the river. The walls were loopholed for musketry; and inside ran a gallery to serve as lookout and defense. Houses, barracks, garden, and fresh-water supply completed the fort. One day, as Champlain {46} worked in his garden, a colonist begged to speak with him. Champlain stepped into the woods. The man then blurted out how a conspiracy was on foot, instigated by the Basques, to assassinate Champlain, seize the fort, and stab any man who dared to resist. One of Pontgrave's small boats lay at anchor. Champlain sent for the pilot, told him the story of the plot, gave him two bottles of wine, and bade him invite the ringleaders on board that night to drink. The ruse worked. The ringleaders were handcuffed, the other colonists awakened in the fort and told that the plot had been crushed. The body of Duval, the chief plotter, in pay of the Basques, swung as warning from a gibbet; and his head was exposed on a pike to the birds of the air. Though Pontgrave left a garrison of twenty-eight when he sailed for France, less than a dozen men had survived the plague of scurvy when the ships came back to Champlain in 1609.

Champlain's part had been to explore. Now that his fort was built, he planned to do this by allying himself with the Indians, who came down to trade at Quebec. These were the Hurons and Montaignais, the former from the Ottawa, the latter from Labrador. Both waged ceaseless war on the Iroquois south of the St. Lawrence. After bartering their furs for weapons from the traders, the allied tribes would set out on the warpath against the Iroquois. In June, Champlain and eleven white men accompanied the roving warriors.

The way led from the St. Lawrence south, up the River Richelieu. Champlain's boat was a ponderous craft; and when the shiver of the sparkling rapids came with a roar through the dank forest, the heavy boat had to be sent back to Quebec. Adopting the light birch canoe of the Indian, Champlain went on, accompanied by only two white men. Of Indians, there were twenty-four canoes with sixty warriors. For the first part of the voyage night was made hideous by the grotesque war dances of the braves lashing themselves to fury by scalp raids in pantomime, or by the medicine men holding solemn converse with the demons of earth; the tent poles of the medicine lodge rocked as if by wind, while eldritch howls predicted victory. {47} Then the long line of silent canoes had spread out on that upland lake named after Champlain, the heavily forested Adirondacks breaking the sky line on one side, the Green Mountains rolling away on the other. Caution now marked all advance. The Indians paddled only at night, withdrawing to the wooded shore through the morning mist to hide in the undergrowth for the day. This was the land of the Iroquois.



On July 29, as the invaders were stealing silently along the west shore near Crown Point at night about ten o'clock, there were seen by the starlight, coming over the water with that peculiar galloping motion of paddlers dipping together, the Iroquois war canoes. Each side recognized the other, and the woods rang with shouts; but gathering clouds and the mist rising from the river screened the foes from mutual attack, though the night echoed to shout and countershout and challenge and abuse. Through the half light Champlain could see that the Iroquois were working like beavers erecting a barricade of logs. The assailants kept to their canoes under cover of bull-hide shields till daylight, when Champlain buckled on his armor—breastplate, helmet, thigh pieces—and landing, advanced. There were not less than two hundred Iroquois. Outnumbering the Hurons three times over, they uttered a jubilant whoop and {48} came on at a rush. Champlain and his two white men took aim. The foremost chiefs dropped in their tracks. Terrified by "the sticks that thundered and spat fire," the Iroquois fell back in amaze, halted, then fled. The victory was complete; but it left as a legacy to New France the undying enmity of the Iroquois.

When Champlain came out from France in 1610, he would have repeated the raid; but a fight with invading Iroquois at the mouth of the Richelieu delayed him, and the expiration of De Monts' monopoly took him back to France.

In 1611 trade was free to all comers. Fur traders flocked to the St. Lawrence like birds of passage. The only way to secure furs for De Monts was to go higher up the river beyond Quebec; and ascending to Montreal, Champlain built a factory called Place Royale, with a wall of bricks to resist the ice jam. This was the third French fort Champlain helped to found in Canada.

Presently, on his tracks to Montreal, came a flock of free traders. When the Hurons come shooting down the foamy rapids—here, a pole-shove to avoid splitting canoes on a rock in mid-rush; there, a dexterous whirl from the trough of a back wash—the fur traders fire off their guns in welcome. The Hurons are suspicious. What means it, these white men, coming in such numbers, firing off their "sticks that thunder"? At midnight they come stealthily to Champlain's lodge to complain. Peltries and canoes, the Indians transfer themselves above the rapids, and later conduct Champlain down those same white whirlpools to the uneasy amaze of the explorer.

It is clear to Champlain he must obtain royal patronage to stem the boldness of these free traders. In France he obtains the favor of the Bourbons; and he obtains it more generously because the world of Paris has gone agog about a fabulous tale that sets the court by the ears. From the first Champlain has encouraged young Frenchmen to winter with the Indian hunters and learn the languages. Brule is with them now. Nicholas Vignau has just come back from the Ottawa with a fairy story of a marvelous voyage he has made with the Indians through {49} the forests to the Sea of the North—the sea where Henry Hudson, the Englishman, had perished. As the romance gains the ear of the public, the young man waxes eloquent in detail, and tells of the number of Englishmen living there. Champlain is ordered to follow this exploration up.

May, 1613, he is back at Montreal, opposite that island named St. Helen, after the frail girl who became his wife, preparing to ascend the Ottawa with four white men—among them Vignau. What Vignau's sensations were, one may guess. The vain youth had not meant his love of notoriety to carry him so far; and he must have known that every foot of the way led him nearer detection; but the liar is always a gambler with chance. Mishap, bad weather, Indian war—might drive Champlain back. Vignau assumed bold face.

The path followed was that river trail up the Ottawa which was to become the highway of empire's westward march for two and a half centuries. Mount Royal is left to the rear as the voyageurs traverse the Indian trail through the forests along the rapids to that launching place named after the patron saint of French voyageur—Ste. Anne's. The river widens into the silver expanse of Two Mountains Lake, rimmed to the sky line by the vernal hills, with a silence and solitude over all, as when sunlight first fell on face of man. Here the eagle utters a lonely scream from the top of some blasted pine; there a covey of ducks, catching sight of the coming canoes, dive to bottom, only to reappear a gunshot away. Where the voyageurs land for their nooning, or camp at nightfall, or pause to gum the splits in their birch canoes, the forest in the full flush of spring verdure is a fairy woods. Against the elms and the maples leafing out in airy tracery that reveals the branches bronze among the budding green, stand the silver birches, and the somber hemlocks, and the resinous pines. Upbursting from the mold below is another miniature forest—a forest of ferns putting out the hairy fronds that in another month will be above the height of a man. Overhead, like a flame of fire, flashes the scarlet tanager with his querulous call; or the oriole flits from branch to branch, {50} fluting his springtime notes; or the yellow warbler balances on topmost spray to sing his crisp love song on the long journey north to nest on Hudson Bay. And over all and in all, intangible as light, intoxicating as wine, is the tang of the clear, unsullied, crystal air, setting the blood coursing with new life. Little wonder that Brule, and Vignau, and other young men whom Champlain sent to the woods to learn wood lore, became so enamored of the life that they never returned to civilization.

Presently the sibilant rush of waters forewarns rapids. Indians and voyageurs debark, invert canoes on their shoulders, packs on back with straps across foreheads, and amble away over the portages at that voyageurs' dog-trot which is half walk, half run. So the rapids of Carillon and Long Sault are ascended. Night time is passed on some sandy shore on a bed under the stars, or under the canoes turned upside down. Tents are erected only for the commander, Champlain; and at day dawn, while the tips of the trees are touched with light and the morning mist is smoking up from the river shot with gold, canoes are again on the water and paddle blades tossing the waves behind.

The Laurentian Hills now roll from the river in purpling folds like fields of heather. The Gatineau is passed, winding in on the right through dense forests. On the left, flowing through the rolling sand hills, and joining the main river just where the waters fall over a precipice in a cataract of spray, is the Rideau River with its famous falls resembling the white folds of a wind-blown curtain. Then the voyageurs have swept round that wooded cliff known as Parliament Hill, jutting out in the river, and there breaks on view a wall of water hurtling down in shimmering floods at the Chaudiere Falls. The high cliff to the left and countercurrent from the falls swirl the canoes over on the right side to the sandy flats where the lumber piles to-day defile the river. Here boats are once more hauled up for portage—a long portage, nine miles, all the way to the modern town of Aylmer, where the river becomes wide as a lake, Lake Du Chene of the oak forests. Here camp for the night was made, and leaks in the canoes mended with resin, round fires gleaming red as an angry eye across the {51} darkening waters, while the prowling wild cats and lynx, which later gave such good hunting in these forests that the adjoining rapids became known as the Chats, sent their unearthly screams shivering through the darkness.

Somewhere near Allumette Isle, Champlain came to an Indian settlement of the Ottawa tribe. He camped to ask for guides to go on. Old Chief Tessouat holds solemn powwow, passing the peace pipe round from hand to hand in silence, before the warriors rise to answer Champlain. Then with the pompous gravity of Abraham dickering with the desert tribes, they warn Champlain it is unsafe to go farther. Beyond the Ottawa is the Nipissing, where dwell the Sorcerer Indians—a treacherous people. Beyond the Nipissing is the great Fresh Water Sea of the Hurons. They will grant Champlain canoes, but warn him against the trip. Later the interpreter comes with word they have changed their minds. Champlain must not go on. It is too dangerous. Attack would involve war.

"What," demanded Champlain, rushing into the midst of the council tent, "not go? Why, my young man, here"—pointing to Vignau—"has gone to that country and found no danger."

What Vignau thought at that stage is not told. The Indians turned on him in fury.

"Nicholas, did you say you had visited the Nipissings?"

Vignau hems and haws, and stammers, "Yes."

"Liar," roars the chief. "You slept here every night, and if you went to the Nipissings, you went in a dream." Then to Champlain, "Let him be tortured."

Champlain took the fellow to his own tent. Vignau reiterated his story. Champlain took him back to the council. The Indians jeered his answers and tore the story he told to tatters, showing Champlain how utterly wrong Vignau's descriptions were.

That night, on promise of forgiveness, Vignau fell on his knees and confessed the imposture to Champlain. When the fur canoes came down the Ottawa to trade at Montreal, Champlain accompanied them to the St. Lawrence, and sailed for France. His exploration had been an ignominious failure.

{52} Champlain was ever Knight of the Cross as well as explorer. He longed with the zeal of a missionary to reclaim the Indians from savagery, and at last raised funds in France to pay the expense of bringing four or five Recollets—a branch of the Franciscan Friars—to Quebec in May of 1615. With the peaked hood thrown back, the gray garb roped in at the waist, the bare feet protected only by heavy sandals, the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages.

Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea. Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen, the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brule, his interpreter. In order to hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada, Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from a chance war party.

Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa. Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening {53} on a low-lying, clay-colored lake—the country of the Nipissings, with whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.

In a few sleeps—they tell him—he will reach the Sweet Water Sea. The news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake—French River. This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the bodies of countless French voyageurs. It is more dangerous going with rapids than against them; for the hastening current is sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before the roar of the waterfall has given warning. And the country is barren of game.

As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is dependent on chance fishing. Indian hunters are met,—three hundred of them,—the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their headdress tipped by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is very near the Inland Sea.

It comes as discoveries nearly always come—his finding of the Great Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the region. You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters—long lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels. Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes. Instead of the earthy smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose itself at the horizon. There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your view. The river begins to coil in and out among islands. The amber waters have become sheeted silver. You wind from island to island, islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted pine, islands that are in themselves forests. There is no end to these islands. They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands. Then you see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line. You are not on a river at all. You are on an inland sea. You have been on the lake for hours. One {54} can guess how Champlain's men scrambled from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.

But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea. With the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang. Where these little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.

Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron tribe. How numerous were they? Records differ. Certainly at no time more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children. Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century before.

Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail to the Huron villages. Here he found the missionary. One can guess how the souls of these two heroes burned as the deep solemn chant of the Te Deum for the first time rolled through the forests of Lake Huron.

But now Champlain must to business; and his business is war. Brule and twelve Indians are sent like the carriers of the fiery cross in the Highlands of Scotland to rally tribes of the Susquehanna to join the Hurons against the Iroquois. A wild war dance is held with mystic rites in the lodges of the Hurons; and the braves set out with Champlain from Lake Simcoe for Lake Ontario by way of Trent River. As they near what is now New York state, buckskin is flung aside, the naked bodies painted and greased, and the trail shunned for the pathless woods off the beaten track where the Indians glide like beasts of prey through the frost-tinted forest.

{55}



October 9 they suddenly come on some Onondagas fishing, and they begin torturing their captives by cutting off a girl's finger, when Champlain commands them to desist. Presently the forest opens to a farm clearing where the Iroquois are harvesting their corn. Spite of all Champlain could do, the wild Hurons uttered their war cry and rushed the field, but the Iroquois turned on the rabble and drove them back to the woods. Champlain was furious. They should have waited for Brule to come with their allies; and the foolish attack had only served to forewarn the enemy. He frankly told the Hurons if they were going to fight under his command, they must fight as white men fight; and he set them to building a platform from which marksmen could shoot over the walls of the Iroquois town. But the admonitions {56} fell on frenzied ears. No sooner was the command to advance given than the Hurons broke from cover like maniacs, easy marks for the javelin throwers inside the walls, and hurled themselves against the Iroquois palisades in blind fury, making more din with yelling than woe with shots. Boiling water poured from the galleries inside drove the braves back from the walls, and the poisoned barb of the Iroquois arrows pursued their flight. A score fell wounded, among them Champlain with an arrow in his knee-cap. The flight became panic fast and furious, with the wounded carried on wicker stretchers whose every jolt added agony to pain.



As for Brule, he arrived with the allies only to find that the Hurons had fled, and here was he, alone in a hostile land, with Iroquois warriors rampant as molested wasps. In the swift retreat off the trail Brule lost his way. He was without food {57} or powder, and had to choose between starvation or surrender to the Iroquois. Throwing down his weapons, he gave himself up to what he knew would be certain torture. Had he winced or whined as they tore the nails from his fingers and the hair from his head, the Iroquois would probably have brained him on the spot for a poltroon; but the young man, bound to a stake, pointed to a gathering storm as sign of Heaven's displeasure. The high spirit pleased the Iroquois. They unbound him and took him with them in their wanderings for three years.

The Hurons had promised to convey Champlain back down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, but the defeat had caused loss of prestige. The man "with the stick that thundered" was no more invulnerable to wounds than they. They forgot their promises and invented excuses for not proceeding to Quebec. Champlain wintered with the hunters somewhere north of Lake Ontario, and came down the Ottawa with the fur canoes the next summer. He was received at Quebec as one risen from the dead.

While Champlain had been exploring, New France had not prospered as a colony. Royal patron after royal patron sold the monopoly to fresh hands, and each new master appointed Champlain viceroy. The fur trade merchants could pay forty per cent dividends, but could do nothing to advance settlement. Less than one hundred people made up the population of New France; and these were torn asunder by jealousies. Huguenot and Catholic were opposed; and when three Jesuits came to Quebec, Jesuits and Recollets distrusted each other.

Madam Champlain joined her husband at Quebec, in 1620, to stay for four years, and that same year Champlain built himself a new habitation—the famous Castle of St. Louis on the cliff above the first dwelling. Louis Hebert, the apothecary of Port Royal, is now a farmer close to the Castle of Quebec; and the wife of Abraham Martin has given birth to the first white child born in New France.

Now came a revolutionary change. Cardinal Richelieu was virtual ruler of France. He quickly realized that the monopolists {58} were sucking the lifeblood of the colony in furs and were giving nothing in return to the country. In 1627, under the great cardinal's patronage, the Company of One Hundred Associates was formed. In this company any of the seaport traders could buy shares. Indeed, they were promised patent of nobility if they did buy shares. Exclusive monopoly of furs was given to the company from Florida to Labrador. In return the Associates were to send two ships yearly to Canada. Before 1643 they were to bring out four thousand colonists, support them for three years, and give them land. In each settlement were to be supported three priests; and, to prevent discord, Huguenots were to be banished from New France.

To Champlain it must have seemed as if the ambition of his life were to be realized. Just when the sky seemed clearest the bolt fell.

Early in April, 1628, the Associates had dispatched colonists and stores for Quebec; but war had broken out between France and England. Gervais Kirke, an English Huguenot of Dieppe, France, who had been put under the ban by Cardinal Richelieu, had rallied the merchants of London to fit out privateers to wage war on New France. The vessels were commanded by the three sons, Thomas, Louis, and David; and to the Kirkes rallied many Huguenots banished from France.

Quebec was hourly looking for the annual ships, when one morning in July two men rushed breathless through the woods and up the steep rock to Castle St. Louis with word that an English fleet of six frigates lay in hiding at Tadoussac, ready to pounce on the French! Later came other messengers—Indians, fishermen, traders—confirming the terrible news. Then a Basque fisherman arrives with a demand, from Kirke for the keys to the fort. Though there is no food inside the walls, less than fifty pounds of ammunition in the storehouse, and not enough men to man the guns, Champlain hopes against hope, and sends the Basque fisherman back with suave regrets that he cannot comply with Monsieur Kirke's polite request. Quebec's one chance lay in the hope that the French vessels might {59} slip past the English frigates by night. Days wore on to weeks, weeks to months, and a thousand rumors filled the air; but no ships came. The people of Quebec were now reduced to diet of nuts and corn. Then came Indian runners with word that the French ships had been waylaid, boarded, scuttled, and sunk. Loaded to the water line with booty, the English privateers had gone home.



For that winter Quebec lived on such food as the Indians brought in from the woods. By the summer of 1629 men, women, and children were grubbing for roots, fishing for food, ranging the rocks for berries. There are times when the only thing to do is—do nothing; and it is probably the hardest task a brave man ever has. When the English fleet came back in July Champlain had a ragamuffin, half-starved retinue of precisely sixteen men. Yet he haggled for such terms that the English promised to convey the prisoners to France. On July 20, for the first time in history, the red flag of England blew to the winds above the heights of Quebec.

But New France was only a pawn to the gamesters of French and English diplomacy. Peace was proclaimed; and for the {60} sake of receiving $200,000 as dowry due his French wife, Charles of England restored to France the half continent which the Kirkes had captured, David Kirke receiving the paltry honor of a title as compensation for the loss. Champlain was back in Quebec by 1633; but his course had run. Between Christmas eve and Christmas morning, in 1635, the brave Soldier of the Cross, the first knight of the Canadian wildwoods, passed from the sphere of earthly life—a life without a stain, whether among the intriguing courtiers of Paris or in the midst of naked license in the Indian camp.



{61}

CHAPTER IV

FROM 1635 TO 1666

Frays between La Tour and Charnisay—Madame La Tour defends the fort—Charnisay's treachery

When Port Royal fell before Argall, it will be remembered, young Biencourt took to the woods with his French bush lopers and Indian followers of Nova Scotia. The farms and fort of Annapolis Basin granted to his father by special patents lay in ruins. Familiar with the woods as the English buccaneer, who had destroyed the fort, was with his ship's cabin, Biencourt withdrew to the southwest corner of Nova Scotia, where he built a rude stronghold of logs and slabs near the modern Cape Sable. Here he could keep in touch with the French fishermen off Cape Breton, and also traffic with the Indians of the mainland.

With Biencourt was a young man of his own age, boon comrade, kindred spirit, who had come to Port Royal a boy of fourteen, in 1606, in the gay days of Marc L'Escarbot—Charles de La Tour. Sea rovers, bush lopers, these two could bid defiance to English raiders. Whether Biencourt died in 1623 or went home to France is unknown; but he deeded over to his friend, Charles de La Tour, all possessions in Acadia.

And now England again comes on the scene. By virtue of Cabot's discovery and Argall's conquest, the King of England, in 1621, grants to Sir William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, all of Acadia, renamed Nova Scotia—New Scotland. By way of encouraging emigration, the order of Nova Scotia Baronets is created, a title being granted to those who subscribe to the colonization company.

Sir William Alexander's colonists shun the French bush lopers under Charles de La Tour down at Fort St. Louis on Cape Sable. The seventy Scotch colonists go on up the Annapolis Basin and build their fort four miles from old Port Royal. How did they pass the pioneer years—these Scotch retainers of the {62} Nova Scotia Baronets? Report among the French fishing fleet says thirty died of scurvy; but of definite information not a vestige remains. The annals of these colonists are as completely lost to history as the annals of the lost Roanoke colony in Virginia.

Under the same English patent Lord Ochiltree lands English colonists in Cape Breton, the grand summer rendezvous of the French fishermen; but two can play at Argall's game of raids. French seamen swoop down on Ochiltree's colony, capture fifty, destroy the settlement, and run up the white flag of France in place of the red standard of England.



Charles de La Tour with his Huguenots hides safely ensconced behind his slab palisades with the swarthy faces of half a hundred Indian retainers lighted up by the huge logs at blaze on the hearth. Charles de La Tour takes counsel with himself. English at Port Royal, English at Cape Breton, English on the mainland at Boston, English ships passing and repassing his lone lodge in the wilderness, he will be safer, will Charles de La Tour, with wider distance between himself and the foe; and he will take more peltries where there are fewer traders. Still keeping his fort in Nova Scotia, La Tour goes across Fundy Bay and builds him a second, stronger fort on St. John River, New Brunswick, near where Carleton town stands to-day.

Then two things happened that upset all plans.

{63} The Hundred Associates are given all Canada—Quebec and Acadia. Founded by Cardinal Richelieu, the Hundred Associates are violently Catholic, violently anti-Protestant. Charles de La Tour need expect no favors, if indeed the grant that he holds from Biencourt be not assailed. Double reason for moving the most of his possessions across Fundy Bay to St. John River.

Then the Englishmen, under the Kirke brothers, capture Quebec. As luck or ill luck will have it, among the French captured from the French ships of the Hundred Associates down at Tadoussac, is Claude de La Tour, the father of Charles. Claude de La Tour was a Protestant. This and his courtly manner and his noble birth commended him to the English court. What had France done for Claude de La Tour? Placed him under the ban on account of his religion.

Claude de La Tour promptly became a British subject, received the title Baronet of Nova Scotia with enormous grants of land on St. John River, New Brunswick, married an English lady in waiting to the Queen, and sailed with three men-of-war for Nova Scotia to win over his son Charles. No writer like Marc Lescarbot was present to describe the meeting between father and son; but one can guess the stormy scene,—the war between love of country and love of father, the guns of the father's vessels pointing at the son's fort, the guns of the son's fort pointing at the father's vessels. The father's arguments were strong. What had France done for the La Tours? By siding with England they would receive safe asylum in case of persecution and enormous grants of land on St. John River. But the son's arguments were stronger. The father must know from his English bride—maid in waiting to the English Queen—that England had no intentions of keeping her newly captured possessions in Canada, but had already decided to trade them back to France for a dowry to the English Queen. If Canada were given back to France, what were English grants in New Brunswick worth? "If those who sent you think me capable of betraying my country even at the prayer of my father, they are mightily mistaken," thundered the young man, ordering his gunners to their places. {64} "I don't purchase honors by crime! I don't undervalue the offer of England's King; but the King of France is just as able to reward me! The King of France has confided the defense of Acadia to me; and I'll defend it to my last breath."

Stung by his son's rebuke, the elder La Tour retired to his ship, wrote one more unavailing appeal, then landed his mariners to rush the fort. But the rough bush lopers inside the palisades were expert marksmen. Their raking cross fire kept the English at a distance, and the father could neither drive nor coax his men to the sticking point of courage to scale palisades in such an unnatural war. Claude de La Tour was now in an unenviable plight. He dare not go back to France a traitor. He could not go back to England, having failed to win the day. The son built him a dwelling outside the fort; and there this famous courtier of two great nations, with his noble wife, retired to pass the end of his days in a wildwood wilderness far enough from the gaudy tinsel of courts. The fate of both husband and wife is unknown.



Charles de La Tour's predictions were soon verified. The Treaty of St.-Germain-en-Laye, in 1632, gave back all Canada to France; and the young man's loyalty was rewarded by the French King confirming the father's English patent to the lands of St. John River, New Brunswick. Perhaps he expected more. He certainly wanted to be governor of Acadia, and may have looked for fresh title to Port Royal, which Biencourt had deeded {65} to him. His ambition was embittered. Cardinal Richelieu of the Hundred Associates had his own favorites to look after. Acadia is divided into three provinces. Over all as governor is Isaac Razilli, chief of the Hundred Associates. La Tour holds St. John. One St. Denys is given Cape Breton; and Port Royal, the best province of all, falls to Sieur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, friend and relative of Richelieu; and when Razilli dies in 1635, Charnisay, with his strong influence at court, easily secures the dead man's patents with all land grants attached. Charnisay becomes governor of Acadia.

For a second time La Tour is thwarted. Things are turning out as his father had foretold. Who began the border warfare matters little. Whether Charnisay as lord of all Acadia first ordered La Tour to surrender St. John, or La Tour, holding his grant from Biencourt to Port Royal, ordered Charnisay to give up Annapolis Basin, war had begun,—such border warfare as has its parallel only in the raids of rival barons in the Middle Ages. Did La Tour's vessels laden with furs slip out from St. John River across Fundy Bay bound for France? There lay at Cape Sable and Sable Island Charnisay's freebooters, Charnisay's wreckers, ready to board the ship or lure her a wreck on Sable Island reefs by false lights. It is unsafe to accept as facts the charges and countercharges made by these two enemies; but from independent sources it seems fairly certain that Charnisay, unknown to Cardinal Richelieu, was a bit of a freebooter and wrecker; for his men made a regular business of waylaying English ships from Boston, Dutch ships from New York, as they passed Sable Island; and Charnisay's name became cordially hated by the Protestant colonies of New England. La Tour, being Huguenot, could count on firm friends in Boston.

Countless legends cling to Fundy Bay of the forays between these two. In 1640 La Tour and his wife, cruising past Annapolis Basin in their fur ships, rashly entered and attacked Port Royal. Their ship was run aground by Charnisay's vessels and captured; but the friars persuaded the victor to set La Tour and his wife free, pending an appeal to France. France, of {66} course, decided in favor of Charnisay, who was of royal blood, a relative of Richelieu's, in high favor with the court. La Tour's patent was revoked and he was ordered to surrender his fort on the St. John.



In answer, La Tour loaded his cannon, locked the fort gates, and bade defiance to Charnisay. Charnisay sails across Fundy Bay in June, 1643, with a fleet of four vessels and five hundred men to bombard the fort. La Tour was without provisions, though his store ship from France lay in hiding outside, blocked from entering by Charnisay's fleet. Days passed. Resistance was hopeless. On one side lay the impenetrable forest; on the other, Charnisay's fleet. On the night of June 12th, La Tour and his wife slipped from a little sally port in the dark, ran along the shore, and, evading spies, succeeded in rowing out to the store ship. Ebb tide carried them far from the four men-of-war anchored fast in front of the abandoned fort. Then sails out, the store ship fled for Boston, where La Tour and his wife appealed for aid.

The Puritans of Boston had qualms of conscience about interfering in this French quarrel; but they did not forget that Charnisay's wreckers had stripped their merchant ships come to grief on the reefs of Sable Island. La Tour gave the Boston merchants a mortgage on all his belongings at St. John, and in return obtained four vessels, fifty mariners, ninety-two soldiers, {67} thirty-eight cannon. With this fleet he swooped down on Fundy Bay in July. Charnisay's vessels lay before Fort St. John, where the stubborn little garrison still held out, when La Tour came down on him like an enraged eagle. Charnisay's fur ships were boarded, scuttled, and sunk, while the commander himself fled in terror for Port Royal. All sails pressed, La Tour pursued right into Annapolis Basin, wounding seven of the enemy, killing three, taking one prisoner. Charnisay's one remaining vessel grounded in the river. A fight took place near the site of the mill which Poutrincourt had built long ago, but Charnisay succeeded in gaining the shelter of Port Royal, where his cannon soon compelled La Tour to fly from Annapolis Basin. Charnisay found it safer to pass that winter in France, and La Tour gathered in all the peltry traffic of the bay.

Early in 1644 Charnisay returned and sent a friar to secure the neutrality of the New Englanders. All summer negotiations dragged on between Boston and Port Royal, La Tour meanwhile scouring land and sea unchecked, packing his fort with peltries. Finally, Charnisay promised to desist from all fur trade along the coast if the New England colonies would remain neutral; and the colonies promised not to aid La Tour. La Tour was now outlawed by the French government, and Charnisay had actually induced New England to promise not to convey either La Tour or his wife to or from Bay of Fundy in English boats.

La Tour chanced to be absent from his fort in 1645. Like a bird of prey Charnisay swooped on St. John River; but he had not reckoned on Madame La Tour—Frances Marie Jacqueline. With the courage and agility of a trained soldier, she commanded her little garrison of fifty and returned the raider's cannonade with a fury that sent Charnisay limping back to Port Royal with splintered decks, twenty mangled corpses jumbled aft, and a dozen men wounded to the death lying in the hold.

With all the power of France at his back Charnisay had been defeated by a woman,—the Huguenot wife of an outlaw! He must reduce La Tour or stand discredited before the world. {68} Furious beyond words, he hastened to France to prepare an overwhelming armament.

But Madame La Tour was not idle. She, too, hastened across the Atlantic to solicit aid in London. One can imagine how Charnisay gnashed his teeth. Here, at last, was his chance. The Boston vessels were not to convey the La Tours back to Acadia. Like a hawk Charnisay cruised the sea for the outcoming ship with its fair passenger; but Madame La Tour had made a cast-iron agreement with the master of the sailing vessel to bring her direct to Boston. Instead of this, the vessel cruised the St. Lawrence, trading with the Indians, and so delayed the aid coming to La Tour; but when Charnisay's searchers came on board off Sable Island, Madame La Tour was hidden among the freight in the hold. For the delay she sued the sailing master in Boston and obtained a judgment of 2000 pounds; and when he failed to pay, had his cargo seized and sold, and with the proceeds equipped three vessels to aid her outlawed husband. So the whole of 1646 passed, each side girding itself for the final fray.

April, 1647, spies brought word to Charnisay that La Tour was absent from his fort. Waiting not a moment, Charnisay hurried ships, soldiers, cannon across the bay. Inside La Tour's fort was no confusion. Madame La Tour had ordered every man to his place. Day and night for three days the siege lasted, Charnisay's men closing in on the palisades so near they could bandy words with the fighters on the galleries inside the walls. Among La Tour's fighters were Swiss mercenaries—men who fight for the highest pay. Did Charnisay in the language of the day "grease the fist" of the Swiss sentry, or was it a case of a boorish fellow refusing to fight under a woman's command? Legend gives both explanations; but on Easter Sunday morning Charnisay's men gained entrance by scaling the walls where the Swiss sentry stood. Madame La Tour rushed her men to an inner fort loopholed with guns. Afraid of a final defeat that would disgrace him before all the world, Charnisay called up generous terms if she would surrender. To save the {69} lives of the men Madame La Tour agreed to honorable surrender, and the doors were opened. In rushed Charnisay! To his amazement the woman had only a handful of men. Disgusted with himself and boiling over with revenge for all these years of enmity, Charnisay forgot his promise and hanged every soul of the garrison but the traitor who acted as executioner, compelling Madame La Tour to watch the execution with a halter round her neck amid the jeers of the soldiery. Legend says that the experience drove her insane and caused her death within three weeks. Charnisay was now lord of all Acadia, with 10,000 pounds worth of Madame La Tour's jewelry transferred to Port Royal and all La Tour's furs safe in the warehouses of Annapolis Basin; but he did not long enjoy his triumph. He had the reputation of treating his Indian servants with great brutality. On the 24th of May, 1650, an Indian was rowing him up the narrows near Port Royal. Charnisay could not swim. Without apparent cause the boat upset. The Indian swam ashore. The commander perished. Legend again avers that the Indian upset the boat to be revenged on Charnisay for some brutality.



La Tour had been wandering from Newfoundland to Boston and Quebec seeking aid, but a lost cause has few friends, and if La Tour turned pirate on Boston boats, he probably thought he was justified in paying off the score of Boston's bargain with Charnisay. Later he turned trader with the Indians from Hudson Bay, and found friends in Quebec. Word of his wrongs reached the French court. When Charnisay perished, La Tour was at last appointed lieutenant governor of Acadia. Widow {70} Charnisay, left with eight children, all minors, made what reparation she could to La Tour by giving back the fort on the St. John, and La Tour, to wipe out the bitter enmity, married the widow of his enemy in February of 1653.

But this was not the seal of peace on his troubled life. Cromwell was now ascendant in England, and Major Sedgwick of Boston, in 1654, with a powerful fleet, captured Port Royal and St. John. Weary of fighting what seemed to be destiny, La Tour became a British subject, and with two other Englishmen was granted the whole of Acadia. Ten years later his English partners bought out his rights, and La Tour died in the land of his many trials about 1666. A year later the Treaty of Breda restored Acadia to France.



{71}

CHAPTER V

FROM 1635 TO 1650

Mystics come to Canada—A city built of dreams—First night at Montreal—Maisonneuve fights raiders—Le Jeune joins the hunters—Brebeuf goes to Lake Huron—Life at the Huron mission—The scourge of the Iroquois—The fight at St. Louis—Rageneau's converts resist—Flight of the Hurons

While Charles de La Tour and Charnisay scoured the Bay of Fundy in border warfare like buccaneers of the Spanish Main, what was Quebec doing?

The Hundred Associates were to colonize the country; but fur trading and farming never go together. One means the end of the other; and the Hundred Associates shifted the obligation of settling the country by granting vast estates called seigniories along the St. Lawrence and leaving to these new lords of the soil the duty of bringing out habitants. Later they deeded over for an annual rental of beaver skins the entire fur monopoly to the Habitant Company, made up of the leading people of New France. So ended all the fine promises of four thousand colonists.

Years ago Pontgrave had learned that the Indians of the Up-Country did not care to come down the St. Lawrence farther than Lake St. Peter's, where Iroquois foe lay in ambush; and the year before Champlain died a double expedition had set out from Quebec in July: one to build a fort north of Lake St. Peter's at the entrance to the river with three mouths,—in other words, to found Three Rivers; the other, under Father Brebeuf, the Jesuit, and Jean Nicolet, the wood runner, to establish a mission in the country of the Hurons and to explore the Great Lakes.

In fact, it must never be forgotten that Champlain's ambitions in laying the foundations of a new nation aimed just as much to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth as to win a new kingdom for France. Always, in the minds of the fathers of New France, Church was to be first; State, second. When Charles de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, landed in Quebec one June morning in 1636, to succeed Champlain as governor of New France, he noticed a crucifix planted by the path side where {72} viceroy and officers clambered up the steep hill to Castle St. Louis. Instantly Montmagny fell to his knees before the cross in silent adoration, and his example was followed by all the gay train of beplumed officers. The Jesuits regarded the episode as a splendid omen for New France, and set their chapel organ rolling a Te Deum of praise, while Governor and retinue filed before the altars with bared heads.

It was in the same spirit that Montreal was founded.

The Jesuits' letters on the Canadian missions were now being read in France. Religious orders were on fire with missionary ardor. The Canadian missions became the fashion of the court. Ladies of noble blood asked no greater privilege than to contribute their fortunes for missions in Canada. Nuns lay prostrate before altars praying night and day for the advancement of the heavenly kingdom on the St. Lawrence. The Jesuits had begun their college in Quebec. The very year that Champlain had first come to the St. Lawrence there had been born in Normandy, of noble parentage, a little girl who became a passionate devotee of Canadian missions. To divert her mind from the calling of a nun, her father had thrown her into a whirl of gayety from which she emerged married; but her husband died in a few years, and Madame de la Peltrie, left a widow at twenty-two, turned again heart and soul to the scheme of endowing a Canadian mission. Again her father tried to divert her mind, threatening to cut off her fortune if she did not marry. An engagement to a young noble, who was as keen a devotee as herself, quieted her father and averted the loss of her fortune. On the death of her father the formal union was dissolved, and Madame de la Peltrie proceeded to the Ursuline Convent of Tours, where the Jesuits had already chosen a mother superior for the new institution to be founded at Quebec—Marie of the Incarnation, a woman of some fifty years, a widow like Madame de la Peltrie, and, like Madame de la Peltrie, a mystic dreamer of celestial visions and divine communings and heroic sacrifices. How much of truth, how much of self-delusion, {73} lay in these dreams of heavenly revelation is not for the outsider to say. It is as impossible for the practical mind to pronounce judgment on the mystic as for the mystic to pronounce sentence on the scientist. Both have their truths, both have their errors; and by their fruits are they known.



May 4th, 1639, Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation embarked from Dieppe for Canada. In the ship were also another Ursuline nun, three hospital sisters to found the Hotel Dieu at Quebec, Father Vimont, superior of Quebec Jesuits, and two other priests. The boat was like a chapel. Ship's bell tolled services. Morning prayer and evensong were chanted from the decks, and the pilgrims firmly believed that their vows allayed a storm. July 1st they were among the rocking dories of the Newfoundland fishermen, and then on the 15th the little sailboat washed and rolled to anchor inshore among the fur traders under the heights of Tadoussac.

At sight of the somber Saguenay, the silver-flooded St. Lawrence, the frowning mountains, the far purple hills, the primeval forests through which the wind rushed with the sound of the sea, the fishing craft dancing on the tide like cockle boats, the grizzled fur traders bronzed as the crinkled oak forests where they passed their lives, the tawny, naked savages agape at these white-skinned women come from afar, the hearts of the {74} housed-up nuns swelled with emotions strange and sweet,—the emotions of a new life in a new world. And when they scrambled over the rope coils aboard a fishing schooner to go on up to Quebec, and heard the deep-voiced shoutings of the men, and witnessed the toilers of the deep fighting wind and wave for the harvest of the sea, did it dawn on the fair sisterhood that God must have workers out in the strife of the world, as well as workers shut up from the world inside convent walls? Who knows? . . . Who knows? At Tadoussac, that morning, to both Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation it must have seemed as if their visions had become real. And then the cannon of Quebec began to thunder till the echoes rolled from hill to hill and shook—as the mystics thought—the very strongholds of hell. Tears streamed down their cheeks at such welcome. The whole Quebec populace had rallied to the water front, and there stood Governor Montmagny in velvet cloak with sword at belt waving hat in welcome. Soldiers and priests cheered till the ramparts rang. As the nuns put foot to earth once more they fell on their knees and kissed the soil of Canada. August 1st was fete day in Quebec. The chapel chimes rang . . . and rang again their gladness. The organ rolled out its floods of soul-shattering music, and deep-throated chant of priests invoked God's blessing on the coming of the women to the mission. So began the Ursuline Convent of Quebec and the Hotel Dieu of the hospital sisters; but Montreal was still a howling wilderness untenanted by man save in midsummer, when the fur traders came to Champlain's factory and the canoes of the Indians from the Up-Country danced down the swirling rapids like sea birds on waves.

The letters from the Jesuit missions touched more hearts than those of the mystic nuns.

In Anjou dwelt a receiver of taxes—Jerome le Royer de la Dauversiere, a stout, practical, God-fearing man with a family, about as far removed in temperament from the founders of the Ursulines as a character could well be. Yet he, too, had mystic {75} dreams and heard voices bidding him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversiere had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum. Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness where there were no people. Also in Paris dwelt a young priest, Jean Jacques Olier, who heard the self-same voices uttering the self-same command. These two men were unknown to each other; yet when they met by chance in the picture gallery of an old castle, there fell from their eyes, as it were, scales, and they beheld as in a vision each the other's soul, and recognized in each fellow-helper and comrade of the spirit. To all this the practical man cries out "Bosh"! Yet Montreal is no bosh, but a stately city, and it sprang from the dreams—"fool dreams," enemies would call them—of these two men, the Sulpician priest and the Anjou tax collector.

Hour after hour, arm in arm, they walked and talked, the man of prayers and the man of taxes. People or no people at Montreal, money or no money, they decided that the inner voice must be obeyed. A Montreal Society was formed. Six friends joined. What would be equal to $75,000 was collected. There were to be no profits on this capital. It was all to be invested to the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven. Unselfish if you like, foolish they may have been, but not hypocrites.

First of all, they must become Seigneurs of Montreal; but the island of Montreal had already been granted by the Hundred Associates to one Lauson. To render the title doubly secure, Dauversiere and Olier obtained deeds to the island from Lauson and from the Hundred Associates.

Forty-five colonists, part soldiers, part devotees, were then gained as volunteers; but a veritable soldier of Heaven was desired as commander. Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, was noted for his heroism in war and zeal in religion. When other officers returned from battle for wild revels, Maisonneuve withdrew to play the flute or pass hours in religious {76} contemplation. His name occurred to both Dauversiere and Olier as fittest for command; but to make doubly sure, they took lodgings near him, studied his disposition, and then casually told him of their plans and asked his cooeperation. Maisonneuve was in the prime of life, on the way to high service in the army. His zeal took fire at thought of founding a Kingdom of God at Montreal; but his father furiously opposed what must have seemed a mad scheme. Maisonneuve's answer was the famous promise of Christ: "No man hath left house or brethren or sister for my sake but he shall receive a hundredfold."

Maisonneuve was warned there would be no earthly reward—no pay—for his arduous task; but he answered, "I devote my life and future; and I expect no recompense."

Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, thirty-four years old, who had given herself to good works from childhood, though she had not yet joined the cloister, now felt the call to labor in the wilderness. Later, in 1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than introspection of the soul. Dauversiere and Olier remained in France. Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of the cross, carried the heavenly standard to the wilderness.

It was too late to ascend the St. Lawrence when the ship brought the crusaders to Quebec in August, 1641; and difficulties harried them from the outset. Was Montmagny, the Governor, jealous of Maisonneuve; or did he simply realize the fearful dangers Maisonneuve's people would run going beyond the protection of Quebec? At all events, he disapproved this building of a second colony at Montreal, when the first colony at Quebec could barely gain subsistence. He offered them the Island of Orleans in exchange for the Island of Montreal, and warned them of Iroquois raid.

"I have not come to argue," answered Maisonneuve, "but to act. It is my duty to found a colony at Montreal, and thither I go though every tree be an Iroquois."

{77} Maisonneuve passed the winter building boats to ascend the St. Lawrence next spring; and Madame de la Peltrie, having established the Ursulines at Quebec, now cast in her lot with the Montrealers for two years.

May 8, 1642, the little flotilla set out from Quebec—a pinnace with the passengers, a barge with provisions, two long boats propelled by oars and a sweep. Montmagny and Father Vimont accompanied the crusaders; and as the boats came within sight of the wooded mountain on May 17, hymns of praise rose from the pilgrims that must have mingled strangely on Indian ears with the roar of the angry rapids. One can easily call up the scene—the mountain, misty with the gathering shadows of sunset, misty as a veiled bride with the color and bloom of spring; the boats, moored for the night below St. Helen's Island, where the sun, blazing behind the half-foliaged trees, paints a path of fire on the river; the white bark wigwams along shore with the red gleam of camp fire here and there through the forest; the wilderness world bathed in a peace as of heaven, as the vesper hymn floats over the evening air! It is a scene that will never again be enacted in the history of the world—dreamers dreaming greatly, building a castle of dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic shriek where the crusaders' hymn rose that May night. A great city has risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! Another generation may scoff at our too-much-worldliness, with our dreamless grind and visionless toil and harder creeds that reject everything which cannot be computed in the terms of traffic's dollar! Well for us if the fruit of our creeds remain to attest as much worth as the deeds of these crusaders!

Early next morning the boats pulled in ashore where Cartier had landed one hundred years before and Champlain had built his factory thirty years ago. Maisonneuve was first to spring on land. He dropped to his knees in prayer. The others as {78} they landed did likewise. Their hymns floated out on the forest. Madame de la Peltrie, Jeanne Mance, and the servant, Charlotte Barre, quickly decorated a wildwood altar with evergreens. Then, with Montmagny the Governor, and Maisonneuve the soldier, standing on either side, Madame de la Peltrie and Jeanne Mance and Charlotte Barre, bowed in reverence, with soldiers and sailors standing at rest unhooded, Father Vimont held the first religious services at Mont Royal. "You are a grain of mustard seed," he said, "and you shall grow till your branches overshadow the earth."

Maisonneuve cut the first tree for the fort; and a hundred legends might be told of the little colony's pioneer trials. Once a flood threatened the existence of the fort. A cross was erected to stay the waters and a vow made if Heaven would save the fort a cross should be carried and placed on the summit of the mountain. The river abated, and Maisonneuve climbed the steep mountain, staggering under the weight of an enormous cross, and planted it at the highest point. Here, in the presence of all, mass was held, and it became a regular pilgrimage from the fort up the mountain to the cross.

In 1743 came Louis d'Ailleboust and his wife, both zealously bound by the same vows as devotees, bringing word of more funds for Ville Marie, as Montreal was called. Montmagny's warning of Iroquois proved all too true. Within a year, in June, 1743, six workmen were beset in the fields, only one escaping. Because his mission was to convert the Indians, Maisonneuve had been ever reluctant to meet the Iroquois in open war, preferring to retreat within the fort when the dog Pilot and her litter barked loud warning that Indians were hiding in the woods. Any one who knows the Indian character will realize how clemency would be mistaken for cowardice. Even Maisonneuve's soldiers began to doubt him.

"My lord, my lord," they urged, "are the enemy never to get a sight of you? Are we never to face the foe?"

Maisonneuve's answer was in March, 1644, when ambushed hostiles were detected stealing on the fort.

{79} "Follow me," he ordered thirty men, leaving D'Ailleboust in command of the fort.

Near the place now known as Place d'Armes the little band was greeted by the eldritch scream of eighty painted Iroquois. Shots fell thick and fast. The Iroquois dashed to rescue their wounded, and a young chief, recognizing Maisonneuve as the leader of the white men, made a rush for the honor of capturing the French commander alive. Maisonneuve had put himself between his retreating men and the advancing warriors. Firing, he would retreat a pace, then fire again, keeping his face to the foe. His men succeeded in rushing up the hillock, then made for the gates in a wild stampede. Maisonneuve was backing away, a pistol in each hand. The Iroquois circled from tree to tree, near and nearer, and like a wildwood creature of prey was watching his chance to spring, when the Frenchman fired. The pistol missed. Dodging, the Indian leaped. Maisonneuve discharged the other pistol. The Iroquois fell dead, and while warriors rescued the body, Maisonneuve gained the fort gates. This was only one of countless frays when the dog Pilot with her puppies sounded the alarm of prowlers in the woods.

What were the letters, what the adventures described by the Jesuits, that aroused such zeal and inspired such heroism? It would require many volumes to record the adventures of the Jesuits in Canada, and a long list to include all their heroes martyred for the faith. Only a few of the most prominent episodes in the Jesuits' adventures can be given here.

When Pierre le Jeune reached Quebec after the victory of the Kirke brothers, he found only the charred remains of a mission on the old site of Cartier's winter quarters down on the St. Charles. Of houses, only the gray-stone cottage of Madame Hebert had been left standing. Here Le Jeune was welcomed and housed till the little mission could be rebuilt. At first it consisted of only mud-plastered log cabins, thatch-roofed, divided into four rooms, with garret and cellar. One room decorated with saints' images and pictures served as chapel; another, as {80} kitchen; a third, as lodgings; the fourth, as refectory. In this humble abode six Jesuit priests and two lay brothers passed the winter after the war. The roof leaked like a sieve. The snow piled high almost as the top of the door. Le Jeune's first care was to obtain pupils. These consisted of an Indian boy and a negro lad left by the English. Meals of porridge given free attracted more Indian pupils; but Le Jeune's greatest difficulty was to learn the Indian language. Hearing that a renegade Indian named Pierre, who had served the French as interpreter, lodged with some Algonquins camped below Cape Diamond, Le Jeune tramped up the river bank, along what is now the Lower Road, where he found the Indians wigwamming, and by the bribe of free food obtained Pierre. Pierre was at best a tricky scoundrel, who considered it a joke to give Le Jeune the wrong word for some religious precept, gorged himself on the missionaries' food, stole their communion wine, and ran off at Lent to escape fasting.



When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more priests joined the Jesuits' mission. Among them was the lion-hearted giant, Brebeuf.

If Champlain's bush lopers could join bands of wandering Indians for the extension of French dominion, surely the Jesuits could dare as perilous a life "for the greater glory of God,"—as their vows declared.

{81} Le Jeune joined a band of wandering Montaignais, Pierre, the rascal, tapping the keg of sacramental wine the first night out, and turning the whole camp into a drunken bedlam, till his own brother sobered him with a kettle of hot water flung full in the face. That night the priest slept apart from the camp in the woods. By the time the hunters reached the forest borderland between Quebec and New Brunswick, their number had increased to forty-five. By Christmas time game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not yet driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth. In vain the medicine man had pounded his tom-tom and shouted at the Indian gods from the top of the wigwams and offered sacrifice of animals to be slain. No game had come as the result of the medicine man's invocation.

Le Jeune gathered the people about him and through Pierre, the interpreter, bade them try the white man's God. In the largest of the wigwams a little altar was fitted up. Then the Indians repeated this prayer after Le Jeune:

Jesus, Son of the Almighty . . . who died for us . . . who promised that if we ask anything in Thy name, Thou wilt do it—I pray Thee with all my heart, give food to these people . . . this people promises Thee faithfully they will trust Thee entirely and obey Thee with all their heart! My Lord, hear my prayer! I present Thee my life for this people, most willing to die that they may live and know Thee.

"Take that back," grunted the chief. "We love you! We don't want you to die."

"I only want to show that I am your friend," answered the priest.

Le Jeune then commanded them to go forth to the hunt, full of faith that God would give them food.

{82} But alas for the poor father's hopes and the childlike Indian vow! True, they found abundance of food,—a beaver dam full of beaver, a moose, a porcupine taken by the Indian medicine man. Father Le Jeune, with radiant face, met the hunters returning laden with game.

"We must thank your God for this," said the Indian chief, throwing down his load.

"Bah," says Pierre, "you 'd have found it anyway."

"This is not the time to talk," sneered the medicine man. "Let the hungry people eat."

And by the time the Indians had gorged themselves with ample measure for their long fast, they were torpid with sleep. The sad priest was fain to wander out under the stars. There, in the snow-padded silences of the white-limned forest, far from the joyous peal of Christmas bells, he knelt alone and worshiped God.

For five months he wandered with the Montaignais, and now in April the hunters turned toward Quebec with their furs. At three in the morning Le Jeune knocked on the door of the mission house at Quebec, and was welcomed home by the priests. The pilgrimage had taught him what the Jesuits have always held—the way to power with a people is through the education of the children. "Give me a child for the first seven years of its life," said a famous educator, "and I care not what you do with him the rest of his years." Missions and schools must be established among the tribes of Hurons and Iroquois.