Delphi complete works of.., p.715
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 715
Such is the background of the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Let it be noted how filled with paradox are the annals of the discovery of America. It was accidentally found in their path by men who were certain it was not there. As Goldwin Smith has said of Columbus, “the new continent was discovered by “The United States,” 1893 the man who had staked most on the belief that no such continent existed.” Columbus died still thinking America part of the East Indies. Even when it had to be admitted that the continent was there, its “discoverers” still hoped to find a way round it or through it. They found it hard to believe that the globe is divided, as it is, by one huge mountain barrier reaching virtually from pole to pole. Cabot and, after him, the Elizabethans and Henry Hudson were trying to get round the top of the continent. This was the famous “North-West Passage” to Asia, the arctic mirage that ended only when Roald Amundsen’s voyage in the Gjöa in 1903 proved it feasible and worthless. Others tried to get through by going up the St. Lawrence. The name “Lachine,” even if given in irony, chronicles this waning belief in a passage to China. As late as 1634 Champlain sent Nicolet up the lakes to Wisconsin, which he thought was part of Asia. For R.G. Thwaites, “The Colonies,” 1901 it was hoped that the rivers of the interior might somehow lead to a portage “over the top,” as indeed they do in Central America. John Smith, in going up the Chickahominy in Virginia, carried letters to the Grand Khan. These eager hopes passed by as of no account the dense forests, the broad savannahs, and the silent waters of an empty continent — its real wealth. This frenzied expectation of palaces, of stores of gold and silk and precious stones, misdirected and distorted all the discovery of America. When the expectation turned to reality in the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas, the wrong turn became the main highway. Thus the real America, our northern continent, had to wait for a hundred years. We have but to recall the calendar and course of discovery in the sixteenth century, to realize that this was not yet settlement, but search. Columbus landed on Watkin’s Island in 1492. John Cabot sailed the coast of Newfoundland in 1497. It was in the year following that Vasco da Gama successfully carried the Portuguese trade-route around the Cape of Good Hope to India. This eastern reality strengthened western effort. In 1501 Corte-Real, another Portuguese, explored the North American coast south of the St. Lawrence. In 1513 Nuñez Balboa made his way through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama and looked out on the illimitable Pacific, “silent upon Keats of Cortez, in error a peak in Darien.” In the same year the ageing Ponce de Leon searched the “land of flowers” (Florida) looking for the Fountain of Youth, which was not there. Old men still seek it there in vain. Hernando Cortez (1519-20) first achieved reality in his seizure of Mexico and its treasure of precious metals. Velasquez landed in “Chicora,” now South Carolina, in 1625 to catch slaves, but found instead Indian savages. Narvaez tried again for Florida in 1528, landed at Pensacola, was lured inland by the savages and perished in the swamps with all of his three hundred followers except four. These men, eight years later, reached the California coast and were saved by Spaniards from Mexico. Coronado (1540) and other Spaniards explored the Rio Grande and spent three years on the south-western plains, looking for the fabulous “Seven Cities of Cibola.” These things are not part of the history of Canada except that they show the reason why there was no history of Canada. The search went on. The brothers Pizarro (1532) achieved an even greater result than Cortez in their discovery and conquest of Peru. Fernando de Soto went overland through the swamps and reached the Mississippi, where he died of swamp fever. Where the lure of gold failed, the sign of the Cross held firm. After the adventurers came the missions from Santa Fé in 1598 till the end of the chain in San Francisco (1776).
With this Spanish adventure went that of France. It was conspicuous in the voyages of Jacques Cartier (1534-41), as discussed later. But it failed signally in attempted establishments in Florida and Carolina (1562-64) and on Sable Island, off our Nova Scotia (1568). The British calendar of exploration in North America showed a long gap after the Cabot voyages. Attention had turned elsewhere, to the Russian seas and to the Levant. Hakluyt chronicles a voyage to Newfoundland made by a leader called Hore, ending in misery and cannibalism, a poor “ad” for A.D. 1536 this country, as we should say. Then no one came till Martin Frobisher (1576), who sailed into our arctic seas, “for the search of the strait or passage to China.” He brought home what seemed C. P. Lucas, “History of Canada,” 1891 gold ore, came again and fetched back quite a cargo of “fool’s gold” (iron pyrites). Then came, just at the end of the chapter and of the century, when exploration was to be exchanged for settlement, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s glorious but futile voyage and first attempt at English colonization.
Thus practically all this early enterprise in the New World was vitiated by its inferior purpose. It was based on the search for treasure, domination and the rapid fortune of conquest. It did not carry with it the fundamental justification of settlement and of a new home beyond the sea.
But even apart from this misdirection of enterprise towards gold and treasure, there were other reasons why much of the best part of the continent slept, and sleeps, so long; why the worst was taken and the best left. These reasons lay in the peculiar geography of access from Europe to the North American continent. One can hardly deny that the western, the Pacific, coast, offers the more attractive area of settlement. To realize this, one has only to think of the sunshine of California, the island paradise of Vancouver and the adjacent shores, and the soft climates and the warm currents that wrap these latitudes.
But there was no way to reach this western side of the A.D. 1519 continent. The voyages of Magellan through the straits named A.D. 1577-80 after him, and those of Drake and others round the Horn, proved that the Pacific could be reached by a sea voyage. But the route could not serve for commerce and migration till later centuries brought better means of transport and better control of scurvy. Balboa’s discovery made it possible to reach the farther ocean through the jungles and fever of Panama and to build ships on the Pacific coast. This served for Peruvian adventure and for the establishment of the Pacific missions but it also was out of J. M. Gibbon, “Steel of Empire,” 1935. Chap. IV the question, for centuries, as a broad path of migration. The Pacific indeed could be reached by an overland journey, as it presently was by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793. But this journey through a savage country of prairie, desert and mountain ranges could only become feasible long after Atlantic settlement had opened the way. Hence the far west stayed empty and unknown, and most of all the part of it that now is Canada. The penetration of North America on the east is facilitated by a coast line easy of access, with innumerable harbours. But the coast once occupied, access to the interior is impeded by the ranges of the Alleghanies. Hence the coast was first settled while the region of the Great Lakes and the Ohio territory remained empty. Access was found through the break offered by the Hudson River and the Mohawk Valley, and by the gap of the Potomac. On the south the tortuous channels of the Mississippi in a land of back-waters and bayous, waited long for commercial use. On the north-east, however, the St. Lawrence offers with the Great Lakes the widest fairway into the very heart of North America, a route still fully to come into its own. But it is ice-blocked in the winter, and in the early days of settlement the hostile tribes of the Five Nations lay across the path. North of the continent is the wide entrance of the Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay and James Bay and the tributary rivers that offer access to the western plains. But here the desolation of the ice-bound sea echoes to the desolation of the barren land. It is not without meaning that the names Hudson Bay and York Factory and Albany River, reproduce, as the counterpart of their christening, New York and Albany and the Hudson River. But the ports of this northern region, when occupied by the Hudson’s Bay Company, remained, as it were, island outposts in the frozen seas with no access to the main settlements in America. At as late a date A.D. 1811 as Lord Selkirk’s Red River Settlement, this isolation still prevailed.
Reflecting on these facts of geography and history, we can realize why the earlier settlement of North America left much of the best of it still untouched. The Western Peninsula of Upper Canada lay empty and untenanted. The fertile valleys of British Columbia and its fortunate islands called in vain. The North-West prairies blossomed and withered with each forgotten season while the moving sails, the waving banners and the marching feet of three hundred years of history passed them by.
Our country waited. Its mighty rivers moved, silent and mysterious, from the heart of an unknown continent. The waves thundered on the rugged coast where it fronted the Atlantic Ocean. For the passing ships that explored its shores all was silence and mystery. Beyond it was the unknown East and from it breathed, as the sun set behind its forests, a sense of history still to come, the murmur of many voices caught as the undertone of its rustling woods. Our country waited — whereby in the fullness of time it might play the larger part.
MEMORABLE DATES
1535
Jacques Cartier discovers the St. Lawrence
1605
Founding of Port Royal
1608
Champlain founds Quebec
1610
Hudson discovers Hudson Bay
1642
Maisonneuve founds Montreal
1670
Charter of the Hudson’s Bay Company
1672
Count Frontenac comes to New France
1682
LaSalle descends the Mississippi to the Sea
1689
Massacre of Lachine
1713
Treaty of Utrecht
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY CHARLES W. JEFFERYS, R.C.A., TORONTO, ONT., 1941
“. . . the Indians led Cartier . . . to the top of the nearby mountain” — page 41
CHAPTER II. THE COLONIAL ERA. 1534-1713
THE VOYAGES OF Jacques Cartier — Hochelaga and Stadacona — The Fisheries of the Gulf and the Banks — Sir Humphrey Gilbert — Champlain and New France — Port Royal and Quebec — Maisonneuve and Montreal — Penetration of the Interior — Hurons and Iroquois — Missions, Massacre and Indian War — Life and Growth of New France — The Seigniorial System and the Fur Trade — Pathfinders of the Mississippi — Frontenac and the Indian and English Wars — Treaty of Utrecht.
The settlement of New France, like that of New England, does not begin until the seventeenth century, which brought actual and permanent colonization by Champlain, by the Puritans and by the Virginia Company. But a prelude to this settlement is found in the preceding voyages of Jacques Cartier, in the opening by both French and English of the Newfoundland fisheries, and in the unsuccessful attempts at colonization made by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh.
The voyages of Jacques Cartier came as an interlude in the unending wars of Europe, preceded by the wars in which France and Spain struggled for the conquest of Italy, and followed by the long series of wars called with unconscious irony the ‘wars J. Winsor— “The Narrative and Critical History of America,” Vol. IV of religion.’ In this pause the restless and energetic Francis I of France, the king who has left to the world after his defeat at Pavia the immortal phrase, “All is lost but honour,” found a new field for honour to occupy. He turned his eager ambition towards overseas empire and the western route to Asia. This last was, so to speak, the ‘grand prize’ that such a sovereign as Francis I would naturally covet. The first commission given to Jacques Cartier, a St. Malo pilot recommended to the king by his admiral, has not been preserved. But other documents show that the voyages of Cartier and of Roberval, his later associate and superior, aimed at the expected opening up of Asia by way of the Western Sea. The discovery of the St. Lawrence and of Hochelaga only strengthened this belief, or at least led the pilots to make capital of it. The new commission to Cartier after his great discovery, speaks of “Canada and Hochelaga” as “forming one end of Asia in the direction of the west.”
But higher purposes and more real ambitions were mingled with this search for imaginary empire. For Cartier himself the conversion of the savages to the Christian faith was throughout a leading motive, as witness his setting up of the great cross at Gaspé. Moreover the prospect of treasure from America itself presently became as bright as the vague vision of Cathay. We are told in the opening of the narrative of Cartier’s third voyage (the new voyage after the discovery of Hochelaga), that King Francis enjoined him to “attain to the knowledge of the country of the Saguenay, where there are, as is declared, great riches and very good countries.” Such is the background of the famous voyages of Jacques Cartier which remain, in spite of their confused and uncertain terminations, one of the great episodes of world history.
The first voyage (in 1534) was little more than a reconnaissance. Cartier’s Narrative in Hakluyt’s Voyages Cartier left St. Malo on April 20, 1534, with two ships, each of about 60 tons, and, in all, a company of 61 men. They sailed across to Newfoundland waters in three weeks and passed through the Strait of Belle Isle and into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There was nothing unusual or novel in this. For a whole generation already the fishermen of four nations had flocked to these grounds. Cartier himself, after he passed the strait, met “a large ship from Rochelle,” looking for anchorage. But his design was to continue westward, beyond the familiar coastal fishing ground, and to find the passage to Asia.
Cartier followed the north shore of the Gulf a little way westward from the strait. He found it empty and desolate. “I believe,” he wrote in his narrative, “that this was the land that God allotted to Cain.” This sounds like a jest, the first, the original of the jokes on Canada. But it is not. After the pious fashion of the age, Cartier meant what he said; he had found where Cain went to, and he quite understood it. He left this shore in disgust, turned south along Newfoundland, then struck out westward across the Gulf past the Magdalens and along the west end of Prince Edward Island. Here was a different country indeed, a land of delight. “It is the fairest land,” he said, “that could possibly be seen, full of goodly meadows and trees.” He skirted the New Brunswick coast and beyond it, on the Gaspé Peninsula, set up a tall wooden cross, thirty feet high, carrying a shield and three fleurs-de-lis, and at the top the legend VIVE LE ROI DE FRANCE. The scene remains in our history, a picture that never fades.
Here and there the explorers saw Indians, especially on the warm waters that Cartier called the Baie des Chaleurs and on Gaspé. They were friendly, frightened people, half naked and so destitute that Cartier thought they must be the poorest in the world. He noted that they had their heads shaved “except for a tuft on the top of the crown, as long as a horse’s tail.” The ominous meaning of this ‘scalp-lock’ was as yet fortunately hidden from the Frenchmen.
Cartier crossed to Anticosti, rounded the east end of the island and made his way westward along the north shore. Where the island ends, rough winds and adverse currents blocked his advance. But in turning back he at least felt sure that he had found a westward passage. His homeward voyage was through the Strait of Belle Isle for as yet he knew no other way out of the Gulf. In spite of terrific storms from the east that delayed him in mid-ocean he reached St. Malo (September 15) one month after sailing from the ‘north shore.’
There followed next year the famous voyage that disclosed Hochelaga and the water gateway to the continent. Cartier himself wrote a narrative report of his first voyage in a manuscript now lost. It was not printed during Cartier’s lifetime, though printing was in its first flower, but the report gained for Cartier ample royal support for a new voyage. The king gave him three good ships, the Grande Ermine (120 tons), the Petite Ermine (60 tons) and the Emérillon, otherwise the Merlin or Sparrow Hawk. To this was added supplies for eighteen months, so that the expedition might winter overseas — all very different from the treatment accorded by the stingy Henry VII of England to John Cabot, who was sent out to make discoveries, like the later despatch of Mr. Pickwick by the Pickwick Club, at his own charges. The ships’ companies numbered in all 110 souls, mostly sailors of St. Malo, together with a few ‘gentlemen adventurers,’ those ‘younger sons’ who figure so largely in the making of Canada. But whoever they were, Cartier’s men played a brave part in adversity. Included in the crew were two Indians who had been taken on board the year before at Gaspé and invited, without option, to spend the winter in France.
The ships left St. Malo on May 19, 1535. A tempestuous voyage parted them in mid-ocean but they came together at their rendezvous off the White Sands, inside the Strait of Belle Isle (July 26). The great Gulf was now familiar ground. This time Cartier was able to pass Anticosti on its north side and then cross to the Gaspé side of the St. Lawrence. Time was wasted in a fruitless detour back to the north side of the river in the vain hope of a passage-way, from which they turned again west, heading up the St. Lawrence.
On the first of September the ships reached the mouth of a S. E. Dawson, “The Saint Lawrence” great river, which fell into the St. Lawrence from the north side through a gloomy gorge of rock. Cartier’s two savages told him that this was the river that led to the Saguenay country, and so the river was called and is called the Saguenay — to the great confusion of all readers. For it would seem that the fabulous “Empire of Saguenay” ought to be somewhere north of this river mouth. But when Cartier reached Stadacona, 83 miles on, and Hochelaga another 160 miles west, the Indians still pointed westward and talked of the Saguenay country. The confusion ends for anyone who looks at the map with an enlightened eye. For the Saguenay River comes down from the north-west, in the first place from the great Lake St. John, which lies west of the city of Quebec (Stadacona) and from this lake begins the ascent of great rivers that lead to the portages of Lake Mistassini, and to the Nottaway River and thus to the Hudson and the James Bays — our new El Dorado of the north. The fabled kingdom of Saguenay passed into the class of the Cities of Cibola and the Land of Prester John, but in reality it was there all the time with treasures of copper and gold and silver, waiting for its discovery three and a half centuries later.
