A Study of Exploration in New France

FIVE years after the discovery by Columbus, John Cabot, in behalf of England, was sighting the gloomy headlands of Cape Breton. Cortereal appeared in the neighborhood in 1501 seeking lands for the Portuguese crown. Two or three years later, at intervals, there came to Newfoundland certain Norman, Breton, and Basque fishers, and, erecting little huts and drying-scaffolds along the rocky shore, sowed the first seed of that polyglot settlement of French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English which has come down to our own day almost uninterruptedly. By 1511 these fishermen appear to have known the mainland to the west; for in the map of Sylvanus, in his edition of Ptolemy, that year, we find a delineation of the “ Square Gulf,” which answers to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1520 Fagundus visited these waters for the Portuguese, and four years later Verrazano was making for the French an exploration of the coast between North Carolina and Newfoundland. Whether or not Cartier (1535) was the first to sail up the St. Lawrence “until land could be seen on either side,” no man can now tell; apparently, he was the first to leave a record of doing so. Progress up the river was checked by Lachine Rapids, and he spent the winter on Montreal Island.

France and Spain were just then engaged in one of their periodical quarrels, and adventurers were needed to fight battles at home, so that it was six years before any attempts were made to colonize the river-lands to which Cartier had led the way. In 1541, a Picard seigneur named Roberval, enjoying the friendship of Francis I., was commissioned as viceroy of the new country beyond the Atlantic, with Cartier as his chief pilot and captain-general, and a choice selection of jail-birds for colonists. Cartier started off before his chief, built a fort at Quebec, and, after a long and miserable winter, picked up a quantity of glittering stones which he took to be gold and diamonds, and gladly set sail for home. Tradition has it that Roberval met him near the mouth of the river, but was unable to induce him to return to his cheerless task of founding a state in an inhospitable wilderness, with convicts for citizens. Roberval, however, proceeded to Quebec with his consignment of prison dregs, and throughout another protracted winter the flag of France floated from the little intrenched camp which Cartier had planted on the summit of the cliff. Roberval’s principal occupation appears to have been the disciplining of his unruly followers, a work in which the gibbet and the lash were freely employed. He also essayed explorations up the river ; but the rude task was not to his liking, and, with what remained of his battered band, he followed Cartier to France.

It is commonly said that Canada was abandoned by the French between the going of Roberval and the coming of Champlain. But though little was done toward colonizing on the St. Lawrence, Newfoundland was by no means neglected. Its fishing industry grew apace. The rules of the Church, prescribing a fish diet on certain holy days, led to a large use of salted fish throughout Catholic Europe, and by 1578 no less than a hundred and fifty French vessels alone, chiefly Breton, were employed in the Newfoundland fisheries, while a good trade with the mainland Indians, as far south as the Potomac, had now sprung up. The island colony proved valuable as a supply and repair station for traders and explorers, and thus served as a nucleus of both French and English settlement in America.

It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that at any time in the world’s history enlightened folk should have thought good colonists could be made out of the sweepings of the jails and gutters of the Old World. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that fallacy was quite generally entertained by wouldbe founders of states across sea ; it required the lessons of more than a hundred years of disastrous experiments to teach discerning men that only the best of the middle class and the masses can successfully plant a new community in the wilderness. The experiences of Cartier and Roberval on the St. Lawrence, and of Laudonnière in Florida (1564), were of no avail in influencing governmental policy at Paris. In 1590, the Marquis de la Roche was sent out with the usual dissolute crew to succeed Roberval as the king’s agent on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Leaving part of his ill-favored gang on the desert Sable Isle, off Nova Scotia (where, early in the century, Baron de Léry had vainly attempted to plant a colony), La Roche set forth to explore the mainland for a site. A wild storm blew his vessels to France, and the wretched skin-clad survivors of the band which he had left behind were not rescued until thirteen years had elapsed. Their tale of horror long rang in the ears of France.

In 1600—1603, Chauvin and Pontgravé made successful trading voyages to the St. Lawrence. Samuel de Champlain was one of the party which in the latter year followed in Cartier’s track to Montreal. The same season, a Calvinist named De Monts was given the viceroyalty and fur-trade monopoly of Acadia, and in 1604 he landed a strangely assorted company of vagabonds and gentlemen on an island near the present boundary between Maine and New Brunswick ; but in the spring following they settled at what is now Annapolis, Nova Scotia, thus planting the first French agricultural settlement in America. Five years later, Champlain reared a permanent post on the rock of Quebec, and New France was at last, after a century of experiments, fairly under way. The Jesuits soon came ; by the time the Mayflower had reached Massachusetts Bay French influence had penetrated far inland, and painted savages from Lake Superior, a thousand miles westward, had begun to feel the power of Onontio, to trade with him, to drink of his “milk,” and to partake of his bounty.

Across the stage of New France, each in their fashion, swept a motley throng of players, fishermen, priests, nuns, soldiers, politicians, voyageurs, coureurs de bois, — self-seeking adventurers in the main, but most of them chivalrously zealous for church and king. A romantic drama, that of the French régime, not without its scenes of squalor and moral degradation, but on the whole a series of tableaux which for life and color and dramatic force have not elsewhere been equaled in American history.

We have been made familiar with it all, in a large way, through the glowing pages of Parkman, and doubtless for generations to come men will turn to him as the chief interpreter of this old régime of transplanted and belated mediævalism. Nevertheless there was much to tell, and new points of view to take, after Parkman had finished; the monographists are only now turning seriously to the detailed cultivation of the fertile field he broke. It is, however, not New France itself which most interests the student of American history, fascinating and instructive though the story may be ; it is the many - sided influence of New France on the American colonies, on the character and temper of the American people, on the savage allies of New France who were the enemies of our forbears, on the borderers who met and dealt with French Creole settlements far in the continental interior.

New France was for nearly a century and a half virtually master of the vast wilderness drained by the interlocking water systems of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. The history of no State on the northern border, from Maine to Minnesota, of no State bordering on the Ohio and the Mississippi, is complete without its chapter on the French occupation, and few of these commonwealths are without some waterside hamlet which can trace its story back to the old forest days when trader, friar, and commandant ruled supreme over a gay retinue of habitans and voyageurs who secretly cared little whether fleur de lis or union jack floated over the palisade, so long as their fiddles were in tune and beaver waxed plenty.

Many of our popular historians treat this French episode in American history quite inadequately ; they look upon the story of the States as summed up in the political strivings of the coast colonies, in the Revolutionary War, and in the expansion from tide-water westward, failing to appreciate the fact that the French régime was part and parcel of our growth. It is evident, however, that popular ignorance of the lasting influence of New France on United States history is not long to endure. Parkman broke the field, and is year by year being more widely read as an American classic ; several of the more competent of the histories published in the last four or five years have given fair treatment of this important episode; the monographists have not been idle, as witness the several excellent articles in the fourth volume of Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America; and now Dr. Winsor conies to the fore with two stout octavos of his own.¹

Upon first opening them, one would be disposed to consider these volumes as a revamp of the material from different workshops grouped in the Narrative and Critical History ; there is the same familiar wealth of early maps, and the arrangement seems not unlike that of the former publication. But examination soon proves that we have here an entirely fresh study, on original lines, bearing no resemblance to the other, save that one readily recognizes the same masterly touch that gave editorial coherency to the great cooperative work. The two volumes before us are but the pioneers in a contemplated series; yet, as both cover and are chiefly devoted to the wilderness explorations undertaken for New France, they may properly be considered together.

Dr. Winsor’s method is, we think, unique. In the main, it is a study of geographical exploration in the interior of North America, made direct from a critical examination of the maps of the period. As a thread on which to hang these, the author gives us a running historical sketch, which is in itself of great value, because of his searching analysis of the evidence on which his statements are founded. Possessing the critical faculty in a high degree, and enjoying almost unexcelled opportunities for research, he finds it possible to reject from the testimony many a flaw that has long been accepted as sound doctrine, to fortify much of what has been hitherto regarded as doubtful, and to introduce many new links in the chain. His treatment of the contemporary illustrations, chiefly maps, which number over a hundred in each volume, is in the same vein, giving us an authoritative history of each important chart, and a thorough examination of its merits and demerits as a document illustrating the geographical knowledge of its time. It is a far cry from the map of Sylvanus (1511), in which Newfoundland, Cuba, and Hayti are close neighbors, to that of Jeffreys (1753), which is concerned chiefly with problems as to the River of the West and the Pacific coast. In skillfully tracing for us the historical connection between the two, as reflected in the slow evolution of cartographical knowledge, our author unfolds two and a half centuries of American history, rich in interest for the philosopher, the scientist, and the statesman.

It could hardly be expected that, in an undertaking of so wide a scope, Dr. Winsor should safely pass all the pitfalls of local antiquarianism. To have done so would have been more than human. Many of the fields he crosses have been, or are being, exhaustively mined by sectional historians, who, reveling in detailed knowledge of the minutiæ, rejoice in tripping the giants who stalk that way. An instance of local error, one of the few which we have noticed, is the phrase, in Cartier to Frontenac, page 198, where the author is referring to the rumors concerning the Mississippi which had reached the ears of the Jesuit Allouez : —

“ Later in the same month [September, 1665], Allouez was at the bay where the modern town of Ashland stands, and on the principal island near the inlet, which the French named La Pointe, he founded the mission of the Holy Spirit, with a village of Chippewas near by, and built a bark chapel for his altar.”

Now, it is well established by historians of the Lake Superior region, and has been pointed out in monographs by Verwyst, Neill, and others, that the mission of Allouez was on the mainland, some seventeen miles to the southwest of La Pointe (or Madelaine) Island. The name La Pointe du St. Esprit, given by Allouez to his mission, had reference to the long sand-point of Chequamegon, which, the principal topographical feature of the neighborhood, hems in Chequamegon Bay on the east. Gradually, the entire region of Chequamegon Bay came to be known to fur-traders, in a general way, as La Pointe, and specifically the name was applied to each of the successive French missionary and trading settlements on the bay shore. Late in the seventeenth century, when the French commandant Le Sueur removed his headquarters to Madelaine Island, as being more secure from Indian attack than a mainland post, the designation La Pointe was naturally removed thereto, to be in turn applied to the later mainland station of the Englishman Henry, and once more and finally to the island, upon the coming of the Scoteh-Irish trader Johnston. Dr. Winsor has been misled into placing Allouez on Madelaine Island, by the shameless persistence with which guidebook writers, though frequently set right, continue to declare that a dilapidated little log chapel, unmistakably built on the island in 1835, by Father (afterwards Bishop) Baraga, is the original mission house of the Jesuits Allouez and Marquette. Such minor slips as this, however, are inevitable in a work covering so broad a field, and cannot be said to detract from its value. To the general reader, the error is of little consequence, and the specialist will not be led astray.

In the successful performance of his great task, Dr. Winsor has again rendered an important service to American letters. These two volumes well deserve to stand side by side with those of the master, Parkman. The latter has given us in the choicest English the story of New France writ large ; Winsor has painstakingly gathered from all the archives of Christendom the materials for a more detailed treatment of the theme, sifting and weighing them for the ready use of future builders. He has done more than this implies : he has given us New France from a fresh point of view, that of the explorer and map-maker, and his work deserves the credit which belongs to one who has found a new field and worked it well.