De Mons
enters the Port-Royal basin, June 1604 ...01a
European Exploitation
of a New World
"The
colonization of the Americas," Gwendolyn Midlo Hall informs us, "was
the earliest stage of the internationalization of the world."
After explaining in a recent history of the Atlantic World the differences between Europeans,
Africans, and Americans on the eve of colonization, Joan-Pau Rubiés
adds: "... it seems safe to conclude that the process by
which c.1490 three different continents came to be connected
by Atlantic navigation could only have been led from Europe."
The genesis of this phenomenon,
historians have long insisted, was the commercial revolution that
swept through Europe during two centuries of crusading in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1095,
at the end of the century in which Norsemen from Greenland had
settled in and then removed themselves from North America, the
Catholic pope stood before a council of bishops and
preached the First Crusade. The pontiff, speaking from
Clermont in France, had learned from the
emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire that a new breed of infidel, the
Seljuk Turks, had seized the Levant and refused to allow Christians
to visit the holy places.
He urged the warriors of Christendom to strap on their swords, take
up the cross of their crucified redeemer, and hurry to the Holy Land
to drive these non-believers from Jerusalem. The knights of
France and other Christian kingdoms took up the papal challenge, and
four years later the Holy City fell to them in an orgy of blood and
righteousness.
These Christian knights
fought the Muslims of the Levant for material as well as spiritual
gain. As they conquered the great cities of the eastern
Mediterranean, they created European feudal states, especially the
Kingdom of Jerusalem, to satisfy their lust for territory as well as
to protect the holy places. For two centuries, they clung
tenaciously to their Levantine principalities, but the Muslims
refused to let them be. By the 1200s, while the Christians
gradually lost their grip on the eastern Mediterranean, Italian
merchants supplying and transporting the crusading armies had opened a
lucrative trade between southwestern Europe and the cities of the
Levant. By the 1300s, despite the loss of the Holy Land
to the tenacious Muslims, Europe was benefiting both materially and
intellectually from the crusading effort. The Italian
city-states of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice exploited the Mediterranean
trade routes that had not seen so much use since Roman times.
New ideas as well as new products flowed through the ports of Italy
and southern France, igniting a Renaissance of art and ideas that
transformed parochial Europe. Put off by Turkish dominance of
the eastern Mediterranean, the Italians, especially the Genoese and
the Pisans, taking advantage of improvements in ocean navigation, opened new trade routes via the Strait of Gibraltar with
northwestern Europe. Meanwhile, the exploits of Venetian merchant Marco
Polo, widely circulated among western literati a century before the
invention of the printing press, turned European eyes towards the
distant Orient, which some fancied could be reached by an all-water
route.
The crusading
spirit compelled two Christian kingdoms in a once obscure corner of
Europe to move southward towards the gold fields of the Guinea coast.
In the 1300s, the Portuguese and the Catalans explored and colonized the Canary
Islands--the "Fortunate Islands" of antiquity--off the coast of west Africa. The natives, called the Guanche, who had inhabited the islands for thousands of years, fought
desperately to preserve their way of life, unique to each island.
Taking advantage of this, the Iberians used the Natives as
auxiliaries, and island after island fell to the determined
invaders, who turned on their allies and used them as slaves on
profitable sugar plantations. In the mid-1400s, the Castilians
drove the Portuguese and Catalans from the islands and continued the conquest of
the Guanche. By the end of the century, most of the Canaries
belonged to Castile. Eventually, Spanish-speaking natives of
the Canary Islands came to be called Isleños.
The Portuguese, encouraged
by their king’s brother, Prince Henry the Navigator, turned their
attention to other islands off the African coast--the Azores,
Madeira, and Cape Verdes--thereby thrusting their economic and
strategic interests deeper into the Atlantic. On these islands, they
established sugar, indigo, and cotton plantations, worked by West
African slave labor.
Meanwhile, with the cooperation of local rulers, they established fortified trading posts along the coast of
northwest Africa, moving steadily southward towards the equatorial
zone and the prosperous kingdoms of Benin and Kongo. What they found in
their exploitation of the African coast proved to be more compelling
than pagan souls—gold, ivory, jewels, pepper, sugar, fish ... and more
slaves. Their ultimate prize, however, would be a spice trade with
the Orient via a route around Africa that would effectively
outflank the Muslims of East Africa. In January 1488, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu
Dias, Prince Henry's great-nephew, rounded the Cape of Good Hope at
the southern end of Africa and noted that the coast beyond the cape
stretched away to the northeast. A decade later, Vasco da Gama repeated Dias's
voyage, used the winds and currents of the South Atlantic to propel
him into the Indian Ocean, and, after a long and sometimes difficult
voyage, returned to Portugal with a cargo of precious Indian spices.
The Portuguese now claimed an all-water route to unprecedented
wealth and power.
It was an obscure Italian
with a bold idea who brought Iberian exploitation of the Atlantic
world to an entirely new level. Cristoforo Colombo was born in
Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver who lost his boy to the lure of
the sea. Young Columbus, as we know him, worked in the
merchant fleet of his native city and then switched his allegiance
to Portugal. Inspired by fellow Italian Marco Polo,
sometime in the late 1480s, after carefully (mis)calculating the
circumference of the earth, Columbus conceived his great plan—to
reach the Indies by sailing westward across the Atlantic Ocean.
He was confident his skills at navigation and command could overcome
all obstacles he surely would encounter, but the result would
be worth it: Portugal would then control a much shorter route
to the spices, and souls, of Asia. Columbus presented his idea
to his Portuguese masters, but a maritime commission rejected his
calculations and refused to entrust a fleet to him (they opted,
instead, for a voyage under Dias down the West African coast).
Undaunted, Columbus moved on to France, England, and Spain but met similar rejection.
Refusing to give up on his grand idea, he eventually sold his plan
to Queen Isabella of Castile, who, with her husband, King Ferdinand
of Aragon, had just conquered the Moors and established a degree of
domestic tranquility within their Iberian kingdoms. Christian
Spain was ready, Isabella believed, to compete in the Eastern trade
and to bring the Asians to Christianity--a continuation of the
crusade against Islam. So Columbus became
the admiral of a fleet of three ships which, in the late summer of
1492, sailed from Palos to the Canary Islands. Two months
later, after sailing due west across the Atlantic, Columbus's
flotilla reached what he insisted were islands of "the Indies," and
the history of the world was profoundly changed. Though
Columbus himself never fully acknowledged that he had stumbled upon a "new world," others did.
As early as 1503, three years before Columbus's death, Amerigo Vespucci,
a Florentine then working for Portugal, applied the
term mundus novus--New World--to what is now the coast of Brazil.
Three decades later, Gerardus Mercator, in his map of the world,
applied the poetic name "America" to the entirety of the mundus novus.
Meanwhile, Iberian
conquistadors, beginning in the 1510s, exploited Columbus’s
discoveries and brought wealth and power to Spain.
The Portuguese came upon
"the Indies" in 1500 when Pedro Álvares Cabral, on his way to India with a
fleet of his own to duplicate da Gama’s voyage, landed on the coast of
the Land of Parrots, present-day Brazil. The papal Treaty of Tordesillas
six years earlier had awarded Portugal that part of the Atlantic
realm east of a certain line of longitude down the middle of the
ocean. The place where Cabral landed and which he promptly
claimed for Portugal stood east of the treaty line. So the Portuguese now had claims to exploit in the European New World.01
.
Meanwhile, another Italian
navigator, Giovanni Caboto Montecataluna--John Cabot, or Caboote, as he came to
be called--went, like Columbus, to several kingdoms in search of a
ship to explore the Atlantic. After soliciting in Spain and
Portugal, the Venetian native moved to London and then to Bristol, England,
by 1490. In
1496, he and an Italian sponsor coaxed King Henry VII into
authorizing a voyage to the northern ocean. Cabot's choice of
Bristol was no accident. Since 1478, when the English were expelled
from the Icelandic cod-fishing grounds, sailors from the port had
ventured into the ocean west of Ireland in search of the mythical
island of Brazil, from which they hoped to resurrect their lucrative
cod-fishery. King Henry tasked the Venetian "to find and
discover 'any islands or countries whether of Gentiles or Infidels
which before this time were unknown to all Christians.'" Sailing from Bristol in early April 1497
aboard "the ratty little caravel Matthew" with a crew
of 18, perhaps including his 14-year-old son Sebastian, Cabot
sailed past Ireland and then turned northwestward. He reached
terra firma at present-day Newfoundland, perhaps at
today's Cape Bonavista, in late June; he and his crew may have been
the first Europeans to set eyes on the place since the Norse had
abandoned their settlements there centuries earlier. Nearby was
a vast fishing ground with what appeared to be a limitless supply of
cod, which proved to be his most important discovery. Cabot explored the coast southward, perhaps
encountering Natives on today's Cape Breton Island. He and his
crew may have been the first Europeans to visit what came to be
called "the English cape." Despite its great significance,
Cabot's voyage was a brief one; he was back at Bristol by August to
report what he had found. The following spring, with Henry VII's sanction, Cabot set out again from Bristol, this time with
five ships and 300 men. His goal was to cross the "British Ocean" to
"Cipango," a spice-producing region of the Indies sought by
Columbus. Cabot hoped to establish an English colony there,
which of course he failed to do.
Cabot and the Bristolians soon were joined by
explorers from the south. In 1500,
Joao Fernandes, a lavrador, or "farmer," from Terceira in the
Azores and his neighbor, Pedro de Barcelos, with the sanction of King Manuel of Portugal,
"rediscovered" Greenland, the southern tip of
which took the lavrador's name before it was applied to another
coast. No doubt to the
chagrin of King Manuel, Fernandes's return voyage took him not to the Azores but to Bristol,
England.
With a joint Portuguese-English expedition out of that port, Fernandes returned to the
northern climes in the spring of 1501, the expedition's ship captained by
John Cabot himself. Both Fernandes and Cabot may have been
lost on the venture; only three of the Bristolians returned.
Nevertheless, King Henry VII authorized another joint
English-Portuguese expedition to Greenland in 1503.
Meanwhile, Sebastian Cabot, like his father, became a noted mariner.
In 1507-09, during the final days of Henry VII's reign, Sebastian,
while looking for a route to Asia, explored the waters
where he and his father had gone the decade before; it was Sebastian,
in fact,
who named Newfoundland Riuo
de los Bacalaos, or Land of the Cod. The sea ice, however,
frustrated his attempts to establish a spice trade with Asia. No matter, the English now
possessed an early claim to the North Atlantic regions. Except
for the fishing, however, the coasts
the Cabots and the Bristolians had explored did not seem to possess
the potential for exploitation as did the Iberian discoveries to the south. England, under a new
king, hesitated, and Spain and Portugal became the
early winners in the imperial competition for the Americas.285
After learning of Cabot's voyage to the northern ocean, King Manuel was determined to overawe the English in a region
reserved by treaty for his nation alone. In the spring of 1500, the year of
the lavrador's voyage, Gaspar Corte Real, whose venture also
was approved by King Manuel, sailed out of Lisbon with a single
vessel and explored the coast of Greenland. On a second voyage
beginning in May 1501, with three ships this time, also out of
Lisbon, Gaspar explored the northern and eastern coasts of
Newfoundland, which he named Terra Verde, or Greenland, and also
explored the coast of today's Labrador. Corte
Real sent two of his ships back to Lisbon with 57 Natives aboard,
either Béothuk or Mi'kmaq, who were sold as slaves in Portugal
perhaps to pay for the cost of the voyage. Meanwhile, Corte
Real lingered in the third vessel to explore more of the mysterious
coast, but he and his ship did not return. In May 1502, Miguel
Corte Real, in search of brother Gaspar, also set
sail from Lisbon with three vessels, but he, too, along with one of his
ships, failed to return. The other two ships returned to
Lisbon, but their captains and crews could not say what had happened
to Miguel and the other vessel. The following year, King Manuel sent
out two vessels to find the brothers, but his mariners
found no sign of them. The loss of the Corte Reals, as well as
the financial cost of their failed expeditions, ended voyages to the
northern ocean sanctioned by King Manuel, who ruled until 1521.286
In 1520, however, towards
the end of Manuel's reign, Portuguese fisherman Joao Álvares Fagundes
of Viana do Castelo in the north of Portugal followed the annual
Portuguese fishing fleet to the Newfoundland Bank. From
there, he sailed
along the eastern and southern coasts of Newfoundland, where he
discovered new cod-fishing grounds and established new fisheries. Among his discoveries were the
"Islands of the 11,000 Virgins," today's îles St.-Pierre
and Miquelon, 16 miles south of Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula.
He
encountered the islands on St. Ursula's Day and named them for her
virgin companions. Fagundes then sailed west from the Islands
of the Virgins into the
entrance of today's Gulf of St. Lawrence. According to
historian H. P. Biggar, Fagundes turned north and followed the western coast
of Newfoundland all the way up to the Straits of Belle Isle.
Biggar insists Fagundes then sailed westward from the Straits
of Belle Isle "along the northern or Labrador shore of the Gulf.
When the Gulf began to narrow he crossed over to the southern side,
and sailed out again by Gaspé and the Acadian peninsula," which
would have made him the discoverer of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On
his voyage home, Fagundes evidently left cattle on present-day Sable
Island, at the southern edge of the Newfoundland Bank, for the benefit of
Portuguese fishermen. In 1521, Fagundes, along with
"gentlemen" from his native Viana do Castelo, may have established a short-lived colony near Cape Breton or on the
Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. In that same year, he sailed around to the
mouth of today's Bay of Fundy, perhaps the first European to view
that body of water.286c
In 1520, a
Spanish caravel "from Hayti made its way" northward "as far as the
point afterwards called Cape Charles, near the 37th parallel of
latitude," the southern tip of today's Eastern Shore of
Virginia.
Not for five more years, however, would another Spanish vessel
appear in that part of North America. Meanwhile, Magellan's
expedition of 1519-22 for Spain proved beyond doubt what
others, beginning with Vespucci, had long suspected: that
Columbus, Cabot, and other explorers had "discovered" features not
of the coast of Asia "but of some hitherto unknown continent
extending across the ocean mid-way between Asia and Europe....
Then at length some idea of the real significance of Columbus's
discovery began to dawn upon men's minds."286b
Da Gama in the 1480s and
now Magellan's expedition had given first Portugal and now Spain
all-water routes to the gold and spices of the Orient via the tips of Africa and South America.
With the realization that a huge expanse of earth lay north of the
West Indies and might offer a
shorter route to Asia, the search was now on for an all-water
passage that would allow Europeans to penetrate the northern
continent. Whoever could find and secure this northwest
passage could control the lucrative spice trade with Asia.
However, only a thorough exploration of the North American coastline
could reveal the location of the elusive passage. "The
European image of North America actually seems to have developed
through a process of slow and painful accretion, with many maps
representing abortive efforts to synthesize logical configurations
out of fragmentary and confusing information," Bernard G.
Hoffman reminds us. "This seems to have been particularly true
in the Newfoundland area, where a combination of rugged and complex
coastlines, persistent fogbanks, and dangerous ice conditions caused
the loss of many expeditions and kept the cartographers baffled for
over a century." This slapdash process was inevitable given
the imperial rivalries among the
European powers. Meanwhile, Europeans derived substantial
economic benefit from the waters and land of the northern
regions--certainly not in spices and not yet in gold, but from fish,
especially the abundant cod, and from a serendipitous trade in
beaver fur.286a
If one were to award
the true "discoverers" of the northern regions, however,
of its size, its intricate configuration, and its economic importance,
the prize must go to the fishermen,
whalers, and seal-hunters who ventured to the other side of the
North Atlantic soon after, or perhaps before, the voyages of the Cabots and the Corte
Reals. Basques, who may have gone there for centuries, Bretons, Normans, Englishmen from the West
Country, especially Bristolians, as well as Dutchmen, Danes,
Norwegians, Spaniards, and
Portuguese--thousands of them ventured across the dangerous ocean to
exploit the Grand Bank of Newfoundland. "Together the whale
and cod fisheries involved an annual trans-Atlantic migration of
hundreds of ships and thousands of men," a Canadian historian tells
us. "Less spectacular than Spanish activities in the
Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, the fisheries in the northwestern
Atlantic involved more ships and men." By the 1550s, cod
fishermen from northern France had perfected the wet or green
fishery, which allowed them to fish the offshore banks early in the
season, salt the cod in their holds, and return to their home ports
to dry the fish without having to make
landfall in America except briefly for fresh water or repairs. But more
extensively, and more importantly to our story, the cod fishermen
also developed the inshore or dry fishery for the southern European and
West Indian markets. This required them to build drying and
salting stations on wide beaches close to the fishing grounds.
The whaling industry off Labrador and, later, in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, also required extensive on-shore facilities. Contact with the Natives was inevitable, as was the exchange of
goods and microorganisms. And, just as inevitably, blood was
spilled. The construction of the drying and salting stations
required use of local lumber resources. Typical of Europeans,
this activity "was carried on with the greatest of waste, the woods
along the shore being 'so spoyled by the fishermen that it is a
great pity to behold them, and without redresse undoubtedly (it)
will be the ruine of this good land. For they wastefully barke,
fell and leave more wood behinde them to rot then they use about
their stages although they imploy a world of wood upon them.'
To add to the destruction," Bernard Hoffman continues, "the
fishermen occasionally fired the woods near the harbours to clear
the land, the resulting conflagrations burning for weeks. The
burned-over areas eventually may have provided the natives with
berry patches, but the process would not have had favourable results
for the fauna." Such abuse of the land drove many of the
Natives to violence. The fishermen seldom used locals in
their labor-intensive drying operations, which began in spring and
lasted through the summer, but they found a secondary market in
trading for the clothing which had kept the Natives warm all winter.
"Both parties profited," Canadian archaeologist John S. Erskine
tells us. "Cast-off beaver cloaks, sodden from the bear-grease
underwear of winter, were in great demand by hatters." The trade
in furs, like exposure to European diseases and wastefulness,
transformed Native life permanently and
profoundly, and would come to rival fishing and whaling in
economic importance to the Europeans.287
France in the New
World
The French, emulating other European powers, conducted early voyages to mundus
novus.
In 1503-04, Binot Paulmier de
Gonneville visited Brazil, claimed by the Portuguese following
Cabral's voyage. In 1506, Jean Denys of Honfleur ventured to
Newfoundland, where the English and the Portuguese already had gone,
and may have explored parts of today's Gulf of St. Lawrence. A few years later, in 1508, the ship
Pensée, owned by Jean Ango of Dieppe and captained by Thomas
Aubert, sailed to the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Emulating
Columbus and Corte Real, Aubert "brought back from there some of the
Natives, whom he exhibited to the wonder and applause of France"--"the
first American Indians," another historian notes, "who trod the soil
of France." According to regional records, a ship out of Dahouet, now Pléneuf,
the Jaquette, "had gone to Rouen in September of 1510 to 'sell the
codfish which they had been searching and fishing for in parts of
the New Land.'" A court decree three years later pardoned the mate of
La Jacquette for causing "the death of a member of the crew by
chasing him overboard during a dispute over wages," so that vessel
may still have been fishing off the coast of Newfoundland. In
1518, Guillaume de Miremont III, baron de Lhéry et Gueux "made an abortive attempt at settlement on
Sable Island," off the coast of Nova Scotia, "where the cattle left
by him remained and multiplied." The baron also left his swine
there. A ship belonging to the three Parmentier brothers
of Dieppe ventured to Newfoundland in 1520 and
discovered an island they called Fernanbourg near Cape Breton. The
following year, Michel de Segure and Mathieu de Biran of Bayonne
petitioned the authorities of that port to take their vessel to
Newfoundland. But none of these ventures was
sanctioned by the courts of Louis XII and François I.02c
Except for its sturdy fishermen, then, France was a
relative late comer to the
competition for America’s riches. "The Atlantic trade, except
for a few piratical captains, was largely abandoned to the
Iberians," a student of colonial France explains. "The French
crown prized far more the traditional Mediterranean trade with the
Near East, and the enterprising Spaniards and Portuguese moved
quickly to protect their tenuous Atlantic commercial advantage."
Papal interference also was a factor in French reluctance to exploit
the Americas. The papal bulls of
Alexander VI--Inter caetera, issued
on 4 May 1493, and Dudum siquidem on 28 September 1493,
ratified the following year by the Treaty of Tordesillas in
Spain--divided the Atlantic world between the Iberian powers, not
only for settlement and trade, but also for exploration.
Although the
papal interdiction was generally ignored, the French Crown was not eager
to test Iberian resolve in enforcing their claims in the New World.
However, there was no such reluctance on the part of Breton and
Norman seamen, who, historian W. J. Eccles explains, "had begun to invade the
Portuguese-claimed coast of Brazil" in the early 1500s,
"establishing amicable relations with the natives and gathering rich
cargoes of pepper and dye wood. In fact," Eccles explains,
"the ports of northwest France were as much concerned with the
Brazil trade as with the fishery of the Grand Banks. The
Portuguese had to countenance this trade lest the French Crown issue
letters of marque against their galleons to the feared French
privateers." This arrangement lasted until the French Crown
itself fell into Spanish hands during one of the many wars between
France and Spain.02a
Not until 1523 did a
French monarch, François I, authorize a voyage of discovery to America.
As a result, France became one of the first European powers to
search in earnest for the northwest passage. France was still
at war with Spain, but the return of the Magellan expedition in 1522, bringing
to Spain "a wealth of spices" and proving beyond
doubt that Columbus had discovered an entirely new world, pressed
French authorities into action. Another Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazzano of Florence,
residing at Dieppe since 1506, was charged with exploring the coast
of North America, this time to find a passage to Asia. The Florentine may
already have gone to the
northern ocean aboard the Pensée with Thomas Aubert in 1508.
Verrazzano certainly had sailed throughout the eastern Mediterranean
and had lived in Cairo, Egypt, for a time, so he was a good choice
to lead an expedition into exotic lands yet unexplored. By the
time he solicited King François for an expedition to the northern
ocean and acquired financing for the voyage from the bankers and
silk merchants of Lyon, it was well known from the voyages of
Vespucci, Columbus, Magellan, and others that a land mass south and
west of the Antilles blocked further passage to Asia. However,
little to nothing was known of the land between the Antilles and
Cape Breton. Recently, the Portuguese Fagundes had explored
some of the region south and west of the Breton cape, but no one knew how far south of the cape lay Florida,
which had been discovered by the Spaniard Ponce de Leon on Palm
Sunday--Pascua florida--in 1513. A map of the world
published the following year and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
showed Florida "as an island in an ocean touching on Japan."
It was entirely possible, then, that a passage to Asia could be
found in the region between Florida and Newfoundland.02u
Verrazzano first attempted
a crossing in four vessels sailing
from Dieppe directly across the northern ocean to Newfoundland in late 1523, but foul weather forced
him back to France after the loss of two ships. With the two
ships that had survived the first effort--his own caravel, La Dauphine, and La Normandie--Verrazzano sailed
from Brittany south past the Spanish coast to
the Madeiras, seeking calmer weather and, since France was still at
war with Spain, indulging in "some privateering." During the
venture, the Normandie was forced to return home, but
Verrazzano remained undeterred. This time he would risk a
transoceanic crossing not yet taken--straight across the mid-Atlantic. On 17 January 1524, he sailed
west from the Madeiras in La Dauphine with a Norman crew of
50 "and 'enough provisions for eight months, arms and other engines
of war and seafaring.'" After surviving a mid-Atlantic tempest
in February, 25 days into his voyage, he and his crew, trending
slightly northward for 25 more days, reached the area of
present-day Cape Fear,
North Carolina, at the 34th parallel, in early March. After
exploring the coast south of the cape for 50 leagues in search of
Spanish Florida, they feared making contact
with the Spanish and so returned to the area of their original
landfall. Verrazzano named the place Annunciata, after the
feast day of the Annunciation, having returned on March 25.
Ashore, they made contact with the local Natives, probably the
Croatoan, who Verrazzano
described in great detail. Back aboard the Dauphine,
Verrazzano concluded that today's Pamlico Sound was the eastern edge
of Magellan's ocean. Finding only a sandy isthmus enclosing
what proved to be nothing more than a brackish-water sound, he and
his crew returned to the blue Atlantic and followed the coast
northeastward, still determined to find a passage to Asia.
Near the entrance to present-day Chesapeake Bay, they again made
contact with the Natives. Verrazzano called the area Arcadia,
such was the transcendent beauty of its trees. The Spanish
later called the great estuary Bahia de Santa Maria.
Verrazzano remained
there three days, exploring the sandy ocean-side inlets of today's Eastern
Shore and kidnapping a Native boy before continuing northward. Sailing past
the entrance to Delaware Bay, he and his crew
explored the narrows at the entrance to present-day New York harbor, where they
encountered more Natives. In a ship's
boat, Verrazzano hoped to explore
the harbor and the rivers that flowed into it, one of them perhaps
the elusive passage to Asia, but contrary winds drove him back to
the Dauphine, and he and his crew returned to the ocean.
After rounding today's Long Island, they explored Narragansett Bay,
which Verrazzano called Refugio--the Refuge. During their
15-day sojourn there, near present-day Newport, Rhode Island, he and
his men encountered Natives who helped replenish their dwindling
stores. A grateful Verrazzano described them as "'the most
handsome and best disciplined' of all the peoples" they "had
encountered during this voyage." Sailing farther up the coast,
Verrazzano called today's Cape Cod the Shoals of Armellino. On
May 6, perhaps at present-day Boston or, more likely, at Casco Bay,
near the mouth of the Kennebec River, he and his men came to the
Land of Bad People, who treated the Europeans with a disdainful
contempt not observed in the Indians to the south.
Significantly, however, these "'evil men'" wore pendant earrings
made of copper. Verrazzano was the first to describe the
magnificent coast of Maine, which he called Oranbega--Norembègue to
his French successors. He found the place "'more accessible
and devoid of forests,' dominated 'by high mountains sloping down
towards the shore,' and fringed with many small islands," evidence,
perhaps, that he and his crew were much impressed with what they
observed of today's Mount Desert Island. Farther up the coast,
like the Portuguese Fagundes a few years earlier, but from a
different direction, they sailed past the mouth of the Bay of Fundy,
failing to make note of it, and coasted along the Atlantic shore of
today's Nova Scotia peninsula, again failing to note anything
significant. In the final leg of the voyage, they rounded the
Breton
cape and the east coast of Newfoundland, where they knew many others
had gone before. All they had seen Verrazzano named
Francesco, after King François, but the name did not stick. On later maps
of the newly-"discovered" coast, the cartographers preferred the name Nova Gallia--New France. Having failed to find any evidence of a short passage
to Asia, Verrazzano--and, with him, the
literate world--could see that "the 'New World,'" from the tip
of South America all the way up to the Arctic region, '"is connected together, not
adjoining Asia or Africa (which I know to be a certainty.)'"
From Newfoundland, Verrazzano crossed the northern ocean,
successfully this time, and returned to Dieppe by early July, having
departed the Madeiras six months earlier.02d
Bernard Hoffman
concludes: "Viewed in perspective, Verrazzano's achievement
stands as an important one. He was the first to explore the
gap between the Spanish ventures to the south and the English" and
Portuguese "enterprises to the north; he was the first to establish
the continental nature of the 'New Founde Land'; and he was the
first commander to bring back anything resembling a detailed account
of the natives of North America. For his time this was a
tremendous accomplishment." Canadian historian Marcel Trudel
adds: "Until 1524, nothing whatever was known of what lay
between Florida and Cape Breton; Verrazano established the existence
of a single, continuous coastline from one to the other, thereby
removing this expanse from the realm of conjecture. The
Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent was now charted in
its entirety for the first time in history."02e
.
Meanwhile, in late
September 1524,
two and a half months after Verrazzano returned to Dieppe, Estêvao
Gomes of Oporto, northern Portugal, serving in the employ of Spain,
left Coruna and followed the Spanish fishing fleet across the North Atlantic on the
first leg of a voyage to find a passage to Asia, which his countrymen had visited
only a few years earlier. Gomes, in fact, while serving as
captain of the San Antonio, one of Magellan's five vessels,
had deserted the expedition before it reached the tip of South
America. After he returned with his ship to Spain in May 1521,
he was
promptly thrown into prison. A year later, the 18 survivors
aboard Magellan's only remaining vessel, the Victoria,
related the horrors of the circumnavigation, which Magellan himself
did not survive. Spanish authorities promptly released the
captain-deserter, who persuaded King Carlos I to let him try his
hand at finding the northwest passage. At Bilbao, the Spanish
built a special ship for Gômez, as they called him--the 75-ton caravel La
Anunciata. After crossing to Santiago de Cuba, where they
took on supplies, Gomes and his
crew of 29 headed north, essentially following Verrazzano's recent
voyage. After rounding Cape Cod, Gomes dubbed present-day
Casco Bay San Antonio. Exploring the coast of present-day
Maine, "taking soundings of all the bays and river mouths as he
went," Gomes "discovered" Penobscot Bay and the magnificent river
that flows into it. The Natives called it Pentagouët, but
Gomes called it the Deer River. Here, he hoped, was the
passage to Asia and perhaps the site of Norumbega (Verrazzano's
Norembègue), the fabled city of gold, which supposedly lay somewhere
near the 45th parallel. However, when Gomes reached the head
of navigation of the Penobscot River at present-day Bangor, Maine,
he realized he was nowhere near Magellan's ocean. "Not wishing
to return empty-handed, Gomes kidnapped on the coast of Maine or
Nova Scotia a large number of Indians whom he planned to sell as
slaves. We know that at least 58 reached Spain alive," one of
his biographers informs us. Although King Carlos I later freed
the captured Natives, they and their relatives would not
have forgotten their ill treatment at the hands of the Europeans.
Continuing northeastward along the coast, Gomes misconstrued the
true nature of today's Nova Scotia peninsula and called it Isla de San Juan. He continued his
northward journey all the way to Cape Race, the southeast tip of
Newfoundland, mistaking Cabot Strait as just another coastal bay,
and returned to Coruna in August 1525 after a voyage of
10 months and 27 days.02v
Before the French could
exploit the new discoveries, King François fell into the hands of
the Spanish during his disastrous campaign in Italy in 1525.
This, W. J. Eccles explains, was "too good an opportunity" for
another French enemy "to miss. King John III of Portugal
quickly dispatched a fleet to Brazil. Most of the French
traders along the coast," who had been there for years, "were
captured, brought to Lisbon, and executed as pirates. A few
escaped and fled into the interior, throwing themselves on the mercy
of the indigenous tribes; but from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, an
effective French presence had been eliminated." Years later,
when the French "returned to resume their trading activities at
Recife on the Brazil coast they were swiftly captured by the
Portuguese and put to the sword. Clearly," Eccles concludes,
"the French were as yet unable to concentrate forces sufficient to
hold their own in the parts of the world claimed by Portugal."
As a result, it was the
Spanish, not the French, who were the first to attempt a settlement in the region of Verrazzano's and Gomes's explorations. With information obtained during the early 1520s from
the voyages of Francisco Gordillo and slave-trader Pedro de Quejo to
the area called Chicora, and likely from Gomes's reports as well, sugar planter Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón of
Santo Domingo sailed northward in three ships from Hispaniola in the summer of
1526. He, too, was searching for a passage to Asia, but he
also was intent on remaining at Chicora. With him were a hand
full of Dominican friars, 600 colonists, including African slaves, a
hundred horses, shiploads of provisions, and livestock, to be
settled on a grant of land awarded to de Ayllón by Emperor Charles
V, who also was King Carlos I of Spain. Also in the
expedition was a captured Chicora,
who served as the expedition's interpreter and guide; Francisco, as
the Spanish called him, had been taken to Spain to be examined by
scholars and learned to speak Spanish fluently. On September 29, the
Feast of the Archangels, de Ayllón's expedition landed at Winyah
Bay, near present-day Georgetown, South Carolina, the gateway to
Chicora. After searching the area northward to today's Pawleys Island, during
which Francisco escaped to his people, de Ayllón lost a ship in Winyah
Bay. This prompted him to head back down the
coast to find a more suitable site for settlement, some of his
colonists traveling overland, others by water. During the first week of October, the parties
united at Sapelo Sound on today's central Georgia coast.
There, on October 8, they began construction of the short-lived settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape. While the settlement was being built, de Ayllón
died. The loss of their commander, compounded by squabbling among the remaining
leaders, hunger, disease, a shortage of supplies, the hostility of
the local Natives, the Guale, who the Spanish hoped to enslave, and a slave revolt
by the West Africans, forced the survivors--only
150 of the original 600--to abandon the venture. In January
1527, only three months after the enterprise was launched, a
flotilla commanded by Francisco Gômez returned
them to Hispaniola.02b
Gomes's 11-month search
for the passage to Asia extended the reach of Iberian hegemony far
above their claims to Florida and provided more details for their
maps of the northern coastline, which they dubbed Gômez Land.
But their first attempt to settle along the coast north of Florida,
in Ayllón Land, south of Gômez Land, proved to
be a dismal failure. The way was now open for other nations to exploit their own claims in North America.02w
.
But, again, a power other than France jumped into the fray and strengthened its own claims in the region.
In May 1527, only two years after the voyages of Verrazzano and
Gomes, King Henry VIII of England sent an
expedition of two ships from London, the Mary of Guildford
and the Sampson, "'to seke strange regions,'" under
command of John Rut, "accompanied by Canon Albert de Prato."
These "strange regions," the English hoped, included the
elusive northwest passage to
Asia. The ships crossed from Plymouth in June, sailing
northwestward across the Atlantic. On the passage over, a
storm separated them. The Mary of Guilford sailed on,
hoping to find the northern passage, but in July the sea ice and
then the surprisingly warm water of the upper Gulf Stream drove her
crew south towards Newfoundland. They anchored at Cape de Bas
for 10 days, waiting for the Sampson. Sailing north again, they encountered more ice,
and then turned south to St. John's, Newfoundland, which they reached in
early August and where they hoped to meet their fellow Englishmen. At
St. John's, they encountered a dozen fishing vessels from Normandy,
Brittany, and Portugal and stayed there a week. During that time,
their pilot, a Piedmontese, was killed by Natives when the Englishmen
attempted to go ashore. Hearing no more of their consort, they may
have re-crossed the Atlantic, returning to England in early October, or they
may have headed south along the Atlantic coast, passing the site of the recently abandoned
Spanish settlement under de Ayllón. In November, an English vessel
appeared at Santo Domingo in the West Indies, its crew hoping to
take on fresh water and provisions, but the Spanish drove them away.
The Englishmen continued on to Puerto Rico, where they found
settlers willing to trade, and then the Spanish heard no
more of them.
Bernard Hoffman
postulates that the English vessel at St. John's may not have been
the same vessel that encountered the Spanish in the West Indies but
rather its missing consort the Sampson. (How else could one explain the return of
one of the expedition's vessels in early October, a month before an
English ship encountered the Spanish at Santo Domingo?)
Marcel Trudel concludes: "This expedition, faring no
better than it predecessors, found no route to Asia. However,
it did enable England to assert her rights on the Atlantic seaboard
along with France and Spain, and moreover it was she, the
late-comer, who was to gain possession of this long coastline in the
end."02x
.
Finally, a full decade
after Verrazzano's first voyage, the French returned to Nova Gallia
with another sanctioned venture. In 1532, about the time the
duchy of Brittany was formally united with France, François I, still
the King of France and no longer a prisoner in Spain, made a
pilgrimage to the seaside monastery of Mont-St.-Michel at the border of Normandy and Brittany. Jean Le Veneur,
comte and Bishop of Lisieux, Grand Almoner of the kingdom, and
Abbé of
Mont-St.-Michel, introduced the King to a Breton pilot, Jacques Cartier of
St.-Malo, then 41 years of age. Le Veneur informed the King that Cartier
was a relative of the bursar at Mont-St.-Michel and had sailed to Newfoundland
and Brazil, proof of his abilities as a trans-oceanic navigator.
The bishop promised the King that if he sent Cartier to Nova Gallia, the
bishop would provide chaplains, as well as funds, for the venture.
François, along with the Admiral of France, was enthusiastic about
the venture, but the King's good relations with Pope Clement VII,
his ally against Emperor Charles V (Spain's Carlos I), made him reluctant to ignore the
bulls of Clement's predecessor, Pope Alexander VI. The
marriage of François's son to a niece of Pope Clement gave the King
an opportunity to discuss the bulls of 1493 with his powerful ally,
"who was more interested in Italian politics than in unknown lands"
and "raised no difficulties" about papal restrictions issued four
decades ago. Moreover, François reasoned "'that the papal bull
dividing up the new continents between the crowns of Spain and
Portugal concerned only already-known continents and not lands
subsequently discovered by the other crowns.'" Also,
perhaps after reflecting on the fate of his subjects at the hands of
the Portuguese in Brazil, François concluded that "claiming ... a
monopoly on trade in any area could be maintained only by permanent
occupation of the region. Wherever Europeans had no fixed
establishments, the trade had to be open to all." And so two
years after their meeting at Mont-St.-Michel, François commissioned
Cartier "Captain and Pilot for the King" and ordered him to return
to North America. The navigator's
primary mission would be to search for "gold and other precious
things," as well as the elusive passage to Asia. According to
Cartier biographer Marcel Trudel, the account of his voyage
"mentions no priest engaged in evangelization among the natives," so
conversion of the "savages" evidently was not a goal of the
expedition. Trudel continues: "it would moreover have
been useless, because of the linguistic barrier. Although the
ship's muster-roll has not been found, one may surmise that at least
one priest was on board; when Bishop Le Veneur had proposed Cartier
he had undertaken to supply the chaplains, and the account of the
voyage alludes to the singing of masses." In all other
respects, however, this expedition, like Verrazzano's a decade
earlier, was motivated by secular interests.02q
After an impressive
ceremony conducted by the Vice-admiral of France, Cartier left St.-Malo on
20 April 1534 "with two ships of about sixty tons' burden each and
with a total of sixty-one men," and reached Cabot's Cape Bonavista,
which he called Bonne Viste, on the east coast of Newfoundland, on
May 10, an amazingly short voyage of only 20 days. The
expedition headed briefly south to Ste.-Catherine harbor to avoid
the sea ice choking Bonavista Bay, and it may have been at the
harbor he named after his wife that he noted the many
fishing vessels from a number of regions in Europe. Turning
north, he sailed to Île-des-Oiseaux, the Island of Birds, 50 miles
out into the North Atlantic, where he "obtained a plentiful supply
of meat," before returning to the coast of Newfoundland.
There, he turned north again and sailed past Cap-Dégrat, today's
Cape Norman, into the Baie-des-Châteaux, today's Strait of
Belle-Isle, which separates Newfoundland from Labrador. Here
was his first major objective, which he reached on May 27, but it
also proved to be his first major obstacle. Immobilized by
winds and ice, he had to wait nearly two weeks at present-day
Quirpon Harbor before he could force
passage through the strait. This gave him time to examine the
inlets, islands, and land forms at the northern tip of Newfoundland,
including the area later called L'Anse-à-la-Médée, now
L'Anse-aux-Meadows, where Norsemen had settled five centuries
earlier but which would
remain unknown to history for four centuries more. Finally,
on June 9, Cartier was able to resume his voyage through the Baie-des-Châteaux.
After passing through the strait, on
June 12 or 13, he encountered his first Natives at Brest, a
water-and-wood depot for cod fishermen on the south coast of Labrador.
These likely were Beothuks who had come to the shore to hunt seals and walruses. A hundred miles to the west of the strait,
while coasting along the north shore of today's Gulf of St.
Lawrence, Cartier encountered a fishing boat from La Rochelle,
evidently lost, and directed it back towards the North Atlantic.
"Cartier was not yet in a totally unknown world,"
Marcel Trudel reminds us,
"but he freely assigned names to the geographical features of the
north coast: Île Sainte-Catherine, also named after his wife; Toutes-Isles; Havre
Saint-Antoine; Havre Saint-Servan where he set up his first cross;
Rivière Saint-Jacques; Havre Jacques-Cartier." Nowhere did he
see land worth settling upon, nor evidence of mineral wealth, nor
anything of value, nor evidence that this could be the passage to
Cathay. "'I did not see one cart-load of earth,'"
he complained in his report, "'it was the land God gave to Cain.'"
On June 15, he steered southward and soon encountered the northwest
coast of Newfoundland. He now had crossed over into terra
incognito (unless one accepts historians' claims of earlier
explorations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during 1506 and 1520).
On the first leg of what would prove to be a grand circuit of the
Gulf, destined to be one of Cartier's most significant voyages, he
sailed down the long west coast of
Newfoundland to present-day Cabot Strait, where heavy tides gave a
clue that this might be a passage back to the Atlantic. But a
passage to Asia would be found to the westward, so he turned his
ship's bow
towards the setting sun. He set up another cross on Île Brion,
which he named for Philippe de Chabot, sieur de Brion, the Admiral
of France. Before sailing on, he noted that the island was more fertile than anything he had seen along
the barren coast of
Newfoundland. The following day, on June 26, he reached what he called the
Îles-de-Margaulx,
today's îles-de-la-Madeleine, and assumed that here was the beginning of a mainland. Three
days later, now trending southwestward, he coasted the north shore
of today's Prince Edward Island and thought it, too, was part of a mainland. He and his men
went ashore in several places and spotted
more Natives, but they did not make contact with them. Around
the first of July, he rounded the coast of this "mainland," now
sailing southward, and
came upon an expanse of water he thought was a bay and named it St.-Lunaire.
Here was the northern end of a long expanse of shallow water called,
in the following century,
Mer Rouge, the Red Sea, today's
Northumberland Strait. Cartier then turned north to explore an
actual mainland--the east coast
of today's New Brunswick. Concentrating once again
on the passage to Asia, he inspected each of the small bays along
this undiscovered shore, lingering perhaps at present-day Miramichi, and found them
all disappointing.02g
He and his men, now, may
have been the first
Europeans to lay eyes on any of these places.
Continuing northward along
the disappointing coast, he entered what the
Natives called Mechsamecht and what he called Baie des
Chaleurs, the Warm-Waters Bay, its name to this day. On July 3, he dubbed the
southern tip of land at the entrance to the bay Cap d'Espérance, "'for the hope we had of
finding here a strait'" that led to Asia. On the north side of
the bay he found a good harbor, which he named St.-Martin, probably
today's Port-Daniel, Québec. For over a week, from July 4 to
12, he investigated every part of the Warm-Waters Bay all the way up
to the wide, beautiful stream that formed its head, today's Rivière Restigouche.
Reaching the mouth of the river on July 8, he and his men noted the "'very high
mountainous land'" off in the distance and knew this could be no
passage to Asia.02y
On July 6, while still
coasting along the north shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, one of
Cartier's long-boats encountered
"two 'fleets' totaling 'forty or fifty canoes'" manned by
Natives whom Cartier called the Toudamans, an Algonquin-speaking
people who called themselves the Mi'kmaq. This was the nation
whose warriors had recently begun the expulsion of the
Iroquois-speaking Mohawk from the Gaspé region, so they were not a
people who were easily intimidated. Moreover, their coastal
bands were among the earliest Indians to make contack with European
fishermen. Shouting and
gesturing in apparent glee, they tried to make contact with the
boatload of Frenchmen who had suddenly appeared in their country.
Fearing their numbers, and unsure of their intent, Cartier ordered
his men to drive the screaming Natives away with cannon and musketry
fired discreetly over their heads. The Natives fled, but they
soon returned and followed the Frenchmen back to Havre St.-Martin.
The next day, July 7, back in the safety of their ships,
Cartier sanctioned contact between his crewmen and the Natives and
doubtlessly held his breath. The Mi'kmaq at "first offered
strips of seal meat, but ended up stark naked after trading away
their clothes," which they happily exchanged for metal implements.
While exploring deeper into the Warm-Waters Bay, Cartier and his men
encountered even more Natives along the bay shore, including women
and children this time. Again, the Frenchmen exchanged
"hatchets, knives, beads and other wares" for the Natives' fur.
Here were the first "official" contacts between the French and
the Mi'kmaq
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, though for years members of that nation had been
encountering Breton and Norman fishermen drying their catch along the Atlantic
shore of today's Cape Breton Island. How else would they have
known that these Europeans would be eager to trade with them for
their winter clothing? Cartier made note of the basic Mi'kmaq
way of life. They "'go from place to place maintaining
themselves and catching fish in the fishing season for food,'" he
wrote in his report of the voyage. Impressed with the nation's
friendliness, especially of its women, some of whom "'advanced
freely towards us and rubbed our arms with their hands,'" Cartier
made a prescient prediction: "'I am more than ever of
opinion,'' he wrote, "'that these people would be easy to convert to our holy
faith.'"02f
Continuing north along the
coast of today's Gaspé peninsula, which Cartier called Honguedo,
his ships sailed past an unusually shaped rock, which the French
later named Île Percé--Pierced Island. On July 14, his
flotilla reached today's Baie de Gaspé, where they anchored to wait out the fog and mist that enveloped the
coast. However, winds so strong that one of the ships lost its anchor
forced them "to push on another seven or eight leagues" up the coast to
present-day Gaspé harbor. Here they waited
nine long days for the weather to improve.
And here they
encountered other Natives, in even more impressive numbers. Cartier
estimated that more than 300 of them had gathered in several camps around the
periphery of the harbor.
These Natives were not Mi'kmaq but Laurentian Iroquois, and, like
the Mi'kmaq, this was their first "official" encounter with the
French. Cartier observed that they had come
to the area from an inland country to fish for tinker mackerel, "'of which there is great abundance.'"
Again, there was much trading and commiseration between Frenchman and
the Indian, including "small tin bells" for the Indian women, who sang
and danced in celebration. Cartier, the world traveler, described the
Natives'
dress and their itinerant lifestyle in great detail: "This
people may well be called savage; for they are the sorriest folk
there can be in the world, and the whole lot of them had not
anything above the value of five sous, their canoes and fishing-nets
excepted. They go quite naked, except for a small skin, with
which they cover their privy parts, and for a few old furs which
they throw over their shoulders. They are not at all of the
same race or language as the first we met. They have their
heads shaved all around in circles, except for a tuft on the top of
the head, which they leave long like a horse's tail. This they
do up upon their heads and tie in a knot with leather thongs.
They have no other dwelling but their canoes, which they turn upside
down and sleep on the ground underneath. They eat their meat
almost raw, only warming it a little on the coals; and the same with
their fish.'" When Cartier and his men left their ships and
went ashore to walk freely among the Natives, "'At this they showed
great joy, and the men all began to sing and dance in two or three
groups, exhibiting signs of great pleasure at our coming. But
they made all the young women retire into the woods, except two or
three who remained, to whom we gave each a comb and a little tin
bell, at which they showed great pleasure, thanking the captain by
rubbing his arms and his breast with their hands. And the men,
seeing we had given something to the women that had remained, made
those come back who had fled to the woods, in order to receive the
same as the others. These, who numbered some twenty, crowded
about the captain and rubbed him with their hands, which is their
way of showing welcome. He gave them each a little tin ring of
small value; and at once they assembled together in a group to
dance; and sang several songs.'" Cartier also described the
Natives' great haul of mackerel and the hempen nets in which they
were caught. He noted that "'they only come down to the sea in
the fishing-season, as I have been given to understand.'" He
described their Indian corn, their beans, and especially their
fruit, which, like Europeans, they dried for the winter; these
included plums, figs, pears, apples, as well as nuts. In turn,
the Natives demonstrated how they planted and cooked their corn,
which they grew "'in the country where they ordinarily reside.'"
Cartier observed that "They never eat anything that has a taste of
salt in it.'" He transcribed the words they used for objects
such as hatchet, knife, corn, beans, nuts, and apples; he even
recorded the word they used to say we "have none of it and know not
what it is.'" Misunderstanding the Natives' cultural
imperative that everything of value must be shared, the Frenchman added: "'They are wonderful thieves and steal
everything they can carry off.'"02h
Before departing Honguedo, Cartier and his men erected a
30-foot cross at the entrance to the
harbor, today's Pointe-Penouille. The cross bore the royal coat
of arms and the inscription "Vive Le Roy de
France." The Iroquois chief, Donnacona, perceived not only the
cross, but also the ceremony accompanying
its erection, as a provocation against himself and his people.
From a canoe which held one of his brothers and three of his sons,
the chief harangued the Frenchmen for erecting the thing without his
permission. Cartier insisted that the cross was nothing more
than a convenient marker to allow them to return to this very
harbor. In a Columbus-like gesture, the Frenchmen lured Donnacona and his entourage aboard one of his
vessels. Following the precedent of many explorations, Cartier implored two of the sons, Taignoagny and Domagaya,
to remain with him as interpreters and accompany him to France. Donnacona at first
demurred but, after much "feasting," consented to release his sons
to the Frenchman if Cartier agreed to return them with European goods to trade.
To further insure that he would see his sons again, Donnacona agreed
to an alliance between his people and the French. On July 25,
with the chief's sons in tow, Cartier sailed not westward--evidently
"a mirage effect caused him to believe that his path was blocked" in
that direction--but east-northeastward to
what he called L'Assumption and the Indians called Naticousti, today's Anticosti
Island. During the crossing from Honguedo to Anticosti, Cartier
did not realize that he was crossing the estuary of a great river
that could have taken him deep into the continent. After
circumnavigating Anticosti first southeastward and then
northwestward, he judged it to be a peninsula, not an island.
From August 1 to 5, along the north shore of Anticosti, "he tried to
find out whether he was in a bay or a waterway," but his efforts
failed to solve the dilemma. The
heavy tides of Le Destroyt St.
Pierre, today's St. Peter's Strait, as well as foul weather,
discouraged him from exploring any farther. If the weather had
allowed him to sail a few more leagues westward along the north
shore of the "peninsula," he would have entered the estuary of the same great river that had eluded him on his way
up to Anticosti. Instead, after a council of his officers and
men, in which they expressed their desire to end their explorations
and head home, Cartier
turned eastward and found himself sailing swiftly before "a
following sou'wester" along another desolate shore. He
encountered more Natives at what he called Le
Cap Thiennot, entered open water, and found himself back at the
west coast of Newfoundland, which he reached on August 8. He
had completed a circuit of an impressive body of water, a great lake
or basin, he could not be certain, but
he had found no passage to Asia anywhere along its shore. After following the coast
back through the Strait of Belle-Isle and refitting his vessels as
best he could, Cartier turned his little fleet into
the North Atlantic. He returned to St.-Malo on September 5,
having left that port only four and a half months earlier.
Aboard his vessels were no chests of gold, silver, or gems, nor any
evidence of these riches in the form of carefully mined ore.
This doubtlessly disappointed the King and his investors, but
Cartier's cargo of furs may have caught the attention of the men who
controlled the nation's hatters' guilds, and his descriptions of "a
great, even teeming abundance of cod ... off the west coast of
Newfoundland" certainly thrilled the fishermen and their investors,
who were always eager to exploit new fisheries. The richest
"cargo" of the voyage, however, was decidedly immaterial--"a
valuable addition to contemporary knowledge of America in
establishing the existence of a sea beyond Newfoundland."02i
.
King François agreed that
Cartier's expedition was a qualified success and that he should make
a second voyage to Nova Gallia. Donnacona's sons, with
their limited command of French, spoke "of a great river which
flowed from their territory" into the sea beyond Newfoundland and
of a kingdom rich in copper and other
metals along the great river's shore. The King invested 3,000 livres to help finance a second undertaking. Cartier's commission
for the voyage was approved in late October
and presented to him at St.-Malo in February 1535. Again,
there was no mandate to convert the "savages," only to find the
passage to Asia and mines of precious metals. He was ready to
sail by May 19, this time with three vessels: the
Grande Hermine, his flag vessel, under Thomas Fromont; the Petite Hermine,
under Macé Jalobert, Cartier's brother-in-law; and the Érmérillon,
a barque, under Guillaume Le Breton Bastille, who may have
been a secular priest. Cartier's expedition was "equipped and
victualled for a voyage of a year and a half." Heeding the
King's dictum about "permanent occupation" of a region, he and his men
intended to spend a winter in Nova Gallia to see if it could be done
there. Cartier's crews now numbered 110, 40 more than
he had taken the year before. Also with him were a hand full
of gentlemen, some of them probably investors; more
of Cartier's St.-Malo relatives; and his "secretary" from the first
voyage, Jehan Poullet.02r
Cartier set sail from St.-Malo
on May 19. A week later, the flotilla became
separated during the stormy crossing, and Cartier's vessel did not
reach the Île-des-Oiseaux until July
7--a crossing of 50 days, more than twice as long as the first
crossing.
From the Island of Birds, he sailed north in the Grande Hermine
to the Belle-Isle strait and waited for his consorts. His
fleet having reunited by the end of July, Cartier led them close
along the north shore of the inland sea and westward to St. Peter's
Strait, from where he had ended his exploration the previous summer.
On the way, to mark his route, he set up a cross in a harbor west of
today's Natashquan. His next stop was at "'a large and very
beautiful bay, full of islands and good entrances,'" which he called
St.-Laurent. Decades later, the cartographer Mercator would
extend the beautiful bay's name "to the gulf, and
then to the river." On August 13, Taignoagny and Domagaya,
now competent in French, directed Cartier to the western end of
Anticosti, which he had named Assumption and which he now
realized was not a peninsula but a large island at the entrance to a huge
estuary. He landed on the island on August 15 and found it
uninhabitable. As if to emphasize the much more hospitable
place from which they sprang, the brothers
described for him
their home, their canada, which lay far to the west, up the
great river they were about to enter. They promised that the river would grow narrower as they
ascended and that its water gradually would turn from
salty to fresh. At their Canada, they explained, the French would have
to anchor their ships and continue up the river in smaller vessels.
They assured Cartier that they had never heard of anyone reaching
the headwaters above the falls at Hochelaga, such was the great distance from which
it flowed. Determined not to miss a passage to Asia during his
ascent of the river, Cartier crossed the estuary and sailed westward along the
shore of Honguedo, its mountains towering above him to several
thousand feet. He then crossed to
the north side of the estuary, which he now could see was gradually
narrowing. To make certain he had missed no passage to Asia,
he turned east again and sailed in that direction
for a number of leagues. He found only walruses and small,
uninhabited islands along another coast as barren as the one he had
observed farther to the east.02
It was the beginning of
September now, time to ascend the river of Canada before the summer
slipped away. Surely here would be the passage across the
continent that Cabot and Verrazzano had missed. Sailing along
the north shore of the estuary, he came upon the
mouth of a "'very deep and rapid river'" flowing in from the west.
The Natives he encountered here called their village Thadoyzeau,
today's Tadoussac,
after the Montagnais word for "'bosom,' probably in reference to the
two round and sandy hills located on the west side of the village."
The Iroquois brothers called the river there Saguenay and assured
Cartier that stores of red copper and other valuable minerals could
be found up the "deep and rapid river." Cartier did not have
time to explore the Saguenay beyond its mouth. Despite the
trees along the harbor shore, he noted that Tadoussac had
but little soil and held little promise of sustaining a settlement.
Meanwhile, an Iroquois fishing party from upriver arrived at Tadoussac, and
the brothers "renewed acquaintance with their compatriots."
Continuing his ascent of
the river of Canada,
Cartier's vessels came upon the first of a series of widely
scattered islands, 14 in number, lying in the narrowing channel.
Near today's Île-aux-Coudres, he and his men may have noticed that
the river's water tasted less brackish. Soon, the
Iroquois brothers assured them, they would reach their native
village. The largest island,
at the upper end of the chain, Cartier estimated to be
fully ten leagues in length and nearly filled the river channel. It now was September 7.
Cartier anchored his ships at the western end of the big island,
today's Île d'Orléans. The
Natives he encountered refused to come near until they learned of
the identity of the Frenchmen's passengers. The Iroquois then
"brought eels, coarse millet (corn), some large melons (probably
pumpkins), and a fest was held; Domagaya and Taignoagny must have
longed for corn while they were away," and here it was for them to
savor. The following day, Donnacona himself, the
"lord of Canada," appeared with a large entourage of a dozen canoes. After
greeting the Frenchmen and his sons with an animated harangue,
followed by more feasting, the
chief led them to a
commanding bluff along the north bank
of the river. Here stood Stadacona, the
canada so dear to the Iroquois brothers.02z
Cartier and his men
lingered at Stadacona longer than he intended. After more
feasting and the requisite ceremonials, Cartier "ordered out the
long-boats and went off in search of a harbour" that could
accommodate his ships. He searched downriver along the north
shore for about 10 leagues and, on September 14, found his harbor.
He called it Ste.-Croix, "after the festival celebrated on that
day," and there he anchored his ships in the mouth of today's
Rivière St.-Charles. Meanwhile, Donnacona and his sons,
especially Taignoagny, did their best to dissuade the Frenchmen from
going upriver to Hochelaga. On September 16, the chief and his
sons, along with many of the residents of Stadacona, appeared at
Ste.-Croix for one last attempt to dissuade the French from
continuing upriver. During the next three days, the Indians
"put on for him a scene of sorcery, which had no effect" of course,
and "Donnacona vainly offered gifts," including three small
children, to keep the French among them. By compelling the
French to remain at Stadacona, Donnacona and his sons, not their
fellow Iroquois upriver, would monopolize the trade that surely
would come. On the 17th, Cartier accepted the gift of the
children, "a little girl and two boys"--the girl Donnacona's niece,
and one of the boys the chief's youngest son. Cartier "presented Donnacona
with two swords and a brass bowl," but he adamantly refused to forgo
his trip. Later that day, when the French fired volleys of
musketry "to crown the celebration ... the Iroquois thought that the
heavens were falling upon them and set up 'such a howling and
yelling that it seemed that hell itself had been loosed.'
Taignoagny," who had refused to accompany Cartier upriver, "spread
the rumour that some natives had been killed during the celebration,
and the Iroquois fled in disorder." On the 18th, the day of
Donnacona's witchcraft farce, Domagaya offered to serve as Cartier's
interpreter in place of his brother, but Cartier suspected that this
brother, too, was in cahoots with his father. Desperate now,
Donnacona offered to let the Frenchmen go if they left a hostage
with him at Stadacona. Put off by their clumsy machinations,
Cartier refused to compromise. He ordered final preparations
for the upriver voyage, and the Iroquois returned to their village.298
On September 19,
determined to find the passage to Asia, Cartier left the larger
vessels anchored at Ste.-Croix and took the barque Érmérillon
and two of his long-boats up towards the falls. Peeved
at Donnacona for opposing the venture, Cartier did not bother to
take along an interpreter--that is, either of the sons--"which
greatly lessened the usefulness of his trip." On the voyage
up, Cartier and his men were much impressed with the land and the
forests on both banks of the still magnificent river. Contact with the
Natives was frequent now, and there
was much trading, especially food for wares. There also was
more exchange of
information, or at least as much of it as the language barrier
allowed. The leader of Achelacy,
at present-day Portneuf,
"put him on his guard against Donnacona and his sons." He
warned Cartier of the navigational hazards lying ahead, and, to seal
an alliance, "presented him with his daughter." On
September 28, below another
large tributary flowing down from the north, the river of Canada widened
into a virtual lake that was "only two fathoms deep." Cartier
named the lake Angoulême, but a later explorer renamed it Lac
St.-Pierre. An exploration of the lake revealed three tributaries flowing in from the south: today's
Rivière Nicolet, which Cartier named the Chateaubriand; Rivière
St.-François, which he called the Montmorency; and, at the far upper
end of the lake, the Richelieu, which Cartier did not name.
Cartier later learned from the Indians that "this last river
originated in a region where there was neither ice nor snow and
where oranges grew, and concluded that this region must lie toward
Florida." Unsure of the river of Canada's channel above the
lake, Cartier left the Érmérillon
anchored
at Angoulême and continued in the long-boats. On
the evening of October 2, he and his men reached Hochelaga, which
stood near the south bank of a large island.
Hochelaga was much larger than Stadacona, and like the other
Iroquoian villages they had seen along the
river but unlike Stadacona, was surrounded by a stout
palisade. At least a thousand Iroquois hurried down to the river's
edge, receiving the Frenchmen "like gods."
Gifts were exchanged, including large quantities of fish and corn
bread, and Cartier and his men spent the night in their boats. The
next morning, the villagers returned to the river's edge to exchange
more gifts, including belts of white beads the Iroquois called
esnoguy and other tribes called wampum, the first of
which Cartier had seen. He and about 20 of his men followed
some of the Indians up to Hochelaga, which lay in a large meadow
beneath a towering height. The town's palisades formed a perfect
circle, and inside the stout walls stood "fifty wooden houses
covered with bark, each fifty paces long and twelve to fifteen
wide." More ceremonies followed, including a curiously
religious one in which the Iroquois presented their sick to be
cured, among them the chief of Hochelaga, "a man of only fifty" who
was "completely crippled." Cartier massaged his twisted arms
and legs and read passages from the Gospel of St. John, followed by
the Passion of Christ, none of which the natives understood but
which they listened to in profound silence. After another
exchange of gifts, Cartier and his men climbed the commanding hill,
which he
named Mont-Réal. From atop the King's Hill, they "could
view the surrounding land for a distance of thirty leagues."
Looking northwest, they caught their first glimpse of what the
Natives called Estendue, later dubbed the Rivière-des-Outaouais, now the
Ottawa, which the Frenchmen could see was another magnificent
tributary of the river of Canada. The Iroquois told them of the
"bad people" who lived along that distant
river "and that this tributary led to two or three big lakes and a
'fresh-water sea of which no man is known to have seen the end.'" Cartier showed them some copper he had received as a gift from
Natives
downriver and asked if it had come from Estendue. No, they
told him, it had come from Saguenay, but they did not tell him where
the fabulous kingdom lay. The huge rapids above the village,
the Frenchmen could see, blocked navigation farther upriver, at
least in the ship's boats. The Hochelagans informed him,
however, that "travel by the water route could be resumed higher up,
and after negotiating three more rapids it was possible to travel
westward by water for three months"--evidence that "[t]he
continental barrier was thus much wider than anyone had believed." Not
ready to test "'the most impetuous cataract that it would be
possible to see,'" Cartier and his men returned to the long-boats
and headed back down to
the Érmérillon, the Indians following them "a long way down
the river." They found the barque still safe and sound.
On October 5, they resumed their journey downriver. Two days
later, Cartier and his men lingered at the mouth of the large
tributary flowing down from the north which they had encountered on
the voyage up. Cartier named it Rivière-de-Fouez--today's
Rivière St.-Maurice--and erected a cross there before moving on.02o
Back at Ste.-Croix on
October 11, after a three-week journey, Cartier found his men
constructing a make-shift fortification near the anchored vessels.
Taignoagny and Domagaya, familiar with business practices in France,
had urged the villagers in Stadacona to demand more in trade.
They also demanded the return of the three children Donnacona had
entrusted to Cartier. Relations between the two parties
quickly soured, so much so that communications with the Natives
ended until Cartier's return. His response was to strengthen
the fort with a moat and reinforced palisades and prepare for
attack. Donnacona soon realized his mistake and did what he
could to placate Cartier and his men. In early November, much
to the relief of the Frenchmen, who still depended on the Natives
for their store of food, the Iroquois relented, a feast was held,
and trade resumed, especially for fish. When weather
permitted, Cartier continued his exploration of the large island
below the village, which he called at first Île-de-Bacchus, after
its many vines, but which he soon renamed Île d'Orléans. He
also inspected the soil at Stadacona, which he claimed was "as good
... as it is possible to find." The lateness of the season
forced him and his men to winter at Ste.-Croix, most of them living
aboard ship, but they kept a wary eye on their neighbors. They
had no choice but to remain: from mid-November until
mid-April, their ships lay icebound in the river, which remained
frozen all the way up to Hochelaga and a good ways down from
Stadacona. Using the time wisely, they listened attentively to
Donnacona's tales about the wonders of the region. The chief
told them of the fabulous Kingdom of Saguenay. There they
would find "'immense quantities of gold, rubies and other rich
things, and ... the men there are white as in France and go clothed
in woolens,'" the chief averred. But, like the Hochelagans,
Donnacona did not reveal the location of this fabulous kingdom.
Did it lie downriver near Tadoussac, as Donnacona's sons had hinted,
or could it be found off to the west, beyond the rapids at
Hochelaga, or up the Estendue, past the land of the "bad people"?
Or was it only legend? Perhaps to intimidate his guests,
Donnacona showed them five scalps, "stretched on hoops like
parchment," which his warriors had taken from among their enemies to
the south, likely the Toudamans, with whom they fought constantly.
The Frenchmen learned of a magnificent lake lying to the south,
between Canada and the country of the Magots. The lake the
Iroquois called Pathnos, most likely today's Lake Champlain.
The Magots may have been the Mohawk, linguistic kin, perhaps even
the ancestors, of the Canadian Iroquois. "The network of
waterways was moreover beginning to take shape in his mind; the
Richelieu, still unnamed, which came from 'Florida'; the St.
Lawrence, which was open to navigation for three months; to the
north of Hochelaga, a river (the Ottawa) which led to great lakes
and to a 'freshwater sea'; great waterways which proved that the
continental barrier was much broader than had been believed."
All of this, along with many of the customs of his reluctant hosts,
their words and phrases, Cartier diligently recorded as the winter
wore on, the snow at times lying four feet on the ground and atop
the frozen river. Worse than the ice and snow, however, was
scurvy, which broke out among the Stadaconans in December and then among the French
soon after. "By mid-February [1536] not more than 10 of Cartier's 110
men were still well; 8 were dead, including the young Philippe Rougemont," on whose remains they performed an autopsy.
Cartier and his men prayed fervently to an image of the Virgin
Mother, "and Cartier promised to make a pilgrimage to Roc-Amadour"
if she intervened on their behalf. Cartier, who remained
untouched by the malady, did his best to hide the condition of his
men from the Iroquois. More Frenchmen died from
the malady, however, 25 in all, until Domagaya, who seemed miraculously to have
been cured of the dread
disease, which Cartier noted had left "one of his legs badly
swollen, his teeth 'lost and decayed, and his gums rotted and
stinking,'"
unwittingly revealed a remedy. The concoction, prepared by
some of the women from the village, was extracted from the bark and leaves of
Thuya occidentalis, the white
cedar, which the Indians called annedda, the Europeans
arbor vitae, "the tree of life." Most of the men were
reluctant to drink the elixir at first, such was the foulness of its
taste, but after the bolder ones drank it and quickly recovered, 85
of Cartier's men were still alive when
spring finally returned in April. Here was proof that
Europeans could survive a Canadian winter and that settlement
there was possible.02p
After the ice broke up and
released his vessels, Cartier had no choice but to abandon one of
them, the Petite Hermine, for lack of men to man her sails.
At the end of April, he also found himself embroiled in a dispute between Donnacona and Agona, one of the chief's rivals. Despite his
sons' intrigues against Cartier and his men, Donnacona was convinced
that the Frenchmen had taken his side in the matter and that Cartier
had agreed to exile his rival to France. In truth, Cartier
reasoned that Donnacona and his sons were the ones who were jeopardizing
French relations with the Iroquois, so Agona was not the one who
needed to be banished. On the first of May, the chief
and his sons accepted Cartier's invitation to celebrate the erection
of another cross. At 35 feet in height, this one would be even more
impressive than the one he had raised in their presence at Honguedo. It would go up near the fort at Ste.-Croix,
in commemoration of "the discovery of the Holy Cross."
During the early afternoon of May 3, the day of the festival, the Iroquois notables appeared in their most
impressive regalia, but Donnacona remained wary and, following Taignoagny's advice,
refused to enter the fort. On Cartier's orders, his men
overpowered the chief, the two sons, and two other village headmen and forced them
aboard the Grande Hermine, where more armed Frenchmen waited. After "'Wailing and howling
all night, like wolves,' the Iroquois demanded their chief," but Cartier refused to release
him. He promised Donnacona and the villagers that he would
return the chief to them "in 12 moons" or
less "with lavish presents from the king." Donnacona
and the Iroquois, believing the Breton, agreed to the proposal.
Perhaps as a ransom offer, perhaps as a gift, the villagers
presented Cartier with "twenty-four strings of esnoguy,
'which is the greatest wealth they have in this world,'" Cartier
noted. No matter, he was determined to follow through on his
plan. Anticipating the skepticism he would face back home, he
was determined to display Donnacona as proof of his having reached
distant Canada. Remembering the chief's accounts of Saguenay,
Cartier also needed evidence of the region's wealth, which would
justify another expedition. With a cargo of furs, "a dozen
pieces of gold" from Saguenay, and 10 natives in tow, including four
children, Cartier left Ste.-Croix on May 6, exploring the south shore this time on his way back down the river
of Canada. Opposite the Île-aux-Coudres, they encountered some of Donnacona's people making
their way back up from Tadoussac. The Iroquois "gave their
leader farewell presents," and Cartier's ships continued on their
way. Continuing along the coast of Honguedo, they sailed
through the southern portion of the Canadian estuary, "'which
passage had not hitherto been discovered' because nothing but land
had been seen there." Sailing past today's îles-de-la-Madeleine, which Cartier had
seen on his first voyage and which he thought had been part of a
mainland, he could see that they actually were a string of islands
and that the body of water in which they lay was much larger than he
had imagined. Continuing southeastward to the north shore of
Cape Breton Island, which he reached at the beginning of June, he
turned northeastward into a wide, tide-churned
passage, today's Cabot Strait, the existence of which he had
speculated upon during his first
exploration of the inland sea. He continued northeastward, past an
island he named for St. Paul, before turning eastward to explore the
south coast of Newfoundland, which he reached on June 3. The farther east he sailed, the
more he realized that Newfoundland was an island, not a part of the continent. He did not make landfall until
June 5, when he reached a small archipelago lying off the
southeastern coast of Newfoundland, today's îles St.-Pierre and Miquelon.
These islands had been discovered 15 years earlier on Jaoa Alvares Fagundes's
first voyage to the region. Only then did Cartier encounter
Breton and Norman fishing boats and know that he no longer was in
undiscovered country. He now realized that the great body of
water west of Newfoundland actually was a large gulf that touched on regions yet to be explored.
He remained at the archipelago, among the fishing boats, for 11 days
before sailing on to Cape Race, at the southeast tip of Newfoundland, which
he reached on June 16. At a nearby harbor variously called Rougnouse, Rosono, and Renewse, he took on fresh water and firewood
and left behind one of his long-boats. He headed out to sea on June
19 and was back at St.-Malo on July 16, having taken 14
months to complete his second voyage to Nova Gallia and back.02j
.
Soon after Cartier
returned to France, the nation was again at war with Spain, so a
third expedition to Canada had to wait for more peaceful times.
Cartographers, meanwhile, following accounts of Cartier's ventures, redrew their maps and
charts of the regions the Breton had explored. Even if a
third voyage had not materialized, "Cartier's achievement in 1535-36
marked the peak of French exploration in America in the sixteenth
century," Marcel Trudel insists, which was true in the realm
of cartography but less so in the great game of European
exploitation. King François
granted an audience in which Cartier presented reports, both
verbally and in writing, of his exploits on the 800-leagues-long
river of Canada, which, the explorer believed, "might well lead to
Asia. He brought a dozen pieces of genuine gold, and furs that
could be sold at a handsome price, and spoke of wondrous things."
The King was so impressed with
Cartier's imagined accomplishments he awarded
him with the Grande Hermine and compensated him for expenses
incurred in the first and second voyages. The King was
especially taken with Donnacona's tales of faraway Canada, which
included accounts of "mines which were very rich in gold and silver,
of an abundance of cloves, nutmeg, and pepper (the spices of which
Europe dreamed)" in the magnificent Kingdom of Saguenay.
Evidently Donnacona and the other Iroquois captives consented to
speak to a
St.-Malo scholar preparing the relations of Cartier's voyages.
The
result was an extensive vocabulary of Iroquois words and phrases, as
well as descriptions of their customs and beliefs. The King
certainly was pleased to hear that three of the "'savages of Canada'"
had been baptized at St.-Malo on 25 March 1539.02k
The Spanish, however, did
not applaud Cartier's efforts in a part of the New World they
insisted was theirs. On learning from his many spies that
François I planned to send another expedition to "the Indies,"
Carlos I mobilized Spanish forces in the region, attempted to coax
Portugal into opposing the French, and complained to Pope Paul III of French violations of the Treaty of Tordesillas,
now four and a half decades old.
The current conflict between the two nations, called the War of
Provence, ended with the Truce of Nice in June 1538, but, even in
times of peace, the Spanish kept a wary eye on French intentions in
their Atlantic realms. They, too, refused to limit
exploitation of the unexplored regions of North America. In May 1539, a
major expedition from Cuba under Hernando de Soto--nine ships, 620
men, and 220 horses--landed at today's Tampa Bay, their mission to
seek gold, silver, and a passage to Asia in the interior of the
continent beyond Florida. Meanwhile, in February 1540,
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján, with 400 Spanish soldiers,
four Franciscan friars, nearly 2,000 Indian allies, an assortment of
servants, and horses aplenty, launched another large expedition into
the North American interior, this one into the deserts and mountains
at the northern edge of New Spain. Coronado's mission was to
find the seven golden cities of Cíbola, one of which Father Marcos
de Nizar claimed to have seen in an earlier expedition to the north
of Mexico. Back in Spain, court officials were especially
disturbed by a proclamation issued from Paris in August 1540 in which François I "accorded
universal permission to all his subjects to go to the 'new lands,'
including the Portuguese territories." Here was a direct
threat to Spanish interests in every part of their American realm.
Two months later,
on 17 October 1540, as if
to underscore his new resolve, François granted Cartier a commission
as "captain general" of a third expedition to Canada.
At first, the "captain general" was empowered "to continue his
exploration, broaden his relations with the natives, and only live
among them 'if need be,'" taking with him "individuals of 'all
kinds, arts and industries,' including 50 men "he was authorized to
take from the prisons." But an asset he had enjoyed in his
second expedition, the presence of two interpreters, no longer would
be available to him: Donnacona, his sons, and most of the
other Iroquois in Cartier's entourage lay buried in the foreign soil
of France. Here was a circumstance that would not sit well
with their kinsmen back in Canada. In mid-January 1541, the King
added another complication to Cartier's venture; François
appointed an old acquaintance, Calvinist privateer Jean-François
de la Rocque, sieur de Roberval, as the lieutenant-general of
New France and head of the expedition. Now, instead of another
voyage of exploration, the venture also would be "a great colonizing undertaking" with Roberval,
not Cartier, at its helm.
The Breton, well aware of royal inconstancy, agreed to serve as the expedition's "Chief
Navigator." In February, Roberval also was authorized to impress
convicts for the Canadian venture, and settlers would include women
as well as men. Convicts, of course, were to make up only part
of the colonial population and only the lowest elements. "In
order to attract gentlemen and others 'of excellent virtue or
industry' to the enterprise, the King created two institutions for
America which were to be long-lived; the seigneurial régime and
commercial monopoly." Here would be a proper colony that would
sanction French claims to those parts of the New World untouched by
Spanish and Portuguese settlement. Ironically, Roberval's
commission as lieutenant-general also charged him "with 'spreading
the holy Catholic faith'" in Canada and building churches there, so
he may have conveniently espoused the faith of his fathers in order
to secure the appointment. His, and Cartier's of the previous
October, were the first commissions granted to Frenchmen that called for
the building of churches and the conversion of natives. "Indeed,"
Professor Trudel informs us, "the foreign policy of the kings of
France was from then on to be labelled RELIGION."02za
To elude Spanish warships, Cartier and Roberval
agreed to sail
from France in separate flotillas. With the King's urging and Roberval's
approval, Cartier's vessels were the first to sail. He left
St.-Malo on 23 May 1541 in "five ships provisioned for two years,"
with 500 men aboard, though a Spanish spy named Santiago reported 1,500.
Again, Cartier took along two of his brothers-in-law-- Guyon Des Granches,
vicomte de Beaupré; and the pilot Marc, or Macé, Jalobert--as well
as nephew Étienne Noël, who like Jalobert was an excellent pilot; and
Olivier du Breil,
"charged with 'the conduct of the King's ships.'" Cartier's vessels included his own ship, the Grande Hermine, and the
recently-repaired barque Émérillon,
survivors of his second voyage, as well as the Saint-Brieux,
the Georges, and an unidentified vessel. Also aboard were "20 cows, 4 bulls,
100 sheep, 100 goats, 10 hogs and 20 horses and mares ... the first
European livestock in the St. Lawrence valley, if not in all of
North America north of Florida." French authorities could not know it, but,
despite the tenuous peace between the two nations, Carlos I, employing
information provided by his spies at St.-Malo, had ordered two Spanish
caravels to intercept the French flotillas, believed to be
seven ships with Cartier and four with Roberval. One caravel
hurried to the Cape
Verde Islands, the other up to Newfoundland. Luckily for the
French, neither of these
Spanish vessels completed their missions.02zb
Cartier's crossing
was plagued by foul weather, which scattered his vessels. It took
them over a month to cross to Newfoundland, compared to 20 days in
1534 and a stormy month and a half in 1535. After taking on
water and waiting in vain for Roberval's ships--the commander's departure was delayed by lack of artillery
for his vessels--Cartier followed his previous route to the river of Canada and stood before Stadacona
on 23 August 1541, exactly three months after departing St.-Malo. He had been away
from Canada for five long years. The villagers greeted them
"with great demonstrations of joy." Agona, now
chief of Stadacona, revealed no emotion when Cartier informed him
of the death of Donnacona, though one can be certain that Agona was
aware of Cartier's power to seize him as well. As to the other Iroquois who had
been spirited away, Cartier told the villagers that each of them had
"decided" to remain in France and live there like "grands
seigneurs." The villagers presented him with esnoguy,
and Agona proffered to Cartier his leather crown, but "with the
coming of five ships and a considerable population, the Iroquois
began to have apprehensions for their continued possession of the
country. Between the French and the Iroquois," Marcel
Trudel reminds us, "there lay a deeper gulf than five years' absence."
Cartier also harbored apprehensions of his own. Remembering
the true meaning of the Iroquois's outpourings of joy and the
conflicts with them on his second voyage, he chose to settle not at
Ste.-Croix, below Stadacona, but above the village at a site which also stood on the north bank
of the river but at a greater distance from the village. The
new site, which he called Cap-Rouge, lay at the mouth of a small tributary
and was closer to Hochelaga, where
Cartier was confident he still retained the favor of the natives.
After anchoring his five ships off Rivière Cap-Rouge, he and his men
cleared "a large park," erected two forts, one at the mouth of the
little river, the other atop the commanding bluff, both palisades
connected by a trail that ran up "a payre of staires," "and started
cultivating the soil" at what Cartier called Charlesbourg-Royal. While constructing the new settlement, Cartier's men found
not only a stand of precious white cedar, the "tree of life," but also what they
thought were diamonds and gold. On September 2, in compliance
with the King's orders, Cartier sent Marc Jalobert and Étienne Noël
back to France with the Saint-Brieux and the Georges,
bearing a cargo of what
proved to be nothing more than mica and iron pyrite. Also with
them were letters describing what Cartier had found at Cap-Rouge and
the sad announcement of the death of Thomas Fromont dit
La Bouille, one of the ship's masters.
On September 7, after
leaving the settlement in charge of his brother-in-law,
the Vicomte de Beaupré, Cartier headed upriver in two boats to Hochelaga,
where he hoped to find a way through, or around, the rapids there
that would take him to the Kingdom of Saguenay and deeper into the
interior of the continent. On the way up,
he visited Achelacy, where he reaffirmed their alliance with
generous gifts. In a reversal of his policy of capturing
Indians to teach them French, as he had done with Donnacona's son,
Cartier left two French boys with Achelacy to learn the Iroquois language--"the first
Europeans to become pupils of the natives." Reaching the site
of Hochelaga on September 11, Cartier did not receive the wild
greeting he had enjoyed six years earlier. Intending to return
the following spring to ascend the great river as well as the Ottawa
in search of Saguenay, he was there to examine the rapids in greater
detail, not to parlay with the natives. He attempted to ascend
the first set of rapids in one of the boats, but the "'great rockes,
and so great a current'" blocked the way. He did find a
well-beaten path around this first sault, at the end of which
lay another village of Iroquois, whom he befriended. He
explained to them his intentions for the following spring, and they
provided him with four guides, who led them up to another village
near another set of rapids at today's Lachine. Cartier asked
the natives about the rapids farther up, which they demonstrated
"'with certaine little stickes, which they layd upon the ground in a
certain distance, and afterwards ladye other small branches between
both, presenting the Saults.'" Returning to their
boats, Cartier and his men distributed more gifts to the natives in
riverside villages as they made their way down to the ships at
Cap-Rouge. At Achelacy, he was chagrined to find the chief
gone from the village, unaware that his "ally" had gone downriver to
conspire with Agona against the French. Back at Charlesbourg-Royal,
Cartier noted the growing distrust between his men
and the villagers at Stadacona and learned that even Achelacy had
"abandoned him." Agona, meanwhile, pondered the fate of his
predecessor and grew weary of supporting the European interlopers.
Without warning, the Iroquois struck Charlesbourg-Royal sometime
that autumn. More of Cartier's men--perhaps 35 in all--perished behind their
fortifications that autumn and winter, many of them convicts who had
no gift for the art of frontier warfare. The "tree of life"
stood them in good stead over the long, hard winter, but native
hostility, not scurvy, was Cartier's biggest worry through the
winter and spring. "Agona was avenging Donnaconna," the
dead chief's biographer tells us. "We must go back to this
wintering-over of 1541-42 to date the beginning of the wars between
the French and the Iroquois. They were the result of Cartier's
policy," Marcel Trudel insists, and doomed
the navigator's feeble attempts to establish a permanent settlement.02l
Evidently sometime in the
spring of 1542 Cartier and some of his men were able to extricate themselves
from the palisades at Charlesbourg-Royal and return to the falls at Hochelaga, "but we do not know how far
he went," Trudel tells us, or what new things he may
have discovered there. By June, after 10 months of effort,
Cartier gave up on Charlesbourg-Royal. He filled
his ships with more "diamonds and gold," as well as silver,
"pearls and precious stones," and headed back to France. Roberval, meanwhile, still was having difficulty outfitting his
own flotilla. The ships he did provision from the sale of one
of his estates he used to engage in piracy against
English merchantmen to raise more funds for the expedition. France was at peace with
England at the time, so King François had no choice but to repudiate
his lieutenant-general's
depredations. Not until 16 April 1542 did Roberval depart
La Rochelle for Newfoundland. With him were three ships: the Valentine;
the Anne, commanded by Paul d'Aussillon, sieur de Sauveterre; and Lèchefraye.
The flotilla was piloted by an experienced sailor, Jean Fonteneau,
also known as Jean Alfonse de Saintonge. Aboard these vessels were
"gentlemen," including Nicolas de Lépinay, sieur de Neufville;
Robert de Longueval, sieur de Thenelles; François de Mire; and the
sieurs Noirefontaine du Buisson, Michel Rousseil, Froté, La Brosse,
La Salle, Royèze, Levasseur, Talbot, and Villeneuve; as well as "'souldiers,
mariners, and common people.'" For the first time in
a French expedition, females also came along, some of them so-called
"society women" who were part of Roberval's coterie of
fellow courtiers. One wonders how many of the "common people"
were conscripted convicts. Despite his mandate to spread the
faith in Canada, there is no evidence that a churchman of any sort
was among the 200 settlers crossing in Roberval's vessels.
After a short layover at Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the southern coast of
Brittany, to wait for more favorable winds, Roberval reached the
port of St.-Jean, today's St. John's, Newfoundland, during the first
week of June and anchored among the 17 fishing boats already there. A few days later, Cartier sailed into the port
with his three ships, fresh from his misadventure on the river of
Canada. The Chief Navigator gave a verbal report of why he had
abandoned Charlesbourg-Royal and insisted that his ships were carrying precious minerals for the King and
his investors. Roberval nevertheless ordered Cartier to accompany him
back to Canada, but the Breton would have none of it. During the night,
his ships weighed anchor and quietly slipped away to St.-Malo, which
they reached in early September. After "taking on provisions and 'composing and
taking up of a quarell' between the French and the Portuguese"
fishermen, not
until the end of June was Roberval ready to sail from St.-Jean to Canada via
the Strait of Belle-Isle and Anticosti Island. After marooning an enamored couple
along the southern coast of Labrador and a cursory exploration of today's Rivière Saguenay by
chief pilot Alfonse de Saintonge, he reached Stadacona sometime in
July.02s
Though Roberval's chief pilot
accompanied him to Canada, he did remain long on the great river. From his youth, Jean Fonteneau had sailed to Portugal
and Spain, through the
Baltic, the Mediterranean, along the coasts of Africa, into the Red
Sea, and as far as
Japan, before being named "captain and pilot of King François I." He
could speak Portuguese as well as French, and had studied accounts
of the Portuguese and French voyages from Cape Breton down to the
Antilles. His nickname, Jean Alfonse, came from his Portuguese wife's surname,
but he himself was thoroughly Saintongeois.
Roberval assigned Alfonse the task of completing one of the
important missions of
the expedition. "It was probably ... at the end of the summer"
of 1542,
after guiding Roberval to Stadacona, that Alfonse "ventured on
a cruise in search of the northwest passage to China. He
passed through the Strait of Belle-Isle, and seems to have got as
far as Davis Strait, being the first Frenchman to reach what was
later to be called Baffin Bay." Legend has it that Alfonse was
the first to associate Verrazzano's Oranbega, today's coast of
Maine, with Norumbega, Alfonse's name for today's Penobscot River,
which he may have claimed to have explored during the same year as
his voyage to Canada and the Arctic region. If so, he would
have been a busy fellow indeed. "Back in La Rochelle in
May 1543," he could rightly claim to be the first navigator to
have led a French expedition to the Arctic
region, but he, too, had failed to find the elusive passage to Asia.02t
Meanwhile, in Canada,
Roberval promptly rebuilt and strengthened Cartier's Cap-Rouge
fortification, renaming it France-Roy. It may have been while
rebuilding Cartier's settlement that Roberval sent a party of men
back down to Tadoussac to build a small outpost there. In mid-September, aware that his venture
already was in trouble, he dispatched his trusted lieutenant, Aussillon de Sauveterre,
along with a captain named Guinecourt, aboard two of the ships, one
of them probably the
Anne, "to seek the king's help" and "return the
following year 'with victuals and other things.'" Sauveterre
took something else with him. "Now it happened that Sauveterre
had killed a sailor by the name of Laurent Barbot on Christmas day
of 1541, and was threatened with prosecution for the deed,"
Marcel Trudel relates. "Roberval exercised his judicial
right and drew up letters of acquittal in Sauveterre's favour,
invoking legitimate self-defense. This document of September
9, 1542, dated at France Roy on the France Prime," the professor
reminds us, "is the oldest known official text in the history of
French administration in Canada." That winter, rations fell short, and 50
of Roberval's colonists died of scurvy. The nobleman evidently
was unaware of the Iroquois
remedy, well known to Cartier and his men, that could have spared
these lives. Not all of the survivors were allowed to breathe
free. One Michel Gaillon was hanged for theft, "the first
hanging in Canada." To quell an
uprising among the convicts, Roberval, still "thoroughly
Calvinistic," felt compelled to hang six more of them. He banished
some of the offenders, including Jean de Nantes, "'to
an island, in leg-irons, because they had been caught in petty
thefts involving not more than five sous.' Others, both
men and women, were flogged for the same offense.'"
Evidently Roberval's relations with the local natives was much
better than Cartier's of the previous winter. "All we know of
the behaviour of the Indians toward the French is that they came to
barter shad," Trudel relates. "Since Roberval had
military strength at his disposal, they seem to have been less
aggressive than in Cartier's time, and the account (incomplete, it
is true) makes no allusion to any attack." Nevertheless, by
the time the ice had broken up on the river in April 1543, Roberval
had decided to abandon the venture sometime that summer. But
before then he was determined to fulfill another major mission of
the expedition by finding the Kingdom of Saguenay and its mineral
wealth. On June 5, "after supper,'" he took "a number of his company towards
Hochelaga," 69 in eight boats, "the rest of the colony, that is to
say some thirty people," remaining at France-Roy under command of an
officer named Royèze. Evidently Roberval believed, like
Cartier, that the kingdom lay above the rapids. And, like
Cartier's venture of the previous year, this one also failed.
A group of adventurers returned to France-Roy a week after they
left, bringing with them the sad report "that one of the boats had
been lost and that eight men had been drowned," perhaps in another
attempt to force the rapids at Lachine. On June 19, another
group returned to the settlement, "bringing 120 pounds of grain and
word that the departure for France was postponed until July 22."
When a relief ship reached Canada in late June or early July,
Roberval took his entire company back to
France, as Cartier had done the year before. By the time they
reached the mother country, sometime in September, war with Spain had broken
out again, so further French efforts in Canada were postponed indefinitely,
especially after Roberval's cargo of minerals proved to be as
worthless as Cartier's.02n
The wars between François
I and Spain continued for the rest of François's reign, which ended
in 1547, and also during the dozen-year reign of his son, Henri
II.
But the wars and the resulting debilitation of
the kingdom's finances were only part of the reason why
France abandoned its efforts in faraway Canada. The failure of Cartier's
and Robeval's expedition made something crystal clear: even
with the promise of a sizable trade in
fish and fur, there just were not enough profits
to be made in a far-off colony devoid of substantial mineral wealth. Nor could the
French depend on the Natives to succor them through the northern
winters, especially if they treated them as shabbily as Cartier had
done. Cartier's third voyage and Roberval's expedition failed
also as explorations, adding little to knowledge previously gained
in Cartier's earlier voyages. Nevertheless, these earlier explorations in
Canada, as well as Alfonse's venture to the Arctic circle,
gave France the usual dubious claim to a part of the New World and enhanced
the cartographic image of that corner of North America, which French
fishermen and fur traders during the following decades would continue to
exploit.02m
.
The Protestant revolt that
had erupted in Europe a generation after Columbus’s voyage to the
Indies consumed France, as much as it did Germany and England, in a
maelstrom of rancor and violence. The French theologian Jean
Calvin was as important a figure in the struggle against Catholic
authority as was the German priest, Martin Luther. Having been
run out of France in the year of Cartier’s first voyage to Nova
Gallia, Calvin took refuge first at Basel and then Geneva, but his
ideas seeped back into his native country. French Calvinists,
known as Huguenots after the 1560s, challenged the authority of the
pope and preached what Catholics insisted were heretical doctrines.
As a result of these intractable theological differences and a
bloody rivalry between noble families for control of the throne, a
series of civil wars raged through France from 1562 to 1598.
"At times," J. M. Roberts tells us, "they brought the
French monarchy very low; the nobility came near to mastering it.
Yet, in the end, aristocratic rivalries benefited a crown which
could use one faction against another. Meanwhile, the wretched
population of France had to bear the brunt of disorder and
devastation."03
Despite the upheaval of the religious
wars, the Huguenots, at least, sought to establish new French
colonies, but, understandably, they stayed clear of Canada. In
May 1555, Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, a powerful
Calvinist leader, sent an expedition of three ships carrying 600 men
and women under Vice-admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon to South
America to establish a refuge for his fellow Huguenots.
Villegagnon, though a devout Catholic, claimed that he was devoted
to religious tolerance. After a long voyage from Le Havre via
the coast of Spain, the Madeiras, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde
Islands, Villegagnon's expedition reached Brazil in November.
The admiral chose as the site for a new colony the island of
Serigipe in the harbor of present-day Rio de Janeiro--an area the
French called La France Antarctique. The settlers named their
fort after Coligny, who had ignored the fact that Portugal had long
claimed the area as its own. In 1556, with the approbation of
King Henri II, Coligny sent 300 reinforcements to the Huguenot
refuge, "many picked personally by Jean Calvin himself," and they
established a new settlement called Henryville. This second
group of colonists also included devout Catholics, who, with the
urging of the headstrong Villegagnon, quarreled incessantly with the
Swiss Calvinists, "especially in relation to the Eucharist."
The bitterness and intolerance, reflecting conditions back in
France, doomed the colonial effort. In October
1557, Villegagnon banished the Calvinists to the mainland and
returned to France the following year. No longer able to
ignore the French incursion, in March 1560 the Portuguese attacked
the settlement and destroyed their fort, but not until 1565 were
they able to remove the last of the French from Brazil. The
French did not give up in the region. During the following
decades, they turned their attention to Guiana up the coast and to
the islands of the southern Caribbean.03a
Meanwhile, Coligny tried
to establish another Huguenot settlement, this time in territory claimed by Spain for half a century.
In February 1562, during the same year the religious wars erupted in France, the admiral sent
Jean Ribaut in two ships out of Dieppe to plant a Huguenot colony in what the Spanish called La Florida,
their name for all of North America north of Mexico.
The fortified settlement would serve as a base from which to search
for precious metals, "to prey upon Spanish galleons in the
Caribbean and to watch for an opportunity to intervene in the West
Indies." Following Verrazzano's route across the North
Atlantic, Ribaut explored the Florida coast from present-day St.
Augustine up to the St. Marys River, where he landed and took formal
possession of the region for France, erecting a monument to mark the
occasion. Continuing up the coast,
he built a fort near present-day Port Royal,
South Carolina, which he named Charlesfort after the boy King Charles IX,
and returned to France. The local Natives were friendly and
helpful, but the "colonists," more interested in searching for gold
and silver than in tilling the earth, soon ran out of supplies.
Although the Natives provided them with what they could spare, the
storehouse burned, and the Natives could provide no more.
Ribaut, meanwhile, could not succor Charlesfort because of the
religious disturbances in France. The unhappy colonists turned
on the officer whom Ribaut had left in charge, murdered him, built a
crude ship of their own,
and, under the leadership of one of the conspirators, abandoned the fort to the elements.
After resorting to cannibalism, the hand full of survivors were
rescued by an English vessel, which returned them to France.
In April 1564, Coligny sent
René Goulaine de Laudonnière with 300 men in three ships out of Le
Havre to try yet again. Laudonnière also landed at the mouth
of the St. Marys, visited Ribaut's monument, but chose to settle down the coast. Fort
de la Caroline, also named after the French king,
stood on a hill beside today's St. Johns River in the suburbs of
Jacksonville, Florida. Laudonnière quarreled bitterly with the
colonists, who ran short of food, found no gold, and alienated the
local Timucuan. The following year, Ribaut, at the head of a
flotilla of seven ships, sailed to Fort
Caroline with reinforcements, including families, and relieved the
harried Laudonnière. Meanwhile, Spanish
authorities learned of the French incursion into their territory and
resolved to rid the New World of these troublesome heretics.
In September 1565, an expedition out of Cadiz, Spain, under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, attacked Fort Caroline.
Despite Ribaut's valiant resistance, the Spaniards captured most of
the colonists, spared the few Catholics, and hanged the Protestants,
including the redoubtable Jean Ribaut. "The bodies of those who
were hung were left on the trees along the shore; and an inscription
was set up announcing they were hung 'not as French, but as
heretics.'" Laudonnière and some of the men escaped the
onslaught, secured a vessel, and returned to France. To
discourage more heretics from invading the Catholic realm, Menéndez erected a
stronghold, San Agústín, 40 miles south of Fort Caroline. Unlike
the efforts of de Ayllón, Cartier,
and Roberval, and the now defunct Charlesfort and Fort
Caroline, Spanish San Agústín survived the test of time. It is today
St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously-occupied European
community north of Cuba and Mexico.
In France, Laudonnière
wrote a stirring account of the fate of Fort Caroline and its
inhabitants, but the young King seemed disinterested in the matter.
Not so Dominique de Gourgues of Gascony, who, in 1567, two years
after the massacre, equipped an expedition of three ships carrying
200 Huguenots bent on vengeance. In August of that year, they
sailed from Bordeaux to attack Fort Caroline, renamed by the
Spanish Fort San
Mateo. With the help of local Natives, Gourges's Frenchmen
overwhelmed the Spanish garrison and hanged most of them.
Gourges placed near the swinging bodies another placard, proclaiming
they were hanged "'not as Spaniards, but as murderers.'" Gourgues
attacked San Agústín, captured the small garrison there, but spared
the lives of these Spaniards. After burning the Spanish fort,
he returned to France, ending French presence in Spanish Florida.
In late August 1572,
following the ceremony celebrating the marriage of Protestant Prince
Henri de Béarn and Navarre to Catholic princess Marguerite de
Valois, Catholic militants in Paris murdered Coligny, along with
other prominent Huguenots, in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day.
This brought to an end "the first phase of French transatlantic
expansion" and precipitated a fourth war of religion in France.04
.
The interest of the French in North America did not end with the failure of Coligny's settlements
and the resumption of the kingdom's wars of religion; too
many fish and fur-bearing animals demanded their attention in the
northern regions. "Throughout the second half of the sixteenth
century," Marcel Trudel informs us, "the French went to
Newfoundland every year." Contact with the Natives was
inevitable, and, like Cartier, French fishermen and fur traders
"brought a few of them back to France from time to time."
Indians from Newfoundland, perhaps Béothuks, appear in French
records in 1553 and again in 1584-85. "With these annual
fishing voyages to Newfoundland and these contacts with the Indians,
France had been constantly present in the northern regions of
America, in spite of Roberval's retreat in 1543 and in spite of
later official preoccupation with Brazil and Florida. If
France was still to make a place for herself across the Atlantic,"
Trudel concludes, "it was natural to expect that she might
do so in this part of the New World."05g
During the wars of religion, an
influential French nobleman secured from two kings permission to
establish settlements in the northern regions that resulted, a
Canadian historian avers, in a "record of continuous failure,
unrivaled in the history of the northeastern shores of North
America." Troilus du Mesgoùez, sieur de La Roche-Helgomarche,
marquis de Coëtarmoal, vicomte de Carenten and Saint-Lô, is known to
history as La Roche. Like Cartier, La Roche was a Breton.
Like Roberval, he was a member of the high nobility, having served
as a page to Queen-Mother Catherine de Médici and become one of her
favorites. Royal favor led to a series of promotions,
including the governorship of Morlaix in
his native Brittany, a position that "opened his eyes to the profits
brought to Saint-Malo by the fisheries and the fur trade on the
American coasts." In March 1577, during another quiet period
between the religious wars, La Roche secured a monopoly "in the
newly discovered lands" from Catherine de Médici's and Henri II's son, King Henri III. In January 1578, Henri III granted
La Roche the vaunted title of "'Governor and our Lieutenant-General
and Viceroy of the said
Terres neuves and countries which he shall conquer and take from
these barbarians"--the first time the title of viceroy was given
to a Frenchman. By granting this monopoly, Marcel Trudel
reminds us, Henri III was turning from the southward thrusts into
the Portuguese and Spanish realms made during the reigns of his
father and older brother, Charles IX, and "reverting instead to the policy of his
grandfather, Francis I, envisaging a New France in the northern
regions of America. Thus he brought thirty-four years of
official abstention to an end." La Roche's commission as
viceroy awarded him the power to "grant seigneuries" in the Terres neuves, "but the country was never [to be] his
personal property." Soon after receiving his commission as
viceroy, La Roche and Honorat de Bueil, vice-admiral of Brittany,
"fitted out a ship and a pinnace for the undertaking," but the
effort failed. The English, who suspected that La Roche
intended to assist Irish insurgents, sent four ships to capture La
Roche's vessels the following summer, and only the pinnance escaped.
Thus ended the marquis's first attempt to exploit the riches
of New France.05i
In 1581,
after the Treaty of Fleix sent the contending French armies home
once again,
the "merchants of Rouen, Dieppe, and St. Malo began sponsoring
expeditions designed exclusively to bring back furs from the St.
Lawrence River," Canadian historians Sally Ross and Alphonse Deveau
relate.
Cardinal Charles de Bourbon, archbishop of Rouen and uncle of
Huguenot leader Henri de Navarre, "took up, with the Duc de
Joyeuse, the admiral of France, a project for exploring and trading
along the coast south and west of Cape Breton and establishing there
a small outpost, which it would hope would later become the nucleus
of a colony." The cardinal employed Rouen merchant Étienne Bellenger, who had gone to the Grand Bank as a purser with the
Norman fishing fleet, to establish the outpost. In January
1583, the 50-ton barque Chardon, manned by a 10-man crew, left
Havre-de-Grâce with Bellenger and 20 "colonists"; also "aboard" was
a chaloupe, essentially a long-boat with sails, to be used for
exploring inlets where the Chardon could not go. After
a short, uneventful crossing, Bellenger reached Cape Breton in early
February and explored the coast southward, including the bays and
inlets of "Isle St. Jehan," the French name at the time for today's Atlantic
shore of the Nova Scotia peninsula. Bellenger sailed around
Cap-Sable and up into today's Bay of Fundy, one of the first Europeans to explore deep into what Bellenger
called the "Pasaige de St. Jehan." Erecting crosses with the
cardinal's coat of arms here and there along the Fundy shore, Bellenger
explored the bay's southern coast up to the entrance of today's
Minas Basin before crossing to the northern shore. Here, he
discovered and explored the Lower Reach of today's St. John River,
positing that the river "was navigable for 60 or 80 leagues."
Continuing southwestward along the coast of Maine, called by the
French Norembègue since the days of Verrazzano, Bellenger
re-discovered the Penobscot River before returning home, probably by
late May. Back at Rouen, he "presented many mementoes to the
cardinal and sold, at a high profit, the skins bought on his own
adventure," but he did not return to New France. Although the
cardinal's colony never materialized, Bellenger's voyage was a
significant leap in the understanding of that part of North America
which lay south and west of Cape Breton: "The Chardon or her
pinnace put Bellenger on land frequently, ten to a dozen times,"
one of his
biographers tells us. "He made a close examination of the
resources of the land, its timber, its possibilities for making
salt, and its presumed mineral wealth, bringing home an ore believed
to contain lead and silver." He also made extensive contacts
with the local natives, especially the Mi'kmaq at Cap-Sable, with whom he traded
trinkets for furs. "These furs sold at Rouen
for some four hundred crowns," Professor Trudel informs us, "while the trinkets that Bellenger had
given the Indians in exchange had cost him only forty."05a
Noting the financial success of Bellenger's voyage, the marquis de La Roche enlisted
the Rouennais's
backers--Cardinal Bourbon and the duc de Joyeuse--and "organized a
second expedition, in association with some shipowners of Saint-Malo
and of Saint-Jean-de-Luz." Their destination was not the
region south of Cape Breton, where Bellenger had gone, but Canada. The expedition set sail in early
1584 "with a flotilla carrying 300 men," but the "principal ship
sank off the coast of Saintonge," near Brouage, "and this put an end to the
expedition." So many ships now were venturing to the northern
regions that an ordinance of March 1584 "fixed norms of
equipment" for vessels sailing from French ports to Newfoundland.
That same year, "merchants of St Malo organized a commercial
expedition and ascended the St Lawrence," Marcel Trudel relates.
"Their five ships returned so heavily laden with furs that they
prepared a fleet of ten ships for the following year, to the despair
of " English scholar Richard Hakluyt, author of the Divers
Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, published in 1582.
Hakluyt was serving in Paris with the English legation in 1584 and
was a correspondent of Étienne Bellenger and other Frenchmen who had
ventured to North America. Hakluyt "feared that the English
were about to be shouldered aside as the French carried off all the
riches for themselves under their very noses," and he imparted his
fears to the Queen and her ministers. Meanwhile,
"European merchants invaded the St Lawrence in force," leading to
conflicts between competing ventures. Jacques Noël, a nephew
of Jacques Cartier, went there in 1585 and inspected the 40-year-old
ruins of his uncle's habitation. In 1587, rivals burned
three of Noël's small vessels and captured a fourth. Here,
in the Canada of Cartier and Roberval, and, as Bellenger
demonstrated, in other parts of New France, was an industry,
formerly controlled by the fishermen, in which substantial profits
could be made. In order to minimize their risks, merchants and
investors continued to demand monopolies over the fur trade in the
vast areas of New France. The year of Noël's loss, he and his
cousin Étienne Chaton, sieur de La Jannaye, petitioned King Henri III
for such a monopoly. They informed
the King that their uncle "and his heirs were still owed" a
substantial sum. "A royal commission confirmed their
claims. In January 1588," David Hackett Fisher
relates, "they received a monopoly on fur trade
and mining in New France for twelve years," as they had requested, "and authorization to
transport sixty convicts," women as well as men, "to New France and start a settlement.
The monopoly was instantly attacked by traders and fishermen,"
especially from St.-Malo, "and was
revoked" the following July "for all but mining rights." Mines
undiscovered and minerals unproven could not replace a commerce in
Canadian furs known to exist in abundance. As a result, "Nothing appears to have
come of this colonizing effort," and so ended the participation of
the heirs of Jacques Cartier in the affairs of New France.05h
The North Atlantic realm was becoming a
busy place not only for fishermen, fur traders, and miners, but also
for seekers of the elusive northern passage. In
1586, three years after Bellenger's venture and 44 years after
Alfonse de Saintonge's voyage to the Arctic, "a captain from Dieppe,
Jean Sauvage, went in search of a northeast passage" via the North Cape
of Norway and Russian Archangel. During the brief
intermission between the Treaty of Fleix and the eighth and final
war of religion, the French remained active in their exploitation of
North America, reaping the benefits of unsanctioned trade.05k
.
But they were not alone. In 1536, during the reign of Henry
VIII, an English expedition, the first in nine years, crossed
the North Atlantic to seek the northwest passage, but the voyage went
terribly wrong. "After some time had been spent at Cape
Breton and Newfoundland," H. P. Biggar relates, "provisions ran so short that the ship's
company were on the point of eating one another when the arrival of
a French fishing vessel saved their lives."
During the early 1550s, three
decades before Jean Sauvage's voyage to Archangel, Richard
Chancellor of Bristol, protégé of Sebastian Cabot, became second in
command of a combined exploration and commercial venture chartered
by King Edward VI. Seeking, like Sauvage, a northeast passage
to Asia, Chancellor pioneered the route via North Cape and the White Sea to Archangel, where he was invited
to visit the court of Tsar Ivan IV, history's Ivan the
Terrible. With the tsar's encouragement and
Queen Mary's approbation, Chancellor organized the Muscovy Company,
which opened a trade route between London and Archangel, exchanging
British wool for Russian furs.
During the late 1570s, Martin Frobisher
of Yorkshire, one of Queen Elizabeth's most rabid "Sea Dogs,"
conducted three voyages across the North Atlantic in search of gold
and the northwest passage under the aegis of the Muscovy and Cathay
companies. Frobisher Bay at Baffin Island, which he visited on
each of his voyages, bears the explorer's name. Sir Humphrey
Gilbert of Devon, half-brother of Sir
Walter Raleigh, published A Discourse on the search for the
northwest passage in 1576, the year of Frobisher's first voyage, and
presented it to the Queen.
Gilbert backed Frobisher's voyages to the northern regions, and in
1578, the year of Frobisher's third voyage, secured from the Queen a
six-year commission for voyages of his own. In June 1583, he
sailed in five vessels "filled with misfits, criminals and pirates,"
for Newfoundland, but one of the ships, commanded by Raleigh, turned
back. On 5 August, in the harbor of St. John's, Gilbert took
possession of Newfoundland for the English--the beginning,
Anglophone historians insist, of Britain's overseas empire.
After the locals presented Gilbert with the gift of a dog, which "he
named Stella for the North Star," he claimed authority over the fish
stations at St. John's and proceeded to levy a tax on the fishermen
from several countries" working on the nearby Grand Bank. Lack
of supplies, however, and perhaps opposition from the locals,
dissuaded Gilbert from establishing a colony on the island. He
decided, instead, to return to England, steering a meandering course
that led to a fatal shipwreck on a sandbar at Sable Island. After a difficult crossing, his
remaining ships made it to the Azores, where, on September 10,
Gilbert perished in the sudden sinking of his favorite vessel, the
Squirrel.
In late March 1584, with Richard Hakluyt's
urging, Raleigh secured a commission from Queen Elizabeth to
plant a colony in that part of North America the English called
Virginia. The following month, Raleigh dispatched an
expedition under two associates to explore the coast of North
America well south of Newfoundland. The Englishmen brought
back two head men of the Croatoan nation, Manteo and Wanchese,
who came from the area where Verrazzano had made land fall 62 years before.
In April of 1585, about the time open hostilities began between
England and Spain, Raleigh sent his associate, Sir Richard Grenville, with five ships to establish a lodgment in
the land of the Croatoan, from where the English not only could
search for precious metals, but also raid Spanish treasure fleets
sailing through the Strait of Florida. Grenville, aboard his
own ship, the Tiger, was forced by a mid-ocean storm to take
refuge on Spanish-held Puerto Rico, where he remained from mid-May
to the first week of June. Despairing of rendezvousing with
his other vessels, he sailed north to his destination. He
reached Ocracoke Inlet on June 26, ran aground, lost most of the
supplies, but managed to repair the vessel and rendezvous with two
of his other ships in early July. Though they had returned
Manteo and Wanchese to their villages, Grenville and his men quickly
alienated other Natives by accusing them of theft and sacking one of
their villages. This proved to be disastrous for the 107 men
left at a small fort on the north end of Roanoke Island under
Grenville's lieutenant, Ralph Lane. Promising to return the
following spring, Grenville left for England in August with all of
the expedition's vessels. By the following June, seeing that
Grenville had not returned, the Natives, sensing an opportunity,
attacked Lane and his men, who stood firm behind the walls of their
wooden fort. Nevertheless, when Sir Francis Drake, on his way
home from an expedition to the Spanish realms, appeared at Roanoke
later in the month, Lane and his men took up his offer to ferry them
back to England. Grenville returned to Roanoke Island with a
relief expedition soon afterwards but found the colony abandoned.
Leaving a token force to secure Raleigh's claim to the
region, Grenville headed home.
In 1587,
two years into what would prove to be a long war with Spain, Raleigh sent a third expedition to Virginia, the second to attempt a
settlement: 115 colonists, including families, sailing aboard
the Lion, commanded by Portuguese navigator Simon Fernandez,
who had piloted the ships of the Grenville expedition two years
earlier. The head of this venture was John White, a friend of
Raleigh's who had served Grenville and Lane at Roanoke as artist and mapmaker.
Fernandez had been ordered to ferry White and the settlers to
Chesapeake Bay--Verrazzano's Arcadia--but the Portuguese, derisively
called "the swine" by his sailors, returned to the Outer Banks
instead. In late July, he disembarked the colonists at Roanoke
Island and refused to allow them to re-embark. Resigned to the
change in plans, White ordered the rebuilding of Lane's old fort and
searched for the Englishmen Lane had left behind.
Ominously, they found only the bones of the Englishmen, who, chief
Manteo informed them, had died in a carefully coordinated attack by
the Secotan and two other nations. After repairing relations
with the Croatoan and other locals Natives, but not with the
hostiles who twice attacked the fort, White and his men accidentally
attacked a friendly village, and relations with the rest of the
locals steadily deteriorated. Meanwhile, on August 18, Governor White was
pleased to witness the birth of a granddaughter, Virginia Dare--the first English child born in America. After
Natives killed a colonist who had gone out alone to fish for crabs
and their food supply diminished, the colonists begged White to
return to England to organize a re-supply. White demurred but
finally agreed to go. Before he left, however, he instructed
them to maintain their vigilance, but if
the Natives or the Spanish overwhelmed them, they must "carve a
Maltese cross on a tree nearby, indicating their disappearance had
been forced." Back in England late that autumn after a
difficult crossing, White learned that the Queen had
closed the ports in anticipation of an imminent Spanish attack.
The following spring, however, he hired two pinnances, the Brave
and the Roe, deemed too small for naval service, and filled
them with supplies. On the outward-bound voyage their captains
insisted on privateering to increase their profits. French
pirates captured them instead, wounded White in the buttocks, seized
his cargoes, and he and the others were allowed to return to England
only with their lives. Unfortunately for White and his fellow
colonists, Philip II's Armada appeared off the southern coast of
England in August 1588, before White could organize another re-supply.
Not until the spring of 1590--nearly three years after White had
left the colonists--was Raleigh able to send him back to Virginia aboard two ships, the Hope and the
Moonlight. After a difficult crossing, the expedition
reached Roanoke Island on August 18, White's granddaughter's third
birthday. A landing was made under hazardous conditions that
resulted in the drowning of seven of the mariners. On the
island, White found the fort and the settlers' houses carefully
dismantled and no Maltese cross carved into a tree. Most
troubling of all, White and his men "could not find any trace of the
90 men, 17 women, and 11 children, nor was there any sign of a
struggle or battle," only the words "Croatoan" carved into a post
and "Cro" carved into a tree. A search of nearby Hatteras
Island--Croatoan to the English--was abandoned when a storm
approached and White's men insisted on hurrying back to England.
Back at Plymouth in October, they reported the settlers'
disappearance, and the Queen abandoned further efforts to colonize
Virginia.05j
.
Meanwhile, in 1587, war broke out in
France again--the so-called War of the Three Henrys--the eighth war
of religion to plague the war-torn kingdom. Assassination
followed assassination, and in August 1589, King Henri III was
mortally stabbed by Jacques Clément, a Catholic fanatic. With no sons and no
more brothers to succeed him, the dying king, the last of the Valois
line, invoked Salic law and
designated
his brother-in-law, the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre, as his
successor. Henri de Navarre's struggle to secure his throne
against the might of the Catholic League was assisted by money and
troops sent by Queen Elizabeth of England, who looked forward to the
triumph of Protestantism across the English Channel.
Unfortunately for the Protestant cause, Henri converted to Catholicism in July 1593--"Paris is
well worth a Mass," he is said to have quipped--and internecine
warfare, except in Brittany, finally ended.
Crowned Henri IV at Chartres the following February, by then he
had alienated his ally
across the Channel, a falling out that was destined to have global consequences.05l
In February 1597, following the marquis
de La Roche's
release from a long incarceration in the Château de Nantes at the hands of the Catholic
League, King Henri IV granted him another fur-trading monopoly
in the northern region. By granting this concession, the
first of his reign, the new king followed precedent established and
maintained by his predecessors François I, Henri II, and Henri III.
It also marked the new king's entry into the dynamics of the
kingdom's overseas exploration, trade, and settlement.
Nine years earlier, on the eve of the new king's succession, the
nephews of Jacques Cartier had suffered the humiliation of seeing
their fur-trade monopoly in New France fall victim to the complaints
of Breton merchants. This had been "above all a victory for
free trade," Professor Trudel informs us. "For the first time
in the history of New France, the problem of conflict between
merchants and colonizers had been clearly demonstrated, the
merchants wanting simply to barter in the St Lawrence and the
colonizers hoping to be assured of commercial revenues and intending
to apply them in part to the foundation of a new country. In
this first round," back in 1588, "the partisans of pure and simple
trade had carried the day. The merchants of St Malo stubbornly
refused to believe in the fertility of the country and maintained
that it was good for nothing but as a source of pelts. What
they wanted, of course, was commercial gains without the burden of
colonization"--the building and maintenance of fortifications
and the recruiting and sustaining of colonists--"whereas the
foundation and maintenance of a colony would be impossible without
the support of an exclusive monopoly. There was therefore a
complete cleavage of interest between commerce and colonization,"
which would plague French efforts in the New World for decades to
come. By granting another monopoly to La Roche, as his
predecessor had done twice before, the new king
was throwing his substantial influence into the colonizers' corner.05m
A month after receiving his commission
from Henri IV, La Roche contracted with
Thomas Chefdostel of Normandy, captain of the ship Catherine,
who, later in the year, ventured to the Grand Bank of Newfoundland
on a successful fishing expedition. The crossing also served
as "a voyage of reconnaissance" to nearby Sable Island, a
16,000-acre sand bar at the southern edge of the Bank. The
remote island lay a hundred miles east of Canso, the fishing
rendezvous southwest of Cape Breton in a region the French called
La
Cadie. In January 1598, the King named La
Roche "the King's Lieutenant-General for the countries of 'Canada,
Hochelaga, Terres-neuves, Labrador, rivière
de la grand Baye, de Noremberque," and adjacent
lands which were not inhabited by 'subjects of any Christian
Prince,'" but not viceroy. In the marquis's commission
was the usual dictum to advance the "'holy work and advancement of
the Catholic Faith,'" for diplomat as well as religious
purposes. Again, as in 1578, La Roche was given permission to
grant seigneuries in New France and was himself granted a monopoly in
trade. La Roche struggled from the beginning to find
enough volunteers among his fellow Frenchmen to go to New
France. Empowered, à la Cartier and Roberval, to enlist
criminals sentenced to the Mediterranean galleys to fill his
contingent of colonists, La Roche used them, instead, to raise more
funds; "he offered them the opportunity of purchasing their freedom
for a large sum, which he sometimes set at 500 écus"--a clear
violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of his commission.
"The courts, when
informed of how justice was being cheated, refused all further
requests for prisoners." Undaunted, La Roche turned to the
Parlement of Rouen and "recruited" some 250 "beggars and
vagabonds," 200 of them men and 50 of them women, from which to select a corps of settlers. In
mid-April 1598,
he embarked 40 "of the most vigorous" recruits, along with 10
soldiers, on two vessels: Chefdostel's 160-ton Catherine,
and Jean Girot's 90-ton Françoise. After depositing La
Roche and the settlers on the north side of Sable Island, Chefdostel
and Girot, as per their contract, sailed on to the Grand Bank, where they fished for cod before returning to the island
to retrieve the marquis for the return trip to France.
Left under the command of Captain Querbonyer, with Captain Coussez
in charge of the storehouse, the 50 settlers were expected to get "their food from the fish and game
available locally, as well as from the cattle that had been landed
on the island probably by the Portuguese Fagundes around 1520.
At the same time they were to cultivate 'French gardens,' which
supplied them with vegetables." Back in France by October, La
Roche resumed his search for more settlers and informed the King
that his venture was well under way. Despite the severe
depletion of the royal treasury by the nation's interminable wars,
King Henri contributed 12,000 écus
to La Roche's venture, which promised substantial profits in fish
and furs. With this and other sources of funding, from 1599
through 1601 La Roche provided
his settlers with annual spring re-supplies of "'wine, coats and
clothing'" delivered by Chefdostel aboard the Catherine
and deposited in the island's storehouse, "and skins and oils were
sent back to France." In the 1599 re-supply, more settlers
came to the island, but the marquis established no more
colonies in his domain. In
1602, for unknown reasons, La Roche did not send a re-supply. Frustrated by
this neglect and provoked, no doubt, by the post's military
disciple, the "beggars and vagabonds," the ex-convicts,
and perhaps some of the
soldiers, mutinied against the officers, killing them in their sleep. After
dispatching Captain Coussez, the settlement's unpopular storekeeper, they looted
the island's store house and consumed the remaining supplies.
Turning on one another, most of the mutineers did not survive the
winter. Meanwhile, Chefdostel received orders from La Roche,
dated 21 February 1603, to return to the island with a re-supply and
to take along a commissioner "whose task was to inquire into the island's
resources in order to give the king information relevant to a plan
for making it into a reliable and suitable colony."
Chefdostel also was charged with returning Captain Querbonyer and 10
others, presumably the officers, with their baggage, along with the
usual load of oil and skins. Chefdostel set sail that spring,
but when he reached the island, only 11 of the
settlers were still alive. Chefdostel promptly returned them to
France, where, to the chagrin of the marquis de La Roche, the King
believed their "convincing story in their own favour" and
refused to hang them; he even compensated them, at 50 écus
each, for presenting him their furs, granted them letters of pardon,
and agreed that they retained "the right to two thirds of the
profits realized on the skins and oils that had been brought back"
from the island! La Roche sent no more colonists to
New France, but retained his concession there nonetheless.05b
.
Perhaps learning from the La Roche
misadventure, Henri IV, with the urging of his chief minister, the duc
de Sully, pursued a policy of royal parsimony by granting fur-trade
monopolies to other entrepreneurs
sans funds from the royal treasury. On 22 November 1599,
while La Roche's settlers lingered on Sable Island, the King awarded a 10-year
fur-trading and fishing concession "in the country of Canada, the
coast of Acadia and others in New France,'" to Calvinist merchant and former naval officer Pierre de
Chauvin, sieur de Tonnetuit, of
Dieppe and Honfleur; Chauvin also was granted the title of "King's
Lieutenant." Chauvin himself had never been to New France, but
several of his ships had gone to Newfoundland and Canada on
fur-trading and cod-fishing ventures over the past two years. That
Chauvin was a Huguenot reveals what some would have perceived as a
healthy new trend in French official thinking. The King's
commission to La Roche less than two years before "had assured the
exclusivity of an established Catholic faith in the colony," but
here the King was placing the fate of Canada and La Cadie "in the
hands of the Protestant Chauvin. The reason for this radical
change in policy," Marcel Trudel informs us, "was that, between
the issuance of La Roche's letters patent and Chauvin's, two
decisive events had taken place: the signing of the Edict of
Nantes, that 'attempt at co-existence' between Catholics and
Protestants," on 30 April 1598, "which allowed Huguenots to hold
public office, and of the Treaty of Vervins," signed two days later,
"which restored peace between France and Spain." The treaty
included "a secret clause" granting "freedom of action to France
beyond a so-called Friendship Line which passed through the
westernmost of the Canary Islands." There was little danger
now, Trudel concludes, "that the
weakened Philip II might intervene against a New France in which
Protestants had a part." France finally, under its remarkable
new king, could show its true colors to the rest of the world and
make its place in it.05n
Chauvin's chief lieutenant
in the trading venture was 49-year-old François Gravé, sieur du Pont, of St.-Malo
and Honfleur, another naval officer-turned-fur-trader. Unlike
Chauvin, Gravé was a Catholic. While working for La Roche, Gravé had gone to Canada, so he knew the St. Lawrence well;
needless to say, the marquis was not happy to see him
associated with a rival concessionaire. Also part of Chauvin's
consortium were several other well-placed nobles, including Pierre Dugua,
sieur de Mons, a Calvinist, who had been a champion of Henri IV
during the late religious wars. But Chauvin also faced stiff
opposition from powerful detractors. In response to complaints from
the marquis de La Roche, who still held his royal concession, on 15 January 1600 the
King modified Chauvin's commission, designating him "'one of the
lieutenants' of the viceroy" but retaining Chauvin's fishing and fur-trading rights;
however, the extent of his concession would be limited "to a hundred
leagues along the St Lawrence as far as Tadoussac." The
venture also was opposed by a coterie of complaining merchants,
especially from Chauvin's native St.-Malo. Here was yet
another round in the perpetual bout between monopoly and free trade,
but his time monopoly won the decision. By deferring to the
interests of the marquis de La Roche, the King also stood behind the
sieur de Tonnetuit.05r
Later in the year, Chauvin and Gravé, with de Mons
coming along "'for his own pleasure,'" sailed in
four ships to the St. Lawrence valley: the 400-ton Don-de-Dieu,
commanded by Guillaume Lechevalier; with Henri Couillart "in charge
of its sailors"; the 100-ton Espérance, under Captain
Sébastien Morin; the 120-ton Bon-Espoir, commanded by
Guillaume Caresme; and the Saint-Jean, burthen unreported,
under Nicolas Tuvache--"the biggest fleet to set sail for Canada,
under a single command" since the Cartier-Roberval venture nearly
six decades before. Their principal mission was to fulfill an
important requirement of the Chauvin's commission: the
settling of 50 colonists a year, at least 500 during the life of the
concession. Having spent time at Trois-Rivières on the upper
St. Lawrence, first visited by Cartier in 1535, Gravé had hoped to
see a new trading settlement there; he, in fact, only recently had
given Trois-Rivières its name. But Chauvin's commission
limited him to the
lower St. Lawrence, compelling him to choose Tadoussac as the base of
operations.
Moreover, since Chauvin was only one of the marquis's
"lieutenants" now, the settlement, on paper at least, belonged to La Roche.
Gravé and de Mons were not happy with the choice, but, as Marcel Trudel informs us, "All
Chauvin was interested in at first was
trading, and from this point of view Tadoussac was indeed the ideal
place...."05s
Since before the
explorations of Jacques Cartier, this site on the lower St.
Lawrence, at its confluence with Rivière Saguenay, had been an
important Native
rendezvous. In 1535, on his first ascent of the St. Lawrence
River, Cartier visited Tadoussac, occupied even then by the Montagnais,
today's Innu. In 1542, the sieur de Roberval's chief pilot,
Alfonse de Saintonge, explored Rivière Saguenay for "at least two
or three leagues," concluding that here was "an arm of the sea,
through which one could reach 'the Pacific sea or indeed the sea of
Cathay.'" Later that year, some of Roberval's men built a
fortified outpost at Tadoussac. Basque whalers frequented the
place, but another activity brought even more Europeans to the
rendezvous. By the end of the century, despite its rugged
terrain, poor soil, and extremely harsh winters, Tadoussac had
become the most important fur-trading center in the St. Lawrence
valley. The trade with the Indians had become so important by
then that the region's traditional fishing and sea-mammal culture
had given way to hunting for fur-bearing creatures. The
principal nation of the region, the Laurentian Iroquois, whose economy had centered on maize farming and
fishing, the same people who had "hosted" Cartier and Roberval
in the early 1500s, had abandoned the region, driven away by who or what the French did not know. What was evident by
the late 1500s was that, except for seasonal hunters seeking food and furs to trade
with the Europeans, the St. Lawrence valley above Tadoussac was
largely uninhabited. Chauvin built a manor house of sorts at
the trading center, actually nothing more than "a crude building
measuring about 24 feet by 18 and 8 feet, covered with planks and
surrounded by light fencing and 'a little ditch dug in the sand.'"
As the winter of 1600 approached, "without having made the least
attempt at exploration or discovery," Chauvin left only 16 of his
men in his "'country cottage'" at Tadoussac while he and the others
returned to France. Though Tadoussac is touted today as "the
oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in Canada, and the
oldest surviving French settlement in the Americas," Chauvin's
settlement did not survive beyond its first, terrible winter.
Nevertheless, Tadoussac retained its central role in the Canadian
fur trade, remaining "the sole maritime port of the St Lawrence for
the next thirty years."05t
Chauvin sent the Espérance, this
time under command of Guyon-Dières of Honfleur, back to Tadoussac in
the spring of 1601 to succor his settlers, but Guyon-Dières found
only five survivors living with the local Montagnais.
Undeterred, Chauvin maintained a seasonal trading post at Tadoussac,
but the wintering disaster convinced him that settlement was no
longer an option there. In April 1602, he led two of his vessels--the Espérance under
Guyon-Dières and the Don-de-Dieu under Henri Couillart--back
to Tadoussac and spent four months fishing and trading
before hurrying home ahead of the winter. But this expedition
also was a failure: he did not meet the quota of fish he had
agreed to deliver to merchants at Rouen, and his hasty departure failed to
fulfill his mandate for settlement. He did rescue three Malouin
fishermen abandoned by their captain "in 'the isle of Canada'" and
coaxed two young Montagnais to accompany him back to France, where they would
be presented to King Henri IV and return the following year to inform their fellow natives of what they had
seen there. But the King expected a colony, not just
another trading post, in Canada, so he modified Chauvin's monopoly that autumn
by allowing the merchants of Rouen and Normandy to join him in the
venture. The merchants of St.-Malo protested vigorously, and
the King conceded to their demands. He called for a meeting to
be held in Rouen in January 1603 in which Vice-admiral Aymar de Cleremont de Chaste,
governor of Dieppe, and the sieur de La Cour, president of the
Parlement of Normandy, would oversee negotiations between
Chauvin and the coterie of merchants in creating a new partnership for the
settlement of New France. Unwilling to help shoulder the
expense of settlement, the Malouin merchants promptly withdrew,
leaving Chauvin and his Rouennais associates to carry out the
venture, "but Chauvin died soon afterwards," taking the new
partnership with him.05c
.
With Chauvin's death in February 1603,
the question arose: "would the St Lawrence monopoly revert in
its entirety" to the marquis de La Roche, whose settlers were still
ensconced on Sable Island? La Roche, as
beneficiary of the King's January 1600 modification of Chauvin's
commission, still claimed Tadoussac "as part of his domain," so his
claims for yet another monopoly seemed to be a solid one. The
King's answer to the question came soon enough: he "did not seem
convinced of the soundness of" the marquis's "work," so he set the nobleman's claims aside and awarded the New
French concession, instead, to Vice-admiral Aymar de Chaste.
Again following the duc de Sully's advice not to commit royal funds
to a colony, the King instructed de Chaste to seek
investors for the new venture, which he did at Honfleur, St.-Malo,
Dieppe, Le Havre, and especially Rouen. However, neither the admiral's
vaunted title nor the influence of his investors reduced the number
of unauthorized fur traders returning to the lower St. Lawrence.
And the King caved, again, to Malouin demands; he "permitted them to
outfit a vessel which would go and trade in Canada under the command
of Captain Gilles Eberard du Coulombier; this ship might even sail
in company with the ships of Aymar de Chaste. But the monopoly
remained intact."
De
Chaste was too unhealthy for an ocean crossing, so he sent François Gravé du
Pont, Chauvin's commander at Tadoussac, back to the St. Lawrence
valley, his mission to find a settlement site with a more salubrious climate.
On the Ides of March 1603, Gravé sailed from Honfleur in the 120-ton Bonne-Renommée--Good
Renown. Aboard were the two young Montagnais Chauvin had
brought back from Tadoussac the year before, as well as the geographer
Samuel de Champlain.05p
Although this was Champlain's first voyage to
the northern regions, it would not be his last. A native of Brouage in Saintonge, where his father had been a man of the sea,
Champlain was in his early 30s in 1603, still a bachelor, and a man
of means and substance. Since the summer
of 1601, he had been receiving a pension of 600 livres a year
from the King, which he could add to a fortune in land and assets
recently inherited from an admiring uncle who had lived in Spain.
Champlain's pension was compensation for a two-year espionage
mission in Spain and Spanish America, including an exploration of
the Caribbean, from which he had recently returned, and for work on the King's behalf
thereafter. After
his sojourn in the Spanish realms, Champlain had spent a year in the
basement of the Louvre palace,
serving as one of the King's many geographers, and it was then that
his attention turned to North America. His insatiable
curiosity took him to many ports, where he
gathered information from fishermen, whalers, and explorers who had spent
time in New France. Though he was an
accomplished cartographer, an experienced sailor, and a trained
soldier with administrative experience, on this first of his many
voyages to the northern regions he held no official capacity.
He had come along as an observer in the service of the King and at
the urging of the admiral, who thought much of the Saintongois.05q
After a storm-tossed, ice-choked, fog-bound crossing,
Gravé and his party came in sight of Newfoundland on May 7, reached
Anticosti by May 20, and arrived at "the tight little harbor of"
Tadoussac on May 26. Accompanying the Bonne-Renommée was the
90-ton Françoise, outfitted by Rouen merchants and commanded
by Jean Girot, the same ship and the same captain La Roche had
taken to Sable Island five years earlier. Malouin Jean
Sarcel de Prévert also was part of the flotilla, sailing in a vessel
of his own whose name has been lost to history.
Once in New France, Sarcel de Prévert would explore "the coast of
Acadia," as stipulated in Chauvin's and now de Chaste's commission, while Champlain
would remain with Gravé on the St. Lawrence.
At Tadoussac, Gravé and Champlain, with the assistance of the two
young Montagnais, intruded themselves into "The Great Tabagie," in
which Algonquin from the Ottawa River valley, Etchemin from the
coast of Maine, and their hosts, the Montagnais, celebrated a great
victory over their common enemy, the Iroquois of present-day upstate
New York. After days of wild celebration at Pointe St.
Mathieu, today's Pointe-aux-Alouettes, a league south of the
outpost, the
Frenchmen and the Indians established a kind of "entente" that
lasted for many generations (one might even say it has lasted to
this very day). The tabagie was followed by weeks of
trading at Tadoussac. Listening to the Montagnais describe the watershed
of Rivière Saguenay and especially their tales
of a "salt-water sea to the north," Champlain guessed that a great
bay, not part of the Asian Sea but of the North Atlantic, lay far to
the north of the St. Lawrence rendezvous. "In 1603, seven years before its discovery by the
English," one of his biographers tells us, "Champlain divined in some fashion the existence of Hudson
Bay." During the second week of June, in one of Gravé's
ship's boats, Champlain began his remarkable career as a
geographer-explorer of the northern regions; he sounded Tadoussac's harbor and then explored
the Saguenay from its mouth nearly to the falls of Chicoutimi, a
distance of 12 to 15 leagues. The river he found to be
extraordinarily deep at its mouth and a virtual fjord in its lower
reaches, but the mountainous, tree-choked terrain along its banks
presented to him only a "true desert." Even on the eve of
summer he could see that the extreme coldness of the river's water,
coming down from the far north, promised a most unpleasant winter
for anyone who dwelled there.
Moreover, the Montagnais, intent on protecting their status as
middlemen in the lucrative trade for furs with the northern nations,
refused to accompany him any farther upriver, and so he returned to Tadoussac.05d
Another failure among the Montagnais at
Tadoussac was Champlain's efforts to convince their leader,
Anadabijou, to embrace the One True Faith. The geographer was
not there to convert the Indians--he was, by all accounts, the most
tolerant of men--but his conversations with them, as well as what he
witnessed in their remarkable tabagie, including displays of
female nakedness, revealed to him the essence of their beliefs, and
he found their religion wanting. The devout Roman Catholic,
whose adherence to his faith would grow stronger over the years,
could not resist an opportunity to spread the Word to a people for
whom he held a modicum of respect. But by all indications even
he could see that his efforts at conversion were for nothing.05f
On June 18, after the trading at
Tadoussac had ended, Gravé, in a river
barque carrying Champlain, a contingent of armed Frenchmen,
and Indian guides, explored the St. Lawrence--which Frenchmen were still
calling the Rivière de Canada--as far upriver as their vessel could
go. They discovered little that was new; Cartier's explorations 70 years before, and
more recent expeditions, including one by Gravé himself, had thoroughly
mapped the St. Lawrence valley from Tadoussac up to the falls at Hochelaga.
Nevertheless, Champlain's survey of the great river, its depths and
currents, its islands, and the terrain along its banks, was by far
the most thorough to date; moreover, Gravé took along interpreters
as well as guides, something Cartier had spurned on his upriver voyages. On June 22, Gravé's expedition
reached the abandoned site of Stadacona,
now called Kebec, near where Cartier and Roberval had wintered so long
before. They lingered there for only a day, during which
Champlain noted "that if the lands there were cultivated they would
be as good as those of France." Another of his biographers
insists, however, that the geographer was more impressed with
the land farther upriver,
which he considered more "suitable for a 'habitation.'"
There he found the terrain more open and the soil more fertile than
what he had observed downriver.
Champlain explored the lower reaches of today's Rivière St.-Maurice
until he was stopped by rapids, but he noted the Indians'
descriptions of the river's headwaters, which they said began close
to the Saguenay. The mouth of the St.-Maurice was divided by
small islands into three parts, hence Gravé's name for the site, which it still bears today.
Above Trois-Rivières, Champlain and Gravé
entered Cartier's Lac Angoulême, which Champlain renamed Lac
St.-Pierre, after the saint whose feast day--June 29--marked the day
of their arrival. Champlain noted but did not name other
streams falling into the lake, including today's Rivière
St.-François, which flowed up from the south, as well as "thirty
small islands at the head of the lake." Here, they passed the
mouth of a river then called Rivière-des-Iroquois, today's Rivière
Richelieu. The north-flowing river was named for the Iroquois
because here was their main avenue of invasion into the St. Lawrence
valley. Champlain and his companions noticed at the river's
mouth a palisade that had been erected by a party of Montagnais who
recently had made war on the Iroquois. The Indian
guides informed them that up this river, far to the south, in the country of the Mohawk, were a series of impressive lakes,
and that below these lakes a major river, whose mouth was "'some
hundred or hundred and forty leagues away'" flowed southward "toward
'Florida.'" The Indians were describing, of course,
today's Hudson River, the lower reaches of which Englishman Henry
Hudson, in the employ of the Dutch, would explore six years later.
Determined to see for himself, Champlain, in a longboat and then in
a skiff, explored the lower reach of the River of the Iroquois as
far as the rapids at present-day St.-Ours. On July 3, above the abandoned site of Hochelaga,
Gravé, Champlain, and a contingent of sailors, in a specially
prepared skiff, were no more successful than Cartier
and Roberval in
navigating past the Canadian rapids; only Indian guides in a canoe
completed the passage, "but not without difficulty." After
walking through the woods to the head of the cataract, Champlain
queried the natives and came away with a good idea of what lay beyond--a
pays d'en haut, or upper country, consisting of Cartier's
Estendue--today's Ottawa River--and a network of great lakes, beyond
the last of which perhaps ran a passage to the Asian Sea. The
Frenchmen could not have failed to notice that, despite the
difficulty of negotiating the rapids above Hochelaga, "a great trade
route" lay above the falls by which "French goods," especially metal
wares, "that the Algonquins acquired by barter ... were finding
their way up the Ottawa River into the land of the Hurons ... some
fifteen hundred miles from the Atlantic coast."05
Gravé's
party headed
back downriver on July 4 and encountered "some well-travelled
Algonquins," from whom they learned more of the pays d'en haut
as well as the land of the Iroquois. Taking
advantage of the current and the wind, they returned to Tadoussac by
the 11th and then set out in Gravé's ships for the eastern coast of Honguedo,
where they lingered four days, until July 19, "no doubt to lay in a
provision of fish." Champlain also explored the area where they fished,
including Baie
de Gaspé; Île Percé, which he likely named; and Île Bonaventure.
From the Indians, probably Mi'kmaq, he learned about the Baie des
Chaleurs, off to the southwest. From Sarcel de Prévert and the
Mi'kmaq, he learned more about Cape
Breton and the coast of La Cadie, which lay even farther to the south.05u
What Champlain heard about La Cadie fueled his imagination:
"A land rich in promise of minerals, this Acadia.... There was
a high mountain jutting out over the sea, 'brilliant in the light of
the Sun, where there are quantities of verdigris which comes from
the said copper mine' and from which fell pieces of copper; lower
down toward the coast of Acadia, a 'mountain of black pigment, with
which the Savages paint themselves'; then an island where 'a manner
of metal' was to be found which was neither tin nor lead, but which
resembled silver." He learned that "Prevert had given the
Souriquois," what the French called the Mi'kmaq, "wedges and chisels
so that they might bring him pieces from the mines the following
year. In the lands of the Almouchiquois (on the coast of
Maine), there were other mines, but there the Souriquois would not
dare to go unless accompanied by the French to driver off their
enemies." Surely this was the fabled land of Norembèque!
"Champlain made an effort to fix, hypothetically, the positions of
these places spoken of by Prevert, adding, 'All this country is very
beautiful, & flat, where are found all the kinds of trees that we
saw on our way to the first cataract of the great River of Canada.'"
Listening to Prévert and the Mi'kmaq, Champlain's mind turned to the
great European chimera--a northern passage to Asia. Did La
Cadie, then, offer not only "many mines," but also a faster route to
the Asian Sea? "Acadia," on the North Atlantic, "might be an
alternative to the St Lawrence, where navigation was long and
difficult and where there were so many conflicts. In 1603,"
Professor Trudel concludes, "it was Acadia rather than the St
Lawrence that intrigued Champlain."05o
After exploring Gaspé, Gravé and
Champlain headed back to Tadoussac on July 19 but were driven by
foul weather to the north shore of the Gulf, where they took the
time to explore "from Sept Iles upstream." On August 3,
back at Tadoussac, they joined in a Montagnais celebration over
victory against the Iroquois, during which Montagnais women danced
naked before the French and staged a mock battle in the water,
beating at each other with paddles. With this delightful scene
to remember, Gravé and Champlain left Tadoussac on the 16th and
rendezvoused with Sarcel de Prévert at Île Percé two days later.
After an uneventful crossing of the Gulf and the Atlantic, they reached Honfleur on September 20,
their expedition the most successful yet made in Canada.
Unfortunately for the New French enterprise, however, even before
Gravé's flotilla had reached Tadoussac, their
concessionaire, the aging Admiral de
Chaste, had died in France that May.05e
The Founding of Acadia
It did not take long for French
officials to call in new bids for the fur-trade concession and for
furious lobbying at court to commence. On 31 October 1603, the
Admiral of France, Henri, duc de Montmorency, at the behest of King
Henri IV, granted to Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, governor of Pons
in his native Saintonge, a former associate of Chauvin de Tonnetuit, a commission as vice-admiral "for 'all the
seas, coasts, islands, harbors, and maritime countries which are
found in the said province and region of Acadia.'" On November
6, at the King's residence at Fontainebleau outside of Paris, Henri
IV awarded de Chaste's concession to de Mons, who would
hold "extensive rights to settlement, trade, and fishery" in New
France for 10 years. Two days later, after careful
negotiations, in which de Mons requested the title of viceroy, the
King elevated de Mons to the rank of
lieutenant-general but, because he was not a prince of the blood,
refused him the title of viceroy. That Henri IV rewarded the
concession and the title of lieutenant-general to another Protestant
gives some idea of how relatively open-minded the French had become
in religious matters, at least during Henri's reign.
The geographical extent of de Mons's concession was the same as that
of Chauvin's and de Chaste's:
besides Canada, de Mons was granted the rights to La Cadie, which, the
French believed, lay between the 40th and 46th degrees of north
latitude. This huge area comprised not only the
peninsula of present-day Nova Scotia, but also what is now New England and New
York, much of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all of New Brunswick, Cape
Breton Island and Newfoundland on the North Atlantic, Prince Edward
Island and the îles-de-la-Madeleine in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and much of what is today the Province of Québec.06
Like his fellow Protestant Coligny, de
Mons would establish a settlement in territory claimed by rival
nations--in this case, Spain and England. His commission, in
fact, included an admonition from the King not only to promote
commercial relations with the natives and to spread the Christian
faith among them, but also to prevent English incursions into the
region. That aggressive maritime nation, soon to be free of
its long war with Spain and now under a new and vigorous king, James
VI of Scotland, could prove troublesome to French plans in North
America. Unlike Coligny and de Chastes, but like Chauvin, de Mons chose not
to remain in France but to go himself to oversee the establishment
of his new holdings. Also unlike Coligny, but like Chauvin and
de Chaste, de Mons would
establish a settlement not to create a nationalistic "New France" in
North America but to support a headquarters for his commercial
venture, which, the King reminded him, must be funded with his own
and his investors' money. De Mons formed the Compagnie de
Rouen, also called the Compagnie de Mons, which raised 90,000
livres for the venture from merchants at St.-Malo, La Rochelle,
St.-Jean-de-Luz, and Rouen--the latter city, as the Company's name
implies, to serve as "headquarters for the enterprise."
Unfortunately for the venture, many potential investors "hung back
from committing themselves to a colonial enterprise whose costs
looked as though they would run higher than estimated profits."
Seeing this, the King "reduced to sixty from the originally
envisaged one hundred the number of persons to be taken to America." It was essential, then, that de Mons
choose wisely the location of his seat where he would house his 60 settlers. Cartier had
proved in the mid-1530s that Europeans could survive a
Canadian winter if they received help from the Natives, and de Mons himself had traveled
there, though he likely did not winter in the St. Lawrence valley. He
had been there long enough, however, to have witnessed the annual frenzy among the
valley Natives
when French traders appeared at Tadoussac, and he had recently read
Champlain's account of his journey to New France, published in 1603.
This gave de Mons more reason to center his concession farther south, in La Cadie,
where, at the same latitude as his native Saintonge, the climate
surely would be milder. Just as importantly, the Indians of
La Cadie would not have been so thoroughly exploited by
his fellow countrymen, and Champlain, echoing Sarcel de Prévert,
pronounced them to be friendly. There were mines in La Cadie,
the soil was said to be fertile, and a passage to Asia might be
found there. Moreover, the entire continent of North America
north of San Agústín in Florida, "was still unoccupied by European
powers," England included, so La Cadie--that is, the French claim to it--formed a
substantial part of that unsettled region. But de Mons could not neglect Canada.
In early spring 1604, after fitting out three
ships for his La Cadie venture, he sent three more vessels to the
lower St. Lawrence to trade for furs.06a
On 7 April 1604, the first ship of de Mons's expedition
bound for La Cadie departed Havre-de-Grâce, today's Le Havre,
which, along with Honfleur, served as one of the ports for Rouen. The Don-de-Dieu, Gift of
God, 150 tons and 100 feet long, was "'one of the largest Norman ships that went every year to the
Newfoundland cod fisheries.'" It would make the crossing this
time as de Mons's amiral, or flag ship, with Timothée Le Barbier
of Le Havre as sailing master and Louis Coman as pilot. The
Don-de-Dieu had taken on passengers at Honfleur before sailing the short distance to Le Havre to join
the other ship in the flotilla. The Bonne-Renommée, 120
tons and 90 feet long, had been to the lower St. Lawrence for de
Chaste and now sailed under Master Nicolas Morel of Honfleur, with Guillaume Duglas
serving as pilot. De Mons's second in
command, François Gravé du Pont, whose knowledge of New France
was second to none, was the senior officer aboard Bonne-Renommée
and in command of the expedition while "afloat." Gravé's
vessel left Le Havre on April 10, three days after Don-de-Dieu.
Also in the flotilla was a 40-foot
patache of 17 or 18 tons whose name has been lost to history.
Their destination was the fishing
rendezvous at Canso, south of Cape Breton Island.06d
No women and
certainly no families accompanied the venture. Neither were
there farmers among the passengers. This was first and foremost a commercial enterprise bankrolled by an
association of merchants, both Catholic and Protestant, from Rouen,
St.-Malo, La Rochelle, and St.-Jean-de-Luz. Large profits from
trading for fur with the Indians was the main reason for the
venture; everything else, including the fishery, an agricultural settlement, even the search for mineral wealth, would be
secondary to that trade. "Its object," David Hackett
Fischer tells us, "was not to plant a permanent settlement with a
population that could grow by natural increase, but rather to build
an avant-poste, an outpost of empire in North America.
The sieur de Mons intended to construct an advanced base in the
center of Acadia, analogous to a space station in our time, a safe
and protected platform, strong enough to defend itself against the
possibility of attack by Spanish or English raiders. Its
function was to provide a base for exploring missions, to map the
coast, and find sites for colonies where French families might
settle and start small populations growing." To man the
outpost, de Mons "recruited both Protestants and Roman Catholic
participants," one of his biographers tells us. Most of these men,
approximately 120 workers, twice the number required by the King's
contract, were "of varying skills"--surgeon, apothecary, housewright, master
carpenters, sawyers, masons, blacksmiths, gunners, armorers, locksmiths
(who repaired gunlocks), house plasterers, master miners, and professional
hunters, including de Mons's bodyguard, François Addenin, who would
become one of the colony's indispensable men. Also included in de Mons's party were semiskilled artisans, unskilled laborers,
ship's boys, convicts, paupers, and vagabonds, along with "several noblemen whose motives in joining
the daring venture ranged from a quest for riches to a desire ... to
win lands for France." Two Catholic priests, one of them the
young Nicolas Aubry of Paris, the other referred to only as le
curé, as well as a Protestant minister whose name also has been
lost to history, were part of the expedition, their mission not only to provide spiritual guidance to the
expedition, but also
to convert the natives. An important member of the
expedition was de Mons's friend Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt et de
Saint-Just, an influential Catholic nobleman, soldier, and musical
composer from Champagne, who came
on the voyage "for his pleasure" yet was determined to establish "a
new society in a new land." Samuel de Champlain would serve as the expedition's
geographer "but," as with the de Chaste expedition of the year
before, "carried no official title or instructions."
While serving as a court geographer in the basement of
the Louvre, Champlain had studied all of the French efforts in North America
from Cartier to La Roche and Chauvin de Tonnetuit, but as part of the successful expedition to Canada the year before, his knowledge of New France was beyond theoretical. A man of
good sense and towering intellect, Champlain was determined to steer
de Mons away from the many errors that had doomed earlier
ventures. Also coming along was an unusual but eminently
valuable professional: Mathieu Da Costa or De Coste, the
expedition's interpreter, who, French documents attested, "'spoke
the languages of Acadia.'" Da Costa was either from Portugal, Spain,
or the Cape Verde Islands and was described as "a 'nègre' or 'naigre.'"
He evidently was the property of a Rouen merchant named de Bauquemare,
who had recently ransomed da Costa from Dutch corsairs who had
kidnapped him. How da Costa had
learned Algonquin was anyone's guess; most likely he had been
shipwrecked or marooned on the coast of La Cadie and had been
forced to live among the natives until he was "rescued." As
the recent expeditions to Canada had demonstrated, an interpreter
was essential for any venture to the wilds of North America, and de Mons was lucky to have
obtained the African's services.06b
De Mons's expedition reached La Cadie
in early May after a swift crossing.
Gravé and the
Bonne-Renommée, as planned, made landfall at Canso despite
the perils of sea ice off the North American coast, while de Mons's Don-de-Dieu,
on which Champlain also sailed, veered southward to avoid the ice
and spotted Sable Island on May 1.
Avoiding the treacherous shoals around the sandy isles, where the
marquis de La Roche's 11 survivors had been rescued the year before,
the Don-de-Dieu continued on a southwestward tack towards the coast of La Cadie.
Making landfall a week later at "a headland they baptized" Cap de La
Hève, they anchored there for several days. Champlain, true to form, spent much of
the time surveying the harbor and later made an accurate chart of
its depths and dimensions. Ashore, the Frenchmen encountered
two large camps of Mi'kmaq, who Champlain called the Souriquois.
De Mons and his party had stumbled upon one of the Indians' favorite
fishing grounds, which they frequented each summer since time
immemorial. These were not the first Europeans the peninsula
Mi'kmaq had encountered. There had been Norsemen and Basques
and myriads of others; they were not even the first Frenchmen to
venture here. The Mi'kmaq responded in kind to the new
arrivals, who seemed friendly enough, and even "offered to help
them."06e
Unfamiliar with these waters and wary
of seaborne predators, de Mons
moved the ships carefully down the coast, away from the
direction of Canso, in search of a more defensible harbor. On
May 12, de Mons
captured a vessel, the Levrette, or Greyhound, whose master, Jean
de Rossignol of Le Havre, de Mons insisted, "was illegally trading
for furs"--the first of many such interlopers he and his associates
would encounter over the next few years. Champlain named the place of the capture Port-au-Rossignol, today's
Liverpool, Nova Scotia.
The next day, with the Levrette and an angry Rossignol in
tow, they anchored farther down the coast in "a beautiful, sheltered bay" which
they called Port-au-Mouton, after a sheep that fell off the vessel,
drowned, and was promptly roasted and eaten. De Mons set up
camp on the shore of the small bay and sent some of his
men in a chaloupe, with Mi'kmaq guides, to search up the coast for the Bonne-Renommée. On May 19, de Mons sent Champlain in
an eight-ton barque to explore the coast to the southwestward
in hopes of finding a temporary settlement site, "pending the choice
of a permanent" one; this would be the first of Champlain's many
independent explorations in the region. With the geographer were
de Mons's able secretary, Jean Ralluau, and 10 men, including Maître Simon, one of the master miners from Slavonia.
They inched their way around Cap-Nèigre towards Cap-Sable, pulling
out to sea to dodge dangerous rocks and sunken obstructions and then
battling rip tides and strong currents as they darted back to shore
to explore the next cove--a technique Champlain called "ferreting." While
Maître Simon searched for minerals,
Champlain and Ralluau examined the soil for fertility. In a
40-mile stretch of coast, they encountered at least 10 coves and
bays. At Cap-Sable, an island marking the "extreme
southeastern tip of Acadia," they found a spacious anchorage for
ships of substantial size that offered "a promising place for a fort and
trading post." Rounding Cap-Sable, they made their way northward
along another cove-filled coast, encountering islands that supported
abundant bird life. They feasted on their eggs. Many of
the birds were unknown to Champlain, who made careful note of their
variety. They also encountered great colonies of seals,
the flesh of which Champlain found very tasty. Typical of
Europeans upon finding such abundance, they killed for pleasure as
well as "the pot." Farther up the coast they studied carefully Cap-Forchu,
which Champlain named for its resemblance to the tongs of a fork,
and explored the nearby harbor, today's Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
Approaching the wide entrance to present-day St. Mary's Bay, Maître
Simon discovered what they hoped were deposits of iron and silver.
They explored the narrowing bay, and at a place he called
Port-Ste.-Marguerite Champlain found "an attractive site for
settlement with open meadows and 'soil among the best I've ever
seen.'" The master miner also found more evidence of iron and
silver.
After three weeks of diligent exploration, their provisions ran low,
so Champlain turned the barque around to report to de Mons what he had discovered.
Returning the way they had come, an early summer gale nearly wrecked
the vessel, but Champlain drove her ashore at a safe place.
They reached Port-au-Mouton the following day and were greeted
warmly by their worried companions. Determined to examine the
coast himself, in mid June de Mons joined Champlain in a chaloupe
and led his flotilla
around Cap-Sable and up the coast to Baie St.-Marie, which he
explored more thoroughly. "They found little in the way of
minerals, and 'no place where we might fortify ourselves,'"
Champlain recalled. The first mishap in the venture occurred
during the exploration of the north shore of Baie Ste.-Marie.
While
walking through the woods on Île Longue, today's Long Island, with a number of others, the young Father Aubry
accidentally dropped his sword and left the group to look for it.
They moved on, and he lost his way. The others, including
local Mi'kmaq, searched for days without finding him. With so
much else to do, de Mons had no choice but
to leave the young priest to fend for himself.06c
After giving up Father Aubry as lost, de Mons
left the larger ships in Baie-Ste.-Marie and joined Champlain,
Poutrincourt, shipwright-turned-mariner Pierre Angibault dit Champdoré, a master miner
or two, and the usual contingent of sailors, in one of the
chaloupes. On June 16, they sailed out of Baie Ste.-Marie
via today's Long Island Strait and into a much larger body of water
they named, appropriately, Grand Baie Française. Here was
today's Bay of Fundy, which both Fagundes and Verrazzano had sighted
eight decades earlier and where Sarcel de
Prévert had gone so recently. Along what proved to be the
south shore of the Great French Bay, which trended northeastward, "two
leagues along the coast," de Mons directed the chaloupe
into a half-mile-wide gut flanked by
towering heights, and soon they entered a lovely basin surrounded by
commanding hills. Champlain, who named the lovely basin
Port-Royal, describes it best: "... 'we
entered one of the most beautiful harbors I have seen on all these
coasts, which would safely hold 2,000 ships.'" He goes on:
"'From the mouth of the river," named Rivière-au-Dauphin,
today's Annapolis River, "to the point we reached are many
prairies or meadows but these are flooded at high tide, and numbers
of small creeks that cross from one side and another.... The
place was the most proper and pleasant for a settlement that we had
seen.'" Poutrincourt was so enamored of the place
that he asked de Mons to grant it to him, which the proprietor did
at the end of August. Back out of
the Gut after exploring the basin as far up as their vessel could
take them, de Mons and his companions continued sailing northeastward
along the Great French Bay's smooth southern shore. They were searching
now for
the mineral deposits Sarcel
de Prévert had discovered the year before. They rounded two
capes--today's Split and Blomidon--and sailed into a
large basin which they called the Port- or Bassin-des-Mines, today's Minas
Basin, the name evoking
the presence of minerals there. Ashore, they found evidence of
copper ore. Back in the chaloupe, they may have
ventured into the basin as far east as today's Cobequid Bay.
On the way out of the basin, if they had lingered along the north shore
of the basin's entrance at Cap d'Or, due west of Cape Split, they would have found a deposit of so-called "native copper,"
which, according to a history of the Mi'kmaq culture, "could be
found in thin sheets that can be cut and hammered into shape very
easily." Back in the Baie Française and still trending
northeastward, de Mons directed the chaloupe around a
prominent cape and into the mouth of
another bay which the Mi'kmaq called Chignecto,
discovering more inlets and marsh-lined estuaries, including,
perhaps, today's Cumberland Basin, but no mines. They may also have sailed
into the mouth
of the Baie de Chepoudy, inside of which,
if the fog allowed it, they could have seen the estuaries of two
more tidal rivers, today's Memramcook and Petitcoudiac. By then, de Mons
and Champlain could see that the tides in the Baie Française,
especially in its narrow reaches, were by far the highest any
of them had encountered anywhere, including their native Saintonge. Turning
southwestward, they followed a shore as free of inlets as the one
they had coasted along on the opposite side of the bay between the Gut and the
entrance to the Bassin-des-Mines.
Rounding a headland, they came upon the mouth of a large river, the
same one that Bellenger had explored 21 years earlier and Sarcel de
Prévert only a year before. De Mons and Champlain took the time to navigate the river's narrow entrance with its
curious, but dangerous, reversing falls. Waiting for the tide to come in,
they shot through the falls and inspected the shore above the
cataract. By then, it was June 24, the feast day of
St.-Jean-Baptiste; Champlain named the river after the
saint, and de Mons raised a cross on a height above the shore to
commemorate the occasion. Local Indians, probably Maliseet from sagamore Secoudon's village at the mouth of the river, who Champlain called
the Etchemin, informed them that the upper reaches of Rivière
St.-Jean "offered an avenue to the St. Lawrence Valley with only a short portage," important
information indeed. Back out of the river on the lowering
tide, de Mons, with Etchemin guides in tow, pushed
on southwestward down a heavily indented shore
and then southward to a large island at the entrance to Baie
Française. They called it Grand Manan, "after the Algonquian
word for island." They then sailed northward through an
archipelago, including today's Campobello Island, and entered
another bay, this one named for the local Natives, the
Passamaquoddy. They sailed up an estuary that emptied into the
bay, and there, below the place where three rivers form a crucifix, de Mons selected a site
for his settlement.07
For a number of reasons--its defensibility, its beauty, its climate, the
fertility of the soil in the area, the profusion of fish, clams, and
mussels in the surrounding water, its proximity to the mouth of the Baie Française,
and the villages of friendly Natives on the nearby mainland--de
Mons, with Champlain's approbation, picked as the site of his
headquarters a wooded five-acre island in the middle of the estuary.
Another motivation in the selection of the site was the need to
build shelter and plant crops as quickly as possible to sustain
dozens of men over the fast-approaching winter. The French called the islet Île
Ste.-Croix, Holy Cross Island, and the stream in which it lay Rivière-des-Etchemins but later renamed it after the island.
Champlain described Île Ste.-Croix "as a natural fortress, 'eight or
nine hundred paces in circumference.' On three sides it had
granite cliffs twenty to third feet high, so steep as to be
virtually impassable. On the fourth side of the island, facing
downstream, they found a small crescent beach of sand and clay,
guarded by granite rocky outcrops called 'nubbles,' which could bear
the weight of ramparts and cannon." De Mons and his men landed at
the island on June 26, and they began to transform it into a
man-made fortress. De Mons, meanwhile, sent Champdoré back to Baie Ste.-Marie to bring
the ships and the other smaller
vessels across to the
island. One of the men Champdoré brought to the new
settlement was the young priest Nicolas Aubry, who had
survived the Long Island wilderness for 16 days, subsisting on
sorrel leaves and berries, before his fellow Frenchmen spotted him
on a remote part of the shore.
Soon, an eight-ton barque appeared at Île Ste.-Croix.
It had come from Canso, where Gravé had gathered a cargo of fish and
fur destined for the investors in France. Aboard the barque were four Basque ship masters Gravé
had arrested for trading illegally in de Mons's concession.
The proprietor, Champlain insists, "'treated them humanely'" and
ordered them back to France.07b
The post on Île Ste.-Croix took shape over the
summer. "Work began almost at once," a de Mons biographer
tells us, "and the rate of progress indicates both the careful
preparations de Monts had made in France as well as the vigour of
his leadership. Following a plan drawn by Champlain, some
dozen houses were built around a court, being connected in some
places by a palisaded wall so that the whole settlement resembled a
fort. ... [S]ome of these houses," including de Mons's
impressive seat, at the center of the habitation, "were partially built of
lumber brought from France. In addition there were service
buildings such as a storehouse, kitchen, and common living-dining
hall. Also included was a Catholic chapel. While
construction was pressed forward, gardens were planted both on the
island and the mainland opposite," along the river's west bank, "where the first wheat to be grown
in New France was sown." De Mons planned to prepare even more
fields on the mainland, including a site they had explored three
leagues farther up, "near some rapids." Also in his plans were
a mill and a facility for the preparation of charcoal. At the
lower end of the island, a battery of cannon appeared atop one of
the "nubbles" to ward off English or other intruders who might
threaten the island from the open sea.07a
In late August, as the
habitation neared completion, de Mons ordered Poutrincourt
and Ralluau, with Father Aubry and the Basques in tow, to return in
Don-de-Dieu and Levrette to France, where he likely assumed
Gravé already had gone. They were tasked with informing the
trade partners of the colony's successful establishment. After completing their personal
business, they would then return "with more men" under Gravé du Pont, as
well as "provisions, tools, seedgrain and livestock," while de Mons
and Champlain wintered on Île Ste.-Croix with 77 officers and men.
But de Mons's order was more easily issued than carried out.
Forced by their deeper drafts to ride at anchor at the mouth of the
river, the larger vessels had to wait out a late-summer nor'easter
before Poutrincourt and his crews could raise their anchors, open their sails,
and hurry back to France. After a difficult passage, while sailing in
the English Channel, they "were almost wrecked on the Casquets,"
north of the Isle of Guernsey. "Poutrincourt ordered the crew to help him
'shift the sails.' They refused. A friend of
Poutrincourt wrote that 'only two or three of them did so'"--not a
resounding affirmation of Poutrincourt's qualities as a leader.08c
Champlain, meanwhile, revealed his
growing maturity as a geographer-explorer as well as an
ambassador to the local Indians. While the habitation
was being completed, he explored the cross-shaped river above and
below the island. At de Mons's request, Champlain turned
southward "to seek the ideal site for a permanent abode" in
Norembègue, the fabled land of gold. In de Mons's
18-ton
patache, a fully-decked, keel-built vessel specially designed for
"ferreting" a rock-strewn coast,
Champlain sailed with a dozen seamen, various specialists, including
shipwright Champdoré, and two
Indian guides, 20 men in all. The guides were either
Passamaquoddy from Rivière Ste.-Croix, Maliseet from Rivière
St.-Jean, or Mi'kmaq. In the hold of the sturdy
vessel, Champlain's men packed "spares" and a month's supply of
provisions. On the deck of the patache the Etchemin
stored a birch-bark canoe, and Champlain secured a skiff for
close-in surveying. On September 2, they sailed downriver to
the ships' mooring and waited out a storm. Three days later,
on the 5th, the storm finally over, they continued south towards Grand Manan
Island, enduring a thick coastal fog bank on the way. Turning
southwestward, they sailed along the coast of today's
Gulf of Maine. Before the end of their first day of
exploration, they rounded today's Schoodic Peninsula and came upon a
large island with towering peaks, some of them bare of trees, that
Champlain named Île des Monts-Déserts, today's Mount Desert Island.
Although he described the island's highest peaks as "barren" of
life, the lower eminences and the rest of the island he found to be
anything but an inhospitable désert. "Champlain was
fascinated by this place," one of his biographers tells us, "as many
visitors have been through the centuries." In the gloom of
dusk, he guided the patache northward to the head of today's
Frenchman Bay and could see that Monts-Déserts was indeed an island,
separated from the mainland "by 'less than a hundred paces.'"
Before nightfall, he turned the patache southward and
ferreted the island's rocky east coast, sailing past today's Bar
Harbor, behind which the summit of the island's highest peak,
today's Cadillac Mountain, took on the light of the setting sun. They continued down the coast towards Otter Point at
the southeast tip of the island. Somewhere off the point, the
patache slammed into a hidden rocky ledge and promptly took
on water. Champlain guided the sinking vessel into a lovely
cove "with a broad tidal flat of rounded pebbles," today's Otter
Cove, and eased her onto her side as the tide went out. He and his
carpenters found a hole near the keel, but the keel itself and the
rudder had not been damaged. As some of the crew made repairs,
others foraged the rocky shore for edibles. It was Champlain's practice to
supplement "his crew's rations with fresh food wherever he could
find it." The patache was seaworthy by the morning of
the 6th, and on the rising tide they continued on their way.
During the following days, they carefully explored the southern and
western shores of the big island. When they encountered local
natives in their birch-bark canoes, the Indians would maintain a
safe distance, even when Champlain's Etchemin guides approached
them. On September 7, however, probably still off of the big
island, local natives approached the patache to speak with
their fellow natives and exchange presents with the strangers.
The Indians called the big island Pemetic--"the sloping land"--and offered to take them to their chief,
who lived on a nearby river they called
Pentagouët. Champlain followed them through the Western Way
past an imposing island off to seaward that he named Île-au-Haut,
and soon they entered today's Penobscot Bay. After rounding Deer and Ilesboro islands, they sailed upriver past the site of lovely
Castine, Maine, into the Pentagouët's magnificent narrows.
Ignoring the Indian name for the river, Champlain called it Norembègue,
after Jean Alfonse's fantastic river. Today it bears another Indian name: Penobscot. Past the site of today's Bucksport, Maine, which
Champlain admired, the patache continued upriver to the head of navigation--a waterfall "two
hundred paces wide and seven or eight feet high," at the center of
today's Bangor, Maine. They anchored the patache near a
magnificent grove of old oaks and explored the surrounding
countryside. Soon natives appeared, likely of the Penobscot
nation. A dignified
sagamore, called Bessabez, Betsabes, Bashaba, or Bashabes, arrived with
his entourage. The other Indians began to dance and sing.
A second sagamore, Cabahis, arrived with a smaller
entourage. Champlain noticed that the followers of Cabahis sat
apart from those of Bessabez, but both contingents welcomed the
French, the canoeists already having spread the word that the
strangers had come in peace. On a level piece of ground at the
confluence of the Kenduskeag and the Penobscot, in what is now downtown Bangor,
Champlain met with the Indian leaders, approaching them with a small
entourage of two Frenchmen and two interpreters so as not to
frighten them. He nevertheless sensed the potential for
trouble and positioned his crewmen, weapons loaded but out of sight,
in such a way that they could retreat to the patache
under fire if the occasion demanded it. Pleased with the
Frenchman's soldierly bearing and what they understood he had said
in the way of welcome, Bessabez beckoned him to sit down amongst them. Champlain then
endured his second tabagie in as many years, though this one
was much smaller than the bacchanal he had witnessed at Tadoussac
the year before. Champlain, likely through an interpreter,
perhaps the African da Costa, "invited them to make peace with the
Souriquois and the 'Canadiens,' adding that de Monts wished to
'inhabit their land, & show them how to cultivate it, so that they
might no longer lead so miserable a life as they did'"--a fine piece
of hubris on the part of the French. More speeches followed, more exchanges of
gifts, more singing, dancing, feasting, and smoking the pipe of
peace, into the night. At dawn, the French and Indians
bartered for beaver skins and trade goods and then went their
separate ways. Cabahis, however, agreed to accompany his new
French friends in their impressive boat as far downriver as
present-day Belfast, Maine. On the way down, Champlain took
the opportunity to query the sagamore about tales of a city
of gold the French called Norembègue, of which Cabahis evinced no knowledge.
Concluding that the tale likely was pure fiction, and not being
there to search for gold, Champlain pressed him for more important
information--the nature of the region's rivers and lakes. Cabahis described a portage from the head of the Pentagouët leading
to a tributary of the Rivière de Canada. Champlain asked
about the next big river to the west, which the Indians called
Qui-ni-be-guy. Cabahis informed him that the head of this
river also, today's Kennebec, could be portaged to Canada. Champlain now possessed "a clear idea" about the real
Norembègue. Back in Penobscot Bay by September 17, Champlain sailed
southwestward towards the mouth of the Kennebec, but foul weather, a
contrary wind, and diminishing supplies, as well as the refusal of
his guides to follow him, prevented him from going any farther than
the peninsula at Pemaquid. He turned the patache about on September 23, and, taking advantage of the
prevailing westerly winds--"the origin of the expression 'down east'
in Maine"--they returned to Île Ste-Croix on October 2, a month
to the day after they had left it. Though the coast of
Norembègue had been explored by Verrazzano and Gômez eight decades
before, and Gômez had ascended the Penobscot as far as
Champlain had done, the region had never been so thoroughly charted.
Moreover, Champlain's treatment of the Indians was the antithesis of
the Spaniard's brutality. Champlain
had found no suitable site for settlement, so his exploration was
not a glowing success, but he nonetheless was eager to return to
the place where he had secured the trust of the local natives.08b
When he
returned to de Mons's island, Champlain found the habitation completed.
But Île Ste.-Croix soon revealed its inadequacies as a suitable site
for settlement. The sandy soil held no water, so they could
not sink a well. Rain, which fell too infrequently, failed to
nourish the garden crops. Only wheat sown on the mainland,
farther upriver, produced a crop. The fish and shellfish
became the staple of their diet. Winter came sooner, and
harder, than expected. Snow fell during the first week of
October, and by early December ice floated past on the river.
No more rain fell, only snow. Deep snow, four feet of it still
on the ground in late April, thick ice on the river, heavy winds,
biting cold, and the poor condition of their boats, transformed the
island into a virtual prison. If anyone had thought that
moving the trading venture south of Canada
would mean milder winters, the experience at Île Ste.-Croix proved
otherwise. "'It is difficult to know the country without
having wintered there,'" Champlain averred, a reminder
that, although he and de Mons had spent time in Canada, neither had
wintered there. "With supplies of fresh food
exhausted, they were reduced to salt meat; fresh water was scarce
and melted snow had to be used as a substitute," Champlain
lamented, the island providing them with neither a spring nor a
brook, let alone a well. "Unaccustomed as they were to North
American winters," Professor Trudel observes, "no one had thought to
dig cellars, chink cracks in the walls or lay in a plentiful supply
of firewood...." In March
1605, a band of Passamaquoddy appeared and exchanged meat for bread,
which noticeably improved the Frenchmen's diet, but by then it was
too late for many of them. Poor food and water, combined with
forced idleness, proved disastrous. By spring, which finally
came in May, nearly half of the 79 men on Île Ste.-Croix--perhaps as
many as 36 of them--had died of scurvy, with another 20 close to
death, and only "about ten" unaffected. Neither the local
Indians nor de Mons or even Champlain were aware of annedda,
the extract of the white cedar that had saved so many of Cartier's
men at another Ste.-Croix seven decades earlier. De Mons had expected Gravé to return from France by
April, but even before then he was certain that the isolated little
island was no place to spend another winter. In May, he ordered the construction of two chaloupes
of seven and 15 tons each to take them to a fishing rendezvous--Canso, Cape Breton, even Gaspé--where they were sure to find a ship to take them home. Finally, "an hour before midnight on 15 June 1605," Gravé and Ralluau appeared at
Île Ste.-Croix with two ships full of essential supplies and 40 reinforcements.08
The colony was saved.
.
Determined to widen his search for a
more hospitable settlement site, de Mons turned his attention
southward, to Norembègue. From 18 June to 3 August 1605, he repeated Champlain's late-summer voyage to that coast.
With him were Mi'kmaq chief Panounias and
his wife, an Almouchiquois, serving as interpreters, and perhaps Etchemin chief
Secoudon, who was interested in establishing better relations with
the Almouchiquois. Also aboard de Mons's patache
were Champlain, 20 sailors, shipwright Champdoré, and "'several gentlemen-adventurers,'" bringing
the
party "to a total of about thirty souls." The first days of the
voyage quickly revealed the difference in leadership styles between de Mons and
Champlain. The sieur was not as
disciplined as the geographer in the use of time and resources.
It took this expedition two weeks to travel the same distance that
Champlain, even with a punctured hull, had sailed in two days in the
same kind of vessel.
If de Mons and his gentlemen companions saw an island that was
interesting, they lingered there, to the detriment of the local
wildlife. At Île des Monts-Déserts, which Champlain had deemed
unsuitable for settlement and which "offered no access to the
interior," de Mons insisted on lingering for several days to study the place while his gentlemen-adventurers enjoyed the
island's wonders. On the western side of Penobscot Bay, near
today's Owl's Head Point, Natives finally appeared. Three of
them offered to lead them to their chief, whose village lay on the
lower Kennebec. De Mons agreed, but no tabagie
followed; his relations with the Indians remained formal and aloof,
in sharp contrast to Champlain's openness. They left Owl's
Head on the first of July and followed the Indians--likely
Almouchiquois--the 25 leagues past Pemaquid to
the mouth of the Kennebec, reaching that point in a single day.
During the following week, they followed their hosts "through an
astonishing maze of meandering channels that connected three major
rivers in mid-coast Maine: the Kennebec (by the modern city of
Bath); the Sheepscot to the east (Wiscasset), and the Androscoggin
River to the west (Brunswick)," which gave the Frenchmen a good idea
of the magnificence of the Kennebec estuary. On the Sheepscot
near present-day Wiscasset, a sagamore named Manthoumermer
came out in his canoe to greet them. Panounias's wife spoke
with him, and he made a long-winded speech "expressing pleasure" at
seeing them and desiring an alliance. Manthoumermer promised
to send word to fellow leaders Marchin and Sasinou, the latter
addressed as "'chief of the Kennebec.'" De Mons "responded
with small gifts of hardtack and dried peas," but, again, he did not
bother to come ashore and endure a tabagie with his new ally.
The Indians guides then led the patache back to the ocean via
a longer, even more complex and difficult passage via today's
Merrymeeting Bay, where the meeting with Marchin and Sasinou was to
have taken place. They waited in vain for the sagamores
to appear: "Things were not going well with the Indians, and
the guides gave them no explanation," one of Champlain's biographers
tells us. De Mons had failed "to establish a rapport with them
or build a basis for friendship." Back at the mouth of the
Kennebec by July 8, they continued sailing southwestward to
present-day Casco Bay, from which they could see off to the north
some very high mountains--the White Mountains of today's New
Hampshire. They spent the night near present-day Portland,
Maine, and on September 10 reached today's Saco, which the Etchemin
called Choüacoet. There they met another local native leader,
young Honemechin of the Almouchiquois. Unfortunately, Panounias,
a Mi'kmaq, could barely communicate with the young
sagamore, whose language, though Algonquin, was largely
unintelligible to the Mi'kmaq. Panounias's wife, an Almouchiquois, "had
suddenly disappeared" when they needed her most. Leaving de Mons and his companions
aboard the patache, Champlain went ashore to inspect
the Almouchiquois fields of corn, beans, squash, and tobacco.
They were one of the few nations in the region who practiced sedentary
agriculture, and Champlain was thoroughly impressed with them, which
would only have heightened his frustration over his inability to
communicate effectively enough to secure an alliance. In hopes
of remedying this problem, de Mons agreed to allow one of the
Frenchmen to remain among the Almouchiquois--"the first to live with
the natives as one of them in order to learn the language."
Back on
the ocean, de Mons sailed southward, now, along a coast less rocky and
more sandy. At dusk of the same day, they reached what Champlain called Cap-aux-Îles or the Island
Cape, present-day Cape Ann.
Failing to find an anchorage for the night, they pressed on into
Massachusetts Bay, reaching the site of present-day Boston as the
sun came up. De Mons remained aboard the patache and
sent Champlain ashore to communicate with the local Indians, a
nation called the Massachusetts, as best he could. Now beyond
the linguistic competence of their Mi'kmaq guides, Champlain was
forced to employ sign language. The Massachusetts were
friendly and eager to trade. Champlain presented each of them
with a knife, and they danced with glee. He then coaxed them
into drawing with a piece of charcoal the streams and inlets of the
area. Their crude sketch depicted, among other things,
present-day Charles River and the Back Bay of Boston, then a scrawny
peninsula. Champlain, ever observant, noticed that south of
the Island Cape the Indians used pirogues, or dugouts,
instead of birch-bark canoes, to get about. He agreed to try
to steer one of their dugouts, with limited success, much to the
amusement of his hosts. He also noted that the Indians below
the Island Cape tended to wear clothes of grass and hemp, not skins
or fur. Champlain would have remained a while longer to secure
their friendship, but de Mons insisted on hurrying on. They
encountered large numbers of Indians in Massachusetts Bay, and
Champlain concluded that this part of Norembègue was more populous
than the regions up the coast. Champlain took a small boat
ashore to distribute more gifts of trade knives and biscuits, but
the language barrier prevented him from learning the name of their
leaders or the sites of their villages. On July 17, they
sailed out of Massachusetts Bay and followed the coast, now trending
southeastward, past Scituate to present-day Brant Point, where more
Indians came out in dugouts to greet them. This time a
sagamore appeared; Champlain called him Honabetha. They exchanged food,
but their attempts at communication failed. The following day,
de Mons directed the patache past Gurnet Point and into Plymouth Bay, where the
Indians, perhaps the Wampanoag, again were numerous and friendly. Some of them were
returning in large dugouts from a fishing expedition down the coast,
displaying codfish they had caught on hooks made of bone tied to lines of hemp. Crossing the mouth of a large
bay, de Mons and his men made their way eastward to a long sandy
peninsula they called, appropriately, Cap-Blanc, or White Cape,
which Englishman Bartholomew Gosnold had named Cape Cod three years
earlier. They were much impressed with the
wooded terrain rising above the large white dunes, "'very delightful
and pleasant to the eye,'" Champlain described it.08a
On the 20th, now over a month into the
venture, de Mons and his party rounded the White Cape and
re-entered the North Atlantic. Sailing
south again along a sandy coast, they slipped carefully into a shoal-plagued harbor with "'breakers on every
side.'" Champlain named it Mallebarre, or Bad Bar, today's
Nauset Harbor. More dancing Natives appeared. Champlain
went ashore to greet them and
was impressed with their beauty and their impeccable grooming,
especially among the women and girls. De Mons must have been
impressed with them as well; he agreed to leave the
patache and visit their village. Perhaps here was a
better site for settlement, so it was worth his time and effort to
inspect the place. On their march to the Nauset village, de
Mons and his 10 or so men at arms helped themselves freely to the
native's crops, without permission. At the village, de Mons
asked about the harshness of the winters, and the Indians explained
as best they could that the harbor never froze over and the snow
fell to a depth of about a foot. The natives had noted the
boorish attitude of de Mons and his men in their march to the
village and could not help but noticing that they had come bearing
arms "as if for war." As a result, "their tone began to
change." A few days later, on July 23, a party of Frenchmen
came ashore to gather fresh water in large metal pots. A Nauset, envying the shiny
implement, snatched one of the pots from a Frenchman and ran away.
The Frenchman pursued but could not catch him. Other Nauset
appeared to investigate the matter. The other Frenchmen,
thinking the natives were acting in "a menacing way," fled back to
the patache, yelling for their fellows to open fire on their
pursuers. Unfortunately, several Nauset were aboard the vessel
on a friendly visit. Seeing the Frenchmen fleeing in panic and
realizing the danger of the situation, they jumped into the ocean
and swam for their lives. French sailors caught one of them,
inviting retaliation. Meanwhile, the Indians ashore fired a
volley of arrows into the Frenchman who had pursued the thieving
Indian and finished him off with their knives, perhaps recently
acquired in trade, and hurried in pursuit of the
other Frenchmen. Champlain, aboard the vessel, rallied the
crew and hurried ashore to rescue the
survivors of the watering party. While laying down a covering
fire, Champlain's arquebus exploded in his hands, injuring him badly.
The Nauset fled, the French pursued, but they had no chance of
catching them. After the watering party was rescued, the dead
man, a carpenter from St.-Malo, was buried on the beach. Regaining control of his wrought-up men, de Mons ordered the release
of the blameless captive and lingered at Mallebarre for two more
days, hoping to make amends with the Natives. But the Nauset and their
neighbors "were now openly hostile and made clear that the French
should go." On July 24, de Mons ordered the patache out
to sea, keeping clear of the Massachusetts coast as they headed back
north. They
nevertheless could see many signal fires, no doubt spreading the word of their
conflict with the Nauset. They stopped again at Saco and
Kennebec, hoping to make an alliance with Sasinou, but again the
sagamore did
not appear. An Indian named Anassou, with whom they bartered
for furs and could communicate, informed de Mons that a sailing
vessel had been engaging in fishing
10 leagues down the coast when its crewmen killed five Indians from Kennebec.
De Mons and Champlain assumed that the intruders were English, which proved
to be correct, but the Indians were not from Kennebec: George Weymouth, captain of
the Archangel, had left England on 5 March 1605 and had
arrived at Mohegan Island near the mouth of the Kennebec in May, two
months before de Mons and Champlain had gone that way on their
voyage down the coast. It was Weymouth and his men who had
kidnapped, not killed, five Indians father up the coast near the
mouth of the Penobscot when the Natives, Eastern Abenaki, approached in
their canoes to greet them. By the time Anassou told de Mons
about the incident, Weymouth and his captives were back in England. The brutality of the English on
this and earlier voyages had alienated the area Natives, but
the incident at Mallebarre denied the French an opportunity of
settling in Massachusetts anytime soon. Nor did de Mons find
along the coast of Norembègue an alternative site for the colony's
headquarters. The weeks-long venture proved to be a bust, the
proprietor and the geographer achieving "none of their goals," one
of Champlain's biographers concludes.08d
Back at Ste.-Croix by the first week of
August, de Mons was determined to relocate his headquarters, but he
still was unsure where to move it. He had hoped to relocate
his settlement somewhere "south of
Cape Cod," but bad relations with the Indians precluded a
movement there for now.
After much deliberation, he chose a place he had visited the summer before: the
lovely basin across the Baie Française which he had promised to
Poutrincourt the previous August and which Champlain had named Port-Royal.
The site could be reached only via a narrow gut surrounded by
heights that could be easily defended, and the
earlier exploration had revealed a harbor of such magnificent
proportions hundreds of vessels could rest there safely at anchor.
Following the advice of Gravé and Champlain, de Mons sited his new
habitation on the crest of a
hill along the north side of the basin, opposite Île-aux-Chèvres,
Goat Island. The first blast of winter only three months away,
he ordered his men to use materials from the
structures on Île Ste.-Croix to construct a small quadrilateral-shaped
wooden "fort" 60 feet long and 48 feet wide, its outer walls, 200
feet in circumstance, completely surrounding its many buildings.
A bastion large enough to support four guns stood at the lower
downriver corner of the fort, and a bastion for musketeers stood
above the gate on the upriver end of the structure. The buildings inside the fort, no longer
scattered as on Île Ste.-Croix, were carefully arranged
"to maintain social rank and internal order." The most
impressive structure, of course, was the sieur de Mons's pre-fabricated house brought piece by piece from
Ste.-Croix. Besides houses and dormitories for the residents,
as well as a new barracks for the Swiss mercenaries, the buildings
inside the walls of the fort included a bakery, a kitchen, a blacksmith shop, "and a 'maisonette'
for small boats and rigging." The magasin, or
storehouse, with its six-foot cellar, stood on the northeast side of
the habitation and held the company's "stock of wine, cider,
grain, and other provisions." Outside the wooden palisade
stood a protective earthen glacis and, beyond, across the
slopes and on natural terraces, lay the gardens, fields, and meadows
that would help sustain the inhabitants. From the basin, de Mons's
habitation "resembled a fortified farming hamlet in
France." Nearby stood the village of Membertou, a bearded
sagamore. He and most of the hundred or so Mi'kmaq welcomed the Frenchmen
and their trade goods.09b
Heeding reports from home that his
trading company was in financial difficulty, de Mons left for France in September.
With him went Jean Ralluau, a cargo of furs, and exotic gifts for
the King, including a red-painted birch-bark canoe, a six-month-old
moose, a caribou, a set of moose antlers, a muskrat, a humming bird
still alive in a cage, assorted stuffed birds found nowhere in
France, a collection of Indian weapons, "and other marvels for the
royal collection." De Mons had hoped to leave Sieur d'Orville, "a
gentleman of some social standing" who had survived the winter at
Île Ste.-Croix, in charge of
the habitation, but the aging gentleman fell sick, and Gravé du
Pont took charge of the post. Also remaining were Champlain,
who was not yet done with his explorations and who shared de Mons's
house with his friend Gravé; Champdoré the shipwright; a surgeon
named Deschamps; the curé and his nemesis, the Protestant
minister; and 40 or so others, many of them survivors of the
previous winter. Champlain "built a sluice in order to
stock his own trout," and "took 'a particular pleasure' in
gardening." He also continued his explorations for mines.
That fall, with Gravé's encouragement, Champlain returned to the
Bassin-des-Mines. With him were master miner Jacques of
Slavonia and, most importantly, Etchemin sagamore Secoudon,
who had assisted Sarcel de Prévert two years earlier. From his
village on the lower St.-Jean, Secoudon led Champlain and Maître
Jacques to an outcropping of copper at the entrance to the basin.
Champlain duly noted the quality of the ore. Jacques,
meanwhile, found an even richer source of the mineral below the tide
line, which required him to wait for the ebbing tide to chip away at
the vein of what he called "'rose copper.'" Dissatisfied with
what they had found, Champlain tried again. Guided by Mi'kmaq chief Messamouet
and some of his warriors, he returned to Baie Française "in a pinnace
of five or six tons, manned by nine sailors." They found two
deposits between Île Ste.-Croix and Rivière St.-Jean, but neither of
them contained copper of any purity. That winter,
1605-06, in his "work-room among the trees," a kind of
gazebo structure, Champlain reviewed the
notes from his journeys in the Baie Française and down the coast and
planned to return to Norembègue the following spring.09
When Champlain returned from his search
for minerals, he was shocked to see symptoms of scurvy among
some of the 45 men at Port-Royal even before the winter set in.
To supplement the habitation's grain and dried-meat
supply, Champlain secured wild game from the Mi'kmaq. Luckily,
the first snow did not fall until the third week of December, a sign
that this winter might be less severe than the previous one.
Unfortunately, the first winter at Port-Royal proved to be just as
severe in cold and discomfort as the one they had endured on Île
Ste.-Croix. At least a dozen men died of scurvy, including the
curé and the Huguenot minister, and five did not recover until
the spring--not as many as had died the winter before, "but still
very cruel." The death toll may
have been higher if Membertou's Mi'kmaq had not taken in several of
the sick Frenchmen. One suspects that the Indians' more
natural diet, as well as their "antiscorbutic plants and herbal
remedies," preserved the lives of the lucky Frenchmen who occupied
their wigwams. With the arrival of spring, Gravé and Champlain
explored the coast southward again in hopes of finding a settlement
site with a milder climate, but foul weather and a near disaster
plagued their efforts. They had set out in one of the
barques in mid-March and were returning to Port-Royal during the
second week of April when Champdoré, whose skills as a pilot did not
match his gifts as a shipwright, nearly wrecked the vessel on a
rocky shore not far from the Gut. Only Champlain's quick
thinking saved the officers and crew. Unfortunately, Gravé
suffered a heart attack probably during the mishap, but, luckily for
his fellow colonists, it did not kill him. The ailing Gravé
and the others returned to the
habitation on April 10, and as soon as he could manage it, Gravé
ordered Champdoré slapped into irons. To everyone's chagrin,
the re-supply from France still had not arrived, and shortages were
beginning to plague the winter's survivors. The wine gave out
first and then other provisions. Champlain attempted to feed
the settlement with what he could grow along the basin. He
laid out new gardens, traces of which can still be seen today.
As mid-summer approached with still no sign of the re-supply, Gravé
had to make a hard decision. Unwilling to face another winter
with what the contents of their meager gardens or Membertou's people could provide
for them, Gravé, with
Champlain and most of the remaining settlers, chose to abandon the
isolated outpost. Two intrepid Frenchmen named La Taille and Miquelet
agreed "to stay behind as caretakers of the fort." On July 17,
in the two barques de Mons had left them, Gravé led the party
out the Gut and towards the fishermen’s rendezvous at Canso. There they hoped to meet a ship that could
take them back to France. They were even prepared to sail as far as
the Gulf of St. Lawrence to find a fishing vessel that could take
them out of the country.09a
The fishing trade at Canso and other
harbors along the Acadian coasts had been flourishing for decades.
"First in dozens, then in scores, and finally in hundreds,"
Andrew Hill Clark avers, fishermen from western
Europe "came to the coast of Newfoundland and gradually to the
offshore banks and the coasts of Greater Acadia in search of
codfish" throughout the sixteenth century. "Norman and Breton,
West-country English and Basque, Spanish and Portuguese, they
gradually added to the technique of packing the cod down in heavy
salt on their vessels (the ‘green’ or ‘wet’ fishery) the practice of
curing their catch on shore, in the open air soon after catching,
with much less salt. This (the ‘dry’ fishery) made a more
valuable product and required landing on, and learning the nature
of, the rocky Atlantic shoreline. Disembarking only briefly in
the summers at first, they began to find the shore phase of their
work important enough to require leaving men to winter in the new
land in order to protect structures and to prepare for the following
season…. We have records of many who virtually lived their
lives in such a fishery and whose knowledge of the coasts of today’s
Atlantic Canada must often have been profound. [Marc] Lescarbot described a meeting at Canso, in 1607, with a French
fisherman who was on his forty-second annual voyage to the area."
They also harvested other species of marine life that flourished in
North Atlantic waters: salmon, sea sturgeon, sea trout,
herring, sardines, eels, whales of every kind, walruses and seals. Despite the plethora of nationalities, cultures, and languages among
them and the dynastic and imperial wars raging back in their home
countries, the seasonal fishermen of the Atlantic coast managed to
keep the peace amongst themselves. They "belonged to a social
class which had nothing to gain by becoming involved in war," John
S. Erskine notes. "They did not quarrel with each
other, though each race preferred the company of men of their own
language. So, without making any national claim, each national
group adopted a particular harbour as its own center. The
Spanish took Sydney Harbour" on Cape Breton Island, which the French
called Baie-des-Espagnols; the English preferred present-day Louisbourg, also on Cape
Breton, called Havre-à-l'Anglois by the French; and the
French preferred Canso as well as Cap-Forchu north of Cap-Sable.
In the summer of 1606, then, only the fishermen working in their
scattered stations could have rescued de Mons's beleaguered colonists.10
.
Poutrincourt, who had stayed in France
in 1605, was named lieutenant-governor of Port-Royal in 1606.
Upon his and de Mons's request, the King formally granted
Poutrincourt "'the
seigneury of Port-Royal and adjacent lands'" on February 25
of that year, with the stipulation that he plant a colony there within two
years. But Poutrincourt could not wait that long--he "had yet
another vision of Acadia," David Hackett Fischer informs
us. "He hoped to found a feudal utopia in the new world, which
he and his family could rule in a benevolent way, for the good of
the whole." Poutrincourt left La Rochelle aboard the 150-ton Jonas
in May 1606 with supplies and more men for his Acadian venture.
De Mons, meanwhile, would remain in France to take on new partners and do battle at court with his
powerful detractors. Before Poutrincourt sailed, he also made
certain that the re-supply was more than adequate for the colony's
needs. With Poutrincourt was de Mons's trusted secretary, Jean Ralluau, who would look after the proprietor's
interests. After a failed attempt to get clear of La
Rochelle harbor, Poutrincourt finally made it to the open sea, but,
because of contrary winds, the crossing took longer than usual.
He reached Canso in July, several months behind schedule, and
hurried Ralluau in a chaloupe to Port-Royal to inform the
settlers of his arrival.10c
While the Jonas was approaching
Canso at the end of its two-month-long crossing, Gravé, Champlain, and the others
nearly perished in their attempt to reach the fishing
rendezvous. They spent
the night of July 18, the end of their first day out of
Port-Royal, at anchor off Île Longue near
the entrance to Baie-Ste.-Marie. The rising tide snapped an
anchor chain on one of the vessels. Miraculously, the
barque drifted not onto the nearby rocks, where certain destruction
awaited, but out into the Baie Française, where their luck changed
dramatically. A "sharp squall" churned up high seas that
"smashed their rudder irons," but, as Champlain noted, Champdoré
redeemed himself by "'cleverly'" mending "'the rudder.'"
By July 24, as they approached Cap-Sable, they were near starvation
when a sail appeared on the horizon. It was Ralluau, who
informed them of Poutrincourt's arrival. Replenished with what
food Ralluau could give them, Gravé and the others ventured back to Port-Royal, where Poutrincourt joined them by July 27.10d
The Jonas brought seeds, fruit trees, and domestic animals, including
cattle, swine, sheep, pigeons, and poultry, to set up an agricultural base
in Poutrincourt's new
seigneurie. Unfortunately, Old World rats also arrived
aboard the Jonas and escaped into the countryside, infesting
not only the habitation, but also the nearby Mi'kmaq village
with its meager food supply. Also aboard the "veritable ark" were 50 or so new settlers to add to the two dozen already there. Among the
new arrivals was Robert Gravé du Pont, the navigator's 21-year-old son,
who, according to Champlain, "was 'favoured with a splendid
physique, good looks, and an alert, practical intelligence,'" not
unlike his famous father. Robert also was a free spirit who
quarreled with Poutrincourt and other leaders. Louis Hébert,
one of Poutrincourt's in-laws, hailed from "a family of prosperous
merchant-apothecaries and spice dealers" at Paris and was himself a master
pharmacist and amateur horticulturist. Poutrincourt's older
son, Charles de Biencourt, only 15 years old, also came along.
Among the ship's company were widower Claude de Saint-Étienne de
La Tour of Champagne, and his 14-year-old son Charles.
Born Nicolas dit Claude Turgis, son of a master mason
of Paris, the charming Claude had secured a most fortunate marriage
to Marie de Salazar, widow of Paul de Verrines de Vouraches
of Champagne and a kinswoman of Jeanne de Salazar,
Poutrincourt's mother. The marriage granted to the humble
Turgis not only landed estates, but also two noble de's.
But it was not enough. According to one of son Charles's
biographers, Claude came to Acadia in
hopes of finding mineral wealth, having sold some of his dead wife's
property in Champagne in order to pay the passage for himself and
his son. Another newcomer was Marc Lescarbot,
who, like the others, would contribute much to the history of the colony. Lescarbot was Poutrincourt's
"lawyer, literary companion, and family friend," and also an
acquaintance of the sieur de Mons. He had left his native
Paris after "he had suffered a wrong at the hands of corrupt judges
... and decided to 'flee' to Acadia as a place of refuge for those
who 'love justice, and hate iniquity.'" But he was more
than a lawyer. One of Champlain's biographers describes him as
"another Renaissance man--a living example of its ideal of the
uomo universale, the universal man. Lescarbot was a poet,
playwright, historian, and man of learning, steeped in humanistic
values and widely read in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and his
native French. His first love was classical literature, and
his dream was to emulate its glories in the modern era." This
made him a welcome companion not only to Poutrincourt, but also to
the settlements other Renaissance man, Samuel de Champlain.
Also coming to the colony were a surgeon named Estienne; a repairer
of firelocks named Jean Duval; three young journeymen carpenters, Jehan Pussot
and Simon Barguin from Rheims, and Guillaume Richard from
Lusignon, Poitou. Three journeymen woodcutters--Antoine Esnault from
Montdidier, Picardy; Michel Destrez from Magney en Vexi; and Michel Genson from Troyes,
Champagne--were skilled in the essential art of charcoal
production. Poutrincourt also brought along assorted unskilled workers,
members of the French lower classes to whom gentlemen like Lescarbot
showed only contempt; Lescarbot, in fact, referred to the colony's
new workers as "a wild bunch." Again, there were no women
among the new settlers. Interestingly, Poutrincourt brought no priests
or ministers with him,
having failed to induce any of them to risk their lives in the
Acadian wilderness. The curé and his "friend" the
minister having died of scurvy the previous winter, "Presumably
there was no priest," let alone a Protestant minister, "present
throughout the winter of 1606-07."10e
Unfortunately for the colony's economic health, Poutrincourt's
arrival so late in the season hurt the fur-trading operation. "The
party arrived ... to find that the bulk of the good furs had already
been taken by Basque interlopers," one of de Mons's biographers tells us. In late August, having
lingered at Port-Royal for barely a month, the Jonas returned
to France, with François Gravé du Pont, his health restored, in command this time; Jean Ralluau
also was aboard. Champlain, for the third straight year,
remained in the colony, a willing participant in Poutrincourt's venture.
Also remaining was Champdoré, who had played a part in the colony
since its beginning; and the sieur de Boullay, "a captain in
Pourtrincourt's regiment," who had come to the colony the year
before. "Poutrincourt gave Port-Royal a different tone from
other feudal utopias in America, which were strongly collectivist,"
David Hackett Fischer informs us. Under the seigneur's
supervision, "A lime kiln was built, a forge set up and charcoal
made for it, and paths were cut from the settlement to the fields
and the valley. Tradesmen of many kinds spent a brief part of
the day at their trades," fulfilling the collectivist part of the
venture, "the rest of it fishing, hunting, and gathering
shellfish," as their individual needs dictated. The same held
true for the unskilled workers, who were expected to dig drainage
ditches, widen the moat, or perform other such tasks for "two or
three hours" before tending their own gardens, joining the others at
fishing, hunting, or gathering, or bartering for food with the
Indians the rest of the day--the kind of individual freedom enjoyed
only by noblemen back in France. And the two teenaged noblemen
were put to work. Biencourt and Charles La Tour were
encouraged to spend as much time as they could among the Mi'kmaq to
learn their skills on land and water and especially to master their
language. Biencourt, in fact, became so well-versed in the
Mi'kmaq tongue that he served as his father's interpreter. Looking to the needs of everyone,
Poutrincourt ordered some of the colonists to plant a crop of wheat
on a natural meadow upriver from the habitation. He
also ordered them to construct a water-driven grist mill--the first
of its kind in North America--on the upper reaches of a
north-flowing stream that fell into the river near the wheat field.
Poutrincourt and the other leaders "were quick to
discover that settlers were more productive when they worked for
their own gain," a Champlain biographer notes. "These two ideals, feudal and entrepreneurial,
coexisted at Port-Royal."10a
After seeing to the needs of his
colonists, Poutrincourt, heeding de Mons's instructions, ordered
Champlain to prepare yet another venture down the coast to
scout out potential settlement sites. This would be Poutrincourts's first voyage
to Norembègue,
and Champlain's third. Poutrincourt left Lescarbot in charge
at Port-Royal, such was his faith in the lawyer-turned-colonist. Evidently
Poutrincourt thought less of Champlain's judgment. The
geographer advised the seigneur to wait until the barque
he had chosen for the expedition could be properly repaired.
His eyes on the calendar--it already was September--Poutrincourt insisted that the barque
was seaworthy enough to be repaired on the way. He took along
the trusty Champdoré,
"several artisans, a 'store of planks,' and a shallop,'" satisfied
that these measures would suffice. Also aboard were Etchemin
sagamore Secoudon
and Mi'kmaq sagamore Messamouet, who had agreed to accompany Poutrincourt on a diplomatic mission. Champlain preferred to sail
straight down to Mallebarre, past a coast already twice explored,
and then push on south to the 40th degree of latitude or even
farther south, "revisiting on our return the entire coast at our
leisure." Poutrincourt chose, instead, to repeat the previous
voyages down the coast despite the looming winter. The left Port-Royal on
September 5, but their progress was slow, having to stop several
times to repair the leaking barque before going on their way.
They then took an unnecessary detour that wasted more precious time.
At the abandoned
habitation at Île Ste.-Croix, which Poutrincourt insisted on
visiting, they found wheat and vegetables
still growing in the sandy soil. Losing more time exploring
what Champlain and the sieur de Mons already had thoroughly
investigated, it took them 16 days to reach Saco, where Poutrincourt
hoped to heal the differences between the Mi'kmaq and the
Almouchiquois. Messamouet and Secouton represented their
respective nations, and sagamores Onemechin
and Marchin stood for the Almouchiquois. The meeting was not a
success; the chiefs parted in anger, more determined than ever to
war against one another. Matters only got worse farther down
the coat. From Saco they sailed down to Cap-aux-Îles--Cape
Anne--and into an excellent harbor they called Beauport, today's
Gloucester, Massachusetts, where they stopped to repair the leaky
barque. Hundreds of Indians gathered and appeared friendly
at first, but they spurned the gifts the French offered them and
approached them menacingly the following day. Alone, Champlain
ran ahead and coaxed them into putting aside their weapons and
dancing with him, but Poutrincourt appeared with a phalanx of
musketeers, and the Indians grabbed their weapons and scurried away.
Word reached the Frenchmen that hundreds of more Natives were
coming, so Poutrincourt ordered the barque out to sea, and
they sailed through night in the direction of Cape Cod. They
reached Cape Cod Bay the following morning and explored the western
side of the peninsula. Champlain was pleased with what he
saw--cornfields, meadows, lovely beaches, pleasant coves, "'fine
stands of trees.'" They lingered at an excellent harbor they
called Port-aux-Huistres--today's Wellfleet, Massachusetts--and
then, as de Mons and Champlain had done the year before, rounded the
cape to the ocean side and sailed south along the littoral.
They passed Mallebarre with its unpleasant memories on October 2 and sailed down to
a place they called Port-Fortuné, today's Stage Harbor at Chatham, Massachusetts.
Poutrincourt's barque, still prone to leaking, damaged its
rudder at the harbor's entrance, but they managed to maneuver it to
a safe anchorage, where Champdoré worked his wonders again.
Indicating an intention to remain for a while, Poutrincourt ordered
his men to build an oven on the beach. Gathering firewood
without permission, they began to bake bread. The extended
stay allowed Champlain to investigate the local villages, where his
engaging manner extracted much information from the natives.
Champlain was convinced that this was a fine place for a settlement,
but Poutrincourt's hard-handed manner with the Natives soon
alienated the occupants of these villages as well.10b
They were still at Port-Fortuné
at the end of the second week of October when Poutrincourt came
ashore with his usual armed contingent and erected a cross on the
beach. More crosses were erected here and there, and the
Indians rightly perceived them as symbols of '"possession.'"
Champlain also erected crosses in the area, but not until he had
invited the local Natives to participate in the ritual. As
tensions between the Natives and the Frenchmen mounted, Poutrincourt
ordered his men to return to the barque each nightfall.
Four
of them, likely led by locksmith Jean Duval, who had proved to be an
inveterate
troublemaker, refused to return
to the boat for the night, preferring to tend the oven on the beach.
Poutrincourt attempted to assert his authority over the men, but only one of them
returned to the ship. Worse yet, two others defied him and
joined their fellows at the oven. Their disobedience cost them dearly. A party of Nauset,
the same Indians de Mons had alienated the year before, may have
shadowed the expedition
after it passed Mallebarre and encouraged the malcontents at Port-Fortuné,
likely members of the same nation, to drive away the French.
Seeing an opportunity, early on the morning of October 15, 400
Natives, by Champlain's estimate, attacked the Frenchmen
sleeping on the beach and killed or wounded all of them. The troublemaker Duval, to the
chagrin of some of the others, survived the fight with an arrow in
his chest. A party of Frenchmen, including Champlain,
Poutrincourt, Biencourt, apothecary Hébert, and Robert
Gravé du Pont, rushed ashore with arms at the ready and did what
they could to drive off the Indians. During the struggle, the young Gravé du Pont, while
returning fire, lost a hand when his firearm exploded. The
Indians, armed with only bows, arrows, and spears, fled before the
fire of muskets and pistols. "'All we could do was carry off
the bodies and bury them near the cross,'" Champlain lamented.
During the hasty burial, the native warriors "'did dance and howl
a-far off,'" Champlain recalled. Determined to drive the interlopers away,
the natives returned to the beach once
the Frenchmen were aboard their vessel. The Frenchmen fired back
at them, but the Indians expertly eluded their projectiles. In
full view of the Frenchmen, they tore down the cross and dug up the
bodies of the unfortunate sailors. Under cover of arms, a
force of Frenchmen returned to the beach
to rebury their comrades, but the Indians dug them up again and made
gestures of contempt within range of the Frenchmen's weapons.
Some of the Frenchmen, perhaps without their officers' permission,
set up an ambush to capture some of the warriors in order to torture
them, but the natives, old hands at this kind of warfare, managed to
kill more of Poutrincourt's men. The
bloodshed on the beach at Port-Fortuné was another blow to plans for French settlement in the region. Poutrincourt and
his men left the harbor the day after their clash with the natives and sailed south into today's Nantucket Sound until
their sails no longer were visible from shore. Contrary winds
prevented them from reaching today's Martha's Vineyard or
Verrazzano's delightful Refugio--today's Narragansett Bay, not much
farther to the west--where they may have found de Mons's ideal site
for French settlement. Poutrincourt had seen enough; October
would soon turn into November, and they were hundreds of leagues
from home. He "decided to return to Port Royal, but before
leaving he promised that the following year the French would come to
live beyond Mallebarre." Turning north, they endured "more
misadventures at sea" along the coast of Norembègue. The barque's
gimpy rudder malfunctioned again, but Champdoré managed to restore
it to service.10f
Poutrincourt and the survivors of his
ill-fated venture "limped back into" Port-Royal by mid-November, on the eve of another Acadian winter.
Marcel Trudel offers the long perspective: "This
month and a half of exploration had been almost a total waste of
time. Even though a temporary alliance of the Almouchiquois,
Etchemins and Souriquois had been achieved," a conclusion Champlain
would have questioned, "the friendship of the Indians to the south
had been lost and the 1605 expedition's exploration had been
advanced no more than the width of Cape Cod! This was as far
south as the French were ever to go, for all Poutrincourt's promise
that they would come back another year to settle further to the
south. It was the last French exploration along this coast.
The history of New France in these parts thereupon came to an end;
the history of New England was about to begin."10h
At the time of their homecoming,
however, Poutrincourt, Champlain, and their fellow adventurers could
not have known what history held in store for them. To their amazement, and
especially their amusement, Lescarbot and company welcomed
them at the shore with a spectacle entitled Le Théâtre de Neptune--the
first recorded theatrical production performed in New France.
The cast of Lescarbot's masque included Neptune, played by Lescarbot
himself, six Tritons, four "Indians," a trumpeter, and a drummer.
The production ended with the French and Indians "dwelling together
in peace"--appropriate vis-à-vis their relationship with Membertou's
Mi'kmaq, but sadly ironic in light of what Poutrincourt's expedition
had just endured in Norembègue and Massachusetts.10g
Luckily for everyone, the winter of 1606-07
at Port-Royal was milder than the previous ones.
To keep the company well fed, thus avoiding scurvy, and to combat boredom, L'Ordre de Bon-Temps,
or the Order of Good Times, which Champlain had created soon after
returning from the voyage down the coast, included in its
membership not only the French notables who shared Poutrincourt's
table, but also Membertou and some of his Mi'kmaq. Poutrincourt, touted by
one historian as "'North America's first [musical] composer,'" wrote
secular and religious pieces, which he performed inside the
habitation or out in the open, and Lescarbot wrote more plays to enhance
the company's good cheer. Though scurvy took four of the
colonists, according Lescarbot, or seven, according to Champlain,
the company, in general, "had a good winter,"
Andrew Hill Clark attests, "and toward the end of March started sowing
seeds" in anticipation of another harvest while they waited for
the annual re-supply from France. The colony's food supply had
achieved such a level of abundance, Lescarbot would have us believe,
that the local Mi'kmaq, "instead of continuing to work the soil to
feed themselves, ... came to the French to beg 'beans, peas,
biscuits, and other edibles,' and became 'lazy.'"11
Then court politics and the vagaries of
French colonial policy threatened the colony's
existence. On 24 May 1607, as Poutrincourt and the colonists
prepared for another year at Port-Royal, "a barque du port of
about six or seven tons, flying a French ensign," under command of a
young Malouin named Chevalier, brought disturbing news to the
settlement: the King had withdrawn de Mons’s
concessions in New France. The year before, "merchants and
shipbuilders from Dieppe and La Rochelle," as well as Normandy
and Brittany, "succeeded in having
[de Mons’s] 10 year trade and commerce rights in Acadia annulled just
when the entire venture was beginning to look promising." Most
damaging of all were the independent fur traders, Dutch as well as
French, who swarmed to the
region and refused to
recognize de Mons's, or anyone's, monopoly; the Dutch, in fact, "had
carried off the lion's share of the furs of the St Lawrence in 1606." As
one of de Mons's biographer reminds us, "It must be remembered that
those who traded illegally did not bear the burden imposed on the de
Monts company to supply colonists and their necessities."
Here was the old French commercial dilemma--free trade versus
monopoly. One of the most unprincipled violators was Rouen merchant Daniel Boyer, who
sent his "own traders to Canada in violation of the monopoly."
The
Hatters Corporation of Paris, citing higher prices for beaver felt,
also had complained to the court about de Mons's monopoly. One
of the charges brought against the proprietor was that, during the
three years and a half years he had held his concession, he failed
to convert a single "savage" to the One True Church. And, of
course, behind these schemes and accusations, one way or another, was Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, now at the peak of his
influence over King Henri IV. Most disturbing of all, perhaps,
were suspicions, soon to become accusations, that members of de
Mons's concession, including treasurer de Bellois, Gravé du Pont,
even the proprietor himself, "had been attempting to defraud the
company!" Not until 17 July 1607 did King Henri IV issue an
edict ending de Mons's monopoly, but he had known "from the spring
of 1607 ... that his monopoly, which would normally have had another
seven years to run, had been cut short." After sending word ahead to Poutrincourt
of the loss of his concession, de Mons dispatched Jean Railluau aboard
the Jonas, that "ill-named" vessel, to take the settlers
home. De Mons then wound up his company affairs and
turned his attention elsewhere.11a
Champlain, seeing that his time
was short in La Cadie, conducted one more sweep of the Baie Française "to look for a copper mine," but he found "only nuggets"
in the Chignecto area. In July, Ralluau, in the Jonas, reached
Niganiche, now Ingonish, on Cape Breton Island and sent word to
Poutrincourt, still at Port-Royal, that he would rendezvous with them at Canso to take them home. On July 30,
after receiving Railluau's message,
Poutrincourt sent two barques ahead with most of the company, a cargo of furs and cod, plus "samples of
wheat, corn, minerals, and Canada geese to prove the value of the
settlement." Most of the leaders remained behind to wait for
the first grain to ripen. They also wished to say farewell to
Membertou, "who had been away leading a war party against the
Almouchiquois at Saco." The sagamore returned to his village in triumph on
August 10. "The next day," one of Champlain's biographers
tells us, "the French harvested some grain from their fields, put it
aboard their small shallop, and made ready to depart.
Membertou and the Indians were sorry to see them go. There
were tears and lamentations. The Indians promised to protect
the settlement, which they did with complete fidelity." On August 11, Poutrincourt and the others,
probably including Champlain, boarded the chaloupe
for the voyage around to Canso, which they reached on September 2.
Typically, on the way around to Canso, Champlain took the time to
renew "his acquaintance with the coast and made 'a map (of it) as of
the rest.' He noted, in particular, 'a very sound bay seven or
eight leagues along, were there are no islands in the channel save
at the end.' Here, described for the first time in 1607 and
called Baye Saine, with the Rivière Platte which emptied into it,
was the future harbour of Halifax. This was Champlain's last
look at Acadia," Marcel Trudel reminds us, "for he never came
there again," his gaze now turning northward.12
.
And so, in the summer of 1607, "the
longest and most elaborate post-Viking settlement of Europeans on
the North American continent north of Florida" was abandoned by the
French while two companies of English merchants founded colonies
of their own along the North Atlantic coast. Again, Marcel Trudel offers the
grand perspective: "By an ironic twist of fate, at the very
time that the French were forced to abandon the continent for lack
of support, the English were coming to settle permanently in North
America." By the end of this momentous year, "the only
Europeans to spend that winter of 1607-08 in America north of
Florida" were 150 English colonists in Virginia and Maine.12k
Nevertheless, Trudel assures us, "the years spent by the French in Acadia from
1604 to 1607 had not been entirely wasted. Geographic
understanding of the area had made spectacular progress; where the
vast peninsula of Acadia had formerly been undefined and confused
with the rest of the coast, it was now separated from the continent
with the insertion in its proper place of the great bay known today
as the Bay of Fundy; there remained only the inland regions of
Acadia to be further defined. And the map of Acadia was a
French one." Just as important as these
cartographical advances were socioeconomic lessons that would allow the
French to resume their exploitation of North America:
"These three years spent by the French in Acadia," Trudel
continues, "made it possible for them to establish a lasting
relationship with the Indians. The existence of sagamis,
each the domain of a sagamore, gave the French the advantage
of dealing with well-defined groups led by recognized chiefs.
The French were sure they had found a land of great promise here.
Moreover, Ste Croix and Port Royal had provided them with an invaluable lesson in adaptation; they would never again abandon a
colony for reasons of climate. In short, Acadia had lost
nothing of its original attraction. For all the obstacles that
had confounded de Monts, there was reason to believe that if ever
there were to be a New France it would be here in Acadia."12l
With Champlain's encouragement, then, de Mons
did not give up on his dreams for New France. Emphasizing the
threat of English and Dutch incursions into territory long claimed
by France, de Mons and Champlain reminded the King, as well as
disgruntled merchants, that a monopoly on the fur trade and fishery
was essential to establish French permanence in America. Raleigh
Gilbert and George Popham, aboard the Mary and John and
the Gift of God, ships of the Virginia Company of
Plymouth, had visited Canso in July 1607, about the time that
Poutrincourt was preparing to abandon Port-Royal. After
trading with fishermen down the coast at La Hève, the Englishmen
continued southward towards Norembègue. In August, they
celebrated the first Protestant service in today's New England on Monhegan Island,
which George Weymouth had visited two years earlier.
Continuing on to the mainland, Gilbert and Popham
founded a settlement at Sagadahoc, on the Kennebec
estuary near today's Phippsburg, Maine--well within the territory claimed by France.
Meanwhile, farther down the coast, in territory claimed by Spain, another joint stock
company of English merchants, the Virginia Company of London, founded
Jamestown in May 1607, about the time the settlers at Port-Royal received
the news that de Mons's concession was being revoked.12h
De Mons's and Champlain's gambit worked. In early
January 1608, only half a year after Poutrincourt abandoned Port-Royal,
King Henri IV, spurning Sully's counsel, granted de Mons a one-year extension on his monopoly
in New France, after which the region would revert to free trade. Champlain,
having hoped for more, insisted that the new concession was "'luy donner la mer à boire,'"--"utterly worthless." Moreover, he and de Mons did not agree
on the placement of the new venture's seat. De
Mons, as he had done since his first days in La Cadie, favored a southern site, but Champlain insisted on
returning to Canada, still the heart of the North American fur trade.
Using the same argument employed in winning over the King, Champlain
touted the greater defensibility of the St. Lawrence valley, with its
several strategic chokepoints, over the "'infinite number of ... harbors'" in
La Cadie "'which could only be guarded by large forces.'"
Champlain's vision for the new trade concession was grandiose.
La Cadie, with its long, indented coast line, perfect for smuggling
and impossible to police, no longer fit the plan. Compared to the St.
Lawrence region and its many allied nations, La Cadie "'was sparsely
populated by sauvages, who on account of their small numbers
cannot penetrate from these regions into the interior where
sedentary peoples live, as one could by the river St. Lawrence.'"
In that vast interior accessible from the St. Lawrence lay "an
inexhaustible fur supply" ready to be exploited. De Mons
"perceived the strength of Champlain's reasoning ...." In the
spring of 1608, he granted Champlain his first official
title--lieutenant in New France--and sent the geographer with two ships,
including the redoubtable Don-de-Dieu, to
establish a new seat for the trading venture in the St. Lawrence
valley. But it would be
more just a trading post. De Mons tasked his lieutenant with
laying "'the foundation of a permanent edifice for the glory of God and
the renown of the French people.'" With him would go François Gravé du Pont, who, despite his precarious health and erratic
behavior, would assist Champlain from Tadoussac in enforcing the
monopoly on fur and fish. Also aboard the Don-de-Dieu
were Nicolas Marsolet de Saint-Aignan, then only 21, and Étienne Brûlé,
a boy of 16, who would play important roles in Canadian history. Not aboard were any
women and children, and, despite the hope of converting les sauvages,
no priests or ministers accompanied the venture.
Champlain's flotilla reached Tadoussac in June and encountered
Basque interlopers led by a fellow named Darache who had taken the
trading station by force. Gravé ordered them to withdraw, but
"they replied with cannons and muskets." The old Malouin fell
wounded in the brief exchange of fire and was "relieved of his arms
and ammunition." Darache "agreed that the dispute should be
settled" not there but at court, and a precarious peace ensued, but
here was proof of Champlain's assertion that de Mons's concession
was "utterly worthless." Before continuing upriver, Champlain
explored the Saguenay again, all the way up to the waterfall at
Chicoutimi. There he "obtained from the Indians a new
description of the hydrographic system of this region," but, as
before, he found the area to be uninhabitable. He chose for the
new headquarters the site of the
old Iroquois town of Stadacona, near where Cartier and Roberval had wintered three quarters of a century before.
The Laurentian Iroquois were gone now, having been driven from the
valley two decades earlier. Except for a Montagnais encampment
in a pine grove just above Stadacona, the site of
the old Iroquois village was largely
abandoned. Called Kebec now, an Algonquin word for "where the
river narrows," Champlain arrived there on 3 July 1608 and dubbed
the site Québec. On September 18, led by the wounded Gravé,
most of Champlain's company boarded the two ships and sailed for France.
Champlain and 27 others remained at Québec. Tragically, only
eight of them survived the first winter at the new St. Lawrence
outpost, 13 having died of scurvy and seven of dysentery. Here, despite its troubled birth, rose the French province of Canada, whose development would overshadow
further French efforts to colonize the North Atlantic.12a
But de
Mons was not quite done with La Cadie. Soon
after Champlain departed Honfleur in April, the proprietor, with
the King's approval, sent Champdoré and Ralluau in a third company
vessel
back to La Cadie, where they would trade with the Indians and
perhaps "revive the settlement" there. Champdoré the
shipwright redeemed himself as a mariner. Crossing from Honfleur,
he sailed directly to Port-Royal, where Membertou greeted him warmly and
presented him with some of the grain the Mi'kmaq had harvested from
Poutrincourt's fields. Champdoré then sailed down the coast to
Saco in Norembègue to negotiate the dispute between the Mi'kmaq and the Almouchiquois
that had led to war the previous summer. Emulating Champlain,
he and Ralluau lingered at Île de Monts-Déserts, the summer camp of Penobscot
sagamore Asticou, to secure an alliance with this "'man of
weight and fine presence,'" as Lescarbot described him. They
also ventured to Rivière St.-Jean in search of Etchemin sagamore Secoudon.
Evidently the chief had gone upriver, so they explored as far
upstream as their ship would take them in territory that seemed rich with fur-bearing animals. "They
were likely the first Europeans to explore the Saint John for any
distance," Ralluau's biographer tells us, "and they supplied a good
description of the country and its vegetation." Despite these efforts,
however, de Mons did
not establish a new post in La Cadie or re-occupy Port-Royal.
The
habitation lay abandoned for three long years, faithfully watched over by Membertou and his
band of Mi'kmaq.12i
Early Struggles to Maintain the
Colony
It would be Poutrincourt who would risk
his fortunes in a new Acadian venture. In February 1608, de
Mons, still focused on La Cadie, designated
Poutrincourt as his second in command, replacing Gravé du Pont, who
would assist Champlain in Canada. De Mons urged
Poutrincourt to develop his seigneurie at Port-Royal, which
still lay within the area of de Mons's new concession. Champdoré and Ralluau's report of their expedition to La Cadie, delivered at Paris during the fall of 1608, praised
the "'wondrous beauty of the wheat'" Poutrincourt "had sown the
previous year." This and other considerations
motivated the King to grant Poutrincourt permission to re-establish
Port-Royal. The agreement, unfortunately,
probably at the Queen's insistence, was burdened with the
stipulation that Poutrincourt must transport Jesuits to the colony to insure the conversion of the
natives. Like many devout French Catholics, Poutrincourt cared little for the
Jesuits, so he used the influence of the papal nuncio in France to
secure the services of another sort of priest. After much effort,
slowed by the death of his mother and the
need to settle her estate, Poutrincourt secured enough financial
backing to cobble together another Port-Royal venture. In
early February 1610, at his barony of Saint-Just on the upper Seine,
he filled a boat "'with furniture, food and munitions of war,'" and
floated it downriver and then up the coast to Dieppe, where he
transferred its contents to the
recently-purchased Grâce-de-Dieu, the Grace of God, a small
ship of only 50 or 60 tons burthen. In late February,
Poutrincourt departed Dieppe "with 'a number of honest men and
artisans,'" at least 40 in number, including a secular priest,
Abbé Jessé Fléché; Thomas Robin,
vicomte de Coulogne, an important investor; and Poutrincourt's relatives
Claude and Charles La Tour, the latter now age 18.
Poutrincourt also brought along two of his own sons, 19-year-old
Charles de Biencourt de Saint-Just, who, like the La Tours,
had gone to Port-Royal in 1606; and younger son Jacques de Salazar,
who was going to the colony for the first time. Again, there
were no women. After a two-month crossing, the Grâce-de-Dieu
reached Port-au-Mouton before turning southwestward towards Cap-Sable to make its way around to the Baie
Française. While rounding the cape, a contrary wind blew the
ship 40 leagues off course, all the way down to the mouth of Rivière
Pentagouët in Norembèque! Sailing back up towards Port-Royal,
the Grâce-de-Dieu made two stops: at Île Ste.-Croix,
"where prayers were said for the dead of the winter of 1604-5," and
at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean, where the party lingered for
several days so that Poutrincourt could hear "the complaints of a
number of Indians against Robert Gravé, son of François, though in
what capacity we do not know," Marcel Trudel relates. Poutrincourt
finally reached his seigneurie
in late May or early June.12g
Thanks to Membertou's care, the habitation at Port-Royal, despite
years of neglect, was still in tolerable condition: "The furniture was
untouched and the buildings sound except for a partial falling-in of
the roofs," which were quickly repaired.
Poutrincourt's mill also needed work. "Because the
settlement's spring was some distance away," Trudel
explains, "a well was dug inside the fort." Eager not to repeat de Mons's
mistakes, one of the first things Poutrincourt did after he anchored
at Port-Royal was to summon the local Natives, who seemed overjoyed to
see him. Abbé Fléché preached
the Word to Membertou's band of Mi'kmaq and baptized 21 of them,
including the bearded sagamore, on June 24--the first such
baptisms in New France, the Natives' eagerness for the ceremony
perhaps prompted by a mysterious illness that struck the Mi'kmaq in
1610 and killed "the majority of the people in many villages."
Abbé Fléché also baptized some of the Etchemin
from Secoudon's village on Rivière St.-Jean. Within a year,
the secular priest had saved over a hundred Algonquin from eternal
damnation. Since Abbé Fléché could not speak the Native languages, Poutrincourt
appointed the young Biencourt, who from his earlier months in the
colony had become fluent in Algonquin, to instruct the Indians in the
tenets of the faith. Only then could the Frenchmen resume the business for
which they had come. Poutrincourt was determined, as de Mons
had been, to make his fur trading venture
agriculturally self-sustaining. Once again, his men planted wheat and
vegetables along the rocky slope behind the habitation, as
well as in a natural meadow a few miles upriver. "[I]t was
perhaps in this year of 1610," Trudel speculates, "that
Poutrincourt parcelled out farms in his domain, making his grants to
the colonists in deeds signed by his own hand." If so, "The
first page was turned in the history of settlement in Acadia."12j
On July 8, the young Biencourt departed
Port-Royal aboard the Grâce-de-Dieu
with a cargo of furs and an abstract of the baptismal record kept by Father Fléché.
Unrealistically, Biencourt was expected to return to the colony
before winter set in. On his way through the Grand Bank,
he learned from French fishermen that a Catholic fanatic had
assassinated King Henri IV in May. The "Good King," as many of his
subjects called him, had been succeeded by his nine-year-old son,
Louis XIII. The queen mother, Marie de Medici, whose coronation
had occurred only a day before her husband's death, would serve as the
boy King's regent until he came of age. In France, the usual commercial and bureaucratic
entanglements delayed Biencourt's return. During an audience
with Marie de Medici, Biencourt produced the copy of Abbé Fléché's baptismal
register to reassure members of the Court that the good priest was
rapidly converting the Natives of La Cadie, thus fulfilling
one of King Henri's dictums for establishing the
colony. Following his father's instructions, Biencourt also
"requested the privilege of a commercial monopoly." The
Queen-Regent, much impressed with the young nobleman, named
Biencourt, only 20 years old, vice-admiral "in the Sea of the
Setting Sun," but this largely ceremonial title did not include a
monopoly on the New-French fur trade. Biencourt thus lost the
support of valuable investors, including "seven Parisian hat-makers"
who were prepared to advance him 12,000 livres.
Moreover, the Jesuits reminded the Queen-Regent that the dearly
departed king "had promised to send them to Acadia with a grant of
2,000 livres." Sadly for the new vice-admiral of
Acadia, the Queen-Regent was inclined "to carry out this promise."
Unfortunately for Biencourt's and his father's efforts to control
the destiny of their Acadian venture, one of Marie de Medici's most
influential ladies-in-waiting intruded herself into the business of
converting the Indians. Antoinette de Pons, marquise de
Guercheville, widow of the comte de La Roche Guyon, was now the wife
of Charles du Plessis, duc de Liancourt et comte de Beaumont-sur-Oise, the governor of Paris. The marquise, once a
favorite of King Henri IV, was an ardent champion of the
Jesuits. She insisted that two of her priests accompany the
new vice-admiral
back to Port-Royal, and the Queen-Regent agreed. Biencourt and
his father were forced to "welcome" the Jesuits to La Cadie, but the
matter was not resolved without difficulty. To finance the
re-supply of his father's colony, Biencourt had been forced to take
on as partners two Huguenot ship owners of Dieppe, Abraham Duquesne
and one Dujardin. Hearing of
the arrangement with the Queen-Regent, the Huguenots refused to be a
part of any venture that included the hated Jesuits. The
Queen-Regent was so angry by the merchants' refusal to associate
themselves with a Jesuit mission in La Cadie that she ordered the
governor of Dieppe to see to it that the two priests chosen by the
order be placed aboard the
Grâce-de-Dieu. Duquesne and Dujardin remained adamant in
their opposition, and the Queen-Mother "declared her refusal to
'stoop to begging of the villains.'"
Heeding the advice of her Jesuit advisors, the marquise de
Guercheville bought out
the Huguenots' interests, amounting to 4,000 livres, in Biencourt's
re-supply, and the Jesuits themselves threw in another
1,225 livres to restore the
Grâce-de-Dieu to a seaworthy condition. Duquesne and
Dujardin promptly loaned Biencourt another 1,200 livres "to
enable them to transport the very Jesuits they had refused to
transport themselves." As part of the new
financial arrangement, priests of the Society of Jesus not only would go to Port-Royal to minister to the
Natives,
but also would reap part of the profits derived from the colony's
fish and fur trade.12b
Delayed by the back-and-forth between
the court and the Huguenots over the taking of Jesuits to
Port-Royal, Biencourt was unable to leave Dieppe until 26 January
1611, and only after a contract was signed there on January 20 by
him and his new partners. Moreover, his return crossing aboard
the
Grâce-de-Dieu was as troublesome as his sojourn in France.
Early in the voyage, because of the season, foul weather drove his
ship into Newport harbor on England's Isle of Wight. Informed
of the identity of the passengers aboard the stranded French vessel,
English authorities now had "new evidence that French colonization
was continuing near or in territory granted to the Virginia Company
and that the Jesuits" were part of the venture. Biencourt
finally made the crossing, but late sea ice blocked his passage
through the Grand Bank of Newfoundland. He did not reach
Port-Royal until May 22--the seeds of the colony's destruction
already sown.12d
With Biencourt were precious provisions
and 36
more settlers, including his father's old acquaintance, Louis
Hébert, and perhaps Biencourt's mother. Also aboard were two Jesuit priests, Fathers Pierre Biard and Énemond Massé, the
latter the marquise de Guercheville's spiritual advisor.
The settlers at Port-Royal, half-starved, welcomed the much-needed
food but not the black-robed priests. It did not take long for Poutrincourt and
the Jesuits to quarrel over religious and political matters.
He also found himself again at odds with a former acquaintance. Soon
after becoming queen-regent in 1610, Marie de Medici
had granted a fur-trading concession to Robert Gravé du Pont,
whom Poutrincourt had known from earlier days
in La Cadie. The young Gravé, along with a handful of other
Frenchmen, had established themselves at Île Emenenic, or the Isle of Prayer, today's Catons Island,
six leagues up Rivière St.-Jean in the country of the Etchemin.
Since they were not associates of Poutrincourt, Gravé and his
partners posed a serious threat to the proprietor's commercial interests.
The Etchemin had complained about
the Frenchmen's loose morals, including outrages against their women,
and evidently the Natives were complaining again, but it was the
fur-gathering activities of Gravé and others that posed a greater
threat to Poutrincourt's efforts. As soon as Biencourt's
re-supply arrived and he informed his father of his vaunted title,
Poutrincourt hurried across the Baie Française to Rivière St.-Jean
"and called together the captains who had come there to trade,
obtained their recognition of his son as Vice-Admiral, and made his
peace with Robert Gravé." After
pledging to recognize the proprietor's authority and to treat the
Natives with more respect, Gravé and the others went about their
business, but the damage had been done. The ship's captains
from La Rochelle and St.-Malo, unhindered by a monopoly on the
region's fur trade, "had already garnered the available furs, and
there was nothing left for Poutrincourt that spring of 1611.
It was a financial disaster for the enterprise that was now the
joint concern of Poutrincourt and the Jesuits. Poutrincourt
was reduced to borrowing food from La Rochelle merchants, who
thought nothing of supplying him with 'spoiled & mouldy ship's
biscuit.'" Meanwhile, Gravé, now reconciled with the
Indians, went to live among the Etchemin, whom he tried to turn
against Poutrincourt and the Jesuits. Several attempts to
arrest him in 1611, one by Louis Hébert, failed to subdue the wily one-handed Frenchman.
Intruding himself into the matter, Father Biard
pardoned Gravé and persuaded Poutrincourt to do the same.
Using Gravé's cooperation for their own purposes, Father Briard
threatened to move the mission to Rivière St.-Jean if Poutrincourt
did not meet his demands.12e
Biencourt's long voyage from Dieppe had
spoiled much of the re-supply. In June 1611, less than a month
after his son's return, Poutrincourt left Port-Royal in charge of Biencourt and,
with the rest of his family,
headed back to France in the Grâce-de-Dieu. Also aboard
was Abbé Fléché, "who gladly (it would seem) gave up his
place to the Jesuits." Again unrealistically, Poutrincourt
hoped to secure more supplies for the colony and return to
Port-Royal before winter set in. Poutrincourt reached France
towards the end of July and was in Paris by August. Deeply in debt and desperate for more financial
assistance, he turned to the Queen-Regent for help, "but,"
Marcel Trudel asserts, the proprietor "obtained no
help from her of a material nature." Like Biencourt the year
before, Poutrincourt turned to the marquise de Guercheville, who
agreed to pay 3,000 livres for a re-supply in exchange for a
share in the profits from his seigneurie. Poutrincourt
stubbornly refused to grant her shares in any future profits.
Casting about for other investors, he found none. Forced, now, to accept Madame de Guercheville's offer for funding
the re-supply, Poutrincourt agreed that the money would be disbursed not by himself but by a Jesuit
coadjutor employed by the marquise. The new partnership cobbled together
a re-supply as quickly as possible, and the ship, under Captain
L'Abbé, set sail from Dieppe at
the end of November. Poutrincourt, however, remained in France.
Meanwhile, that winter, Captain Jean Plastrier of Honfleur and his ship's crew
re-occupied Île Ste-Croix, evidently to use it as a storage depot.
One doubts if the captain did so with Poutrincourt's permission.12f
In late January 1612, Captain L'Abbé's
ship reached Port-Royal with Poutrincourt's agent, Simon
Imbert-Sandrier, aboard. With Imbert-Sandrier came Jesuit
Brother Gilbert Du Thet, the marquise de Guercheville's coadjutor.
Left at Port-Royal with only 23 men, Biencourt had been having his
differences with one of the headstrong Jesuits. Father Biard
had hoped to spend the winter of 1611-12 on Rivière St.-Jean, where
more souls awaited conversion, but Biencourt, "because of his
rankling distrust" of Robert Gravé, refused to allow it. "The
missionary continued nevertheless to show great consideration and
tact toward Biencourt," Marcel Trudel insists.
Father Massé did go to Rivière St.-Jean to live among the
Etchemin; back at Port-Royal, he earned the sobriquet Père Utile--"Father
Useful." And then Brother Du Thet stepped off the re-supply
ship and resumed
his quarrel with Pourincourt's agent over the handling, or
mishandling, of the cargo. Father Biard, at least, felt
compelled to take the side of his brother-coadjutor.
Biencourt, of course, backed his father's agent, who accused Brother Du Thet, among other things, "of having stated during the voyage
that the assassination of Henry IV had been the salvation of
Christendom." Tempers became so heated that the
Jesuits threatened Biencourt with excommunication. In March, Father Biard attempted to board the ship returning to
France so he could present his complaints to the Court, but
Biencourt physically detained him. Claiming to be "the victim of violence,"
the Jesuit laid a "canonical
interdict" on Port-Royal, which was tantamount to mass
excommunication. The interdict forbade fathers Biard and Massé
to perform "no further acts of ministry," even among the local Indians, and,
while denying the settlers the sacred sacraments, they "said their masses in private." On June
25, after three months of this awkward behavior, Biencourt and Father Biard
reconciled their differences, and the priests agreed to celebrate
Mass publicly. They also persuaded Biencourt to allow Brother Du Thet
to return to France to secure another re-supply. Back at
Paris, the coadjutor roundly traduced the young nobleman to his powerful patroness, who was providing support to
the Acadian venture only because
of the Jesuit mission there. The marquise's agent, René Le Coq
de La Saussaye, had approached the hard-strapped Poutrincourt in
August with the proposal that he and the proprietor would share the cost of
another re-supply for the colony, to be taken to Port-Royal under La Saussaye's
command. Poutrincourt, desperate to keep his colony fed,
agreed to the arrangement, but he was compelled to borrow money from
a Rouen merchant to finance his half of the operation. Hearing Brother Du Thet's account
of the conflict with Biencourt, and probably on the advice of La Saussaye, the marquise
ended her relationship with Poutrincourt and washed her hands of the
Port-Royal venture. Discredited at court, left penniless, and
unable to repay the Rouen merchant or his other creditors,
Poutrincourt, despite his noble rank, was thrown into debtor's
prison.12c
Though the marquise de Guercheville had
cast aside the ruined Poutrincourt, she was not done with La Cadie. Dissatisfied with efforts
there
on behalf of her faith and aware that Poutrincourt's seigneurie included only
Port-Royal, she acquired the sieur de Mons's remaining interests in
the region, thus creating a second Acadian seigneurie
whose extent dwarfed that of Poutrincourt's. De Mons's
relinquishment of his rights in La Cadie was understandable.
Several years earlier, in 1609, his year-long monopoly had expired,
and King Henri IV refused to renew it. After the Good King's
death, de Mons and other Huguenots were banished from the
Queen-Regent's court, which greatly diminished their chances to
secure royal patronage. While Poutrincourt was struggling with his creditors
and Biencourt with the Jesuits and commercial rivals, the founder of
Acadia chose to walk away from his affairs in New France. In
October 1612, he willingly surrendered the title of
lieutenant-general of New France to Charles de Bourbon, the comte de Soissons,
who died a few weeks after his appointment. In November, the comte was succeeded as viceroy of New France by his
nephew, Henri de Bourbon, prince
de Condé, who also was a prince of the blood and whose appointment the marquise
applauded, if she did not help to arrange it. In January 1613,
a welcomed re-supply, financed by the marquise, reached
Port-Royal, but with it came the unwelcome news
of Poutrincourt's humiliation, the appointment of a new viceroy, and
the marquise's new seigneurie.
Meanwhile, despite the disapproval of the General of the Jesuits, Madame de Guercheville
fitted out an expedition for a new Acadian
mission and filled it "with eighty or a hundred souls, of whom
thirty were to spend the winter in the new colony."
Under command of Captain Charles Fleury, the 100-ton Jonas
and an unnamed patache of 12 tons left Honfleur
in March 1613 and reached La Hève on May 16. Aboard the
Jonas were agent La Saussaye,
Brother Du Thet, and Father Jacques Quentin, who would head the
marquise's new Jesuit mission if Fathers Biard and Massé had not
survived their ordeal at Port-Royal. At La Hève, La Saussaye
erected "a pillar" bearing the marquise's "armorial
escutcheon" and proclaimed that the entire coast of North
America, except for Poutrincourt's Port-Royal, now belonged to the
black robes's benefactress and would be administered by the Jesuits.
La Saussaye then ordered Captain Fleury to sail
around to Port-Royal to retrieve the two Jesuit priests, who were
still very much alive. The flotilla then headed south to Norembègue
to establish the new mission closer to the center of the
marquise's vast domain.
Their original destination was
Kenduskeag, at the head of navigation of Rivière Pentagouët, today's
Penobscot. There, at the site of present-day Bangor, Champlain had enjoyed a
tabagie a decade
earlier. Heavy fog, however, obscured the Jonas's passage up the
Pentagouët. The Jesuits's flotilla was forced to take refuge off Île des Mont-Déserts,
which Champlain also had visited in 1604. After Father Biard
"healed" two dying Natives by placing a crucifix around the neck of
a woman and baptizing a child, the Natives were determined to keep
such magic as close as possible. They assured the black-robed
priest and his fellow Frenchmen that their island "would make a fine
mission site." And so the new settlement rose not along the
channel of a major river several leagues above the ocean, but
"at a beautiful and sheltered place" on the western half of
Mount Desert Island, near the entrance to Somes Sound, at today's Fernald Point. Father Biard
called the new venture St.-Sauveur, mission of the Holy Savior.13
La Saussaye, still in charge of the
expedition, may have been adept at financial administration, but he
lacked the basic skills of a successful colonizer. He already
had alienated the Jonas's captain and crew by insisting they
continue up the Pentagouët despite the fog, uncharted rocks, and other hazards.
The ship's pilot's refusal to continue upriver may have saved them from seaborne disaster. After the decision
was made to remain on Île des Mont-Déserts, La Saussaye's officers,
including Nicolas de la Mothe, advised him to order the men
to unload the Jonas and construct
at least a temporary defensive work, but La Saussaye "did not see
the urgency of doing so." Despite Captain Fleury's demands
that he be allowed to return to France, the Jonas remained
idly at anchor. "For the time being," Marcel Trudel informs us, La Saussaye
"sheltered his men under canvas and turned his attention to
cultivation of the land." One suspects that La Saussaye depended on the
Jesuits--now four in number--to keep the local Natives properly
subdued.13b
No sooner had La Saussaye and the Jesuits attempted to
establish themselves at the southern edge of La Cadie than a greater
menace came sailing up the coast, flying the red and white banner of England.
In July 1612, a year after Biencourt's detour to the Isle of Wight and less than a year before the
establishment of St.-Sauveur, Virginia's governor commissioned Samuel Argall,
a member of the Jamestown council and admiral of the colony, "to
expel the French from all the territory claimed by England."
According to the Virginia Company charter, this territory ran from
the 34th degree of north latitude up to the 49th parallel, which ran from Florida
to the St. Lawrence River. Moreover, English law forbade any Jesuit from
setting foot on English soil, so this gave them all the more reason
to expel the intruding Frenchmen. After capturing the Indian
princess Pocahontas in the spring of 1613 on orders from his
immediate superior, Virginia's marshal, Sir Thomas Dale, Argall
sailed north from Jamestown to fish and explore and to keep an eye
out for French interlopers.
Aboard his 130-ton Treasurer were 14 guns and 60 men.
In late June, while anchored off the mouth of the Pentagouët to wait
out the thick summer fog, local Indians, thinking this ship, also,
belonged to the French, paddled out to the Treasurer and
alerted Argall to the presence of "Normans" on a nearby island. When Argall
came
upon the infant settlement on July 2, he discerned not
only that the settlers were French, but that some of them were
Jesuits. Luckily for the English, they reached
St.-Sauveur before La Saussaye and his men had finished unloading the Jonas
and while most of them were still living in tents. Seeing the
approach of the English vessel, Captain Fleury and Brother Du Thet
scrambled aboard the Jonas and prepared the ship's gun for
action. One of the
fatalities in the brief encounter that followed was the gallant Du
Thet,
who fell mortally wounded in a hail of musketry on the deck of the Jonas.
The English hauled the Jesuit ashore with the other wounded, and he
died the following day--one of the first of many members of the Society of
Jesus to be
martyred in
America. Argall's men captured the remaining colonists, including La Saussaye,
who had fled into the nearby woods when the English opened fire.
Argall allowed his men to
pillage the camp as well as the Jonas. They forced open
the French commander's personal chests and found La Saussaye's
commission, which Argall concealed. Accusing the Frenchmen of
being pirates, a charge they could not disprove without La Saussaye's commission, Argall forced him and the other prisoners into the Jonas's
boat, in which he intended to set them loose on the ocean. Father Biard protested that so many men
sailing in such a small
vessel could only end in tragedy,
so La Saussaye, eager to be free of his captors, volunteered to take
half of the prisoners, including Father Massé, back to La Cadie in the
Jonas's boat. Argall agreed. After making their
way up the coast, aided by friendly Indians, La Saussaye and the
others sailed across the
mouth of the Baie Française to the south shore of the Acadian
peninsula. There, two French
trading vessels rescued them and took them on to St.-Malo, which
they reached in October. Meanwhile, with his booty and
his prisoners--14 Frenchmen, including Fathers Biard and Quentin and Captain
Fleury--in tow, Argall returned
to Jamestown with the captured French vessels and
was greeted as a hero.
In October 1613, with the full approbation
of Dale and the Virginia council, Argall sailed back up the coast
with his Treasurer, the Jonas, and the smaller French
vessel, his orders reflecting a cold determination to rid the region
of rival powers. He was "to raze every French fort or
settlement as far as Cape Breton, to hang La Saussaye and his men"
if he could find them, "to sack all French ships and to send the prisoners back home."
At St.-Sauveur, Argall tore down
the Jesuit cross, replaced it with a Protestant symbol proclaiming the sovereignty of James I in the
region, and destroyed what little remained of the Jesuit mission,
which soon returned to the elements. Moving farther up the
coast, Argall destroyed what was left of the
French habitation at Île Ste.-Croix and confiscated a supply
of salt being stored there, likely the property of Captain Jean Platrier
of Honfleur. After
crossing the Bay of Fundy, Argall's flotilla slipped through the
Gut on the night of October 31 and, on the morning of All-Saints'
Day, took Biencourt's token garrison of eight men completely by surprise. Argall and his Englishmen rounded up the best of the livestock,
destroyed the rest, "tore down the King's arms from above the gate,
chiselled[sic] the fleur de lis and founders' names from the great
marking stone," looted and burned the habitation, and set
fire to whatever crops in the
field had not been harvested. They would have burned Poutrincourts's grist-mill,
located up a small river above the
habitation, if they had known of it. When Argall appeared
at Port-Royal, Biencourt and
most of his men had been hunting with the Indians, so they escaped
the fate of their incautious fellows. Argall remained in the
lower basin for a week, hoping that the remaining Frenchmen would
surrender to him. Alerted by the Mi'kmaq, Biencourt returned to the habitation just as
Argall was about to depart. The two leaders met privately on
the shore. Argall blamed the Jesuits for the English attacks,
and he likely began the fiction that Father Biard had guided him
to Île Ste.-Croix and Port-Royal. Biencourt demanded
the surrender of the troublesome priest so he could hang him
then and there. Argall of course refused the demand.
Leaving Biencourt and his men to their own devices, Argall, with as
much booty as he could carry, set sail for Jamestown during the
second week of November, taking the prisoners with him. A storm struck his flotilla soon
after he departed Port-Royal, and the French patache was never seen
again. The Jonas, commanded by a lieutenant named
Turner, with
Fathers Biard and Quentin aboard, was driven out to sea.
Turner guided his damaged vessel to the Azores, took on fresh water
and supplies, and sailed on to Pembroke in Wales, from where the
Jesuits, after some diplomatic wrangling, were repatriated to
France. The Treasurer, meanwhile, ran south before the
storm and stopped at the Dutch
trading post on the tip of Manhattan, where Argall forced the men
there to acknowledge English rule. He then sailed on to
Jamestown without incident. At Port-Royal, meanwhile, as winter approached, Biencourt
sent some of his men overland to the St. Lawrence and others to
winter with the Mi'kmaq. Biencourt and the
remainder of his men, likely including Charles La Tour, spent
the winter in
the colony's grist mill.13a
They could not know it, but here was a
foreshadowing of a conflict that would haunt French Acadia for
nearly a century. Argall's raid "set the pattern for
the future of the region," Canadian historian W. J. Eccles observes.
"Although blessed with rich natural resources[,] the Acadian
marches, owing to their geographic position, were doomed to remain a
buffer zone between the rival empires until one or the other
prevailed."14
His rights, health, freedom, and finances
finally restored, Poutrincourt cobbled together another partnership in
the spring of 1613,
this one "with several ship outfitters of La Rochelle, including
the firm of Georges and Macain, by promising them a share of the fur trade in
the Port-Royal region...." The partnership enabled him to
send the Grâce-de-Dieu back to Port-Royal that summer with a
precious re-supply. Meanwhile, at La Rochelle, he and Louis
Hébert, who was back in France, planned another expedition to
reinforce his seigneurie. With younger son Jacques de Salazar as well as Georges's nephew, David Loméron,
in tow, Poutrincourt left France on December 31 and returned to Port-Royal
on 17 March 1614. To his astonishment, he found only ashes and ruin at his
habitation beside the beautiful basin. Biencourt and
his companions, some of them already dead from starvation and others
on the verge of it, emerged from their hiding places and related the
events of the previous autumn. Four years of effort had
produced little for Poutrincourt and his associates. Here also
was an indictment of the parsimonious settlement policies of King
Henri IV, the duc de Sully, and the Queen-Regent, Marie de Medici.
Poutrincourt returned to France almost
immediately, taking with him his younger son, Louis
Hébert, most of the other men, and a cargo of furs, which at
least paid for the voyage. Again, he left Biencourt, now age
23, to administer the seigneurie at Port-Royal, his task to
transform the former settlement into an outpost for the fur trade. In December 1615, before he
could return to Port-Royal, Poutrincourt, age 58, "was killed while battling
an anti-monarchical uprising near his Champagne estates."
Biencourt inherited his father’s title as well
as his claims in La Cadie. Despite his father's failure,
Biencourt and a handful of other Frenchmen refused to abandon the
fur trade. They were determined to supply their trade partners
in La Rochelle with a commodity that could be
acquired in profitable quantities only in the wilderness of North
America.15
.
For the next ten years, French activity
in La Cadie was limited to Biencourt and his compatriots
seeking profit in the young nobleman's
seigneurie. Six years into that decade, however, missionaries
appeared in his domain, seeking souls among the
region's Natives.
Not the Jesuits but an older, rival
order, re-established the Church in New France. Moreover, they planted their first missions in Canada, not in La Cadie. "[A] Franciscan order that had been
founded in Spain as early as 1484, and been admitted to France in
1592," the Récollets were especially popular in the south of
France, where they were celebrated as "the first missionaries in the
New World and the first to say mass on American soil...." (The
Society of Jesus had been founded at Paris by former Spanish soldier
Ignacio de Loyola in 1534, so that order at least existed in France
decades before the Récollets were admitted there.) Seeking
another level of permanence for his St. Lawrence venture and aware
of Poutrincourt's troubles with the black robes, Champlain, with the approval of the French and Roman hierarchies,
lured several Franciscans to Canada, where no priest had gone since
Cartier's time.
In the spring of 1615, during the
vice-royalty of the Prince de Condé, four gray-robed
friars from the Récollet Province of St.-Denis--Fathers John Dolbeau, Pacifique
Duplessis, and Joseph Le Caron, and their superior Father Denis
Jamet--crossed with Champlain, the colony's lieutenant-general, on a re-supply ship, the
St.-Étienne, out of Honfleur. From Tadoussac, where
they landed on May 25, the friars followed the lieutenant-general up to Québec,
which they reached on June 2. Under the supervision of Father Pacifique, they immediately began construction of a mission house
and chapel "close by the cliff below Cape Diamond," near Champlain's
habitation and storehouse. When Champlain ventured
upriver to the St.-Louis rapids, Fathers Jamet and Le Caron
followed. On June 23, they celebrated a Mass at
Rivière-des-Prairies, on Montréal island, perhaps the first Mass
celebrated in Canada. Two days later, Father Dolbeau
celebrated the first Mass at Québec. After the St. Lawrence
valley was divided into apostolic zones, Father Le Caron, with
Champlain's approval, was ministering to the Huron by the second
week of August; after Champlain's humiliating return from the
Iroquois country in October, Father Le Caron joined him in exploring
Huronia that winter. Meanwhile, back in Canada, the other
friars assembled the hand full of inhabitants at Québec to instruct
them in religious matters. In December, Father Dolbeau
attempted to establish a mission among the Montagnais at Tadoussac,
who then were the most important middlemen in the regional fur
trade, but failing eyesight forced him to return to Québec. In
July 1616, the four missionaries gathered in Québec to evaluate the
fruits of their first year's efforts; they were not pleased.
"The first conclusion borne in upon them," Marcel Trudel informs
us, "was that before the Indians could be converted they would have
to be civilized. Now to civilize them, the French would have
to mix with them and, conversely, accustom the Indians to life among
the French," which would require many more colonists--Catholics, not
Huguenots--the Company of Rouen and St.-Malo had managed to lure to
Canada. They also insisted that the Company was failing to
bring enough missionaries to the colony to do much good among the
natives. The friars' efforts to send Indians to France to
become properly gallicized and return as interpreters and purveyors
of French culture also failed miserably; of the six they sent over,
only two returned, and only one of these "persevered and proved to
be of service." In the spring of 1617, Champlain returned from France with three Récollets--Fathers
Jamet and Le Caron, who had returned with him on Company business, and Father Paul Huet on his first
voyage to the colony (also aboard were apothecary Louis Hébert,
his wife, and three children, from Paris, the first French family to
remain in America). Father Huet resurrected the mission at Tadoussac, where,
on July 11, he celebrated the first Mass there. The Récollets built
a chapel at Cap-Tourmente below Québec, where Champlain oversaw a farm,
and constructed a permanent residence just below Québec on Rivière
St.-Charles. In
1617, Father Pacifique began a mission at Trois-Rivières and opened
the first school in Canada there. The following year, Father
Huet joined him at Trois-Rivières, and Father Le Caron replaced him
at Tadoussac. Though well liked by both French and Indians
for their piety and humility, the friars, at first, were ignorant of native languages and customs,
which limited their success in converting them. Like
Champlain, however, they persisted in their "efforts to learn and
understand" the ways of their Native charges. Father Le Caron,
in fact, created dictionaries of the Algonquin, Montagnais, and
Huron languages which were presented by a fellow friar to King Louis
XIII,
but these dictionaries have not survived. In March
1618, the Récollets of the St.-Denis Province in Canada "obtained a charter from the Papal
Nuncio" in Paris, which granted them "canonical existence." In
the summer of that year, the Récollets celebrated the first marriage
in New France, that of Étienne Jonquest of Normandy to Anne,
daughter of Louis Hébert. The year also marked the
first "jubilee" celebrated by the Church in New France, which Father
Dolbeau proclaimed in the chapel at Québec on July 29. In 1619,
the year of Father Pacifique's death at Québec (he was the first
missionary to die in Canada), Récollet mission work in the colony received a welcome boost when the Prince de Condé,
restored to the office of viceroy of New France, gave to the order half of his
3,000-livre allowance. In the early summer
of 1620, three more friars came to Québec aboard the St.-Étienne, among them Father Georges
Le Baillif, who the new viceroy, the duc de Montmorency, ordered
Champlain to consult on colonial matters. That year, under the guidance of Fathers Jamet
and Huet, recently returned from France, the order began
construction of a convent and seminary at Québec, which they
dedicated to Notre-Dame-des-Anges, Our Lady of the Angels. The following year,
Father Le Baillif returned to France with a petition inspired by a
popular assembly convened at Québec.
The petition angered the directors of the Compagnie de
Montmorency, some of whom were Huguenots, who
the friars insisted were "paralysing the development of the
Church" in Canada. From 1615 to 1629, a total of 16 Récollets came to the colony, including
Father Poullain, who arrived by 1621; Father Nicolas Viel and Brother Gabriel Sagard,
who came in 1623; Father La Roche d'Aillon, who arrived in 1625; and
Brother Mohier, who was in the colony in 1627. With Father Le
Caron, Father Viel sought to re-establish the mission in Huronia, which had been idle for seven
years.
In the fall and winter of 1626-27, Father d'Aillon visited the
Neutral nation between present-day lakes Erie and Ontario, but Huron
treachery prevented him from luring the Neutrals into the regional
fur trade. Father Viel, meanwhile, became the second Récollet friar to perish in the colony; in late June 1625,
while returning from Huronia, he drowned in the rapids beside Rivière-des-Prairies, at a place still called
Sault-au-Récollet, and the mission to the Huron again was
abandoned. Brother Sagard wrote two important books about his years in New France, including a dictionary of
the Huron language unequalled in its scope.
By 1620, enough Franciscans had come to
Canada to allow them to turn their attention to another part of New
France. That year, four friars from the Récollet Province of
Aquitaine--Fathers Sébastien Bernardin, Jacques de La Foyer, Louis Fontiner, and Jacques Cardon--ventured from
Québec down the St.-Jean portage to minister to the nations of La
Cadie. Their
river mission, located perhaps at Robert Gravé du Pont's trading
post on Île Emenenic, failed to draw enough Indians to it. For the next four
years, then, the friars wandered through the wilderness, from village to village,
ministering to the Etchemin and the Mi'kmaq. Their travels
took them from Rivière St.-Jean to Île Miscou on the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and from Port-Royal to Cap-Sable on the Acadian peninsula.
One wonders how often during their wanderings through the wilderness
of La Cadie did the friars encounter Biencourt and his associates
bartering with the Natives for beaver pelts. In 1623, Father Sébastien
died of exposure in the woods near today's Campbellton, northern New
Brunswick, and the other friars returned to Québec the following year.
Not until 1630 would the Récollets return to La Cadie, directly from
France, not from Canada.
The Jesuits returned to New France in
the spring of 1625, on the eve of the vice-royalty of the duc de
Ventadour, who succeeded his uncle, the duc de Montmorency.
Ventadour, like the marquise de Guercheville,
was a champion of the Jesuits, and it was he, not Champlain, who
lured them to Canada. The first of the order to go there were Father Charles Lalemant, the superior;
Father Jean de Brébeuf; and two lay brothers, François Charton and Gilbert Burel--all new to the
wilderness--and Father Énemond Massé, now age 50, who had endured two years in
La Cadie with Father Pierre Biard a dozen years earlier. The
Jesuits were
compelled to live
with the Récollet friars until they could build their own compound. Despite their rigorous education, the black robes also struggled to master native languages and
learn the vagaries of native customs. Unsurprisingly, their
correspondence revealed an abiding prejudice against the many
Huguenots trading in Canada. Infused with the order's
determination to rid the world of Protestantism, the Jesuits, along
with their Récollet confreres, did what they
could to expel these heretics from the colony in spite of King Henri's Edict of
Nantes. Several more Jesuits, including Fathers Anne de Nouë
and Philibert
Noyrot, the latter one of the viceroy's personal confessors, sailed to Québec in the spring of 1626 in an 80-ton
ship, the
Alouette, with 20 hired workmen in tow; the vessel was part of a flotilla commanded by Champlain
himself, whose attitude towards the Huguenots was very different
from that of his black-robed passengers. Soon after Father
Noyrot's arrival, the Jesuits began constructing their own residence at Rivière St.-Charles, across from the Récollet
convent. They dedicated the structure to Notre-Dame-des-Anges,
"in recognition of the services rendered them by the Récollets."
In the same year, Fathers Brébeuf and Nouë established a Jesuit
mission among the Huron, who were becoming the indispensable middlemen in the trade that
sustained the colony. The Jesuits also established a mission
at Tadoussac among the Montagnais, who were still important in the fur trade.
The result of their work and that of
the Récollets was not impressive. "As for the missionary
effort," Marcel Trudel relates, "in 1615 there seems to
have been serious intent to push ahead" with converting the Natives,
"but by 1627 it had brought about only dubious results. Of the
fifty-four converts claimed in those twelve years, thirty-nine died
after baptism and two more did not persevere in their new-found
faith. There remained therefore, from the St. Lawrence to the
Great Lakes, only thirteen native Christians!"15b
.
Biencourt, meanwhile, frequented the
wilderness of La Cadie on a quest of a different sort. Among his 20 or so associates
were kinsmen Charles La Tour and, on occasion, Charles's father Claude. Charles,
only a year or two younger than Biencourt, became his friend and
lieutenant. Like Robert Gravé du Pont, who continued to pursue
the fur trade on Rivière St.-Jean, the hardy young Biencourt "lived
much like an Indian, roaming the woods with a few followers, and
subsisting on fish, game, roots, and lichens." This lifestyle
engendered in these young French noblemen an abiding respect for
the Natives. One of them, for instance, referred
to the Natives of La Cadie not as sauvages, or
forest-dwellers, as the people back home and the fishermen called
them, but as "'people of the country.' Bare-chested in summer,
fur-clad in winter," these hardy Frenchmen "endured the smoky warmth
of flea-ridden bark wigwams, slept on furs laid over spruce boughs,
ate strips of half-roasted meat and sagamité--potluck stew.
In small pinnaces and snubnose Micmac canoes they explored the
coasts and inland river systems as far south as the Kennebec and
'learned with great toil' to speak the tongues of the different
tribes." Some of them, including Charles La Tour,
married Native women, a practice the French called métissage.
They had in fact become a new kind of Frenchman: comfortable in the
era's formal attire at the court of the Queen-Regent, but just as
comfortable in buckskin and fur as they roamed the Acadian wilderness with
their Native companions. Biencourt, the La Tours, and their
associates, however, did not forget who they were and why they were there. They
largely abandoned agriculture and other forms of sedentary settlement
but rebuilt as much of the Port-Royal
habitation as they could use to shelter their wares, while
maintaining far-flung trading posts at Cap-Forchu and other places along the coast.
From these posts they hunted down fur poachers who frequented the
Atlantic littoral, a perfect haven, with its many coves and bays,
for anyone wishing to trade with the Indians, legally or otherwise.
On 1 September 1618, Biencourt, fully aware of the efficacy of fixed
settlement, suggested to the authorities in
Paris "that a haven be sought in Acadia for those unfortunate
citizens who were dying of hunger in France, whereas in America they
might find the means of living at ease." He warned officials at the young King's
Court that
"if immediate action were not taken in the waters off New France,
French fishing fleets would be driven from the shores of North
America." Moreover, "From his vantage point on the coast,
Biencourt signalled that the English were daily growing stronger in
Virginia and Bermuda, and that if the French did not act and send
aid soon, 'the name of France will little by little vanish from the
country.'" But officials ignored his appeals, and
Biencourt and his men were left to themselves. By 1620, the La Tours
set themselves up in the Cap-Sable area, where Charles built Fort Loméron, named for David
Loméron, now his
agent at La Rochelle. Despite English claims and Argall's recent
actions, Claude established himself at Pentagouët,
west of the site of
the destroyed Jesuit mission and a good place from which to patrol
the coast of Norembègue. After fortifying their posts as best
they could, and receiving no relief from France, Biencourt and the La Tours
planted what crops they could and made frequent contact with the
region's cod fishing posts. This allowed them to ship their
furs via fishing vessel to their Huguenot merchant-creditors at La Rochelle.15a
Without the fishermen and
especially the Natives, it would have been impossible for Biencourt and
his associates to maintain a fur trade in the abandoned colony,
which, in the eyes of French authorities, "was no longer anything
more than a trading area." In
the beginning, the French were no more impressed with the local nations than
with any of the other Natives they had encountered in New France.
The principal nation of peninsula Acadia, the
Mi’kmaq, whom the French called the Souriquois or the Gaspésiens, were,
Andrew Hill Clark tells us, "a small group
thinly scattered over a large area when the seventeenth century
opened. Contacts throughout the previous century, chiefly
through fishermen, had prepared them for trading relationships with
the French," but, despite encounters with Cartier at the Baie
des Chaleurs in 1534 and Bellenger at Cap-Sable five decades later, they were little acculturated to French habits and
attitudes when de Mons and his associates encountered them.
The Mi'kmaq numbered about 3,000 over the roughly 30,000 square
miles of their territory then, but European diseases dramatically
thinned their numbers. The French nonetheless put them to good
use, and the Mi’kmaq responded in kind. According to
A. H. Clark: "The chief services of
the Micmac to the French, consistent with the maintenance of their
own basic culture patterns, were as guides, paddlers, hunters, and
procurers of the furs and feathers for which a market existed in
Europe, the St. Lawrence settlements, or the English colonies to the
south." Naomi Griffiths adds: "... in the
early decades of European settlement, the natives received the
newcomers with wary friendliness rather than belligerence.
There was no need for the early settlers to carry guns with them as
they began to farm, as their contemporaries had to do along the St.
Lawrence. The Mi'kmaq shared their incomparable skill in
winter travel, and their knowledge of seagoing canoes with the
Europeans. They were also quite willing to trade," especially
furs for metal goods and powder weapons. This largely amicable
relationship with the French was sealed by the efforts of Roman Catholic
missionaries, beginning with Father Jessé Fleché and continuing with
the Jesuits and the Récollets. A. H. Clark asserts: "The slow, but ultimately universal, attachment
of the Micmac to the Roman Catholic faith reinforced their ties to
the French. These ties were maintained assiduously by
missionaries largely based on Quebec."16
Biencourt died suddenly near Port-Royal in 1623,
age 32. Charles La Tour was by his
kinsman's side at the time of Biencourt's passing, and now only the
La Tours and their hand full of associates remained to
carry on the Acadian enterprise. Charles quickly formed a
partnership with Biencourt's heir, younger brother Jacques de
Salazar de Saint-Just, who had lived in Acadia briefly a dozen years
earlier but who was content to remain in Champagne while his kinsmen
looked after his interests in La Cadie. Charles, from his headquarters at Fort Loméron, considered
himself the leader of the Acadian venture, but his rivals in the
region were many. They included the trading company formed in
Canada by
the de Caëns of Rouen, whose vessels slipped south
from the St. Lawrence region to trade for furs with the Mi'kmaq.
In 1626, Guillaume de Caën,
though banned from New France because of his Huguenot faith,
ordered the construction of a trading post on Île Miscou, at the
northern edge of La Cadie. Also troublesome to
Acadian interests were English, Dutch, and Basque interlopers, who
were not above attacking outposts in the "colony." Charles and
his associates did what they could to maintain the region's fur
trade. Again, their good will among the natives was essential
to their endeavors. "'After the death of the … Sieur de
Biencourt," a future enemy of La Tour asserted, "Charles Latour travelled the woods with 18 or 20
men, mingled with the savages and lived an infamous and libertine
life, without any practice of religion, not even bothering to
baptize the children they procreated and instead abandoned them to
their poor, miserable mothers as the coureurs de bois still
do today.'" These half-breed children, called
Métis
by the French in Canada, "became some of the staunchest allies of
the first French families of Acadia." Many of them were
baptized by French missionaries and clung to the faith of their
fathers. They, too, pursued the trade in furs that sealed
the relationship between the worlds of their parents.20
But the struggle to maintain French
presence in La Cadie soon would become even more complicated. The English reappeared in force
again, and this time they came to
stay.
Nova Scotia and the La Tours
Virginia, too, had endured its share of
troubles after its founding in 1607. From the beginning, the
English colonists exhibited a remarkable ineptness in dealing with
the Algonquian-speaking natives who lived in the vicinity of
Jamestown. In the first years of the settlement, mostly as a
result of incompetent leadership and Indian depredations, the death
toll among the settlers was astonishingly high. The
introduction of tobacco cultivation as a profitable venture and the
conversion of Princess Pocahontas to Christianity after her
kidnapping by the resourceful Argall were lucky strokes for the
hard-pressed English during the administration of Thomas Dale.
In 1614, the princess married John Rolfe, the colony's secretary and
the fellow who had introduced tobacco cultivation into the colony.
In 1619, compelled by a new charter, the Company introduced the
rudiments of representative government into the New World. In
that year also, the governor and a Point Comfort merchant bought 20
or so Africans from a Dutch privateer to enhance the colony's supply
of indentured servants. But the peace that had followed the
princess’s marriage was shattered in March 1622 when the Indians
massacred hundreds of colonists in dozens of settlements along the
James. Two years later, the King removed Virginia from a
ruined London Company to ensure that its most successful colony would not fail. By then,
in November 1620, 35 English Separatists
and 66 "ordinary" English colonists, having
crossed on the Mayflower, had founded a colony of their own
on Plymouth Bay, east of Cape Cod, 15 years after de Mons and Champlain
had explored the area and only a hand full of years after English
explorers had captured local Natives for the Spanish slave trade. Plymouth lay only 300 miles south of
Port-Royal, closer to Acadia than to Virginia. These
"Pilgrims" were no more adept at relations with the Indians than the
pioneers of Virginia had been, nor were they more tolerant of French presence in the region.
In 1626, a force from Plymouth attacked Pentagouët and drove out Claude La Tour.
Now two English colonies posed an existential threat to the
tenuous French hold on La Cadie.18
To make matters worse for the French in
North America, in September 1621 King James I of England (who also was King
James VI of Scotland) rewarded to one of his Scottish favorites a
generous grant--all of French Acadia! Sir
William Alexander, viscount and later first earl of Stirling, noted
poet, scholar, and Scottish official, while serving as a prominent
member of the King's Court, "began to dream of making a name for
himself by diverting the constant stream of Scottish manhood from
the continetal wars into a colony that should bear the name of
Scotland." Sir William first approached Captain John Mason,
English governor of Newfoundland in the late 1610s, "for aid in
getting room for a plantation there." With Mason's help, Sir
William "obtained a grant of the northwestern part of that island,
from the Bay of Placentia to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but, although
he name it Alexandria, he made no use of it, because of a grander
vision that emerged from the suggestion of Governor Mason that he
consult Ferdinando Gorges, treasurer of the recently formed Council
of New England." The Council, under pressure from King James,
agreed to "surrender ... all their territory north of the
Sainte-Croix"--that is, Acadia. The King then instructed the
Scottish Privy Council, of which Sir William was a member, "to
prepare a grant of this territory" for Sir William, which was signed
on 10 September 1621. The grant included not only present-day
Nova Scotia, but also New Brunswick ([Nova] Alexandria), Prince Edward Island,
Cape Breton Island, Sable Island, and the
Gaspé peninsula--"to be called for all time New Scotland or Nova
Scotia." The following year, Sir William ventured to Nova
Scotia with a boatload of settlers but managed to establish only a
small fishery at St. John's, Newfoundland. He visited his
"settlement" again in 1623 and found it largely abandoned. He
nevertheless coaxed 10 of the fishermen to accompany him on an
exploration of the
coast of peninsula Nova Scotia "as far as Cap-Nègre." They
"landed at Port-Joli and Port-au-Mouton, formed a favorable opinion
of the natural beauty and resources of the country, but returned to
Newfoundland, from whence they took passage to England...." As a
result, Biencourt and his associates would hardly have noticed the
Scottish presence in the region. In 1625, the new English
king, Charles I, renewed Sir William's charter, "confirming the
rights granted in 1621." The new charter allowed for the
creation of up to 150 knight-baronies in New Scotland to help pay
for future settlements there and made Nova Scotia
part of the kingdom of Scotland.18a
Meanwhile, in 1624, the Dutch
established a North American colony of their own in a region they
had claimed 15 years earlier. In 1607-08, Henry Hudson, an Englishman, had sailed twice for his nation's Muscovy Company,
searching for the northern passage to Asia via the Arctic Ocean.
A year later, while Port-Royal lay abandoned and the Englishmen at
Jamestown struggled to maintain their infant colony, Hudson led a
third expedition in search of the elusive passage, this one for the
Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. In a single ship, the Halve Maen,
Hudson left Amsterdam in early April 1609 and sailed up the coast of
Norway, back towards the Arctic Ocean. Having gone that way
twice with no success and running into heavy sea ice again, he
turned westward at Norway's North Cape and crossed the northern
ocean to the Grand Bank of Newfoundland. He did not make
landfall until July, when he lingered for 10 days at La Hève, in
French La Cadie, to repair a broken mast and to fish for food. He
and his Dutchmen encountered Mi'kmaq willing to trade their furs,
but commerce evidently did not take place. On July 25, a dozen
sailors, brandishing muskets and small cannon, attacked the nearest
village, drove off the natives, and took their boats and whatever
else they pleased. Rounding Cap-Sable, Hudson led his Dutchmen
southwest to the coast of Maine and reached Cape Cod on August 4.
He continued on to the entrance of Chesapeake Bay before sailing
north to Delaware Bay, which he discovered and explored. On
September 3, he re-discovered today's New York harbor, where
Verrazzano had lingered in 1524. Five days later, the
expedition lost an Englishman to an Indian arrow fired from the
shore. On September 11, Hudson reached upper New York harbor.
For 10 days, he sailed up the river he called Mauritius, but which
now bears his name, as far as his ship could take him. Only
then was he certain that this body of water was not the northern
passage to Asia. After trading for furs with several tribes
along the river, he re-crossed the North Atlantic, arriving at
Dartmouth, England, on November 7. He managed to pass his
ship's log to the Dutch ambassador in London, and the Netherlands
now had a claim of their own to territory in North America. A
fourth voyage, in 1610, this time under the aegis of the Virginia and
British East India companies, led to Hudson's discovery on August 3
of the great northern bay which still bears his name and to his death
in the bay at the hands of mutineers in the summer of 1611.
Meanwhile, the Dutch pondered settling in territory also claimed by
England, Spain, and France. Managing to avoid the English and
the French, several Dutch trading expeditions visited the Manhattan
area in the five years following Hudson's exploration. In
November 1613, however, English admiral Samuel Argall, on his way
back to Virginia after burning Port-Royal, forced a small contingent of Dutchmen at the Manhattan
post to acknowledge English rule in the region. The name New Netherland appeared on the map of a 1614 expedition led
by Portuguese-Dominican trader Juan Rodriguez, of African descent,
who was known to the Dutch as Jan Rodrigues. By then, Dutch
claims in the region, centering on Manhattan, ran north to Cape Cod
and south to Chesapeake Bay. In 1614, Dutch merchants
established a fur-trading post, Fort Nassau, on Hudson's Mauritius, near the place where he had ended his upriver exploration,
at present-day Albany. By doing so, "the Dutch strove to
channel the fur trade" from the French-controlled St. Lawrence
valley "toward the Hudson River." In 1621, a year after the English ship
Mayflower failed to reach its original destination on
Hudson's river, the Dutch created their own West India Company and
ordered the private traders in the region to vacate their posts.
Not until 1624, however, did the Company sanction settlements in New Netherland colony: on Nut Island, today's Governor's Island in
New York harbor; at New Amsterdam, on the tip of Manhattan; at Fort
Nassau, which they renamed Fort Orange; on the Delaware River west
of Manhattan; and at the mouth of Verse River, now the Connecticut,
north of New Amsterdam. New Netherland now stood poised
between Virginia and Plymouth and promised to complicate further
imperial rivalries in North America.
Even the Swedes established a colony of
their own in the region. In 1638, with the sanction of King
Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish West India Company landed "a number
of Swedes and Fins" on the lower Delaware River and "purchased from
the natives, all the land from the Cape to the falls of the
Delaware," which the Company called New Sweden. The Company's
fortified settlement arose on the west bank of the river, at present-day Wilmington, Delaware,
across from territory claimed by the Dutch. Called Fort
Christina, it was named for Sweden's Queen. New Swedish settlers included not only Swedes and
Finns, but also Dutch and Germans, all Protestants. The first
governor of New Sweden, in fact, was not a Swede but a Dutchman:
Peter Minuit, who from 1626-31 served as governor of nearby New Netherland.18b
.
Despite a rebirth of sorts in La Cadie and Canada during the hectic 1620s, such competition could
have ended French efforts in North America had not a leader emerged who, in the spirit
of Henri IV, took up the role as savior of New France. In 1624, soon after Biencourt's
death in faraway Port-Royal, Armand-Jean du Plessis, bishop of Luçon and duc
de Richelieu et
de Fronsac, known to history as Cardinal Richelieu, became chief minister
of Henri's successor, the 23-year-old Louis XIII. Two
years later, in 1626, the young King granted to Richelieu control "of commerce, colonies,
and maritime affairs." After purchasing the duc de Ventadour's post as viceroy of New France for
100,000 livres, the cardinal assumed that title as well.
In the spring of 1627, Richelieu
organized the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France,
more commonly known as Compagnie des
Cent-Associés--the Company of the Hundred Associates.19g
Richelieu's new Company subsumed all
the monopolies and seigneuries
granted in New France, including those in Acadia held by Jacques de Salazar de
Saint-Just and the marquise de Guercheville, and
in Canada by Guillaume de Caën.
Significantly, the field of the Company's operations was not limited
by the 40th parallel of north latitude, as in the days of de Mons
and other holders of the trade monopoly in New France. "[R]everting
to the explorations of the sixteenth century," Marcel
Trudel explains, "the Company's boundaries "extended from Florida to
the Arctic Circle, and from Newfoundland to the Great
Lakes"--wherever the King's name could be broadcast and made known
in all of North America. "This immense domain was to be the
Company's property in fief and seigneury, and could be
subdivided into fiefs." The Company secured a 15-year monopoly
on trade in New France, "with the exception of the fisheries," and
tax-free shipment of all merchandise held by the Company to and from
New France. To encourage investment into the new enterprise,
Richelieu secured from the King a lifting of the ancient ban on
"nobles and ecclesiastics" from holding shares in commercial
companies "on pain of losing their rank...." The King promised
to issue a dozen "letters of nobility to twelve members of the
Company who were commoners, the twelve to be chosen by the Company,
demonstrating that henceforth commerce, like military service, might
lead to advancement in the social hierarchy." By May 1629, 107
associates held membership in the Company, 26 of them "merchants or
business men, twelve being from Paris; the other members were for
the most part officers of the upper level of civil, judicial or
military administration. The predominance of these officers
and the large numbers of Parisian merchants had the effect of
changing the commercial orientation of New France; no longer was its
commerce centred on Brittany and Normandy, as it had long been, but
on the French capital." Nor did the Company ignore the lower
classes and their essential role in the development of New France.
Any craftsman who served the Company there for six years could
return to France with "the dignity of 'master craftsman' and might
'open shop'" wherever he chose, a privilege difficult to attain in
France, where the craft guilds retained so much power and privilege.
King Louis XIII also granted to the Company "revocation of the
application to New France of the Edict of Nantes," which gave the
cardinal and his associates the power to bar Protestants from their
North American domain. Richelieu and his associates, moreover,
would determine which missionary orders would, or would not, return
to New France, how many of them would go there, and where they would
serve. A concomitant of the conversion experience would be a
policy of françisation, which sought "'to turn Indian
converts into Frenchified convert subjects of the king--not only
Catholic but also linguistically, culturally, and legally French.'"
Thus, colonization, not sporadic but systematic, and conversion of
the Natives, would be among the Company's principal goals. "In a world transformed by
the Renaissance," Marcel Trudel informs us, "gold had become
the principal vehicle of exchange between nations, and because gold
was a rare commodity to be accumulated and laid by in the greatest
possible quantities, nationalism in commercial matter was imperative
for any state seeking to prosper. This was mercantilism, the
management of a state's economy by keeping the importation of
manufactured goods to a minimum and acquiring a maximum of raw
materials from abroad for the supply of its own industry.
Colonies became an essential factor in such a system; they supplied
raw materials which otherwise would have to be bought from foreign
powers and, theoretically, they would absorb a portion of the mother
country's production, thus stimulating its export trade."
Thus, the France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, on the eve of
war with England, was "preparing to occupy a country that she hoped
would embrace the whole of North America and should greatly
strengthen her commerce and manufacturing industries. The New
France that she intended to establish would be founded upon commerce
and crafts and should be able to support a society whose social
hierarchy would be the same as her own. But the Huguenots,
against who such a bitter struggle had been waged to preserve the
unity of the State, would be excluded from that society. In
short, for the enhancement of her prosperity and power, France
intended to create in America a French and Catholic society."
Here was the socio-economic manifestation of
the cardinal's grand design:
the strengthening of the monarchy and its attendant institutions,
which he believed would unite the French nation, at the expense of
the nobility and the Huguenots, who he was certain could only divide
it.19f
.
On 6 May 1628, Louis XIII signed the
charter papers for the Company of New France while laying siege to
the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle. The siege had begun
the previous summer, only a few months after Richelieu and his
associates organized the Company at Paris. Louis XIII's
attempt to suppress the rebellious Huguenots, the disastrous
marriage of his youngest sister Henrietta Maria to Charles I of
England, and Louis's secret
alliance with Hapsburg Spain, drew England into war on the side of
the Huguenots in the spring of 1627. That summer, however, the
English attack on Île de Ré by
13,000 men under the Duke of Buckingham failed spectacularly to
relieve the Huguenots at nearby La Rochelle. After the English
incursion, the civil war in France only heated up, and Louis's siege of La Rochelle soon followed. Buckingham's failure at Île de Ré
did not end Louis's fight with his brother-in-law. Having
failed in his invasion of coastal France, the aggressive Charles turned,
instead, to the removal of France from North America.19a
In June 1627, "on the initiative of
Gervase Kirke," a merchant of Derbyshire, London, and Dieppe, and
with the support of Sir William Alexander of Stirling, English and
Scottish investors formed the Company of Adventurers to Canada, also
called the English and Scottish Company. Charles I granted the
company a monopoly on furs in the northern region, as well as "a
commission to "to displace the French from 'Canida.'" In the
spring of 1628, the company sent three ships to North America
commanded by three of Gervase Kirke's sons--David, Lewis, and
Thomas. Though born in Dieppe, where their father did
business, the Kirkes considered themselves Englishmen, while the
French insisted they were traitors. Jacques Michel, also a
Protestant from Dieppe, sailed with the Kirkes. "[A] deserter
from Champlain," Michel was intimately familiar with the
coast of New France and served as the brothers' pilot. After escorting a
Scottish expedition to Newfoundland, the Kirkes, guided by the
trusty Michel, sailed
around to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, their mission "to take
possession of Canada and Acadia" in anticipation of British
settlement there.19i
Elated by the English failure at La
Rochelle and "confident of support from Spain," Richelieu, with
the King's approval,
insisted that the Company "dispatch a very large convoy to New
France" to launch his
mercantilist scheme. The Company's directors, however, alerted
to British
activities in North America, beseeched the cardinal to wait "until their ships could be protected."
Richelieu refused. Four large chartered merchant vessels, under
Company associate Admiral Claude Roquemont de Brison, would
reinforce Québec with 400 souls, the largest group of French
settlers sent to North America. Included in Roquemont's flotilla were smaller vessels intended for other outposts in
New France, including a chartered barque commanded by
Jesuits under Father Philibert Noyrot. Leaving Dieppe in late April
1628, Roquemont's fleet, after enduring "a violent storm" and eluding
"two
heavily-armed ships from La Rochelle," crossed the North Atlantic
without further incident. After erecting a cross on uninhabited Anticosti Island
"as act of official taking of possession," Roquemont sailed south to
Baie de Gaspé. After sending Company agent Thierry Desdames in
a chaloupe to Québec to inform Champlain of his presence,
Roquemont learned from friendly fishermen that English
privateers had captured Île Miscou and Tadoussac and were seizing
French vessels at Île Percé and in the lower St. Lawrence. These privateers, of course,
were the Kirkes, led by oldest brother David, now in
command of half a dozen vessels anchored at
Tadoussac. In early July, after burning the vacherie at
Cap-Tourmente, the Kirkes had attempted to capture Québec, but
Champlain bluffed them out of it. Alerted to Roquemont's
presence at Gaspé, the businessmen-turned-privateers hurried back
downriver. Despite the possibility of facing a superior force,
the admiral
and his commanders sailed into the St. Lawrence under heavy fog,
determined to fight their way up to Québec. Their plan was
bold but foolhardy, with a predictable result. On July 17-18, off present-day Rimouski,
below and on the opposite shore from Tadoussac, the opponents
exchanged 1,200 cannon shots in a 15-hour battle. Guided by Jacques Michel,
the Kirkes captured most of Roquemont's ships and wounded the
admiral. Only two small
vessels escaped the onslaught: the Jesuits's barque,
which retreated to France, and Desdame's chaloupe, which
remained at Québec. David Kirke released Roquemont's sailors,
the settlers, and their priests, leaving them two
of the captured vessels in which to return to France, while he and
his fellow privateers returned to England. With
them went the admiral, the ships' captains, and other notables, each to
be held to ransom.19j
The hand full of settlers with
Champlain at Québec, already on the verge of starvation, were forced
to face another winter without fresh supplies. Yet there was a
bright side for the French, dimly lit, in light of the Kirkes'
triumph in the lower St. Lawrence. "Apart from destroying the
Habitation at Miscou," Marcel Trudel relates, the Kirkes "had
engaged in no large-scale operations in Acadia, where the young
[Charles] La Tour's mean of resistance were even slimmer than
Champlain's. Despite the damage done at Miscou, Tadoussac, and
Cap Tourmente, La Cadie and Canada were still occupied only by the
French," a circumstance that soon would change.19o
Buttressed by the Company of
Adventurers, Sir William Alexander seized the
opportunity to make his Nova
Scotia dream a reality. Sir William's 26-year-old son, Sir
William the Younger, took two ships on a privateering expedition to
North America in the spring of 1627, thus familiarizing himself with
the coast of North America. At first opposing the efforts of the Kirkes to
secure a trade monopoly in Canada from "the Crown of England," Sir
William agreed to a compromise for the good of British solidarity. In late March 1628, William the
Younger set out from Dumbarton near Glasgow
with an expedition of "70 men and tua weemen." Perhaps in
the company of
the Kirkes, the Scots landed probably at Newfoundland, where the Alexanders
ran a fishery at St. John's. The Kirkes sailed on to the lower
St. Lawrence, captured Roquemont's fleet, shared
some of their booty with Alexander's Scots, and continued their
depredations in the region, including the capture of Charles
La Tour's Fort Loméron north of Cap-Sable, before returning
in triumph to
England. William the Younger, meanwhile, returned to Scotland, where, with the Kirkes,
he secured "a monopoly of the trade to Canada," granted on 4
February 1629. Sometime that summer, with
the help of French turncoat Claude La Tour, William the
Younger relocated the principal Scots settlement from Newfoundland
to the
opposite side and farther up the Port-Royal basin from Poutrincourt's old habitation.
He called it Charles Fort. Sir William and his Scots now saw for themselves what La Tour could have told them about the brutality of an Acadian
winter. Samuel de Champlain, back in France, learned from his
sources in North America that "of the seventy [Scots] who
wintered" at Port-Royal that year, "thirty had died," probably of scurvy.19k
Charles Fort was not the only Scots
settlement established in the region that summer. James
Stewart, fourth Lord Ochiltree, an associate of Sir William
Alexander, accompanied William the Younger on his return to North
America in 1629 and followed him to the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island, which the
Scots called New Galloway. At the beginning of July, with 60
Scots, including army captain Constance Ferrar, his wife, and
children, Alexander and Ochiltree landed at Port-aux-Baleines, where Ochiltree attacked a Basque fishing crew under Michel Dihourse
of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Using cannon captured
from the Basques, the Scots erected a fortification at La Baleine
and called it Fort Rosemar. Ochiltree then announced to the
fishermen in the area that they could fish or trade for furs only with his permission
and then they must pay a 10 percent fee on whatever they caught or traded.19l
The Kirkes, with the turncoat Jacques Michel
in tow, returned to the
lower St. Lawrence, their target this time the outpost at
Québec, which they had failed to capture the year before.
Only by ousting Champlain could the Kirkes secure the monopoly of
the Canadian fur trade. Departing Gravesend in March 1629, a
month after they secured their monopoly, they could not have known of
a treaty signed at Susa, in the Duchy of Savoy, on April 24.
Nor could Champlain have been aware of the treaty when he sent
Eustache Boullé to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to hurry along an
expected re-supply he hoped would avert starvation at Québec.
Boullé met the re-supply vessel at Gaspé, where its commander, Émery de Caën, informed
him about the peace signed at Susa. Meanwhile,
David Kirke learned of the plight of the garrison at Québec and its
inability to defend, or even feed, itself. Three armed vessels under brothers
Lewis and Thomas appeared at Pointe Lévy, across from Québec, on
July 19. The following day, after a brief negotiation with
Lewis Kirke under a flag of truce, Champlain surrendered the outpost without
firing a shot. A few days later, on the voyage back down to
Tadoussac, with Champlain and most of his settlers in tow, Thomas Kirke
encountered de Caën making his way cautiously upriver. Near La
Malbaie, on the northern shore between Île aux Coudres and
Tadoussac, the two ships exchanged cannon fire. After Kirke's Englishmen boarded the French vessel, Champlain negotiated another
capitulation, this one de Caën's to Kirke. Only then did the
Kirkes hear of the Susa treaty. The
agreement, signed half a world away, called for the return
of territories captured during the war, but the Kirkes insisted it
was only "'an idle rumor'" and refused to restore Canada to
Champlain. As it turned out, the Kirkes' insistence was not
far from the truth. Even after both parties had ratified the
treaty by the first week of July (still prior to the surrender of
Québec), Charles I refused to return lands
in North America until his wife's dowry was paid.
And so war
between the royal brothers-in-law continued for three more years.19
Not until a year after Roquemont's
disaster was Richelieu's Company able to send more than a single
ship back to New France. In June 1629, about the time the
Kirkes returned to Tadoussac, Captain Charles Daniel of Dieppe, an
experienced Grand Bank fisherman, former partner of the de Caëns in
Canada, and an associate of Richelieu's Company, serving in place of
Isaac de Razilly, led a small flotilla out of La Rochelle to deliver
messages and supplies to Québec. Daniel's ships, including
another one chartered by the Jesuits, again under Father Philibert
Noyrot, became separated in heavy fog on the Grand Bank of
Newfoundland, and Daniel sailed on alone. On August 24, the
Jesuit vessel, still fog bound,"broke up on the rocks off Canso."
Father Noyrot and a lay brother drowned in the mishap; a Basque
fishing vessel rescued the survivors. Towards the end of
August, Daniel arrived at the fishing rendezvous at Grand Cibou,
today's Bras d'Or Bay on Cape Breton Island. Here he learned
of Champlain's surrender as well as Ogiltree's actions, committed
after the peace of Susa had been signed. Outraged by this "'usurpation of
territory belonging to the King,'" and determined "to protect
French fishermen," Daniel resolved to
deal harshly with the Scottish interlopers. On September 18, he and 52 of
his Frenchman attacked the fort at La Baleine and quickly overwhelmed
it. He promptly dismantled Fort Rosemar and constructed
a fortified settlement of his own, Fort Ste.-Anne, up the coast at Grand Cibou.
On November 5, before winter set in, he left 40 men at Fort
Ste.-Anne "under the command of a certain Sieur Claude" and carried Ochiltree and his Scotsmen
back to France as prisoners of war. Meanwhile, Richelieu's Company did what it could to
strengthen Charles La Tour's hold at Cap-Sable, which, until
the construction of Daniel's fort, had been the "last remaining post
France had in the country."19e
.
Life had become
dangerously complicated for the hard-pressed La Tours.
After losing Pentagouët to a force from Plymouth in 1626, Claude
returned to Champagne the following year to divest some of his
holdings there. He also presented letters from son Charles to
King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu seeking permission to defend
Acadia against the English, who, from their posts at Saco and on the
Kennebec, were becoming bolder in their incursions in the region.
Charles also sought protection from his fellow Frenchmen
in Canada, especially the de Caëns, with whom he and Biencourt had been
clashing for years. Through Claude, Charles "asked for a
formal commission entrusting him with the defence and preservation
of the coasts of Acadia...."19d
Claude's sojourn in France was not a
happy one. It included a series of law suits over a failed
commercial partnership and a short stay in Paris's St.-Eloi prison
for indebtedness. Eager to escape his tenacious creditors,
Claude lobbied his way into Richelieu's New-French enterprise.
Sailing aboard a supply ship destined for Cap-Sable, where son
Charles still held sway, Claude departed Dieppe with Admiral Roquemont de Brison's
fleet in April 1628. Claude's ship, unfortunately, was not one
of the few that escaped the Kirkes in the lower St. Lawrence.
Too well known to be released with the lower-ranked Frenchmen, Claude
was among the notables the Kirkes took to England to be held for
ransom. In London, however, Claude the
schemer as well as the dreamer did what he could to put his
troubles behind him. Approached by Sir William Alexander,
Claude seriously considered the proprietor's offer to grant him and son
Charles titles of nobility in
exchange for their assistance in establishing the English in French Acadia.
The offer included large grants of land to be rewarded after the
British took control of the colony. Claude, now age 60 and
again a widower, was quicker to seize another opportunity, this one to improve his
personal life. Likely converting to Protestantism, he
remarried to one of Queen Henrietta Maria's ladies-in-waiting,
a kinswoman of the Alexanders whose name has been lost to history.
Now in the employ of the English, Claude sailed to Nova Scotia in the spring of 1629
and helped Sir William Alexander the Younger establish the Charles
Fort settlement at Port-Royal, but Claude did not
winter there. Serving as a courier
for Sir William the Younger, by November of that year Claude was back in London, where
he assisted in presenting to the English court Mi'kmaq sagamore Segipt
and the chief's wife and son as the king, queen, and prince of
Canada. At the end of November, Claude accepted the elder Sir
William's proposal and became Baronet of Nova Scotia. His
acceptance required him to renounce all
allegiance to France; he now would be a traitor in the eyes of loyal
Frenchmen. The following May, Claude naively accepted a
baronetcy for son Charles, which came with a generous grant of land in the
southern portion of the colony.19h
In May 1630, Claude took his bride to
Nova Scotia with another Scottish expedition. The ship on
which he traveled took a detour to Cap-Sable, where he related to
Charles all that had transpired during the three years since last
they had seen one another. Charles, the former
woodsman, now in his late 30s, was married to a Mi'kmaq woman and
the father of three daughters. Hearing his father's story and
his treasonous proposals, he refused to renounce his allegiance to
France. According to Champlain, the son informed the father
that "'he would rather have died than consent to such baseness as to
betray his King.'" Hearing this, the father informed his son
that now he must treat him as an enemy. Claude returned to his
ship, rounded up a force of
British soldiers and sailors, rowed back to the shore, and attacked
Charles's Cap-Sable hideout.
"The ensuing battle between father and son lasted two days and a
night and has no parallel in the history of the New World," one of
Claude's biographers insists. Charles emerged the victor--the
walls of his fort stood firm against his father's attack.
Claude and the Scotsmen returned to their ship and continued on to
Charles Fort. Learning of the father's defeat at the hands of
his son, the Charles Fort settlers lost faith in the old Frenchman.
Humiliated, Claude offered to send his bride back to England,
but she refused. Meanwhile, he sent a message to Charles,
asking permission to return to the cape to embrace him and France again, but Charles
refused.19m
Had Claude succeeded in taking his
son's fort and changing his allegiance to Britain, only Daniel's 40 men
and two priests at Cape Breton would have constituted French
presence in North America. Compare this to the English
presence at Virginia, Bermuda, Newfoundland, Plymouth, Port-Royal,
and, the following year, Massachusetts Bay, and Charles La Tour's
defeat at Cap-Sable would have marked the nadir of New France since
1608.19p
That summer, a small flotilla from
Bordeaux, sent by Company associate Jean Tuffet and led by Basque surgeon-turned-seaman Bernard Marot of
St.-Jean-de-Luz, arrived at Cap-Sable. The two ships carried supplies,
munitions, and reinforcements. Marot handed Charles a
letter from the Company's directors naming Charles an
associate. Well fixed now, he consulted with Marot and the
Récollets about the
problem with Claude. Charles reluctantly sent his lieutenant,
Jacques de Murat, sieur de Lestang, "to inform Claude that he would be welcome to return to
French service," but he
insisted that his father and stepmother live in a house outside the
walls of his new fort. Charles called it Fort St.-Louis, after
Saint Louis XI, the thirteenth-century King of France. Using
material supplied by Tuffet, the rock and brick structure arose on a
height of land overlooking the approaches to Cap-Sable bay during
the summer and fall of 1630.
Back at the cape with his sturdy wife, Claude informed Charles that the Scots had reinforced
their post at Port-Royal and soon would attack Cap-Sable, but the
attack did not come. The following spring, another re-supply
came to Cap-Sable, and the ship returned in October "with a good
number of artisans and some Récollets," the first priests in the
colony since 1624.19n
Properly supplied with provisions and
artisans, in 1631-32 Charles built a new fort at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean
on a five-by-10-league concession Richelieu's Company had granted to
him. The Company offered Claude command of the post, which
Charles named Fort Ste.-Marie. Probably on Charles's advice,
however, they gave the command to Charles's lieutenant Jean-Daniel Chaline.
This proved to be a good thing for Claude. In mid-September
1632, not long after Charles sailed to France on personal business,
a force of 25 Scotsmen under command of Captain
Andrew Forrester crossed the Bay of Fundy from Charles Fort,
attacked Fort Ste.-Marie, and captured the post "by treachery." The Scotsmen "tore
down a large cross, damaged the chapel, and plundered the supplies," including
a "cache of beaver, otter and moose pelts to the value of fifteen
hundred beaver, reckoned as currency."
After removing the royal arms of Louis XIII from the gatepost of
Fort Ste.-Marie, Forrester took his prisoners, including Chaline,
back to Charles Fort and then placed them "aboard a passing
New England pinnace and ordered the captain to maroon them on a
barren island in Penobscot Bay--a sentence to death by starvation.
The New England captain released them instead near the Saint John
River, and they found their way back to Cape-Sable," where they
informed their fellow Frenchmen "of their cruel treatment." In
retaliation, Charles, in November 1633, soon after his return from France, struck the New
English trading post at Machias in Maine. He "pillaged it as a warning that his posts could not be
molested with impunity," killing two New Englanders in the process. Meanwhile, on 8 February 1631, thanks
largely to Bernard Marot's positive report, King Louis XIII named
the 38-year-old Charles "'governor and lieutenant-general of His
Majesty's shore and the places which depend upon it.'" Charles
signed the commission the following July 16--his position and power
securely
established after a quarter of a century in the colony.19b
The Treaty of St.-Germain-en-Laye,
signed on 29 March 1632, finally ended hostilities between the two kingdoms.
As the Susa accord of three years earlier, the new agreement compelled the
British to abandon their footholds in New France. With Pentagouët
now back in French hands, Richelieu's Company offered
Claude La Tour command of the post he had founded a dozen years earlier.
Evidently the old adventurer had paid close attention to the turmoil
around him and chose to hang up his boots. He and his wife remained at Cap-Sable, and another La Tour associate
took command at Pentagouët. Nicolas Denys found Claude
still living at the cape in 1635. In his memoirs, Denys "reports him to have been the picture of domestic
bliss, a genial host who waxed enthusiastic about his extensive
garden." The following year, Richelieu's Company granted
Claude a seigneurie in "an area
between Le Touquet and Cape Sable which the grant called 'the old
house' (le vieux logis) at present-day Shag Harbour," Nova
Scotia. Claude died on his seigneurie "sometime after 1636, a
turn-coat, an opportunist, a rogue perhaps, but one who lends colour
to the early history of Acadia." The old reprobate would have
been in his late 60s, perhaps his early 70s, at the time of his
passing.19c
French Acadia Resurrected
After Canada and La Cadie reverted to
France, Cardinal Richelieu organized yet another expedition to
buttress French presence in
North America. A scaled-down version of Roquemont's venture, it would be a substantial effort at settlement
nonetheless. "At long last," Naomi
Griffith observes, "French
expansion across the Atlantic was now to become something more than
the probing efforts of a diverse group of individual entrepreneurs."
French fortified outposts finally would give way to actual
settlement. Significantly, French efforts in the region no longer would be
burdened by English interference, at least not in the form of armed
conflict directed from London. Taking no chances, Cardinal
Richelieu had hidden from English negotiators his grandiose plans
for New France, but he probably need not have bothered. King
Charles was more interested in paying off his mutinous army and navy
and securing financial independence from Parliament
than blocking French settlement in North America. Peace and the rest of his wife's dowry (four
million crowns, having come due in 1626 but still unpaid in 1632)
would serve his purposes well.21c
Heading the new French venture would be Richelieu's
cousin, Isaac de Razilly of Touraine, a naval commander and former
associate of Samuel de Champlain. Razilly was known to his
fellow Frenchmen as Loup de Mer, the Sea Wolf, but he was a
one-eyed wolf, having lost an eye in a siege at La Rochelle in
1625. Despite his fierceness in battle, Razilly, like
Champlain, was a humanist, one of a large circle of French
intellectuals "who took the world for their province and regard all
of God's children as their kin. They were students of the
world, with a passion for the pursuit of knowledge, as a way of
understanding God's purposes." In November 1626, while
recovering
from his wounds, Razilly submitted a report to his cousin on the
state of French commerce. In it, he rebutted the common notion
among royal officials that international trade "was not vital to the
country's welfare." He also highlighted the importance of
mastery of the seas and of colonization on a much larger scale than
France had attempted over the previous half century. He proposed the creation of a
large trading company with at least 300,000 livres in
capitalization--a suggestion that came to fruition the following
year when Richelieu organized the Company of New France, of which
Razilly became an associate. After a treaty signed at Susa
negotiated an end to the war with England in April 1629, Richelieu's
Company chose Razilly to lead another expedition to New France to
secure French claims in North America. For two months, the
expedition waited at La Rochelle for its commander to appear, but
Richelieu sent Razilly to Morocco instead, where he took on the
Moorish pirates. The flotilla at La Rochelle sailed to New
France in June under another Company associate, Captain Charles
Daniel.21d
A
Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem since age 18, Razilly was still a
bachelor in his mid-40s when his cousin named him his lieutenant in
New France in early 1632. No doubt flattered by the
appointment, Razilly nevertheless refused it. He had served in
naval campaigns in home waters, in the Mediterranean, and in other parts
of the world, but not in New France. He informed Richelieu
that he preferred to serve as a ship's captain under Samuel de
Champlain, whose experience in North America was second to none.
Richelieu, by then, had lost confidence in Champlain and rebuffed
his cousin's suggestion. In March, still under the thrall of
his powerful cousin, Razilly signed a contract with
Richelieu. This prompted King Louis
XIII in May to commission his Sea Wolf
"Lieutenant-General of all of New France (Canada) and Governor of
Acadia," though Richelieu's Company would direct the
affairs of the resurrected colonies. English aggression
had stymied the Company's activities from its beginning, yet it was the Company that
had supported Charles Daniel on Cape Breton after he drove away the Scots, and
it was the Company that had sustained Charles La Tour in the face of
the Scottish incursion at Port-Royal. Having granted Guillaume
de Caën a trade monopoly on the St. Lawrence in 1631, when the
English still held Québec, Richelieu had no choice but to extend the
Huguenot's monopoly there. The King's ban on Protestants in
New France was still in effect, so Guillaume's Catholic cousin,
Émery de Caën, was named commandant at Québec and given the task of
compelling the Kirkes to return the outpost. As a result, Razilly would make his seat
in Acadia, where he would establish an expanded French colony to
support the Company's
commercial ventures and where he would be closer to the
region where he hoped "'to confine the English as closely as
possible.'" Against the cardinal's wishes, but with Razilly's encouragement, the
Company's directors appointed, or rather re-appointed, Samuel de
Champlain as acting governor in Canada. It was Champlain who had established
the Québec outpost in 1608 and governed it, without the title of
governor, for most of its two
dozen years, and it was he who had lured the first
French family there, that
of apothecary Louis Hébert, in 1617. Champlain also had
a long acquaintance with Acadia. He had explored de Mons's
concession extensively
and spent three winters there before Port-Royal was abandoned. Now, under the leadership of these intrepid men,
settlement in New France would be "on a larger scale than ever
before," and Richelieu's Company would place the two colonies "on a stronger material base than ever before."21
But it would be easier said than done. The larger picture of European
settlement in North America was not a happy one for France.
"In this first quarter of the seventeenth century, while Spain,
Portugal, England and even the Netherlands had acquired possessions
in the far corners of the world in pursuit of their mercantilist
policies, France still had no colonial economy and did not even have
the means of acquiring one," Marcel Trudel contends.
"England had established her East India Company in 1600, and the
Netherlands had had a similar company since 1602. These
companies embodied a system which, through close ties between
company and state, assured riches for the merchant classes and power
for the state through maritime commerce. France, in
comparison, still had only the seasonal fur trade of New France,
which, moreover, she left to the exploitation of small private
companies. The little island of St Christophe in the West
Indies, occupied in 1625, was her only other colonial possession."
The situation for France in North America was just as bleak. In
1627, Trudel reminds us, "all that remained of Verrazano's New France were those
regions that France had been labouring painfully to colonize for
twenty years, Acadia and the St Lawrence, completely isolated one
from the other, and totalling together some hundred habitants."
Only 72 Frenchmen lived at Québec in 1627, and only the Héberts and a
kinsman remained when the English seized the outpost two years
later. No more than three dozen Frenchmen roamed the
woods of La Cadie during the late 1620s, none of them with European
wives. In 1628, on the other
hand, the Dutch
could boast 270 colonists in New Netherland. The English at
Plymouth numbered 300 men, women, and children in 1629, and dozens
more, including women and children, lived in the Scots settlement at Port-Royal. Five years
earlier, in 1624, a Virginia census had counted 1,275 Englishmen and
22 Africans in the James River valley, a number that had risen to at
least 2,000 by 1627. Massachusetts Bay colony would hold
over a thousand Puritans by the end of 1630. Before the decade
was out, the Bay Colony, with the help of new English settlements in
Connecticut, would be numerous enough to obliterate one of the most
powerful nations in the region, the Pequot of southern New England. Even on
far-northern Newfoundland, a colony established by Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore,
at Ferryland in the early 1620s "was
numerically as strong as all of New France" in 1627. Moreover, the Spanish still clung to San Agústin
in Florida, now in its sixth decade of existence. France also
had surrendered to England and Denmark exploration of the far
northern regions beyond Hudson Bay.
Despite
efforts which began in La Cadie fully three years before the
founding of Jamestown, France had fallen far behind in its peopling
of North America. Among the three major Atlantic
empires--Spain, France, and England--only France "possessed a
demographic advantage with a home population of twenty million in
the sixteenth century, while Spain had six million and England only
five million," notes Gilbert C. Din. "France,
however, never espoused large-scale overseas emigration of its
citizenry, and French expatriates preferred European destinations,
or even the West Indies, by tremendous margins over Canada's"--or
Acadia's--"frozen wilderness." This problem
was only made worse by
Richelieu's quest "to create a world empire for France."
"When the cardinal's thoughts turned to colonies in this period,"
one of Champlain's biographers reminds us, "he gave more attention
to Guadeloupe than Quebec, more to Martinique than Acadia, more to
North Africa than North America, more to the Indian Ocean than the
Atlantic." So Richelieu's subordinates in Canada and Acadia would
be left to their own devices.21b
.
Razilly's expedition of three ships for
Acadia,
one of them his own vessel, L'Espérance-en-Dieu, Hope in God, departed Auray
in southeast Brittany in early July 1632 and arrived at La Hève on September 8 via
Cap-Sable. Aboard were 300 settlers, three
gray-robed Capuchin missionaries, and supplies aplenty, all financed
by Razilly's own
trading company, the Launay-Razilly-Cordonnier, a subsidiary of
Richelieu's Company. Like
Champlain in Canada, David Hackett Fischer notes, "Razilly
made a particular effort to recruit families ... the hardest part of
their task and the most vital to peopling of a colony. French
families showed great reluctance to emigrate, unlike those from
Britain, Germany, and other European countries. The anomaly of
French attitudes toward emigration has never been explained.
With great effort, Razilly found twelve or fifteen French families
for his first voyage ... not many, but enough to start a population
growing." Other sources insist that Razilly brought with
him "300 hand-picked men." In mid-December, after setting up the settlers at La Hève, until
then just another fishing station on the Atlantic but now his new
headquarters, Razilly sailed around to Port-Royal to take
possession of the fortified settlement from Captain Forrester and the surviving Scots.
Three months earlier, on September 18, Forrester and his Scots had
seriously complicated Razilly's efforts in restoring the colony to
France. Upon hearing of the French arrival at La Hève and
refusing to accept the British retrocession, Forrester and two dozen
of his men attacked
La Tour's fort at the mouth of the St.-Jean and grossly
mistreated the Frenchmen there. Razilly
found only 42 of the Scotsmen still in their fort, too few to put up an effective
resistance against him. Characteristically, Razilly did not repeat the acts of
cruelty and degradation that Forrester had meted out at Fort Ste.-Marie. After the Scots agreed to
lay down their arms, Razilly paid them 15,000 livres for the
food and munitions they were forced to leave for him at Port-Royal
and hustled them aboard one of his vessels, the St.-Jehan,
which returned them via France to England. There the French captain
dumped "them ashore among the sand dunes of the English seacoast in
early February 1633." After 18 years of
neglect and British interference, French suzerainty in greater Acadia finally was restored. Razilly then "ordered some of his
colonists to take possession of the old French settlement" at
Port-Royal "under the
command of René Le Coq de la Saussaye, an old hand on the Acadian
coast." Good relations with the local Mi'kmaq soon were
restored, and "a fur trade began to revive" there the following
year.21a
Razilly next had to deal with Charles
La Tour, who, as the King's original lieutenant-general, considered himself
still master of all Acadia. Moreover, La Tour enjoyed considerable influence with the local Indians as well as
Company officials in France. About the time of Razilly's
arrival at La Hève but before the Scottish attack on his fort at
St.-Jean,
La Tour
sailed to France--his first visit there in decades--to clarify
his standing with King and Company. He reached La Rochelle in
early autumn of 1632, "arriving with a party of Indian warriors,
French traders, and their mixed offspring," including his two
younger daughters, completed business with
the firm of Georges, Macain and Lomeron, long his agents in France,
left his daughters with a female Huguenot
relative named Saint-Hilaire, and returned to Acadia in 17 days to evaluate the
damage to his St.-Jean fort before hurrying back to La Rochelle. At
Paris that winter, he and his entourage "made a great splash in the city," where
they
stayed at the home of court attorney Claude Pignault "on the rue Quincampoix in the financial district of Paris.
One street away on the rue St. Martin were the offices of the
Hundred Associates," Richelieu's Company. "There La Tour
and Champlain," who was back in France to oversee the
publication of one of his books, "worked together" and
"'were sure to have renewed their acquaintance, spending
absorbed hours talking over affairs in New France," to which each
expected shortly to return. In Paris, Charles also recruited
his younger stepbrother, François de Goudart, to serve with him in
Acadia; François older brother, Jacques de Goudart, sieur de Rainville,
already was there, having been left in charge of the Cap-Sable
outpost while Charles was in France. Charles may even have met his future wife,
Françoise-Marie Jacquelin, on his
sojourn in Paris. The primary purpose of his
visit, however, remained his business with the Company. After
Charles
returned to Acadia in the spring of 1633, Razilly was compelled to
abide by the agreements Charles had worked out with Company
officials back in Paris. At his own expense, La Tour would
maintain his posts at Cap-Sable
and on Rivière St.-Jean, as well as Machias in
Maine, from which he and his men could pursue the fur and fishing
trade; he also would retain the titles granted to him by Company and
King. Razilly would grant to him a half-share in the fur
concession "from Canso to New Holland ('Flandre)." Each would
hold a key to the Company's warehouse at La Hève "in order to ensure
a fair and equal division of the trade." Razilly, in turn,
would retain the "same privileges at La Tour's posts," where
he would have the right to inspect all goods and wares used in the
fur trade as well as the furs resulting from that trade before they
were sent on to France. In 1635, La Tour moved his headquarters from
Cap-Sable to Rivière St.-Jean; father Claude remained at
the cape with his wife and stepsons. Razilly remained at La Hève, where he was determined to establish an
agriculture-based settlement as well as an entrepôt for furs and
codfish. La Tour
was interested primarily in the fur trade. The forts at
Cap-Sable and especially Rivière St.-Jean were well-placed bases
from which to pursue his interests, but they had their agricultural
components as well. These compromises, suitable to the
character of each of the principals, promised only good things for
the colony. By all accounts, Razilly "got on well" with
La Tour, whose rights and titles were confirmed by the
Company in January 1635.22
Razilly brought with him several lieutenants who also would
play prominent roles in Acadian history. That he could
get along with men of such contrasting character said much about the
character of Razilly himself. Charles de Menou, sieur
d’Aulnay de Charnisay, Razilly’s cousin and chief lieutenant, was
only in his late 20s when he arrived at La Hève in 1632 as commander of
L'Espérance-en-Dieu. D'Aulnay returned to France in
L'Espérance-en-Dieu the following autumn with a valuable cargo
of "beams, ship masts and beaver pelts to be sold in La Rochelle for
the Company." There, his arrogance and impetuosity
managed to alienate at least one "civic magnate" before
d'Aulnay
returned to the colony. Nicolas Denys de
La Ronde, a native of Tours, also was a young man in his late 20s when he reached
the colony with his older brother, Simon de La Trinité, age 32.
Simon at the time was even more accomplished than Nicolas, having served as "King's councillor and representative
in civil matters at the salt store-house at Tours." Like
d'Aulnay, Nicolas Denys was a
bachelor. Brother Simon, on the other hand, had married at Tours in May 1628
and was the father of three children when he came to La Hève. Razilly, as he
had done with Charles La Tour, granted d'Aulnay and the Denyss
concessions in the colony, continuing the New World modification of
what in France was called the seigneurial system.22a
D’Aulnay would direct the colony's
principal agricultural effort at La Hève as well as the fur trade
on the peninsula and along the Maine coast, where, from 1635, his
men occupied Claude La Tour's old fort at Pentagouët. As before, the
agricultural component was secondary to the commercial one,
"intended only to provide a supply base for the fur trade or the
fishery," not "for colonization in the usual sense."
Nevertheless, as Nicolas Denys observed many years later, "'he
[Razilly] had no other desire than to people this land, and every
year he had brought here as many people as he possibly could for
this purpose.'" One of Razilly's biographers adds: "In
his letters to Richelieu, Razilly spoke in the most glowing terms of
the land of Acadia and of the number of people then living and
suffering in France who could dwell in comfort in this 'blessed
land.' 'The soil,' he writes, 'is rich both on the surface and
below; the sea abounds in fish that we are exporting to southern
France.'" Razilly established 40 allotments for the settlers
at La Hève, and at least one successful wheat crop was reported
there. A certain sign that Razilly intended to colonize his
base was the creation by the Capuchins of "the first boarding-school
in New France," intended for the use of the colonists as well as the
local Indians.22b
Razilly and d'Aulnay chose to keep the
agricultural settlement on the Atlantic side of the peninsula for
several compelling reasons. First, La Hève, with its excellent
harbor, provided easier communication with France. Nearby were
the fisheries and also villages of friendly Mi'kmaq, who could help
sustain the venture, in more ways than one, until it became self-sufficient. Second,
the soil at La Hève, derived from glacial drumlins, though not of
the highest quality, was adequate to sustain a small agricultural
community. And then there was a characteristic of the Baie Française that seemed to preclude
any sustainable agriculture along its shores.
Andrew Hill Clark explains:
"Around the Bay of Fundy and its various branches there are,
roughly, some 120 square miles of salt marsh and associated bogs.
Its origin lies in the extraordinarily high tidal range of the Bay
of Fundy area ... of thirty to forty feet at normal tides, and fifty
feet or more at spring tides.... The ranges are still higher
when gales are combined with spring tides...."--the highest
recorded tides on the planet. These
amazing tides had been observed by de Mons and Champlain during
their exploration of the bay three decades earlier and by other
early explorers of the region, so this natural, and troubling,
phenomenon would have been well known to Razilly and d'Aulnay as
well. To compensate for La Hève's more vulnerable location
facing the Atlantic, Razilly "built a strong battery," which he
dubbed Fort Ste.-Marie-de-Grâce, "on what is still called Fort
Point," evidence that he intended to stay.22c
map
Nicolas Denys, a tireless entrepreneur,
had little interest in agriculture other than as a source of
sustenance for his various enterprises. He took charge of the Acadian
fisheries, a white oak lumbering enterprise at La Hève, and also
shared in the fur trade. Encouraged by Razilly, Denys opened a
fishing post at Port Rossignol, just
down the coast from La Hève, but disaster soon crippled his efforts. Nicolas
sent brother Simon to Oporto, Portugal, with a load of
dried cod. Unfortunately for the brothers, war had broken out
in 1635 between France and Spain, and Portugal was still controlled
by Spain. The Spanish seized the shipment as well as the Denys'
vessel and imprisoned Simon in Madrid.22d
Razilly also faced a potential disaster
of his own. Despite the many supplies he brought from France
in 1632, a
fifth of his men--42 of 200--died at La Hève during the first year
of settlement, most from inadequate housing and exposure than from scurvy. Razilly
promptly corrected the problem, and the second year at La Hève saw
an improvement in the survival rate. D'Aulnay, back from his
venture to France, returned to the mother country in January 1633 to recruit more colonists and gather more
supplies; amazingly, he was on his way back to La Hève by March 12. More colonists,
some of them recruited by Razilly's brother Claude and their partner
Jean Ordonnier, came to La Hève in
1634:
58 men aboard the Catherine out of Auray, and a hundred more
from La Rochelle to endure another winter in
Acadia. Meanwhile, Razilly "constructed a chapel for the
Capuchin fathers and encouraged them to open the first boarding
school in New France. Children of both French colonists and
Mi'kmaq families were invited to study together." Razilly,
like Champlain in Canada, did his best "to establish good relations
with the Indians [and] encouraged them to settle close by."
The result was the creation, or more likely the augmentation, of a
Métis, or mixed-blood, community that Razilly, like
Champlain, did not discourage. With its trading post and small
farming community, La Hève was now, more than anything, a thriving
fishing port. More than 500 transient fishermen from dozens of
fishing vessels riding at anchor in the settlement's spacious harbor
came ashore during the summer months to interact with the colonists.
Still, Naomi Griffiths reminds us, "Settlement was
not yet the establishment of families, whether with Europeans or
Amerindian partners, and agriculture was a supplement to European
supplies, not yet a means of permanent sustenance." During its
first few years, then, except in scale, Razilly's venture at La Hève
was not much different from earlier efforts at Port-Royal.22e
And, of course, forces beyond Razilly's
and the Company's control threatened the future of the Acadian
venture. By 1632, the English had established yet another
colony along the wide swath of the North Atlantic seaboard—Massachusetts Bay. The founders of this
colony were dour, exceedingly righteous, extraordinarily hardworking
Puritan dissidents whom the new English king, Charles I, was glad to
see gone. He granted them a charter in March 1629 to establish their "City
upon a Hill." A flotilla of five ships, including the
Mayflower, with 300 men, women, and children aboard, left London
in late April and early May and reached Massachusetts Bay that
summer. Boston, up the coast from the Separatist settlement at
Plymouth, had a flawless harbor and thus every chance of permanence.
Other English settlements appeared at Wessagusett, now Weymouth;
Merry Mount, now Quincy; and Naumkeag, now Salem, and were subsumed
into the Massachusetts Bay colony after Boston was established in
the spring of 1630, when a thousand more dissenters reached
Massachusetts Bay under Suffolk magistrate John Winthrop. With
a population now of at least 2,000, New England was there to stay.
It was only a matter of time before these good Puritans clashed with
their French neighbors up the coast. Naomi Griffiths observes: "Contact between the
Europeans attempting to establish colonies on the northeastern
seaboard of the American continent was inevitable and, given the way
in which religious antagonisms were linked to national rivalries at
that time, tended to be hostile more often than not. The
relationship between Acadia and Massachusetts was, from the
beginning, one of inequality. Massachusetts was always the
more populous, in terms of European settlers, and the stronger, in
terms of commercial activity, and it was also much more important to
England than Acadia was to France. From the beginning
Massachusetts recognized the need to pay attention to Acadian
affairs. On 17 January 1633, John Winthrop, still governor of
that colony, wrote in his diary 'that the French had bought the
Scottish plantation near Cape Sable [sic], and that the fort
and all the ammunition were delivered to them, and that the
cardinal, having the managing thereof, had sent some companies
already, and preparation was made to send some many more the next
year and divers priests and Jesuits among them.' Winthrop
believed that the French 'were like to prove ill neighbors being
Papists' and he set about strengthening the defences of Boston."
Late that year, Massachusetts merchant Isaac Allerton sailed to
Machias, between Pentagouët and Rivière Ste.-Croix, where
Richard Vines of the Plymouth
Company, one of Allerton's associates, had recently established a trading post. Allerton's
mission was to rescue the English traders La Tour had
recently captured there and to
reassert New English claims to the post.
Finding Machias abandoned and the New Englishmen gone, Allerton
sailed on to Rivière St.-Jean, where he confronted La Tour
and demanded full compensation for the company's loss. La
Tour of course refused. When Allerton demanded to see
La Tour's commission, the fiery Frenchman brandished his sword
and informed the would-be-rescuer that English rights
extended up the coast of Maine no farther than Pemaquid,
between the Kennebec and the Penobscot. The following year,
however, La Tour astonished Winthrop and his fellow
Englishmen
by assisting immigrants who had been unceremoniously dumped by an
English vessel on the shore near the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean.
The passengers had been left "'with nothing but a small shallop'" to
take them down the coast and across "'a dangerous bay of 12
leagues....'" La
Tour, ever the French gentleman "when not directly challenged or
afronted," treated the stranded Englishmen "with 'great courtesy' and insisted
on sending them on in his own pinnance[sic]" to improve
their chances of reaching Boston.
By
late summer of 1635, Razilly felt
secure enough to send d'Aulnay to seize the fort at Pentagouët,
at the mouth of the Penobscot. The La Tours had built
it in the early 1620s, but Separatists from Plymouth, now under
Thomas Willet, had occupied it since 1626. D'Aulnay employed both force and treachery to drive the
New Englanders away.
Soon afterwards, he drove off two ships full of
Separatists who tried to retake the
fort. This left Pentagouët, Machias, Île Ste.-Croix, and
Rivière St.-Jean squarely in French hands … for now.24
A more immediate problem, one that had
plagued the colony from its beginnings, arose at the old fishing
post of Canso, up the coast from La Hève. Razilly
had sent a lieutenant, Nicolas Le Creux du Breuil, to
construct a stockade, Fort St.-François, to protect Company
interests at Canso. Meanwhile, back in France, Cardinal Richelieu had
granted fisherman Jean Thomas permission to engage in cod fishing on the
Grand Bank, but, respecting Razilly's concession in the region,
forbade Thomas from engaging in trade with the
Indians. In 1635, ignoring the chief minister's restrictions, Thomas
set up his own operation near Canso and began a lucrative fur trade
with the Mi'kmaq, who could care less about European points of law.
Even worse, "Thomas incited the Indians through talk and plying them
with wine to attack and pillage the fort," which they did at the end
of July. Le Creux received two sword wounds in the encounter.
Hearing of the incident from the wounded Le Creux, Razilly acted swiftly. He sent lieutenant
Bernard Marot to Canso to capture Thomas and bring him to La Hève
for judgment. Holding Thomas in confinement, Razilly conducted two
inquiries, in which he grilled members of Thomas's crew and
residents of Canso about the fisherman's activities. Adjudged
guilty, Thomas was hustled back to France, arraigned before the
admiralty court at La Rochelle by Le Creux and imprisoned
there. In September, Thomas, who probably had friends at
court, secured an early release on bail. Wisely, he did not
return to Acadia.24a
Despite his title and his high
position in the Company, Razilly was faced with other conflicting claims.
To the south, somewhere below Pentagouët, lay the contested boundary with New
England. A separate Company entity, Charles Daniel's, under Pierre Desportes de Lignères
of Paris since February 1636, occupied Cape Breton Island, a region
that Richelieu had granted to Razilly. Under the management of
Desporte's new partner, merchant Jean Tuffet of La Rochelle,
a new Company post, Fort
St.-Pierre, stood at the head of an inlet that led to the narrow
peninsula south of Bras d'Or, with direct access to Canso--a fine
place to construct small vessels not only for the fishery, but also
for a coasting trade that was sure to develop in the region.
By 1640, the Desportes-Tuffet partnership fell apart. Jean
Tuffet died in 1642, but two of his sons, André and Louis, took up
the Cape Breton concession. André secured two merchant
partners, Dominique de Chevery and Auger Duchanin of La Rochelle,
and remained there to look after his deceased father's interests,
while brother Louis commanded at Fort St.-Pierre. In early
1644, the brothers signed up 11 engagé's to work at the
fort, among them master ship carpenter Robert Cormier,
who was allowed to take his small family to Acadia.
Unfortunately, the venture failed soon after, and all of the
engagés, including Cormier, returned to La
Rochelle aboard the small supply ship L'Étoille.
And then there was
Canada. It was generally understood that Canadian interests
ran to the western edge of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but the precise
boundary between Canada and Acadia had not been established.
Was the Company post on Île Miscou on the south shore of the Baie
des Chaleurs--built
at the behest of Guillaume de Caën in 1626, burned by the English,
rebuilt by Champlain, and
commanded now by Champlain associate
Thierry Desdames--part of Acadia? And what of Gaspésie on the
north shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, at the western edge of the Gulf of St. Lawrence? Razilly's solution was to enforce the
southern boundary between New France and New England with firmness
and vigor, as he had done with Allerton, but to
handle conflicting French interests in the region--those of Daniel and Desportes de Lignères on Cape Breton; La Tour at Cap-Sable, Rivière St.-Jean,
and Machias; Desdames at Île Miscou; and Champlain at Québec--with
circumspection.24b
Razilly took the same
approach with his most important subordinates. Certainly he
was aware that his second in command, cousin Charles d'Aulnay, "was
the complete opposite" of Charles La Tour, not only in
personality, but also in their relationship to Acadia. La Tour, one might say, was the first
"Acadian," having spent most of his life in the colony.
In his early 40s in 1635, he had lived in the region since the age of
14. D'Aulnay and Nicolas Denys, both a decade younger than
La Tour, were, like Razilly, new to the colony. La Tour
had married a Native woman and was father of three daughters,
while d'Aulnay and Nicolas Denys were still bachelors in 1635.
D'Aulnay had sprung from French nobility, while La Tour and
the Denyss had been born to families of lower social rank. While
Razilly lived, the simmering conflicts between these proud men
remained below the surface.
Unfortunately for the colony,
on 2 July 1636, at La Hève, Razilly died suddenly
of natural causes. Again, French Acadia
was thrown into confusion. Isaac de Razilly was age 48 when he died.
He had never married, so his brother, Claude de Launay-Rasilly,
inherited his shares in the family's trading company and in
Richelieu's Company of New France. To the
chagrin of La Tour and the Denyss, Claude de Launay-Rasilly,
who chose to remain in France, ignored brother Isaac's wishes and named
cousin Charles d’Aulnay as his "lieutenant" in Acadia. La
Tour nevertheless felt secure in his titles and possessions,
which the Company had reaffirmed in 1635. Nicolas Denys
hoped to remain in Acadia and develop his fisheries as well as the
fur and lumber trades on his concessions along the Atlantic.25
Without Razilly's
intelligent leadership, however, it did not take long for his chief
associates to come to blows. In September 1637, Nicolas
Denys paid for the passage of
Bernard Bugaret dit Saint-Martin of Bordeaux, who had
first come to the colony aboard the St.-Jehan in early 1636. Denys
also sent over Bugaret's wife and "'ten men that he could bring with him to New France.'"
Bugaret and his men took up residence at Mirliguèche, up the coast
between La Hève and Chebouctou, a sure sign that Denys was
intent on expanding his interests in the colony. In the first round of conflict between
Razilly's former associates, d'Aulnay refused to allow Denys to export his timber on Razilly's ships.
When Denys attempted to hire a ship out of Boston to ship his
timber back to France, d'Aulnay accused one of Denys's
associates of treating with the English, which, to him, was an act
of treason, and slapped him in irons. Naomi Griffiths observes: "It
was obvious that d'Aulnay intended to establish his authority as the
sole legitimate authority in the colony; he would rather stand the
financial loss of ships sailing in ballast than aid someone who
claimed rights, both of fishing and settlement, obtained without his favour." Frustrated by
d'Aulnay's enmity, Denys returned
to La Rochelle to resume his duties with the Company and did not
return to Acadia until the following decade. During his
sojourn in France, Nicolas finally married and began a family of his
own.25a
.
Soon after Razilly's death, d’Aulnay
moved the colony's major agricultural settlement from La Hève to
Port-Royal, where he believed there was more arable land to build up
a greater base of supply. Port-Royal also stood closer to a
primary source of furs in the region. By the time of the move,
the number of settlers at La Hève had fallen to less than a hundred.
At Port-Royal, which he believed was squarely in his sphere of control,
d'Aulnay
resettled most of the transplanted colonists "on individual allotments on which they could
contemplate some security of future..." The hand full
of settlers who remained at La Hève most likely had taken Indian
wives from
local villages and chose to remain with their Métis
families near Mi'kmaq relatives.
D'Aulnay chose a different location for his
headquarters at Port-Royal than the site occupied by
de Mons and Poutrincourt in earlier days. The old fort
or habitation was located on the north shore of the basin opposite Goat Island.
Probably noting the limited potential for agriculture there, D'Aulnay
chose a site eight miles farther up, or east, of the old
habitation in a
bend on the south side of the main river channel that flows into the
basin, at the present site of Annapolis Royal, a location much closer to
the Scots fort of 1629-32 than to the old French habitation of 1605-07. The French called
the river that flows into the basin Rivière-au-Dauphin and also Rivière
Port-Royal, today's Annapolis River.26a
Despite the claims of some scholars,
genealogical records reveal that only two of the original male
colonists at La Hève established lasting family lines in the colony, and they did so no earlier than the 1640s, when French families
already were established at
Port-Royal. Germain
Doucet, sieur de La Verdure, of Couperans or Conflans-en-Brie,
east of Paris, one of Razilly's lieutenants, was married and the
father of two or three children when he came to Acadia in 1632, but
he likely did not bring his family to the colony until later in the decade.
Sieur Doucet remarried at Port-Royal in c1654,
probably in his 60s. Pierre Comeau, a cooper, was age 34
and still a bachelor when he came to Acadia with Razilly. He
did not marry until c1649, when he was 51.26
While d'Aulnay was contemplating
resettlement, the ship
St.-Jehan, having left La Rochelle on the first of April 1636, arrived at La Hève with 78 passengers
and 18 crewmen. Nicolas Denys, representing the Company,
registered the ship's passenger roll on May 6. Aboard were
the first recorded French families who would remain in Acadia.
"With this ship," Naomi Griffiths asserts, "Acadia
began a slow shift from being primarily a matter of explorers and
traders, of men, to a colony of permanent settlers, including women
and children." However, "While the presence of
European women is a signal that settlement was seriously
contemplated, there were yet so few of them in this group of
migrants that they did not immediately affect the status of Acadia
as basically a colony of European transients."
The passengers aboard the St.-Jehan included 35-year-old farmer Pierre Martin of
St.-Germain de Bourgueil in the middle Loire valley, his wife Catherine
Vigneau, and sons Étienne age 5, Pierre, fils, age
4, and Urbain age 2. Guillaume
Trahan, also age 35, was an edge-tool maker from
Montreuil-Bellay in Anjou south of the middle Loire but had been living at Bourgueil,
north of the middle Loire,when he left France.
With him ws his wife
Françoise
Corbineau, two daughters, Jeanne age 7, and a younger
daughter whose name and age have been lost to history, as well as a
valet. Isaac
Pesseley, a merchant from Piney, Champagne, may have
sailed with wife Barbe Bajolet, age 28, and daughter
Marguerite, age 3. Also aboard the Mayflower of Acadia
was Company associate Nicolas Le Creux du Breuil, who, while
commanding
Fort St.-François at Canso, had been wounded in a skirmish there in late July 1635. With Le Creux were several indentured
workers, as well as his family. Wife Anne Motin was
accompanied by her brothers Claude and Jehan,
"the latter probably a priest," and her 21-year-old sister Jeanne.
The Motins were children of Louis Motin, sieur de Courcelles, another associate of Isaac de Razilly
and Charles d'Aulnay and controller of the salt stores "at Mont St.
Vincent in the Charlovais." Two years after her arrival in the
colony, Jeanne would marry the
sieur d'Aulnay and, 15 years after that, Charles La Tour.
Also aboard the St.-Jehan were master salt-maker Jehan Sandre
or Sandry, also called Jean Cendre dit Causinier,
his wife Perrine Baudry, and "a small number" of other sauniers,
including Pierre Gaborit of Tasdon, recruited by Claude de Launay-Rasilly.27a
According to genealogist Bona
Arsenault, several other settlers who would create families in
Acadia arrived in c1636:
Jean
Gaudet, perhaps from Martaizé south of Loudun at the southern
edge of the middle Loire valley in northern Poitou, would have been a
61-year-old widower that year. With him would have been three children--Françoise, age 13;
Denis, age 11; and Marie, age 3. Antoine Bourg,
a farmer perhaps also from Martaizé, would have been a bachelor in his late 20s.
Vincent
Brun, from La Chaussée south of Martaizé,
was another bachelor in his 20s. Like Bourg, he had
been hired with other men from the Poitou region "on a five-year
contract as land clearers and laborers." François
Gautrot from Martaizé, age 23 in 1636, would
have come
with his wife Marie, whose family name has been lost to history.
Although their names do not appear on the role of the St.-Jehan
or any other ship that reached the colony, the Gaudets and Gautrots,
Bourg and Brun,
certainly came to Acadia during the early years of d'Aulnay's administration.27b
These sturdy Frenchmen, recruited by
the Company to enhance the colony's agricultural efforts, also joined
d'Aulnay at Port-Royal.
Sadly, Pierre Martin's sons Étienne and Urbain died in c1636,
soon after they reached La Hève and perhaps on the eve of the family's
movement to Port-Royal--among the first recorded French
children to die in the colony. By most accounts, Pierre
Martin's fourth and youngest son Mathieu, born at Port-Royal in
c1639, was "the first Frenchman born in Acadia."27
Civil War and the Death
of d'Aulnay
The move to Port-Royal put d’Aulnay’s
new
headquarters perilously close to La Tour’s seat at Rivière
St.-Jean. La
Tour, who still considered himself heir, or at least caretaker,
of the Poutrincourt family's seigneurial rights in the colony, claimed Port-Royal as part of his personal domain. This
d'Aulnay refused to accept. Having vanquished Denys,
d'Aulnay did what he could to coax the Company and the King's ministers
into granting him control of all of Acadia. Assisted by Claude de Rasilly and certainly by his own father, influential nobleman
René de Menou de Charnizay, former councilor of state under Louis
XIII, d'Aulnay's efforts bore fruit. On 10 February
1638, the Company of New France, in the name of King Louis XIII,
recognized d'Aulnay as Razilly's successor by granting him the title "lieutenant general in Acadia with authority over
Port-Royal and La Hève," but the decree "enjoined him to
maintain a good understanding with La Tour." Meanwhile, La Tour’s
powerful friends in Paris acquired for him the same title,
lieutenant-general of Acadia, with authority over his own domains.
Again, the amazing insouciance of the French Court over affairs in
the colonies only contributed to the chaos there. The ministers then "made an unsuccessful attempt to
divide all of Acadia west of Canseau (Canso) between" d'Aulnay and
La Tour. "In their ignorance," one of La Tour's
biographers asserts,
"Louis XIII's ministers gave d'Aulnay the land lying north of the
Bay of Fundy," including Pentagouët and Rivière St.-Jean, "but not Fort Sainte-Marie, and La Tour the
peninsula part of Acadia but not Port-Royal. This simply made
matters worse and the struggle continued." The conflict
between the rivals became so intense, in fact, that a virtual civil
war erupted in Acadia which lasted for nearly a decade.28
In 1638, his year of triumph, d'Aulnay,
then age 34, married 23-year-old Jeanne Motin,
who had come to the colony two years earlier on the St.-Jehan, and
they set up a household in
his headquarters at Port-Royal. Here
was a sure sign that d'Aulnay would not return to France, as La
Tour had hoped, but intended to remain in Acadia. Two
years later, in his fort at Cap-Sable, Charles La Tour, age
47,
remarried to François-Marie, 38-year-old daughter of French physician Jacques
Jacquelin,
"who was connected to La Rochelle commercial interests."
Charles likely had met her on his trip to France eight years earlier
and contracted the marriage through his trusted agent, Guillaume
Desjardins, sieur de Saint-Val, a naval captain. In mid-June
1640, soon after their marriage, Charles took his bride to Rivière
St.-Jean to set up a household of his own at Fort Ste.-Marie.28e
In the months between
d'Aulnay's and La Tour's
marriages, their rivalry turned violent. According to d'Aulnay and his apologists, Indians friendly to La Tour,
likely Maliseet, perhaps from the village lying just across the
harbor from La Tour's Fort Ste.-Marie, attacked a boat
carrying a Capuchin friar and two of d'Aulnay's traders--another
source says a single soldier---on Rivière St.-Jean. The
Indians killed the traders and stole their merchandise but allowed
the priest to escape. Sometime later, d'Aulnay insisted, he
sent nine of his soldiers to his outpost at Pentagouët, which he
believed was threatened by Englishmen from Plymouth who had been
forced by treaty to surrender the post eight years earlier.
Somehow La Tour got word of the reinforcement and captured
d'Aulnay's men on their way down the coast. According to one
account, La Tour "carried them to Fort St.-Jean and ...
treated them like slaves." But accusations such as these
can cut both ways: "According to a complaint filed later by La
Tour's Récollets," a La Tour biographer tells us, "d'Aulnay
also committed acts of violence against La Tour, although the
document describing them has never been found."28f
Shortly after La Tour's
remarriage, the rivalry heated up considerably. From the
early 1630s, Razilly and La Tour had shared in the profits
and the expenses of the colony's fur trade. As a result,
the two men met often at La Hève so that La Tour could
inspect his share of the furs and the supplies that were necessary
to acquire them. La Tour rightly assumed that he could go to
d'Aulnay's headquarters
at Port-Royal to conduct his periodic
inspections, as in the days of Razilly at La Hève. That he did
so in the late 1630s, following Razilly's death, is not recorded.
Early in July 1640, however, he resolved to make an inspection.
He and his entourage, which included his wife, agent Desjardins, and
Jacques Jamin, captain of the ship L'Amity de la Rochelle,
which had brought Françoise-Marie to Acadia earlier in the year,
crossed the Baie Française to Port-Royal in two armed pinnaces.
D'Aulnay was not at Port-Royal at the time, and the officer in
charge had been instructed by d'Aulnay to refuse La Tour
access to the Company warehouse. La Tour considered
this an insult to his dignity as well as a threat to his economic
interests. He remained anchored for the night before
Port-Royal, fussing and fuming in vain. The following morning,
he ordered his vessels to pull up anchor and head back towards the
Gut for their return across the bay. Two sails suddenly
appeared at the lower end of the basin, and the conflict between the
lieutenant-generals erupted
into warfare.28a
Having learned, again, that Plymouth traders were planning to recapture the post at Pentagouët,
d'Aulnay
took two ships--the Notre Dame under Jacques LeBoeuf and the
Saint-François under Bernard Marot, a former associate of Charles La Tour
but now La Tour's enemy--filled them with men and
provisions, and hurried down to coast to reinforce the outpost,
which he did successfully. D'Aulnay then headed back up the
coast to Port-Royal. After clearing the Gut and entering the lower basin,
his flotilla came upon La Tour's two armed pinnaces.
Both claimed that the other fired the first shot in the short,
bloody encounter that followed. La Tour's
gunners managed to dismast one of d'Aulnay's vessels and kill
several of his men, but La Tour's
lieutenant, Jacques Jamin, fell in the first exchange of fire.
Fighting in waters well known to him, and employing his experience
as a naval commander, d'Aulnay, in his remaining vessel,
outmaneuvered La Tour's pinnaces and drove them into the
shallows near one of the islands of the lower basin. La Tour had
no choice but to surrender. D'Aulnay hustled him, his bride, and agent Desjardins to
the fort at Port-Royal, where he held them as prisoners. Using the full
power of his position, d'Aulnay ordered an
immediate inquiry, "presided over by Mathieu Capon, clerk and registrar," into La Tour's actions. Three of the witnesses who testified against La Tour
on July 14 were Germain Doucet, Isaac Pesseley, and Guillaume
Trahan, all stalwarts of the small Port-Royal community.
D'Aulnay extracted a written promise
from La Tour and his associates to keep the peace. Upon the urging of a
Capuchin friar, d'Aulnay then "set them all at liberty," and La Tour and his wife returned to their fort.
D'Aulnay now held the upper hand, but Charles
La Tour was no Nicolas Denys; he refused to go away
peacefully.
Nor was d'Aulnay the sort of leader to underestimate a dangerous enemy.
He promptly informed his associates in Paris of his troubles with
Charles
La Tour.28d
Frustrated
in his efforts to drive d'Aulnay from Acadia, a desperate La Tour
sent agent Desjardins back to La Rochelle to stir up trouble against
his rival. Desjardins coaxed Jacques Jamin's widow to press
charges of murder against d'Aulnay and his officers. When
d'Aulnay associate Jacques LeBoeuf arrived in port with the Saint-François, he
was promptly arrested and his cargo of furs impounded. In the
end, the Jamin case lingered in the courts for years, during which
d'Aulnay was accused of defrauding the Company as well as engaging
in heavy-handed violence against La Tour and other colonists.
"But although these disclosures would confirm the Company in its
mistrust of him," one of La Tour's biographers notes, "the
effect on d'Aulnay would be negligible," such was his influence at
court. In the spring of 1642, Desjardins managed to send a
re-supply to Rivière St.-Jean, along with 26 engagés, all
skilled tradesmen, pledged to serve La Tour for three years.
La Tour, meanwhile, took a nod from his late father and
crossed into a place his fellow Frenchmen would have considered treason. He urged Desjardins, along with his Huguenot merchant friends, to seek an
alliance with the Puritans at Boston, who alone could provide him
the necessary means to drive d'Aulnay from the colony. La
Tour's timing in this dangerous ploy could not have been better.
Naomi Griffiths points out that, after the skirmishes
along the Maine coast in the early 1630s, "as Massachusetts
strengthened and the possibility of a major military challenge from
Acadia, diminished, 'anti-Catholicism became less intense' and while
'prejudice remained ... it was never strong enough to preclude
commercial or diplomatic relations.'" In early summer 1642, La Tour sent
to Boston Nicolas Gargot de La
Rochette, later called Jambe de Bois, or Peg-leg, scion of a Huguenot family, to solicit "for the right to trade and to recruit mercenaries" for the
fight against d'Aulnay. The Puritans leaders agreed to trade
with La Tour, but they declined to assist him any further in
his struggle
against d'Aulnay.28b
Meanwhile, d'Aulnay's
father, "from his house in Rue St. Germain,"
pushed his son's case against La Tour at court, especially
with cousin Richelieu. Having been provided d'Aulnay's version of the clash with La Tour, at the end of
January 1641 the King's council ordered the arrest of
Desjardins and the seizure of his trade goods, revoked La
Tour’s concessions in Acadia, and summoned him to Paris to
answer charges against his conduct. At the end of February,
Richelieu twisted the knife in favor of his kinsman. He
revoked La Tour's commission as governor, authorized d'Aulnay to seize La Tour's
holdings and "put his forts into the hands of faithful persons
devoted to the King's service." Typically, Richelieu gave
d'Aulnay only a half dozen men to help him do it.
That summer, upon receiving his cousin's dictum, d'Aulnay found
enough men to move against the fort at Cap-Sable, which La Tour
could not defend. Typically, d'Aulnay exceeded the King's
orders by pillaging and burning Fort St.-Louis, including the Récollet church
and monastery there, but he did not possess the force to move against
St.-Jean, which La Tour was busily strengthening.
Determined to finish off his rival once and for all, d'Aulnay
hurried to France that autumn to shore up his hold on the colony. Claude de Launay-Rasilly
had been dragged into the Jamin lawsuit and saw no chance of
recuperating any of his losses in Acadia; on 16 January and 19 February 1642,
Claude transferred his rights in Acadia to d'Aulnay "for the paltry
sum of 14,000 livres, payable in seven years at the rate of
2,000 livres a year," and essentially
washed his hands of the place. D'Aulnay also strengthened his
relations with the Capuchins, who had extensive holdings in Acadia
granted to them by Richelieu. Some of them, however, including
Father Pacifique de Provins, head of the Port-Royal mission, had
complained about d'Aulnay's heavy-handed behavior, and four of them
had been recalled to France. The astute Father Vincent de
Paris, a fellow Capuchin recalled, "vainly tried to convince
the council that d'Aulnay was a hypocrite who spoke one way while
acting another." No matter, with the assistance of Father
Pascal de Troyes, d'Aulnay convinced the other Capuchin fathers to name him their
Company administrator in the colony. Noting Desjardins's recent re-supply of
Fort Ste.-Marie, d'Aulnay secured from cousin Richelieu and the
King's council a proscription on trade with Charles La Tour,
the violation of which would result in "severe corporal punishment." Most significantly for the future of the colony,
d'Aulnay established a financial partnership with
Emmanuel Le Borgne, sieur du Coudray, a wealthy La Rochelle
merchant born in Calais "who became at the same time the man responsible for
fitting out [d'Aulnay's] ships, his banker, and his business agent."
Amazingly, during his months in France, d'Aulnay found the time to
visit "the de Menou properties in Touraine to recruit families who
would join the other colonists brought out by Razilly, now well
established at Port Royal."28c
His mission complete,
d'Aulnay
departed France in mid-May 1642 aboard Le Saint-Hélie with
kinsman Martin Le Godelier, who had helped him recruit settlers in
the La Chaussée area.
With them were three other ships he had leased from Le Borgne, including the
200-ton Vierge, which was heavily armed.
Back in Acadia by the middle of August, d'Aulnay stood before the
St.-Jean fort and "despatched three gentlemen and four sailors"
to present the King's summons to his nemesis. Predictably, La Tour
lost his temper, crumpled up the order in front of the messengers, and imprisoned them in
his dungeon for "above a year." D'Aulnay hurried
back to France to inform the court of La Tour's refusal to
obey the King's orders. By then, the embargo against La
Tour was taking its toll. In early October, desperate to
sell his furs and acquire needed supplies, he sent Lestang with 14
men to Boston to negotiate a deal with Governor Winthrop.
La Tour "again asked for assistance against d'Aulnay and the
opportunity to trade with New England." Again, the New English
were eager to trade with La Tour but refused to provide
direct assistance against d'Aulnay. Lestang and his men
escorted a Boston pinnace back up the coast. The resulting
trade gave La Tour some relief, but d'Aulnay was soon on to
him. On their trip back down the coast to Boston, the crew of
the pinnace stopped at Pemiquid, where d'Aulnay was on a visit.
Upon learning of their recent activity, d'Aulnay sent a
firmly-worded letter to Winthrop, threatening to capture any English
vessel that traded with La Tour. He then ordered the Vierge
and several other vessels to blockade Rivière St.-Jean.
Hypocritically, d'Aulnay employed at least one English pinnace of 24
tons, captained by a pilot named Peter Mutton, to ferry merchandise
to and from his various posts from La Hève to Pentagouët, to fish
for cod to sustain the post at Port-Royal, and to join
the Vierge in front of the St.-Jean.28g
Shortly after tearing up
the King's summons and imprisoning d'Aulnay's emissaries, La Tour
saw no choice but to employ his wife's considerable charms in
breaking the embargo against him. Carrying La Tour's
lengthy appeal to the Company's directors, many of whom did not care
for d'Aulnay, as well as a deposition penned by the Récollet fathers
condemning the governor's violent actions, she left the St.-Jean
fort in September, ahead of d'Aulnay's blockade, and made it safely
to La Rochelle, where she stayed with Desjardins. Momentous
changes were occurring in France: Richelieu was dying and
would breathe his last on December 4, followed five months later
by King Louis XIII, who died on 14 May 1643; he was only 42 years
old. Louis XIV was
only four years old when his father died; Queen Anne of Austria
became the boy King's regent, but she deferred to her chief
minister, Richelieu's
successor, Cardinal Guilio Raimondo Mazzarino, her
spiritual mentor, known by his French name, Jules Mazarin.
Richelieu's nephew, Armand de Maillé,
duc de Fronsac, Vice-Admiral and Grand Prior of France, succeeded
his uncle as head of commerce and navigation, which included
supervision of the Company of New France. Françoise-Marie,
with the help of Desjardins, coaxed the Grand Prior into sending an armed supply
ship, the 120-ton St.-Clément, under Desjardin's
brother-in-law, Étienne de Mourron, to succor La Tour at Fort Ste.-Marie.
The ship
departed La Rochelle in April 1643, on the eve of the King's death, with Madame La Tour aboard.
She carried a letter from Company associates addressed to her
husband "describing several new schemes of d'Aulnay's with sound
advice on how to foil them." The King's council, meanwhile, named
d’Aulnay "Governor and
Lieutenant-General of the entire coast of Acadia from the Gulf of
St. Lawrence to Virginia," removing La Tour, on paper at
least, from any authority in Acadia. Hearing of La Tour’s
refusal to appear before them, the King's council
authorized d’Aulnay to seize him and force his return. In
March, d'Aulnay's ships dismasted and captured a New English vessel
under "a certain Captain Bailly," who had tried to elude the
blockade and re-supply La Tour. Perhaps La Tour
was vulnerable now to direct attack. Soon after Bailly's
blunder, d'Aulnay "landed cannons and men for an attempt on the
fort," but La Tour's return fire drove them back to
their ships.28h
The St.-Clément
did not reach Acadian waters until late May. De Mourron eluded
d'Aulnay's
blockaders, took shelter up the coast, and, under cover of darkness,
sent a chaloupe ashore carrying seven men, who made their way
overland to La Tour's fort. Heartened by his
wife's successful mission, La Tour turned to the New English
once again, but this time he would go to them in
person. Under cover of darkness, he and some of his men,
including two Récollet friars, slipped past d'Aulnay's
blockade in a chaloupe and rendezvoused with the St.-Clément.
La Tour enjoyed "an
emotional reunion with his wife." Happy to find an old friend in command of the vessel,
La Tour also found aboard the St.-Clément 140 passengers and crew, both Catholics and
Huguenots, 45 of them engagés from France and
Switzerland pledged to serve La Tour for two and three years.
La Tour coaxed de Mourron into sailing on to Boston, which they reached on June
12.28i
England also was
undergoing dramatic change during the early 1640s: civil war
erupted in 1642 between King Charles I and his Parliament. By
the following year, the war
"had not much affected New England, although New
Englanders were continually apprehensive that it might. Most
of the colony's leaders had emigrated because of their opposition to
the royal political and religious policies and naturally favored the
Parliament cause." Happily for them, they were at peace
with the local Indians as well as the French, and their commerce was
rebounding after years of stagnation. In May, New English
leaders from Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, and Massachusetts Bay
had formed an impromptu confederacy "for mutual protection." One suspects that Charles La Tour
understood the nuances of English politics and religion when he came
to call at Boston on that late spring day. Once he was
ensconced in Major Edward Gibbons's townhouse, where Lestang had
stayed the autumn before, La Tour restricted his men's access
to the city, allowing them "to come ashore for exercise and
recreation, but only in small parties so as not to afright the
women." He told the two Récollet friars who had come along
that they were allowed into the city only "to confer with John
Cotton (Boston's chief authority on the scriptures) and other
elders," who enjoyed discussing theology with the learned
Franciscans. There is no record of the Récollets objecting to
La Tour attending divine services in the city's "austere
Meeting House, formally escorted by the governor and an honour guard
of halberds and musketeers." Madame La Tour also
attended divine services, sitting on the women's side of the Meeting
House between the governor's wife, Margaret Winthrop, and her
hostess, Margaret Gibbons. Evidently the Puritans considered
Françoise-Marie to be a devout Protestant, an impression husband
Charles sought to encourage. As to Charles's own
religious sentiments, the Puritans believed that, despite
his claim to be a Protestant like them, he likely remained a devout
Roman Catholic and therefore could not be fully trusted. "Had
he not two priests with him?" many of them asked. Meanwhile,
the wily Frenchman wasted no time pressing his case, not only with Governor Winthrop in
private conversations, but also before the Boston council, where he
and de Mourron presented pertinent papers, including indictments against
d'Aulnay. Again, the Boston magistrates refused to grant
La Tour
"official assistance without the approval of other members of the
new colonial federation," but they saw "no reason why he should not
make private arrangements to hire ships and men" for his struggle
against d'Aulnay. By mortgaging his remaining property--the
fort at St.-Jean--to shipbuilder-turned-merchant Thomas Hawkins and
Major Edward Gibbons, La Tour was able to hire four armed vessels--the
100-ton Seabridge, the Increase, the Philip and
Mary, and the Greyhound, 38 cannon in all--and their captains and
crew, for a foray against d'Aulnay. Towards the end of the
month-long visit, however, even this compromise nearly came
unraveled. As word spread through New England of the
Frenchmen's sojourn in Boston, protests came in from Salem, Ipswich,
Essex, and other settlements about treating with Papists and
jeopardizing the peace with "'Mounsieur Dony'" and his
confederates. Winthrop and Gibbons nevertheless held firm in the Boston council,
and La Tour secured his ships, captains, and crew.29
On 14 July 1643, 300 New
Englishmen, led by Thomas Hawkins, left Boston with La Tour and the St.-Clément
to raise d'Aulnay's blockade and arrived at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean
during the first week of August. In the face of such opposition,
d'Aulnay's ships withdrew to Port-Royal, and La
Tour and his five vessels followed. La Tour
sent a boat ashore with a New-English envoy who could speak French
well enough to communicate. The New Englishman presented
letters from Winthrop and Hawkins as well as La Tour that
"formally requested damages for the destruction" of the Cap-Sable
fort, but d'Aulnay would not to budge. He refused to open La
Tour's letter "on the grounds that it omitted to salute him
properly as lieutenant-general" but responded to the ones from Winthrop and
Hawkins. Holding the messenger blindfolded for "six or seven
hours," he exhorted his men to strengthen the fort's walls and
ramparts, but the structure could not be made sound enough to resist
an attack from so large a force. While the friars urged the
settlers inside the fort to fight these "infidels and heretics," the
women "cried pitifully," and d'Aulnay resolved to find other shelter
for himself and some of his men. Impatient with d'Aulnay's
delaying tactics,
La Tour ordered an attack on the post, placing Hawkins in a
quandary: it was peacetime, and he had come along only to help
raise the blockade and secure La Tour's property. The
New Englishman refused to attack Port-Royal, but not all of his men
were as scrupulous as their commander. While Hawkins and La
Tour discussed the matter, d'Aulnay and 20 of his men abandoned
the fort and retreated to a mill on a nearby river, perhaps the
same structure that Poutrincourt had built for the colony 37 years
earlier.
La Tour and his men, with 30 Puritan volunteers, attacked the mill,
"'wounded several men, killed three others and took one captive,'"
but d'Aulnay and most of his men escaped. In the foray, La
Tour's men "'killed a quantity of livestock and took a ship loaded with
furs, powder and food'" as booty. After burning the
mill and a field of standing corn, La Tour ordered his men to
return to their vessels for the voyage back to St.-Jean. One
suspects that Hawkins reminded the New Englanders who had joined in
the fight that they had "broken their orders and compromised their
colony" by helping these Frenchmen strike their enemy. La
Tour's luck held out on the voyage home. While crossing the bay, his flotilla came upon
Peter Mutton's pinnace making its way up the coast. The
victorious raiders "divided up Mutton's cargo, including four
hundred moose skins and four hundred beaver pelts. The pinnace
and one-third of the furs went to La Tour--small
compensation, he said, for all the goods of his that d'Aulnay had
unjustly taken--one-third to the ship owners, the rest to the men."29a
La Tour and his
flotilla returned to Rivière St.-Jean on August 16. The New
English vessels remained to fulfill their two-month contract. One
of the crews negotiated the reversing falls at the mouth of the
river and sailed 20 leagues up to bring back a load of "surface coal" to Fort Ste.-Marie.
Another transported marble from a nearby quarry to provide lime for
the fort's walls and gardens. The New Englanders returned to
Boston in early autumn, "not a man missing or sick," but some of
them
suffered Governor Winthrop's wrath for their actions at Port-Royal.
In September, La Tour sent the St.-Clément back to
France with Françoise-Marie aboard. She had saved him before,
and she would try to save him again, this time before the new
French court led by Cardinal Mazarin. D'Aulnay, meanwhile,
also resolved to end the conflict. After
rebuilding the fort at Port-Royal, he struck back at La Tour, this time with words, not
bullets. After gathering statements from the Capuchins and other supporters attesting to the treachery of
Charles La
Tour, he returned to France
in late October "to request further help."29b
D'Aulnay's efforts paid
off. In an edict issued on 6 March 1644, Mazarin and the new
royal council essentially declared Charles La Tour
an outlaw. He was ordered, once again, to return to France to
answer charges against him. With more soldiers and the 16-gun frigate Grand Cardinal, obtained with Le Borgne's
assistance, d'Aulnay hurried back to Acadia, going first to his
outpost at Pentagouët before returning to Port-Royal by early September. The object of his wrath was
not only Charles La Tour, but also his wife. She not only
had failed to overcome d'Aulnay's influence at court, but
also was "charged with complicity in
her husband's conduct," as was Desjardins and de Mourron. "Forbidden"
by the March 6 edict "to leave France under pain
of death," she defied the council's order, borrowed money from
friends, some of them probably officials of the Company of New
France, and fled in disguise to
England. There, she chartered a ship, the Gillyflower,
captained by French turncoat Jean Bailly of Amiens, who knew Acadian
waters well. Bailly and his associates promised in writing to
transport Madame La Tour directly to Rivière St.-Jean. The Gillyflower left London in late
March, but, after an uneventful but nonetheless difficult crossing, Bailly ignored
the agreement and went
about his business in northern waters. He lingered
at the Grand Bank to fish for cod, coasted Newfoundland, and
ventured up and down the St. Lawrence River before finally turning
south to Acadia. Off Cap-Sable in mid-September, d'Aulnay,
aboard the Grand Cardinal, forced the Gillyflower to
heave to so that he could search for the elusive Madame La Tour.
While she and her
entourage hid in the hold, among the casks and smelly fish, Bailly and
d'Aulnay,
who were old antagonists, commiserated
on the deck above them. Bailly convinced d'Aulnay that his
ship was bound for Boston and had no business in French Acadia.
D'Aulnay handed Bailly a letter addressed to the
Massachusetts authorities and returned to his blockade of the
Acadian coast. After a six-month ordeal aboard the
Gillyflower, Françoise-Marie arrived safely in Boston in late
September, only eight days after her husband had left the city.
She stayed again with the family of Major Gibbons. Incensed by
the unnecessary delay in reaching her destination and being left in
a foreign port without a ship, she sued Bailly and the ships's
owners in a Massachusetts court for enough money, she hoped, to get
her home. She was aided in her effort by Major Gibbons "and
his merchant friends." After four days of hearings before the
Boston magistrates, Françoise-Marie won her case, but Bailly et
al. appealed the decision, and weeks of legal wrangling
followed. Meanwhile, to counter the influence of a Capuchin
friar sent by d'Aulnay to win favor with the Puritans, she converted
to Anglicanism and won the praise of many New English, who
considered her to be "'a wise and valiant woman and a discreet
manager, well worthy of his (La Tour's) unlimited
confidence.'" Finally, in early December 1644, the Boston court
issued its final ruling in Françoise-Marie's suit against Bailly
et al. Again ruling in her favor, the court granted her
the Gillyflower's confiscated cargo, valued at L1,100, and
L2,000 more in damages. True to his nature, Bailly eluded
payment by running his ship "into waters outside the town's
jurisdiction, took on provisions and passengers and set sail for
London," where he and the ship's owners "hounded the Bay authorities
through Admiralty and Chancery courts and finally into Parliament
itself." Not until late December was Françoise-Marie able to hire
three vessels from a West Indian trader, fill them with supplies,
elude d'Aulnay's
blockade, and return to her husband at St.-Jean.30
Charles La Tour,
meanwhile, returned to Massachusetts to treat with John Endecott, the new governor, who recently had
replaced the long-serving Winthrop, now the colony's deputy-governor.
La Tour had the temerity to approach Endecott at his
home in Salem during the heat of mid-July 1644. "He
found the fiery ex-soldier--plump, middle-aged, his round face
furnished with a small white goatee and moustache--in a sympathetic
mood." Endecott spoke French fluently, so La Tour, who
did not speak English, would not have needed an interpreter.
Endecott agreed to call a meeting of the Boston magistrates for
early August. Employing a new tactic, La Tour reminded
the Puritan leaders that he had been granted a barony in Nova Scotia
by Sir William Alexander, now the Earl of Stirling, when the Scots
controlled the colony. He touted his long tenure in Acadia,
dating back nearly three dozen years, and his possession of a
seigneurie at Port-Royal long before d'Aulnay appeared on the
scene. After two meetings, in Boston and Salem, the
magistrates were unable to settle the question of whether they
should help La Tour again after the embarrassment of the year
before. Realizing that they feared d'Aulnay more
than any other Frenchman, they chose to appease him with a carefully
worded letter and offered La Tour nothing of substance beyond
the promise of open trade.30b
But the wily Frenchman
would not give in. He tried, instead, a different approach,
one that not only appealed to New- English obsession with unfettered
commerce, but also played upon their fears of Charles d'Aulnay.
Before La Tour began his summer sojourn in Massachusetts,
three New-English merchants--Abraham Shurt of Pemiquid, Richard
Vines of Saco, and Thomas Wannerton of Piscataqua, now Kittery, all
from coastal Maine--resolved to trade with him at Rivière St.-Jean
and put in at Pentagouët on their way up the coast. D'Aulnay,
just returned from France and "displeased that they were dealing
with his rival, promptly imprisoned them. After several days
he let them go for the sake, he said, of Mr. Shurt, who he esteemed
(and owed money to). The three merchants continued on to Fort
La Tour." La Tour reminded them that
d'Aulnay's outpost
was "weakly manned and in need of supplies" and tried to coax them
into an attack against Pentagouët to make amends for their shabby
treatment. Shurt and Vines would have nothing to do with such
a scheme, but the volatile Wannerton agreed to it. He and some
of his neighbors, along with 20 of La Tour's men, fell on an
isolated farmhouse six miles or so from d'Aulnay's fort before
moving against the fort itself. The brief but deadly encounter
cost Wannerton his life, "a second Englishman was wounded and his
French assailant killed. The rest of the party then took the
farmhouse with its two surviving defenders--there had been only
three-burnt the buildings, killed the livestock and departed by ship
for Boston where La Tour was now staying." The rest of
New England held their breath in fear of retaliation from the
ferocious d'Aulnay. La Tour, unable to coax the Boston
magistrates into helping him, took full advantage of these fears.
While biding his time in Boston until September 9 (September 19 on
modern calendars), he became a silent partner in a new fur trading
venture "in Penobscot," as the English called the upper Maine coast.
At the end of August, Edward Winslow, governor of New Plymouth,
signed an agreement with the Boston trading firm of
John Winthrop, junior, Edward Gibbons, and Thomas Hawkins,
transferring the Plymouth colony's "rights to land and
fortifications at 'Matchebigautus, in Penobscot,'" that is, at
Machias, "recently seized by 'Mous'r D'Aulnay under a pretence or
color of commerce.'" Here, at least, was indirect assistance
against the troublesome d'Aulnay.30d
La Tour and his
escort, the New-English ketch Mountjoy, managed to trade
their way back up the coast without falling prey to d'Aulnay's
blockaders. On her way back down to Boston, however, the
Mountjoy ran afoul of d'Aulnay's frigate, which escorted her
back to Rivière St.-Jean. There, her captain served as hostage for the
safety of the officer d'Aulnay sent ashore to deliver the March 6
decree. La Tour fumed and fussed of course, but he let
the officer go. At Port-Royal, instead of confiscating
the Mountjoy and its cargo and imprisoning its captain and crew,
d'Aulany purchased their
cargo of fish, giving them "a highly favourable rate,"
before sending them on their way.30e
Aware of La Tour's machinations
in Boston and their potential for success, d'Aulnay saw the need to make amends
with his Puritan neighbors. He had before him a missive
from Governor Winthrop sent to him in early spring of 1644, when he
was still in France, and the recent letter from the new
Massachusetts government, offering the hand of appeasement.
Perhaps fearing that the incarceration of the three merchants at
Pentagouët might have
soured his relations with the Puritans, he penned a syrupy reply to
the Boston magistrates advocating peace between the two colonies.
To make certain that they understood his true intentions, in
mid-October, while Madame La Tour was still in the city,
d'Aulnay sent ten of his men, led by Capuchin friar François-Marie Ignace
de Paris,
to treat with the Boston magistrates. The priest was "'habited
like a gentleman,'" former governor Winthrop noted--an obvious
attempt to play down religious differences. The Puritans
treated the priest with respect and perspicacity, never losing sight
of who had sent him to their city. On October 18, they granted
d'Aulnay a treaty
which recognized Acadia "as 'a province of New
France,'" hinted that Pentagouët lay in French territory,
proclaimed free trade between the colonies, but refused to grant
d'Aulnay assistance in his struggle
with La Tour. The Puritans, instead, suggested that "he
seek ... to make peace with his rival," but "Such a proposal fell on
deaf ears."30c
With more than enough
force to continue his blockade, d'Aulnay had only to wait for an
opportunity to strike a final blow. "He had
succeeded in immobilizing La Tour's only source of military
aid," those powerful friends in Boston, and was confident that,
without their aid, La Tour would soon be finished. In
December 1644, d'Aulnay sent some of his men in two armed chaloupes
to the St.-Jean fort to deliver a message to La Tour's men:
if they deserted La Tour they would be treated well, even
receiving back wages; if not, they would be branded as traitors, the
penalty for which would be harsh. To d'Aulnay's chagrin, "La
Tour's men spurned the offer with scorn and insults." In
mid-February 1645, d'Aulnay learned that
La Tour, desperate for aid from Boston, had gone to the city again,
leaving Madame La Tour in charge of the garrison. And
he learned something else: Madame La Tour and the
Récollet fathers had quarreled bitterly when she urged her husband,
as well as his men, to turn to the Protestant faith. When
La Tour and some of his men responded positively to her
blandishments, "The
outraged superior, Père André Ronsard, called down upon the
sinners the extremest censure of the church--a sentence of
excommunication for heresy." Whatever the actual facts of the
matter may have been, soon after La Tour left for Boston, the
good father and his fellow friar, along with eight or nine of La
Tour's men, embarked for Port-Royal in "an old pinnace 'half
sunk in the water' and two barrels of Indian corn." The
Récollets had stood by Charles La Tour for a dozen years,
defying d'Aulnay at every turn, even going to Boston, that den of
heretics, to assist their patron in the fight against his enemey, but
they could not abide Madame La Tour preaching heresy to
the men, or their patron sanctioning such a thing. D'Aulnay and the Capuchins at Port-Royal welcomed the
friars with open arms. As he had promised, d'Aulnay promptly enrolled La Tour's
deserters and granted them back pay. After interviewing the fugitives and consulting with
his officers, d'Aulnay loaded the Récollets and the deserters into the Grand Cardinal and
hurried to Manawagonish Bay, an anchorage near the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean
where his blockaders had taken up station.
Employing deception, he sent the Récollets and the deserters back to
the fort in hopes that they would be let in
by their former compatriots. The ploy worked.
Unaware that the fugitives approaching their fort had been sent by
d'Aulnay, Madame La
Tour ordered the main gate opened, and she and her men welcomed
their comrades back to fort. The priests and the deserters then
turned on their fellows--with words, not weapons. They incited
the others to join them at Port-Royal and "submit to the King's will."
Realizing their true purpose, Madame La Tour ordered her men
to drive them out of the fort, which was done, amazingly, without
bloodshed. The priests and deserters retreated to their boat
and hurried back to the safety of d'Aulnay's flotilla.30f
D'Aulnay's next
opportunity did not come until April, when the capture of a Boston
relief boat at the entrance to St.-Jean harbor revealed that La Tour
was away from the fort again, visiting his associates in Boston.
Remembering well the fiasco in February, d'Aulnay resolved
to use force this time. He imprisoned the Bostonians--Joseph
Grafton and his men--on a nearby island, probably Partridge Island
at the mouth of the harbor, leaving them "without fire or warm
clothing and only a tattered wigwam for shelter," and there they
remained for 10 miserable days. Having raised 200 men in arms, the largest French force
ever deployed in Acadia, most of them "mustered" from among the
habitants at Port-Royal, d'Aulnay chose to besiege the fort
after softening it up with his superior artillery. On April
13, under cover of darkness, he landed a large party of men "well
down the harbour" with two cannon to form a battery in front of a
weak spot at the rear of the fort's palisade. He then "brought
his ships up in front of the fort, and submitted it to a bombardment
that destroyed part of the parapet." However, aided by a
helpful easterly wind, the fort's gunners drove the Grand
Cardinal behind a point of land, nearly sinking her in the hot
exchange of fire. One of d'Aulnay's men reported 20 killed and
13 wounded aboard the stricken vessel, probably an exaggeration.
Knowing that Madame La Tour had only 45 soldiers and
engagés to defend what was essentially a fortified trading post,
d’Aulnay again demanded that they "submit to the King's orders and
yield the fort to him," and again he was greeted by "catcalls and
insults," as well as a volley of cannon fire. His shore
battery in place, the wind now in his favor, and his powder supply
seemingly inexhaustible, d'Aulnay submitted the fort to another
bombardment on Easter Sunday, April 17. That night, he landed his
infantry force and promised them "the pillage of the place."
Early on the morning of Easter Monday, his men approached the fort
an hour before sunrise. Amazingly, the fort's lookout, a
47-year-old Swiss named Hans Vandre, failed to give the alarm when
d'Aulnay's
men suddenly appeared in the foggy gloom. Some of the
attackers already were inside the fort's shattered
walls when Madame La Tour and her men "caught up their
weapons and rushed to meet them in a mêlée of sword and musketbutt,
pike point and hooked halbred." Overwhelmed by superior force,
Madame La Tour beseeched d'Aulnay to "'give quarter to
all.'" D'Aulnay refused, and more Frenchmen died
in the senseless slaughter. One of the dead among d'Aulnay's
men was Isaac Pesseley, the merchant from Champagne and
adjutant of the garrison at Port-Royal who had come to the colony
with a wife and three children
nine years earlier. Incensed by the stiff resistance, as well as the loss of
so many of his men, d'Aulnay forced one of La Tour's engagés
to execute his fellow survivors, including "some seven or eight men
from Boston," by strangling them slowly at the end of a rope. Compounding the cruelty,
d'Aulnay forced Madame La
Tour to witness the atrocity, purportedly with her hands bound
behind her back and a noose around her
neck. Only André Bernard, the mason who had acted as
executioner; Hans Vandre; Madame La Tour;
and two other women escaped the rope.30a
But
Françoise-Marie Jacquelin did not survive for long. She at
first was given her liberty of the fort, but after she tried to
communicate with her husband "'by means of the savages,'" she was
held in close confinement, probably in chains, "and told she would
be sent back to France under close guard to stand trial for treason
before the King's council." Sometime in May, probably
while still in confinement, she "fell sick from rage," the Capuchins
insisted, and died "in spite of efforts made to save her."
After a solemn funeral service
granted by d'Aulnay, she was buried "somewhere behind the fort in the same
general area as the soldiers' graves," which included the
dead from both sides in the internecine struggle. Her son,
who was four or five years old at the time, had been in the fort
during d'Aulnay's day-long bombardment, witnessed the attack that
killed so many of his father's men, and witnessed his mother's death
a few weeks later. Perhaps to twist the knife on his hated
rival, d'Aulnay sent the son back to France in the company of a
"waiting woman," and the boy likely never saw his father again.30h
.
Not until late June did
Charles La Tour, still in Boston, learn of d'Aulnay's victory
and the fate of his wife. Divested of a wife and son and the
last of his property, the proud La Tour was forced to live on
the charity of his New-English friends. The best of them,
Major Edward Gibbons, in the words of former governor John Winthrop,
also "'was quite undone'" financially by the loss of Fort
Ste.-Marie. Later in the summer, a desperate La Tour
took passage on a fishing boat to Newfoundland, where he sought help
from Sir David Kirke, his father's former nemesis and now a friend,
who the English had made governor of Newfoundland in 1638 as compensation
for the retrocession of Charlesfort and Québec. Kirke
"entertained La Tour in his towered red brick mansion at
Ferryland" and promised him aid, "though not enough to solve all his
visitor's problems." Back in Boston, La Tour spent the
winter of 1645-46 at Samuel Maverick's house on Noddle's Island and
with other benefactors, a number of them, like Maverick, business
associates of David Kirke. In January, La Tour secured
a lease for one of Kirke's pinnaces, the Planter, "to be
repaid from the pelts and merchandise acquired" in a three-month
venture to Cape Berton Island, but La Tour's desperation got
the best of him. He "and several Frenchmen with him conspired
to seize the ship and abandoned its crew on the ice-bound shore,"
one of them shot by La Tour himself. The New Englishmen
were rescued by friendly Indians and sent home to Boston in a
borrowed boat. In the eyes of his former New-English friends,
La Tour was now a pirate. Unwelcome, now, in any
English settlement and determined to stay clear of d'Aulnay's grasp,
La Tour moved on to Canada, visiting friends along the
way--at Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island, where he witnessed a
wedding; and at Île Miscou on the Baie des Chaleurs, where he may
have visited Nicolas Denys. Reaching Québec in early
August 1746, La Tour was welcomed by Governor Charles-Jacques Huault de Montmagny,
successor of the sagacious Samuel de Champlain, who once had quipped
that "the La Tours could always be expected to attend to
their own interests first." La Tour spent the next
four years in Canada, pursuing a busy exile. He fought
Iroquois, engaged in the fur trade, attended baptisms and marriages, and remained
clear of Acadia, Newfoundland, and New England, where he likely
would have swung at the end of a rope.30g
Nicolas Denys,
still in France, raising his new family, followed closely the
struggle between his former associates, no doubt hoping that Charles
La Tour would prevail.
From La Rochelle, he arranged his own fishing and trading ventures
to Newfoundland and especially into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where
he hoped to turn his attention next. Working quietly, he
acquired a concession from
the Company of New France along the Gulf, which he doubtlessly hoped
would place plenty of distance between himself and the grasping
d'Aulnay. Sometime in 1645, during the height of the feud between
d'Aulnay and La
Tour, Denys returned to Acadia, this time with his young family,
and built a new post on the south shore of Île Miscou,
at the southern entrance to the Baie des Chaleurs. As early as
1620, the Récollets, followed by the Jesuits in 1635, had
established small settlements on Miscou and used the island as a
headquarters for their mission activities. French fishermen
had established a station on the island in 1622, wintered over in
1626, and Richelieu's Company had built a fortified post there in 1632.
Denys, ever a champion of the Indians, encouraged more Jesuits to
come to the island. Determined to sustain their efforts as
well as his own interests, Denys ordered his colonists to clear the land and plant
their crops.23
Having vanquished La
Tour and established peace and free trade with Acadia's New
English neighbors, d’Aulnay rebuilt the fort
on Rivière St.-Jean, set up a profitable fur-trading venture there,
and then turned on some of his other former associates, including Nicolas
Denys. He seized Miscou in 1647 and expelled Denys and his
family. D'Aulnay promised to compensate Denys for his losses, but he did
not bother. D'Aulnay also seized Fort St.-Pierre on Cape
Breton Island, which then belonged to Company associate Guilles Guignard and was a key to control of the big
island. Denys and the Company challenged these seizures in the admiralty courts,
but by then d'Aulnay was so well connected at Court
that little could be done to
stop him.31
By 1650, d’Aulnay’s
control of Acadia stood unchallenged. In February 1647, a
decree of the new King, Louis XIV (for whom his mother, Anne of
Austria, still served as regent), had declared d'Aulnay Governor General
and Seigneur of Acadia, his domains extending from the St.
Lawrence all the way to Virginia--"the most sweeping delegation of
vice-regal powers" since Henri IV's grant to the sieur de Mons four
and a half decades earlier. The acquisition by d’Aulnay of La
Tour’s lucrative empire brought him great wealth and undisputed
power, but d'Aulnay's enemies in France did not give in. In late
1647, the Company of New France issued a court challenge to d'Aulnay's assumption of power in Acadia following Razilly's death
and asserted that d'Aulnay had acquired the governorship of the colony
"by an illegal procedure, without consulting the company." The
law suit also alleged that d'Aulnay had neglected the conversion of
the Indians, the same charge that had been brought against the sieur de Mons. Even more troubling for
d'Aulnay, his relationship with
partners Claude de Launay-Rasilly and Emmanuel Le Borgne soon
deteriorated over unpaid obligations. Nevertheless, d'Aulnay
pressed on with his Acadian venture, taking the time in February
1649 to write his will, which revealed a decided turn in his
thinking towards religious piety. Keeping an eye on the
fur trade and its promise of even greater wealth, he also turned his
attention to other enterprises, including lumbering and
the trade in seal oil. Free of his obsession over destroying
La Tour, he also could pay more attention to one of
his original ventures, improving the agriculture settlement in the
Rivière-au-Dauphin valley, for which the law suit back in France insisted "he had
done nothing over the years."32
Contrary to the accusation in the
Company's law suit, d'Aulnay had done what he could to establish an
agricultural base for Acadia. At Port-Royal, Canadian archaeologist
John S. Erskine tells us, d'Aulnay had built not
only a fort, but also "a chapel and a school; he brought over
artisans from France to teach their skills to the colonists; he
continued the conversion and education of the Indians; he improved
the livestock and probably the variety of vegetables and flowers.
In fact, he spent for the benefit of the seigniory far more
money than he had." Another historian avers: "By 1644,
according to a memorandum from d'Aulnay," probably to the Company's
directors, "the habitants of Port-Royal numbered two hundred
men, including soldiers, laborers and other artisans, plus
Capuchins, women, and children who were not enumerated." This
figure did not include the mixed-blood Indian children being raised in the settlement.
A
successful innovation d'Aulnay encouraged among the habitants
was the dyking of the extensive tidal marshes along the Port-Royal
basin. The transplanted Frenchmen, some of them natives of the
marshy regions of western Poitou and the lower Loire valley, employed a
clever device they called an
aboiteau--"a sluice fitted with a clapet
that was forced shut by the rising tide on the seaward side, then
pushed open as the tide fell by water draining from the fields"--to
create their own farmland. In
a few years' time this marvel of engineering could leech the sea salt
from the soil behind the dyke and turn tidal marshes into hay fields
and then into fields of golden grain or whatever else the
habitants
chose to grow there. During the time it took the
aboiteaux to reclaim the briny soil, the dyked fields could serve as rich
pasturage for their sheep and cattle, as well as a source of
salt for themselves and the local fisheries.33
.
Then disaster struck again. Father François-Marie Ignace de Paris, superior of the
Capuchins at Port-Royal, was an admirer of the governor who had gone
twice to Boston on d'Aulnay's behalf. On 21
May 1650, the priest witnessed the governor "return by canoe from the marshes, 'soaked with rain and
mud-stained up to his belt and elbows' after a difficult day
'planting stakes, tracing lines, and marking off with cords another
plot of land to be drained.'" On May 24, a "dark and stormy day,"
d’Aulnay
was paddling from Port-Royal, perhaps to the place where he had
been working three days earlier, when his canoe capsized in the tidal
basin. The swim to shore through the swirling tidal currents
consumed an hour and a half of his energy and determination. Now
well into his middle age, the ordeal was too much for him. "After dragging
himself onto the bank," he died of exhaustion. A few hours later,
a party of Mi'kmaq came upon
the governor's body. They brought it to the north shore of the
basin and sent word to the fort of what had
happened. Father François-Marie Ignace escorted the body back to
Port-Royal and, after a solemn mass of the dead, buried it in
the chapel "in the presence of his wife and all the soldiers and
inhabitants."34
Suddenly the colonists had lost their
most important leader. To be sure, d'Aulnay's ambition, greed, and
aggressiveness had caused chaos throughout Acadia. But it was
d’Aulnay more than anyone who had insured the survival of the
struggling colony. He had encouraged families to put down
roots in the Port-Royal basin, where they could create an agricultural foundation
on which to build a commercial enterprise that would endure.
D'Aulnay's
sudden death left Acadia in great confusion. His leadership
was gone. His creditors were many. And it was anyone’s guess
who would replace him.34a
Nicolas Denys wasted little time taking
advantage of d'Aulnay's sudden passing. In c1651, he returned to Acadia with his older brother Simon and their families.
The brothers expanded their holdings along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and on Cape Breton
Island, with posts on the big island at forts
St.-Pierre, today's St. Peter's, which Nicolas now held, and Ste.-Anne, on an inlet along the middle Atlantic shore not far from
the narrow entrance to the Bras d'Or Lakes, which Simon rebuilt. Both of the Cape Breton posts had existed
years before the Denyss took them over: Charles Daniels had built a post
at Ste.-Anne's in the summer of 1629 near an old French cod-fishing center.
To the south, on the other side of the big island, Richelieu's Company
had built Fort St.-Pierre during the 1630s and awarded the
concession there to Pierre Desportes de Lignères and Jean Tuffet,
whose partnership foundered by 1640.
Tuffet's two sons, André and Louis, resurrected the concession after
their father's death in 1642, but their old partner Desportes pulled
out of the venture in 1645, and the fort fell in disuse. In
1647, Company associate Guilles Guignard was in charge of the fort.
Unfortunately for him, earlier that year, the new French king had
named d'Aulnay governor-general
of Acadia. Taking advantage of his new title and
privileges, d'Aulnay seized Fort
St.-Pierre from Guignard and added it to his own extensive holdings.
D'Aulnay's death offered an opportunity to
Denys and his brother on Cape Breton, and they promptly
took advantage of it.34b
The death of d’Aulnay
also resurrected his
other old antagonist, Charles
La Tour. When the "outlaw" heard that
d’Aulnay was
dead, he left his refuge in Québec and hurried to France, where "he
begged that an inquiry be made into his conduct as well as into the
faults of both he and the Companie de la Nouvelle-France had found
in d'Aulnay's conduct." In February 1651, La Tour
secured from the Queen Regent's government not only a pardon for his
misdeeds, but also the governorship of Acadia! The letters
patent awarding him the governorship granted
him "exactly the same powers that d'Aulnay had received four years
earlier"--such was the fickle nature of the French royal court.
La Tour chose as his lieutenant
Philippe Mius
d’Entremont, an army captain from Cherbourg, Normandy, and
his childhood friend, and
hurried back to Acadia. At Port-Royal, La Tour found
that the representatives of d’Aulnay’s powerful creditors already
had visited the fort there.
Emmanuel Le Borgne, the wealthy La Rochelle merchant and
former agent of the dead governor, insisted that the d’Aulnay estate
owed him 260,000 livres! In November 1650, three months
before La Tour was named governor, Le Borgne
had secured from d'Aulnay's aged father, René
de Menou de Charnisay,
"a formal recognition" of his claims on the dead governor's estate,
which included "'all the dwelling of La Heve, Port Royal, Pentagoet,
the St. John river as well as Miscou, the island of Cape Breton and
other dependencies"--that is to say, all of Acadia! Le Borgne sent an expedition to Acadia the following spring to satisfy the
claim. The Capuchin fathers at Port-Royal tried to protect the
interests of Madame d’Aulnay, but Le Borgne’s men, led by the
creditor's agent, Saint-Mas, pillaged the settlement anyway.
La Tour compounded the widow’s problems by demanding the return
of his old fort on Rivière St.-Jean. She was powerless to stop
him, and so he finally returned to Fort Ste.-Marie to recoup his Acadian fortunes. He
ordered
d’Entremont, who had recently come to Acadia with his
wife and a daughter, to rebuild his old trading post at Cap-Sable.
In July 1653, La Tour awarded the seigneurie of Pobomcoup,
near
the cape, to d'Entremont and another associate, Pierre
Ferrand. This left only Port-Royal and its immediate environs
to the widow d’Aulnay.35
Meanwhile, Le Borgne, still in France, was
determined to recoup what the estate still owed him and to gain
control of the colony. In June 1651, he sent one of his sons
to Boston to improve relations with the New Englanders while
asserting the family's claims. In October, Le Borgne's
men, led by a La Rochelle merchant, probably François Guibourt, and claiming to be agents of
d'Aulnay's widow, seized Chédabouctou
west of Canso, burned La Hève,
and swooped down on forts St.-Pierre and Ste.-Anne on Cape Breton Island.
Nicolas Denys and brother Simon were at their posts on the big
island.
Le Borgne's men slapped them in irons and took them to Québec as
prisoners. They remained for a while in Canada. In May
1652, Nicolas left Québec and built a new post at
Nepisiguit, west of Miscou, along the
southern shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, far from peninsula Acadia.
With him at Nepisiguit was Jean Bourdon de Romainville, whose
wife Madeleine Daguerre "had been raised by Mme d'Aulnay."
Le Borgne's men, meanwhile,
learned that d'Aulnay's widow, at the behest of
the Capuchin fathers, had secured patronage in France from the
influential César, duc de Vendôme, King Louis XIV's uncle. The wily
old duke had demanded, and secured, from the widow's
valet-turned-agent half of her rights to the seigneuries of
Port-Royal, La Hève, Rivière St.-Jean, and on Cape Breton Island. Undeterred, Le Borgne's
men seized
Port-Royal in 1652, imprisoned two Capuchins, Fathers Côme de Mantes
and Gabriel de Joinville, and the widow's agent's mother, Mme de
Brice, and forced them to return to France. Mindful of the
power of the duc de Vendôme, Le Borgne's men left the
widow and her children alone in d'Aulnay's habitation at Port-Royal.37
Determined to stay
clear of Le Borgne's henchmen, to solve the widow’s financial problems as well as his own,
and "to put an end to the disastrous rivalry between their
factions," La Tour agreed to marry
the good woman. Having received no assistance from her patron
in France, and determined to protect her own and her children's
interests, she agreed to the match. The marriage contract was signed at Port-Royal
on 24 February 1653. Among the witnesses were Germain Doucet
de La Verdure and Jacques Bourgeois. The
ceremony took place the following July; Charles was 60 years old
at the time, and Jeanne was 38. He "agreed to look after
d'Aulnay's eight children: the four girls would enter convents
and the four boys, the military." By 1654, Jeanne began
adding to the number of La Tours who would call Acadia home. "His marriage to the widow of the man
who had ruined him and banished him from the colony as a pirate made
Latour sole master of all Acadia, with the exception of the fief
controlled by Nicolas Denys," one historian observes. But
financial matters are seldom solved so easily.36
Le Borgne himself sailed to
Acadia aboard the Châteaufort at the head of a hundred men.
In July 1653, at Port-Royal, he compelled the widow d'Aulnay, now Madame La
Tour, to verify his claims to her late husband's estate. The
paper he compelled her to sign recognized a debt to him of 200,000
livres. To satisfy the claim, Le Borgne seized
Pentagouët and La Hève, which belonged to the widow, and forts St.-Pierre
and Nepisiguit, which belonged to Nicolas Denys, destroying what he
found there. He captured Denys at Nepisiguit and imprisoned
him once again, this time in
the dungeon at Port-Royal, before allowing him to return to France.
In late 1653, Le Borgne also returned to France, where he enticed the duc de Vendôme
into becoming his patron as well.
So armed, by late spring of 1654 Le Borgne had returned to
Acadia aboard the Châteaufort with provisions, merchandise,
and a hundred men, including Pierre Thibodeau of
Poitou, to secure his and the duc's
claims in the colony. Denys, meanwhile, asserted his rights at
Court, and the King's council ruled in his favor. In December 1653, for
15,000 livres, Denys purchased from the Company of New France "the
rights to the coast and islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Cap
Canso to Cap des Rosiers on the Gaspé. This vast territory
included Cape Breton as well as the Îles de la Madeleine, Île
Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), and all other islands in the
gulf." Although the Court did not order compensation for
losses at his holdings on Cape Breton Island and at Nepisiguit,
Denys did return to Acadia with a royal commission, secured in late January 1654, as "governor" of his
former and present domains--some protection, at least for now, from
further depredations at the hands of d'Aulnay's chief creditor.
Back at Fort St.-Pierre in the spring of 1654, Denys warned
his friend La Tour of Le Borgne's
plans to seize him and his fort on Rivière St.-Jean. Le
Borgne learned of the treachery, felt out La Tour's
defenses, realized that an attack against St.-Jean would be ill-advised, and returned
to Port-Royal by the middle of July. There matters stood in
the chaos-ridden colony when the English appeared in overwhelming
force, determined, as before, to remain.36a
The English Seize the Colony Again
Although not directly related, the
turmoil in Acadia mirrored the recent turmoil in France. As
the death of d'Aulnay in 1650 proved to be a turning point in
Acadian history, the rise of France's new monarch, Louis XIV, would
prove to be a turning point in European history. In 1648, the
Peace of Westphalia, actually a series of treaties negotiated at
Osnabrück and Münster in the German province of Westphalia, ended
the Thirty Years' War, which had pitted Catholic Bourbon France
against Catholic Hapsburg Austria and devastated huge swatches of
central and southern Europe. During the long struggle,
Cardinal Richelieu had depended on the powerful French nobles to
provide armies for the fight against Austria and its allies.
While France and its allies were piling up victory after victory
against the Hapsburg states, Richelieu died in 1642. The
following year, Louis XIII died, and his queen, Anne of Austria,
became regent for their four-year-old
son, Louis XIV, but she did rule alone. In subsequent years,
she delegated more and more power to her chief
minister, Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, known to history as Cardinal Mazarin, a protégé of Richelieu, who continued
his predecessor's policy of monarchist centralization. The
Peace of Westphalia found France victorious but exhausted and still
fighting Spain, another Hapsburg kingdom, in a war that had began in
1635. Even more troubling for the kingdom, in January 1648, the year of the Peace, domestic revolt
erupted in Paris and slowly spread to the rest of France--the
so-called Fronde.
The French parlements, a collection of regional appellate
courts, not legislatures, led by the Parlement of Paris, along with some of
the powerful nobles, revolted against the centralizing
policies of Mazarin, which pitted the courts and the nobles against
the queen mother and the new King, who was only 10 years old when
the revolt began. After five years of civil war that
devastated the northeastern and southwestern provinces, the Fronde
ended in 1653. The King, now age 15, never forgot this
challenge to royal authority and encouraged Mazarin to bring the
nation closer to absolute monarchy. The war with Spain, which
was ended,
finally, by the Treaty of the Pyrénées in 1659, included a battle at
Dunkirk, in northwestern France, that saw English "redcoats" make
their first appearance on a continental battlefield, in June 1658.36b
Much also had transpired on the isle of
Great Britain since the English and Scots last held Acadia in 1632.
In the early 1640s, civil war erupted in England, pitting King
Charles I against his recalcitrant Parliament, whose forces
eventually were led by the dour Puritan, Oliver Cromwell. By
1646, after bloody fighting that devastated much of England, the
Roundheads of Parliament defeated the Royalist forces.
Charles, however, was a stubborn Scotsman and refused to follow the
reforms that Parliament exacted from him. War broke out in 1648, and,
again, the Roundheads defeated the Royalists. Cromwell's army and
the so-called Rump Parliament arrested, tried, and
convicted Charles as an enemy of the state! On 30 January
1649, he became the only monarch in English history to be executed
by his own people. His heirs, sons Charles and James, after
taking refuge in Scotland, fled to France and Holland to escape a similar fate.
England became a republic, known as the Commonwealth, which France
recognized in 1652. The following year, England's first
written constitution named Oliver Cromwell Lord Protector, and the
army essentially ruled Great Britain and Ireland until Cromwell's
death in 1658. Meanwhile, in 1652, war had broken out between
the English and the Dutch, which Cromwell ended successfully two
years later.37a
During that struggle, an
English seaborne expedition under Robert Sedgwick of Boston, a
Puritan adherent of Cromwell and former major-general of
Massachusetts militia, was ordered to attack the Dutch colony
at New Amsterdam, in favor of its New-English commercial rival, New
Haven, Connecticut. Before he
could attack Manhattan, however, Sedgwick learned that the war against
the Dutch had ended. One of Sedgwick biographers notes:
"Since his commission from Cromwell of 8 Feb. 1653/54, as general of
the fleet and commander-in-chief of all the New England coast,
authorized him to make reprisals against French commerce for attacks
on English vessels by French privateers commissioned by princes
Rupert and Charles, he resolved to use this power to secure the rich
fur-trading and fishing resources of Acadia for New England and the
Protectorate." "Not one to let men and matériel go to
waste," another historian avers, Sedgwick sailed north on
July 4 with 170 men in three ships, the Augustine, the
Church, and the Hope, as well as a ketch whose name had
been lost to history. During
the second week of July, soon after Le Borgne had left the place, Sedgwick lay
siege to La Tour's Fort Ste.-Marie on Rivière St.-Jean.
After a few days of fighting, Sedgwick accepted the surrender of
La Tour and his 70 men on July 14. As a spoil of "war," he and his
men confiscated a large supply of moose skins. Although
Sedgwick held the "governor" as a prisoner of war, he allowed the
Frenchman "some freedom of movement." At the end of July,
Sedgwick beat back a French ambush in the Port-Royal basin.
After a siege that destroyed the church, the monastery, and the
homes of some of the inhabitants, Sedgwick
seized the Port-Royal fort on August 8. The town's defenses were
commanded by Germain Doucet
de La Verdure
and his lieutenant, surgeon turned merchant Jacques Bourgeois,
who was fluent in English. Naomi Griffiths relates: "At Port
Royal, the situation" for Sedgwick "demanded much more political
subtlety than had been the case at La Tour's fort.... The military surrender" at Port-Royal "was the same accorded La Tour.
The commander, [Doucet de] La Verdure, and his 'soldiers and domestics,'" which
probably comprised many of the local habitants, "were also allowed to
'leave the fort with their arms, drums beating, flags displayed,
fusil on shoulder.'" Sedgwick, whose invasion of Acadia had
been made during a time of "peace" between England and France,
handled the defeated Frenchmen, especially Emmanuel Le Borgne,
with kid gloves. To appease Madame
La Tour, Sedgwick guaranteed her children by d'Aulnay "their
property--furniture, buildings, and cattle." Addressing the
Capuchin missionaries and the local inhabitants, who evidently had
resisted his attack, Sedgwick
negotiated with Le Borgne and Capuchin Father Léonard de
Chartres an agreement that gave them the choice of returning to
France or remaining in Acadia. The settlers who chose to
remain--probably most of them--"were granted freedom of
conscience and the right to remain in their own homes, with whatever
possessions they held, on the condition that they recognized
whatever seigneurial obligations they owed," which doubtlessly
pleased Le Borgne, who, as d'Aulnay's creditor, still claimed seigneurial rights at
Port-Royal. This was good news for the settlers as well, whose
land ownership now was secure. Sedgwick's guarantee of
"freedom of conscience" could be seen as a lack of interest in conversion, as
well as his hope that the settlers would be encouraged now to
question their devotion to papism. Those habitants who chose
to return to France "would be provided with passage at their expense
and they would have ... the right to sell whatever they wished of
their property, providing it was to people who would remain in the
colony." None of the habitants, however, would be
compensated for cattle already taken by Sedgwick's soldiers.
The priests who chose to remain in the colony were ordered not to
settle "within two or three leagues of the fort itself"--another
attempt by Sedgwick to limit the influence of Catholicism among the
French settlers. The capitulation document hints that Doucet
de La Verdure would not remain at the post, that perhaps he would be
taken away as a prisoner. Sedgwick left Port-Royal in charge of
a council of habitants headed by syndic Guillaume Trahan,
the edge-tool maker turned farmer, who was among the signers of the
surrender agreement. That Port-Royal had a syndic--which,
Naomi Griffiths explains, was similar to a secular churchwarden--revealed
that, by 1654, "the settlers were regarded as something more than
colonists with no political identity, under the absolute control of
officials dispatched from France." On his way back to Boston, Sedgwick
seized Pentagouët on September 2 and left it in charge of former
d'Aulnay associate Peter Crushett. Emmanuel Le Borgne returned to France aboard the Châteaufort,
leaving his eldest son, Emmanuel du Coudray, at Port-Royal "as a
token of good faith," and did what he could to maintain his interests in the colony.
Nicolas Denys remained in Acadia, made deals with the new
English overlords, and was left in peace to resume his commercial
operations in what historians have described as "a border colony
between two great empires."37b
Back in Boston by early
September, Sedgwick appointed his son-in-law, Major John Leverett, a
veteran of the English Civil War, as military commander in Acadia.
But before Sedgwick could return in triumph to England, with Charles La Tour in tow,
the General Court of Massachusetts ordered to him to explain his
actions in exceeding his commission from Cromwell. Members of
the Court were especially concerned about the harm Sedgwick's
actions may have done to New English trade with the Acadians.
"Sedgwick's answer to his questioners," Naomi Griffiths
relates, "was the declaration of his
accomplishments, rather than any argued reply." On September
20, the General Court ordered a day of thanksgiving, which Sedgwick
no doubt interpreted as approbation for his actions in Acadia.37d
In
London by December 1654, La Tour "resurrected his Scottish
title" and used the
influence of one of the Kirkes to secure an interview with Cromwell,
which was granted, finally, in the
autumn of 1656. La Tour "asked for the return of his
property on the grounds that England and France had been at peace
when the capture took place." Cromwell refused to compensate
him for the loss of property, agreeing only to recognize his
baronetcy in Nova Scotia. Cromwell also agreed to recognize
Charles La Tour's status as his father's heir. Charles, in turn, must
acknowledge "English allegiance" by taking an oath to the
Commonwealth, pay off his Boston creditors, including Major Edward
Gibbons's widow, and
compensate Sedgwick for the cost of
the Acadian conquest, including maintenance of a garrison at his former fort on Rivière St.-Jean,
an added debt of L1,800!
Defeated, dispirited, too tired to go on, La Tour agreed to
the onerous terms. On 20 September 1656, he ceded Port-Royal, which he claimed was
his, to his new partners, Englishmen Thomas Temple, nephew
of a powerful viscount, and William Crowne, an influential
merchant.
To help raise the L15,000 he needed to pay off his debts to the
Boston Puritans, La Tour surrendered control of the St.-Jean fort
to Temple, and Crowne received the post at Pentagouët. In
exchange, the Englishmen promised to respect his title as Acadia's
"governor," allow him to keep his seigneurie at Cap-Sable,
which would provide a token income, and protect him from Le Borgne,
whom the French court had named proprietary governor of Acadia in
December 1657. The
fort on Rivière St.-Jean no longer his, and having awarded the
seigneurie at Cap-Sable to associates Philippe Mius d'Entremont
and Pierre Ferrand in 1653, the former governor lived probably at Port-Royal in the house his wife had inherited
from d'Aulnay.37c
Charles La Tour died probably at Port-Royal in
the spring of 1663, age about 70; one of his biographers
speculates that he "may well be buried ... not far from his old enemy
d'Aulnay." When he breathed his last, Charles
was a widower again, Jeanne having died the year before giving birth
to their youngest son. Four of his daughters by his first and third wives
married and produced descendants. Paternal lines sprang
from his two sons by Jeanne: Jacques de La
Tour married a
daughter of Charles Melanson dit La Ramée; and Charles
de La Tour, fils, married a Parisian.
Most of the La Tours remained in Acadia, where their father
and grandfather had been prominent players for over
half a century. Displaying the tenacity of their most famous ancestor, the La
Tours asserted their rights to ancestral seigneuries well
into the eighteenth century.37e
Having secured an arrêt against the grasping Le Borgne,
Nicolas Denys, back at Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island, remained in possession of his
many concessions, including
the trade in furs, acquired from the
local Indians, and fishing rights from Gaspé "'as far as Virginia.'"
English possession of peninsula Acadia and the coast of Maine after
1654, however, discouraged him from pushing his fishing operations
south of Canso. From 1654 to 1664, he and his associates made
annual voyages to and from France, leaving for the mother country in May
and returning in October, the hold of their ship filled with cod and
fur. In 1658, the Le Borgnes claimed fishing rights at
Canso, so, the following year, Denys established a new fishing post at
Chédabouctou, today's Guysborough, Nova Scotia, west of Canso, where
he moved his family in 1660. In 1663, Norman trader François
Doublet added to his concessions on the St. Lawrence by obtaining
"the right to exploit the Îles-de-la-Madeleine and Île Saint-Jean
..." in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Since his grant came so
close to Denys's holdings, Doublet informed him of his plans, but
the venture failed within three years. By
1664, Nicolas's own trading ventures were consumed by debt,
and he no longer could acquire enough credit to prosper. But
that was not the worst of his problems. Beginning about 1660,
no doubt with the approbation of the English, Frenchmen A. M. de Cangé or Canger and
the Sieur de La Giraudière, established a fishing post of their own
along Rivière Ste.-Marie on the Atlantic coast, where La Giraudière built
"a fortified house 'with two pieces of brass cannon and some swivel
guns'" south of present-day Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia. Through treachery and influence
peddling, Cangé and La Giraudière attempted to assert their rights
over Denys's concession at Chédabouctou as well. "An armed clash resulted and
the conflict persisted for some years," until Denys was forced to
move his family back to Fort St.-Pierre and return--again--to France
to protect his holdings. In November 1667,
Denys, now in his mid-60s, secured an affirmation of his rights in
Acadia and returned to the colony. A year later, during the
winter of 1668/69, Fort St.-Pierre was consumed by a fire that destroyed his home and what was left of his business there.
Financially ruined, he retreated with his family into virtual retirement at
distant Nepisiguit,
where he wrote his memoirs, entitled Description Géographique et histoire des costes de
l'Amérique septentrionale, avec l'histoire naturelle du païs,
published in two volumes in 1672. Denys hoped the memoir would
stimulate more interest in the colony. Before leaving
for France in 1671 to see to its publication, he designated his only
surviving son, Richard de Fronsac, now in his early 20s, as his
lieutenant. Nicolas's wife Marguerite also was still living.
With son-in-law Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière, husband of
daughter Marie, Madame Denys
would assist her son in supervising the family's affairs.
Unfortunately for his financial interests, Denys's memoirs were not
well received. Moreover, having failed to establish enough
colonists on his far-flung concessions, the Company of New France
had been rewarding many of them--îles-de-la-Madeleine, Chédabouctou, Miscou, Percé--to other proprietors. In
1677, however, Denys received from the intendant of New France an
order granting him control of the coal and gypsum beds on Cape
Breton Island, which others had accessed over the years without
permission or payment. He was still at Paris in
1685, "living in beggary." Perhaps in that same year he
returned to Acadia, but his advanced age--he was in his early
80s--compelled him to leave his remaining business interests to son Richard. Nicolas died probably at Nepisiguit in 1688, in his mid-80s.
Meanwhile, in c1680, Richard married first to an Indian, Anne Patarabego, who gave him a
daughter and a son, and in October 1689 at Québec remarried to Françoise
Cailleteau, daughter of a Canadian merchant who also was a
cousin; she gave him another son. During the autumn of 1685
and the summer of 1686, Richard and his Indian wife hosted not only
New French Intendant Jacques de Meulles,
but also Jean-Baptiste de Saint-Vallier, the Bishop of Québec, at
their manor house, surrounded by a four-bastioned stone fort, at
Miramichi, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore south of Nepisiguit. "In the fall of 1691, Richard ... died at sea. The ship on
which he had embarked for Québec, Le Saint-François-Xavier,
was lost with all hands"; he was only 44 years old. Richard's
older son, Nicolas dit Fronsac, also married an Indian named
Marie. Richard's younger son, Louis, did not marry but died in combat at
age 20 during Queen Anne's War. Nicholas dit Fronsac
and his Indian wife settled at
Beaumont, below Québec, where they raised four children, a daughter
and three sons, but only the daughter married. Nicolas Denys's descendants, then,
like those of his older brother Simon, chose to become
Canadians, not Acadians, eschewing the colony where their
distinguished ancestors had been treated so shabbily.38
Emmanuel Le Borgne refused to give up on Acadia, or at least on his
financial interests there, using his sons to placate and later to harass the English
conquerors. Eldest son Emmanuel du Coudray, age 18 in 1654, remained in Port-Royal as a "hostage"
before returning to France. Unfortunately for Le Borgne,
English military governor Leverett and
his father-in-law, Robert Sedgwick, "enforced a
virtual trade monopoly on French Acadia for their benefit, leading
some in the colony to view Leverett as a predatory opportunist.
Leverett funded much of the cost of the occupation himself, and then
petitioned Cromwell's government for reimbursement. Although
Cromwell authorized payment, he made it contingent on the colony
performing an audit of Leverett's finances, which never took place."
As a result, Leverett was never compensated for the expense.
Meanwhile, after the death of Robert Sedgwick in May 1656, Cromwell
awarded rights in Nova Scotia to Colonel Thomas Temple, nephew of
Lord Fiennes, a member of Cromwell's council. In May 1657, after arriving
from Boston, Temple removed Leverett as military commander and
consolidated his interests in the colony. These included posts
claimed by the Le Borgnes; La Tour's old fort at the
mouth of Rivière St.-Jean; a new post upriver at Jemseg; and Pentagouët
on the Penobscot, from where Temple "spent most of his
time and energy asserting his personal rights to the fur trade."38a
Naomi Griffiths tells us
that, at the time, "England's interests [in Nova Scotia] were of
minor concern in London, but a matter of considerable attention and
concern for merchants and policy makers in Boston." One
suspects that in the last years of Mazarin's rule, French interests
in Acadia also took a back seat to other matters plaguing the court
of the young King. Nevertheless, in November 1657, the Company of New France awarded
Le Borgne, up to then only d'Aulnay's creditor, a huge grant in
Acadia, excluding from his domain previous grants the Company had
given to Denys and La Tour. In its grant to Le
Borgne, the Company stipulated that the border in Maine between
French Acadia and New England lay along the St. George River,
southwest of Penobscot Bay. The following month, on December
10, seeing that Charles La Tour
had succumbed to the English, Mazarin revoked La Tour's
patents and named Le Borgne as proprietary governor of
Acadia. Le Borgne did not return to "his" colony,
however, but sent his sons there instead. In May
1658, Alexandre, only 18 years old, "at the head of a force of fifty
men," retook the fort at La Hève and then attacked Temple's fort at
Port-La Tour, near Cap-Sable. Temple hurried to Acadia from Boston,
counterattacked, wounded the young Le Borgne,
captured him, and took him to Boston and then to London, where he
was "held captive for some years." In November 1658, the
French ambassador to England "delivered a strongly worded complaint
to the English government to the effect that the English had
attacked Port Royal, Saint John, and Pentagöuet, burned the church,
and committed other damage." The French thus were reminding
the English that "there still remained a French colony south of the
Gaspé peninsula." To appease the French, with whom the English
were
still at "peace," in September 1659 Temple
agreed to return La Hève to the Le Borgnes.38e
Cromwell had died in 1658 and was succeeded as Lord Protector by
his feckless son, Richard, who soon abdicated his vaunted position. The restoration of Charles II to
the English throne in 1660 led to the repudiation of
Cromwell's colonial grants and threatened Temple's hegemony in Nova
Scotia.
Claimants for grants in the colony included Thomas Elliott, a court
favorite, and Sir Lewis Kirke, heir of Sir William Alexander.
The King named Elliott governor of Nova Scotia, but Temple bought him out. By 1662, Temple "had managed to consolidate
his position as the appointed English authority for Acadia, albeit
at some financial cost, and had been granted a knight baronetcy"--he
now was Sir Thomas Temple. In 1664, he "forced out some French
fishermen at Port Rossignol and established himself there and at Mirliguèche," demonstrating that he had
every intention of exerting his rights in the colony. "Acadia,
commonly called Nova Scotia," then fell quiet. In late
summer of 1664, about
the time Temple had taken Port Rossignol and Mirliguèche, an English
force led by Richard Nicolls seized New Amsterdam from Dutch governor Peter
Stuyvesant and renamed it New York, after Charles II's brother,
James, Duke of York and Albany. Nine years before, in 1655,
the one-legged Stuyvesant had conquered, without firing a shot, the
adjacent colony of New Sweden on the lower Delaware River, so the
seizure of New Netherland gave England
undisputed hegemony over the vast littoral between Spanish Florida
and Cape Breton Island. Nicolls's bloodless victory at New
Amsterdam helped ignite the Second Anglo-Dutch War in March 1665. Louis
XIV took advantage of the conflict and invaded the Spanish Netherlands.
Despite a number of victories over a superior Dutch navy, the
English suffered humiliating defeats in both England and Virginia.
The treaty ending both wars was signed in the Dutch city of Breda in July 1667:
England would retain
control of New York colony, but the treaty "spelled ruin for Temple" by
restoring
Acadia to France. On 31 December 1667, Charles II
ordered Temple to surrender "the five Acadian forts" to Morillon Du
Bourg, the French commissioner empowered to carry out the provisions
of the Breda treaty in Acadia. Letters patent "naming
specifically 'the forts and habitations of Pentagoet, St. John, Port
Royal and Cape Sable'" were issued in mid-February 1668.
Temple and the General Court of Massachusetts protested vigorously
against the retrocession. Temple insisted that Pentagouët
belonged to "New Plymouth," not to Acadia, and laid the foundation
for decades of conflict over the boundaries of Nova Scotia and
Acadia. In August 1668, Charles II ordered Temple to "'forbear delivery'" of the colony.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Le Borgne named
his son Alexandre as titular governor of Acadia; Alexandre, only 28
years old, assumed the name Le Borgne de Bélisle. In
October 1668, Du Bourg, with the young governor, sailed along the Acadian coast so
that the commissioner could see what the English soon would return
to the French. During the journey, Du Bourg "officially
installed Belle-Isle in command of the colony." In
Boston, Du Bourg learned from Temple of Charles II's August order that "the island of St. Christopher was to be surrendered to the
English before Acadia was returned to the French...." The
young Bélisle, meanwhile, had retaken the fishing settlement
of Port Rossignol. Temple complained about the seizure to Du
Bourg, who advised Bélisle to return to France. Finally, in
August 1669, London ordered Temple "to comply with the terms of the
peace treaty and deliver the colony to the French." Alexandre,
meanwhile, remained in France until the English finally
surrendered the colony. But when he returned to Acadia he did not do so as the colony's governor. By then, the French
Court finally
had come to the realization that, in the
colony's six and a half decades of existence, government by monopoly
and proprietary fiat had been an utter failure. As a
result, Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle "served" as the last
proprietary governor of French Acadia.38f
.
The inhabitants of Port-Royal,
meanwhile, continued to live as they had done since the first of
them had arrived in the basin with d’Aulnay during the late 1630s.
None of them likely had been around during the chaos of the 1620s,
but a few of them could remember the resumption of strife after
Razilly's untimely death in 1636. More immediate were the
struggles between d'Aulnay and La Tour; among Le
Borgne, La Tour, and Denys; and
the present difficulties between the Le Borgnes and the new
English overlords. The turmoil took its toll on recruitment
back in France, but there were other factors limiting growth
in French-controlled Acadia. Naomi Griffiths
explains: "The slow growth of the European population in the
colony since 1636 was partly the result of French migration patterns
and partly of the strife between the Acadian leaders, which had
affected the pace and manner of settlement of the colony, its
religious life, and its attitude towards its English Protestant neighbours. Both
d'Aulnay and Le Tour had organized the
passage of quite a considerable number of people across the Atlantic
between 1636 and 1650. However, the majority were men brought
over primarily for military purposes, whether as soldiers or as
craftsmen, and for limited service contracts. A few,
particularly craftsmen, determined to settle after their contract
was ended, but the majority were part and parcel of those who saw
the Atlantic as something that did not pose much greater dangers
than a long journey overland--a dangerous passage, perhaps, but one
they intended to cross in both directions. Such were the
craftsmen recruited by La Tour's agent, Guillaume Desjardins,
whose contracts still exist: gunsmith and carpenter in 1640;
nail maker and blacksmith, wood sawyer, baker, and mason in 1641.
Similarly, d'Aulnay brought over such craftsman through Emmanuel
Le Borgne. There is no evidence to suggest that any of
these individuals remained after their contracts were ended."
The craftsmen who did remain faced a very different world than the
one they had known back in France. There, in making a living
for themselves and their families, they would have been confined to
the use of their particular skills, tightly regulated by the guild
system. But Acadia was a North American frontier, with
economic verities of its own. "In Port Royal," Griffiths
continues, "there were some specialized craftsmen, especially smiths
and carpenters, but all settlers would find it useful, if not
imperative, to have some knowledge of woodwork and smithing.
Hard and fast categories of occupation, exclusive reliance upon one
activity, would be a great handicap in the early decades of the
colony. Most men would hunt, fish, farm, carpenter, and repair
tools."38b
Another circumstance that may have
limited emigration to Acadia, especially by farmers, was the nature
of land tenure at La Hève and Port-Royal during the late 1630s and
1640s. Griffiths tells us there "is no record of the
terms on which the land was actually worked. Comments were
made by Denys to the effect that d'Aulnay treated the settlers as
'serfs, without allowing them to make any gain.' There is some
evidence, from a generation later, that the terms might have been
those of sharecroppers, ownership of the land being retained by
d'Aulnay and rent paid in the form of a percentage of the crop
harvested. Equipment, seed, and animals would be provided as
well by d'Aulnay against this share in the products." The
death of d'Aulnay and especially the arrival of the English in 1654
significantly changed the nature of land tenure in the Port-Royal
basin. Even though Robert Sedgwick and Thomas Temple did not
impose on Port-Royal a New English system of land holding,
their successor's failure to reinforce French
customs "meant that Acadian land tenure began to resemble the
traditional English freehold system rather than a seigneurial
system."38d
The women who remained in the colony,
either wives or daughters, "were fully occupied," Griffiths explains. "Domestic
tasks were their domain, food and clothing the major products."
Yet, unlike their husbands and fathers, the life of most women on
the Acadian frontier perhaps was not so very different from what
they would have known back in France. "Women had
responsibility for the preparing and preservation of food, and, as
often as not, the responsibility for dairy and poultry products. As well, the care of the garden,
once the land had been dug, was theirs. The preservation of
food, both long and short term, meant the preservation of meat, by
salting and drying. It involved the making of all forms of
preserves, jams, and jellies and the storing of vegetables and
fruits for the winter. At the same time, while tailors had
come out to the colony, the majority of textiles were spun, woven,
dyed, and sewn at home. More than anything else, however,
children ensured that women's lives were centered upon the
household."38c
By the early 1650s, although families
were only in the first and second generations and socioeconomic
institutions were still in their infancy, Port-Royal was becoming an island of domestic
tranquility in a tossing sea of commercial and imperial rivalry.
In 1640, the colony held "some 120 colonists and 40 soldiers."
In 1644, d'Aulnay counted 200 colonists, including
soldiers, artisans, and laborers. By 1650, the population "had
reached no more than 300 people, or some fifty families." As
their numbers grew by natural increase, the settlers moved farther
up the basin and into the valley above it, creating new farm land
with their clever aboiteaux. While being held at Port-Royal in 1653, Nicolas Denys observed the
remarkable growth of the settlement: "There are numbers of
meadows on both shores, and two islands which possess meadows, and
which are 3 or 4 leagues from the fort in ascending," he wrote in
his memoirs, published many years later. "There is a great
extent of meadows which the sea used to cover, and which the Sieur
d'Aulnay had drained. It bears now fine and good wheat."
He described how the settlers moved steadily upstream to get away
from the prying eyes of the authorities at the fort and to create
more farmland from the marshes. "There they have again drained
other lands which bear wheat in much greater abundance than those
which they cultivated round the fort, good though those were.
All the inhabitants there are the ones whom Monsieur le Commandeur
de Razilly had brought from France to La Have; since that time they
have multiplied much at Port Royal, where they have a great number
of cattle and swine." Denys observed all of this about the
time the English seized the colony. "Although we may accept
Denys’s belief that [the inhabitants at Port-Royal] gave up their
homes near the fort to move away from immediate English
surveillance," Andrew Hill Clark concedes, "the direction
of the move was a natural one if they were seeking more marshlands
and there is no evidence that the English paid much attention to
them. Certainly their new masters, whether from New or old
England, had not the slightest interest in settling or actively
developing the part of Acadia they controlled: their interest
was solely in furs and in the control of Indian attacks on New
England, and the Acadians at least were protected from attacks from
that area." Moreover, even if their new English
masters had paid close attention to the dyking operations above and
below Port-Royal, they would have scorned them. "Few, if any,
of the British realized the agricultural sophistication of the
Acadian efforts," a student of the aboiteaux builders
asserts. "They demeaned the Acadians' dyking prowess by
declaring the French to be too lazy to clear stones and stumps from
the adjacent rocky hillsides in the tried and true British pioneer
axe-swinging tradition," as English colonists were then doing in New
England and Virginia. Happily, a change in masters at
Port-Royal had not
ended the trade that was essential to Acadia's survival; it, in
fact, had only redirected it. Commerce that had once linked
Port-Royal to France and Québec now centered on Boston.
Unfortunately for the Acadians who moved higher up the valley, they
found themselves stuck in a virtual cul de sac which tended to limit
their access to New-English trade.39
Back in France, momentous changes at
the highest levels of government would have a dramatic effect on the
future of Acadia. Cardinal Mazarin died in March 1661, and
Louis XIV, now age 23, "initiated major administrative reforms,
laying the foundation both for internal development and for overseas
expansion. Building upon the work of the great cardinals,
Richelieu and Mazarin, the monarch brought under his own supervision
the authority previously vested in the major institutions of the
state. He asserted control over all official government
correspondence, and thus over most official government action, by
announcing on 10 March 1661 that, in future, all ministers would
'assist me with your counsels when I ask for them' but 'not sign
anything, not even a passport ... without my command.'" He
then went on to pare down the administrative centre of the
government, the king's council," which once numbered 30 or more
members, most, if not all of them, powerful nobles. Now, the
High Council, as it came to be called, consisted of only three
members besides the King: a secretary of war, a secretary of
state for foreign relations, and a superintendent for finances, not
all of them members of the ancient nobility. In 1663, the King
revoked the charter of the Company of New France. "This did
not signal the end of trading companies as an arm of French
expansion in North America," Naomi
Griffiths tells us. "[I]n fact, such companies became both
more numerous and larger over the next decades. It did mean,
however, the curtailment of their role as an arm of government.
Henceforth, until 1763, French affairs in North America would be the
direct responsibility of the crown. In practice, 'New France
was now a province with the same royal administrative structures as
the other provinces of the European homeland: a military
governor; an intendant in charge of justice, public order and
financial administration; and a system of royal courts.'
Colonial affairs were now to be the business of the Ministry of the
Marine in Paris, and, in 1663, this ministry was one of Colbert's
responsibilities." This was Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, the King's new superintendent of finances, who also served as director of colonial
affairs. In 1663, the King decreed, and Colbert implemented, a
major reorganization of the government in New France. The
office of governor in Canada would give way to that of
governor-general, who would maintain a seat at Québec. A Conseil-Souverain,
or Sovereign Council, also would sit at Québec. Its membership
included the governor-general, the bishop (at the time still only a vicar-apostolic), and an intendant. The 23 March 1665 commission for
Intendant Jean Talon, Comte de Orsainville, "stated
explicitly that his authority included the supervision of financial
and judicial matters throughout 'Canada, Acadia, the island of
Newfoundland and other countries of France in North America.'"
That summer, the King sent to Canada the Carignan-Salières Regiment,
"the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the
French government." The new French viceroy, Alexandre de
Prouville, marquis de Tracy, employed the French regulars, along
with Canadian militia, to chastise the Iroquois and to intimidate
the English in upper New York.39b
To underscore his new colonial policy, Colbert ordered the
habitants at
Port-Royal not to abandon their settlements in the face of English
occupation; he was confident the colony soon would be restored to
France. Some families defied Colbert’s order and returned to
the mother country or moved on to Canada, but many, if not most, of them,
refused to abandon their farms in the Port-Royal
valley. This was their home now. They had
begun the unconscious process of becoming Acadians, not just
Frenchmen. Their sons and daughters had grown up and found suitable
mates among their neighbors. Married sons moved even farther
up the valley and, with the help of family and friends, wrested from the
salt marshes new plots of ground on which to raise food for families
of their own. The older folks looked forward to the birth of
grandchildren and the blessings of an extended family. A
spirit of independence and self-sufficiency had taken hold of these
French farmers. France, in spite of herself, had planted
sturdy roots in the troubled soil of Acadia.39a
Return of French Control and
the First Acadian Census
Despite Colbert’s optimism, the English
clung to Acadia, including the entire coast of Maine, even after
the Treaty of Breda was signed in July 1667. The English governor at the time, still Sir
Thomas Temple, delayed turning over the colony
to France as long as he could. In July 1669, Louis XIV
commissioned 42-year-old Hector d’Andigné de Grandfontaine, former captain of the
Carignan-Salières Regiment and scion of an ancient noble family, to take possession of Acadia
for France. A mishap off the coast of Portugal near Lisbon in
January 1670 delayed the expedition. In February, the King appointed Grandfontaine
governor of Acadia for three years. In March, Grandfontaine set out for Boston
again, this time aboard the St.-Sébastien with
"some forty soldiers,
thirteen officers, and eight aspiring colonists" in tow; one of
those officers was Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
an 18-year-old ensign, destined to contribute much to Acadian history. Temple, meanwhile, had been ordered in August 1669 "to comply with the terms of the peace treaty and deliver the colony
to the French." When Grandfontaine
reached Boston in early summer of 1670 and presented to Temple
letters from both Charles II and Louis XIV, the Englishman saw no
choice but to give up the colony; he received the new French
governor "courteously." On July 7, Temple agreed upon the
conditions of "restitution" and directed his deputy governor in Nova Scotia, Captain
Richard Walker, "and all other officers to deliver
'Acadia and the forts of Pentagoet, St. John, Port Royal, Laheve and
Cape Sable to M. Grandfontaine, the representative of His Most
Christian Majesty, Louis XIV.'" Grandfontaine left Boston
on July 17 and took possession of the stone fort at
Pentagouët on August 5. Following instructions from Colbert de Terron, the
intendant of Rochefort, Grandfontaine
established his headquarters at Pentagouët, near the disputed border
with New England; further orders from France informed him that he would
be "subordinate to the governor and intendant of
Canada," which at the time were
Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle and Jean Talon. From
Pentagouët, Granfontaine sent his second-in-command, Pierre de Joybert
de Soulanges et de Marson, who had served as his lieutenant in
Canada, to oversee the surrender of the other posts. The
English garrison at Jemseg on Rivière St.-Jean surrendered
to Joybert on August
27; it was the only new post Temple had built in the colony during
his 12 years of control there.
The other posts occupied by the English had been established by the French decades before,
though Temple and his lieutenants had done what they could to shore
up their defenses and make them more livable. Port-Royal
surrendered on September 2, followed by La Hève and La Tour's
old fort at
Cap-Sable.40
Sixteen years of English occupation
were
over. Acadia was finally back in French hands, this time under
royal governance. The new Acadian governor, Naomi Griffiths observes, "had charge of a vast territory, comprising land now held by Maine,
New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and was expected to
establish French control over the coastline south of Pentagöuet to
the Kennebec as well as the area northeast along the coast, across
the Bay of Fundy to Cape Breton. He was also expected to
oversee the Atlantic coast from Canso to the Gaspé peninsula,
including what would become Prince Edward Island and all of
present-day New Brunswick, as well as the area inland from the Bay
of Fundy to the source of the St. John, if not farther north."
Yet, with only 40 men and 13 officers, Grandfontaine could garrison
only Pentagouët, Jemseg, and Port-Royal; his force was too small to
hold any other place. "He had no naval support whatsoever, and
had, in fact, purchased a ketch from Temple to give himself swift
communication between Pentagöuet and Port Royal." And then
there were the original dwellers of the vast lands claimed by the
French: "Within these lands the Mi'kmaq and the Malecite lived, convinced
that they had never surrendered to the Europeans either permanent
ownership of the land or sovereignty over their communities.
Not only were they, at this time, much more numerous than the
settlers but without their cooperation the fur trade, one of the
major economic staples of the colony, would collapse."40a
.
The years of English occupation,
ironically, had been beneficial for the relative hand full of Acadian settlers. During
the time of English control, trade between
Acadia and New England became even more lucrative for all involved,
and there had been a notable growth of settlement in the Port-Royal
basin. Andrew Hill Clark points out that
"there was a substantially larger number of settlers up the Port
Royal River above the fort than there had been sixteen years
earlier; in Acadian terms almost a generation had grown up."
He adds: "Documentation on the conditions of settlement and
agriculture is almost completely lacking. It has been inferred
that after 1654 many of the French settlers moved on to Quebec or
returned to France. For those who remained (and they were, we
think, the majority), we have to assume the gradual but inexorable
increase of numbers and expansion of agriculture, the planting and
reaping of grain, peas, flax, and vegetable crops, and the tending
of sheep, swine and cattle. If the period is largely a
tabula rasa in the historical record, it was nevertheless
one of consolidation and expansion of this nucleus of the Acadian
population." Grandfontaine's biographer, however, offers this
cautionary note: "The population of Port-Royal, abandoned to
its own resources, was managing to live off its crops and its herds,
but lacked clothes and tools. Isolation had also developed the
spirit of independence," which would not have been applauded by the
new royal governor.41
With the resumption of French control
in Acadia, immigration into the colony resumed in earnest, and the
Acadians' trade with New English merchants, now more or less illicit
but still an essential part of Acadian life, continued unabated. Members of the Carignan-Salières Regiment arrived with Grandfontaine and his
lieutenants, and some of them married Acadian as well as native women. In the
spring of 1671, Colbert de Terron sent 60 new settlers, including a
woman and four girls, to Acadia aboard
L’Oranger. Other settlers
arrived from Canada.42
Evidently before L'Oranger
reached Port-Royal, Grandfontaine, following orders from France,
directed Father Laurent Molin, parish priest at Port-Royal, to
conduct a census of the colony’s inhabitants. The Récollet
finished his work that November. In
the first Acadian census on record, Father Molin counted at
Port-Royal 68
families and about 260 inhabitants with "some 419
acres of land cleared and farmed and around five hundred cattle in
pasture, along with more than five hundred sheep, three dozen goats,
and at least thirty pigs." Naomi Griffith
observes that, during the previous two decades, Port-Royal "had become
multi-generational and contained people of all ages"--from 96 years
to 2 days old. The census counted 15 sets of grandparents,
including several who "had children of their own who were younger
than one or more of their grandchildren." Griffiths makes
other telling observations, gleaned from Father Molin's census,
about the families in the colony's capital: "if Port Royal could boast
three generations among its settlers in 1671, it was very much a
youthful community, with 114 children aged ten or under, of whom 19
were less than a year old. When those aged between ten and
fifteen are included, the total reaches 162. While the
evidence does not allow the conclusions about fertility rates per
se, it does permit a comment on the standard of living.
Conception does not take place if a woman is exhausted or underfed.
There were eighteen households in which the wife was twenty-five
years or younger; more than half of the women had borne their first
child before they were eighteen, four of them at age age of sixteen,
five at seventeen. Further, not only did these women begin
their families at a young age, they also had a number of children.
Among them, nineteen women accounted for thirty-one youngsters.
Four had borne a child roughly every two years. ... The
seventeen women living in the colony who were forty-six years and
over had borne ninety-three children between them. Their
family size ranged from the childless state" of one couple to "three
families of eleven children.... Genetic endowment and lack of
disease obviously affected both birth and survival rates, but a good
food supply was a necessary factor for the bearing and rearing of so
many young. It is clear that Acadia had had no major food
shortages for over two decades nor any major epidemic of measles or
chickenpox or smallpox. These were the childhood illnesses
which, with others, such a typhoid, whooping cough, and the plague,
kept the death rate among children so high in seventeenth-century
France There, at the same period, 'out of every hundred
children born, twenty-five died before they were one year old,
another twenty[-]five never reached twenty and a further twenty-five
perished between the ages of twenty and forty-five.'"43b
Noting the contrasts in land and animal
holdings among the Port-Royal settlers, as well as the nature of
their dwellings, Griffiths observes: "There was obviously a
considerable difference in the circumstances of those with lands and
herds and those with little or no land and few animals. But a
number of factors mitigated against the immediate development of
strong social and economic divisions with the community.
Cooperative work was crucial if the migrants were to survive the
first years in their new circumstances. Whether shared or
single-family dwellings, the housing in Port Royal would have been
built cooperatively. Even the simplest of shelters, whatever
the material used, whether logs, planks, or stone, demanded a great
deal of physical labour for its construction. We know more
about the building of the forts and trading posts in the colony at
this time than we yet do about the construction of the average
house. Ongoing [2005] archaeological work in the Annapolis
[Port-Royal] valley, however, indicates that the average dwelling of
the early settler was sturdily constructed with a good cellar and
chimney structure. The materials used included stone and sawn
planks more often than logs. Chinks in the walls were filled
in with tamped clay and grasses." Griffiths continues:
"However simple such dwellings might seem, a man and his wife needed
their neighbours to help. Further, the need to build the dykes
and establish the physical environment of barns and wharfs, not to
mention the church and the fort, made all members of the community
interdependent. Demography, too, reinforced connections
between people. The smallness of the population, limited
immigration, and the social demands of lives lived in relatively
immobile circumstances meant that the pool of available marriage
partners for young adults between 1654 and 1671 was more or less
restricted to their neighbours. In sum, the early years
of settlement demanded a general civility in the community, if a
reasonable standard of living for any and all was to be achieved,"
what one specialist has called "mutuality." Griffiths adds: "... those who settled Port Royal, having left
differing circumstances of life in the various regions of France,
were now constrained to accept one another and set about the
establishing of a community. When examining social
stratification among the Acadian community in 1671, one must
remember that most of the community had only just migrated to the
colony and family relationships through marriages of the second
generation were of major importance. Social stratification
would sharpen over the next decades, with the growth of the colony,
but any analysis of wealth at this point must pay considerable
attention to the family relationships and whether or not there was a
marketable skill in the family."43c
Griffiths concludes:
"... Port Royal in 1671 was an agriculturally based community,
with a standard of living that supported family growth. Its
livestock holdings compared favourably with those of similar
communities elsewhere, both along the St. Lawrence and in
Massachusetts. But it was also more than this. It was a
developing community, embedded in the larger society of
transatlantic European migration. The settlement was also
linked to the activities of other settlers and traders within the
colony, and, above all, it had established trading patterns with
Boston merchants. The perception that Port Royal was somehow a
sleepy gathering places of peasants, relocated from one static
cultural tradition to another, cannot be substantiated. At a
most elemental level, the small community had to have regular
contact with larger centres. It was not, at this point in
time, capable of sustaining itself without trade, whether with other
settlements in North America or with Europe. The settlers
imported goods both for trade with the Mi'kmaq and as necessities in
their own lives; textiles and tools, guns, shot and powder.
They also bought a variety of articles that, if not strictly
necessary, were of great importance: shoes and stockings,
tobacco, and foodstuff, such as sugar, wine and spirits, oil and
vinegar. Between 1654 and 1671, the majority of such goods
came from Boston. French officials were appalled to discover
that this trade was not significantly altered by the arrival of
Grandfontaine." Moreover, "Port Royal had become the most
significant Europeans settlement in an area of interest to
fishermen, fur traders, and would-be migrants from both England and
France. This meant the presence in the region of a highly
mobile population of speculators and a steady trickle of official
military and political personnel from across the Atlantic. The
local governance and politics of Port Royal were, however
intermittently and haphazardly, part and parcel of a more general
structure. Thus Guillaume Trahan, recognized as a
syndic in 1654, was reported in 1671 as a marechal, someone
who represented, at the very least, a delegated authority for law
and order. Fishing vessels brought news and ideas to the area,
as well as the occasional migrant. Those few priests who
visited the colony, even during the years of English control, were
another source of information. Nor were the inhabitants
themselves people inclined to accept, without question, official
directives. Migrants are often people who had already
displayed a great deal of initiative in the organization of their
lives, having usually left the countryside for the town as a first
step towards migrating across the Atlantic. Even those
migrants who came directly from the countryside were people who
sought a better life than the one they had known, one that would
improve both their economic standard of living and their position
within the social structure. The general temper of the early
settlers was one of independence, something that officials, sent
from France to North America, would frequently deplore in the coming
decades."43d
Father Molin also counted much
smaller populations at Cap-Nèigre (a man, a woman, and three
children), Pobomcoup (three men, three women, and eight children), and
Rivière-aux-Rochelois, also called Port-Rochelois, now Port Razoir,
near Cap-Sable; at Pentagouët in Maine (one family and 25 soldiers); at Musquodoboit on the
Atlantic shore (13 residents); and at St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island
(three families with five children); but he failed to count the settlers
on Nicolas Denys's concessions at Île Miscou and Nepisiguit.
In spite of its shortcomings, however,
here was a list of the First Families of Acadia. On it were
Frenchmen who had lived in the colony for over three decades.43
The First Families of Acadia
Few of the men who fathered these first
European families were fur traders or fishermen, as in the early
days. Some were artisans, laborers, soldiers, sailors, clerks,
and even high officials. Most, however, were farmers--laboureurs, as the French called them--sturdy
members of the peasant class who put down deep roots in the rich
soil of Acadia--soil that they themselves literally were creating
with their running dykes and clever aboiteaux.44
In the first census could be found the
names of two families whose progenitors had come to the colony with
Razilly in the early 1630s:
Germain
Doucet, sieur de La
Verdure, had come to Acadia in his middle age and may have been
alive in 1671 (he would have been in his late 70s), but he evidently was not
in Acadia. After the English seized the colony in 1654, the "captain at arms"
seems to have returned to France.
Counted in the 1671 census, however, were Germain's two grown sons,
Pierre and Germain, fils, who had remained in the colony.
Pierre became a
bricklayer and, when he was nearly age 40, married Henriette, daughter
of Simon Pelletret and Perrine Bourg and stepdaughter of René Landry
l'aîné, in c1660, when she was in her early 20s. Between
1661 and 1671, Henriette gave Pierre five children, two daughters
and three sons. Pierre, a farmer,
was age 50 at the time of the census, and Henriette was 31.
With them were their five children.
They lived on four arpents of land along the basin and owned
seven head of cattle
and six sheep. Between 1674 and 1685, Henriette would give Pierre
five more children, three sons and two daughters, 10 children in
all, including
five sons and four daughters who created families of their own. Pierre's younger
brother (likely stepbrother) Germain,
fils, also a farmer,
married Marie, daughter of René Landry l'aîné and
Pérrine Bourg, in
c1664. Marie was a stepsister of Germain, fils's brother
Pierre's wife Henriette. Between 1665 and 1669, Marie gave
Germain, fils three sons. He was age 30 at
the time of the census, and Marie was 24. They lived with
their sons on three arpents of land and owned 11 head of
cattle and seven sheep. Marie was pregnant when Father Molin
came around. Between 1671 and 1685, Marie would give Germain, fils
six more children, four sons and two daughters, nine children in
all, including five sons and a daughter who
would create families of their own. Also in the census was
Germain,
père's older daughter Marguerite, called Marie-Judith by the
census taker, age 46, married to gunsmith Abraham Dugas, age
55. Germain,
père's second daughter, her name lost to history, had
married colonist Pierre Lejeune dit Briard in c1650,
but they do not appear in the first census. They may have left
Acadia by then, or both may have died before the first census was
taken.43a
Pierre
Commeaux, as Father Molin
called him,
the barrel maker, was still alive in 1671 and still working as a
cooper at age 75. He had married 18-year-old Rose Bayon
in c1649, when he was 51. Rose may have come to the colony as
a child aboard the St.-Jehan in 1636. Between 1650 and
1665, Rose gave Pierre nine children, six sons and three daughters.
Pierre was age 75 at the time of the census. Father Molin did
not give Rose's age, but she would have been about 40 in 1671.
Living with them on six arpents of land were seven of their unmarried children, five sons and two daughters.
They owned 16 head of cattle and 22 sheep. Also counted in the first census was their oldest son Étienne, age
21, also called a Commeaux, who had married Marie-Anne, daughter of Martin Lefebvre
and Barbe Bajolet of La Rochelle, the year before the census. Marie-Anne also was age 21 in 1671. Étienne and Marie-Anne were living with one child, an infant daughter, on "no
cultivated land," but they did own seven head of cattle and seven sheep.
Between 1671 and 1676, Marie would give Étienne two more children, a
daughter and a son. The son would create a family of his own.
Four of Étienne's brothers and all three of his sisters also would
create their own families.47
A few of the passengers who
had come to Acadia aboard the St.-Jehan in 1636 were still living
at Port-Royal when the first census was taken:
Pierre
Martin of
St.-Germain de Bourgeuil, a farmer, and his wife Catherine
Vigneau had come
to the colony aboard the St.-Jehan in 1636.
Between 1631 and 1649, in France and Acadia, she had given him seven
children, four sons and three daughters, two of whom, both sons, had
died soon after their arrival. In 1671, the aged
couple--Pierre was 70, and Catherine 68--lived on two arpents of land and owned seven head of cattle
and eight sheep. Father Molin also counted five of their
surviving children, four of whom were married: Marie, age 35,
was counted with husband
Pierre Morin, age 37; Andrée, age 30, with husband François Pellerin,
age 35; and Marguerite, age 27, with husband Jean Bourg, age 26.
Older surviving son Pierre, fils, called le jeune, age 45, and his
wife Anne
Ouestnorouest dit Petitous, age 27, also were counted
in the census. Pierre, fils had married Anne, an
Abenaki, in c1660.
Between 1661 and 1669, Anne gave him four sons, all counted in the
census. They lived on eight arpents of land and owned 11 head of cattle and six sheep. Anne
likely was pregnant when Father Molin came around.
Between 1671 and 1680, she
would give Pierre, fils five more children, another son and
four daughters, nine children in all, including two sons and a
daughter who would
create families of their own. Pierre,
père's younger
surviving son Mathieu, age 35, a weaver, believed to be the first
French child born in the colony, was still unmarried and living on an
unspecified amount of land with four head of cattle and three sheep.
In the late 1680s, soon after his marriage to a woman whose name has
been lost to history, he would become the seigneur of
Cobeguit, at the east end of the Minas Basin. He and his wife
would have no children.48
Edge-tool maker
Guillaume
Trahan
of Montreuil-Bellay, his first
wife François Corbineau, and two
daughters had crossed on St.-Jehan. She gave him no
more children.
When an English force under Robert Sedgwick captured Port-Royal in
August 1654, Guillaume, as syndic, headed a committee of habitants
who Sedgwick left in charge of the settlement. Guillaume may
have been a widower at the time. At
age 65, in c1666, he had remarried to Madeleine, 19-year-old daughter
of Vincent Brun and Renée Breau of La Chaussée, at Port-Royal.
Between 1667 and 1670, Madelene had given him three sons.
Father Molin counted his oldest daughter Jeanne, age 40 in 1671,
with husband Jacques dit Jacob
Bourgeois, age 50, the surgeon at Port-Royal. They
were, in fact, the first couple listed in the census. Guillaume's younger
daughter, whose name has been lost to history, had married widower
German Doucet, sieur de La Verdure in c1654, the year he
likely returned to France. She probably went with him.
Guillaume, who Father Molin called a maréchal, or marshal, was age 70, and Madeleine
age 25 at the time of the census. Living with them on five arpents
of land were their three
young sons. They owned eight head of cattle and 10 sheep.
Between 1672 and 1678, Madeleine would give Guillaume four more
daughters--nine children, six daughters and three sons, in all by two wives.
All of the sons and three of the younger daughters also would create families of their own.49
Still alive in 1671 were some of the
early arrivals from the villages of
Martaizé and La Chaussée south of the middle Loire in the region of Loudun, where d'Aulnay and his mother had
controlled "vast seigneuries" and where some of the passengers
aboard the St.-Jehan may have been recruited. Another
early settler hailed from Chouppe south of La Chaussée, and two
brothers came perhaps from Touraine, east of the Loudunais villages.
Several farmers from the Loudunais villages did not reach Acadia
until after the English had seized the colony in 1654, so they would
not have been recruited by Charles d'Aulnay:
Vincent
Brun, a farmer, like most of the bachelors who
had come to Acadia during the Razilly
years, returned to France after he completed his service. In the 1640s, he married Renée Breau at La Chaussée and returned to Acadia later in the
decade with her and two daughters, both born at La Chausée in 1645
and 1646.
Between 1653 and 1658, Renée gave Vincent three more children, two
daughters and a son, five children in all. Vincent was age 60
and Renée age 55 in 1671. They were living on five arpents with two unmarried children, a son and a daughter,
and owned 10 head of cattle and four sheep. Also in the census
were three married daughters: Madeleine, age 25, was counted
with husband Guillaume Trahan, age 70. Andrée, age 24, was
counted with husband Germain Thériot, age 25. And
Françoise, age 19, was counted with husband Bernard Bourg,
age 23. Vincent and Renée's younger daughters also would
marry. The couple's only son Sébastien, called Bastien, age 15 in 1671,
would marry a sister of Bernard Bourg four years
later and carry on the family line.56
Jean
Gaudet's older son Denis, a
farmer, had
come to the colony from Martaizé with his parents and two sisters in the late 1630s. He had married Martine Gauthier,
six years his senior, at Port-Royal in c1645. Between 1646 and
1657, Martine had given him five children, three daughter and two
sons. At the time of the census, Denis was age 46 and Martine 52. Living with them were three unmarried children, two
sons and a daughter, on six arpents of cultivated land along the
basin. They owned nine head of cattle and 13 sheep, with "more lambs
than mature sheep," Father Molin noted. Also in the census were two of Denis and Martine's married
daughters: Anne, age 27, was counted with husband Pierre
Vincent, age 40; and Marie, age 20, with husband Olivier
Daigre, age 28. Denis and Martine's two sons and youngest
daughter also would create families of their own. In the census also were Denis's older
sister Françoise, age 48, counted with her second husband Daniel
LeBlanc, age 45; and Denis's younger sister Marie, age 38, widow
of Étienne Hébert. Amazingly, their father Jean, père was
still alive in 1671. His first wife, whose name has been lost
to history, had died
in the late 1630s or 1640s, having given him no more children in the
colony, and Jean, in his late 70s, had
remarried to 45-year-old Nicole Colleson, probably a widow,
at Port-Royal in
c1652. She was age 64 in 1671. Father Molin noted that
Jean was "the oldest
inhabitant of Port-Royal ..., the venerable doyen of the colony ...
then aged ninety-six years." He and Nicole lived
"on three
arpents
of land at two locations," and owned six head of cattle and three sheep.
Living with them was their only child, Jean, fils, age 18,
who, a year after the census, would create a family of his own.
Jean, père would remain the oldest settler in the colony for a few more
years. He died at Port-Royal by 1678, in his late 90s or early
100s.50
François
Gautrot,
a farmer from Martaizé, was married when he had come to the colony in the late 1630s
with a wife and an infant daughter, had lost his first wife, Marie,
family name unknown, a few years later, but not
before she gave him another child, a son, in c1639. Charles,
the son, preferred to call
himself a Gottreau and would have been age 34 in 1671. He does
not appear with his father in the first Acadian census because he no
longer lived in the colony. In October 1665, Charles had
married Françoise, daughter of Martin
Cousin and Marie Hubert, at Québec and did not return
to Acadia. Between 1669 and 1681, Françoise gave Charles six children, at
least three sons and two daughters, only one of
whom, a daughter, would marry. Meanwhile, his father François,
in his early 30s, had remarried to 20-year-old Edmée, one of
the Lejeune sisters, at Port-Royal in c1644. Between
1645 and 1668, Edmée had given François nine more children, four
daugthers and five sons, 11 children in all by two wives. At
the time of the census, François was age 58 in 1671, and Edmée was 47. Living with them on six arpents of land were six
unmarried children, five
sons and a daughter. The oldest of their sons--Jean, age 23--was still unmarried. François and Edmée
owned 16 head of cattle and nine sheep. Three of their sons
and four of their daughters would create families of
their own, but oldest son Jean would not be one of them.
Also in the census were four of François's married
daughters: his oldest child Marie, age 34, by first wife Marie, was counted
with her second husband, Michel Depeux
dit Dupuis, age 37. Another Marie, age 24,
François's oldest child by second wife Edmée, was counted with husband Claude Thériot, age 34. Renée, age 19, was
counted with husband Jean Labat
dit Le Marquis, age 33, whom she had just married.
Marguerite, age 17, was counted with husband Jacques dit
Jacob Girouard, age 23. They, too, were newly-weds.52
Jean
Thériot, a farmer from
Martaizé who had come to the colony in the late 1630s, called a
Terriau by Father Molin, was age 70, and his wife age 60 in 1671. Living
with them on five arpents was their youngest
child, son Pierre, age 17. They owned six head of cattle and
one sheep. Between 1637, probably the year of their arrival,
and 1654, Perrine had given Jean seven children,
five sons and two daughters, all of whom would create families of
their own. Also in the census were five of Jean and Perrine's
married children, three sons and two daughters. Oldest son Claude, a farmer,
had married Marie, daughter of François Gautrot
and his second wife Edmée Lejeune, at Port-Royal in c1661.
Between 1662 and 1670, Marie had given Claude four children, two
sons and two daughters. Claude was age 34, and Marie 24 at the time
of the census. Living with them on
six arpents of cultivated land were their four children. They owned 13 head of cattle and
three sheep.
Between 1673 and 1693, Marie would give Claude 10 more children, seven
daughters and three sons, 14 children all, including three sons and
eight daughters who
would create
families of their own. Jean's third son Bonaventure dit
Venture, a farmer, had married Jeanne, daughter of
Michel Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, at Port-Royal in
c1666. In 1667, Jean gave Venture a daughter. At the
time of the census, Venture was age 27, and Jeanne age 26. Living with
them on two
arpents of land was their young daughter. They owned
six head of cattle and six sheep. Between 1673 and 1679,
Jeanne would give Venture three more daughters, four in all, three
of whom would create their own families. Jean's older daughter Jeanne, age
27, was counted with husband Pierre
Thibodeau, age 40, and their growing family. Jean's fourth son Germain,
a farmer, had married Andrée, daughter of Vincent
Brun and Renée Breau, at Port-Royal in c1668. She
gave him a son the following year. At the time of the census,
Germain was age 25, and Andrée also was 25. Living with them on two arpents of land was
their young
son. They owned five head of cattle and two sheep. Andrée likely was pregnant
when Father Molin came around. Later
that year and in 1673, Andrée would give
Germain two more children, another son and a daughter, three
children in all, all of whom would create families of their
own. Jean's younger daughter Catherine, age 20, was
counted with husband Pierre Guilbeau, age 32. Jean's
second son, Jean, fils, who would have been age 32 in 1671,
does not appear in the census. He may have taken his wife, who he
had recently married, to another colony, perhaps to Canada. Her name, as well as the names of
their children, if they had any, have been lost to history.53
Antoine
Bourg, who Father Molin
called a Bourc, a farmer from the Martaizé/La
Chaussée area, had been a bachelor when
he had come to Acadia in the late 1630s. He remained in the colony and, in his
early 30s, married Antoinette, sister of fellow colonist René
Landry l'aîné, at Port-Royal in c1642. Between 1643 and
1659, she had given him 10 children, five sons and five daughters.
Antoine was age 62 in 1671, and Antoinette 53. Living with them were seven unmarried children, two sons and
five daughters, on four arpents of land. They owned 12
head of cattle and eight sheep. Also in the census were
Antoine and Antoinette's three married sons and a married daughter:
François, a farmer, had married Marguerite, daughter of Michel
Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, in c1665. She had
given him a son and a daughter in 1666 and 1668. François was
age 28, and Marguerite age 23 in 1671.
Living with them on five and a half
arpents of land were their two young children. They owned 15 head of cattle and five sheep.
Marguerite may have been pregnant at the time of the census.
Between 1671 and 1684, she would give François five more children,
two sons and three daughters, seven children in all, including two
sons and three daughters who would create their own families. Antoine's daughter
Marie, age 26, was counted with husband Vincent
Breau, age 40. Antoine's son Jean, a
farmer, called Jehan by the priest, had married Marguerite, daughter of Pierre Martin and Catherine
Vigneau, at Port-Royal in c1667. In 1668 and 1670,
Marguerite gave Jean two daughters. He was age 24 or 25 in
1671, and Marguerite 27 at the time of the census. Living with them on 15 arpents of land were
their two young daughters.
They owned three head of cattle and five sheep. Between 1673 and 1690,
Marguerite would give Jean seven more children, five daughters and
two sons, nine children in all. Both of their sons and all but
one of their daughters would create their own families.
Antoine's son Bernard, also a farmer, had married Françoise, daughter of Vincent
Brun and Renée Breau, the year before the census. They lived with a daughter, age unrecorded (she
was still an infant), on "no cultivated land," and owned six head of
cattle and nine sheep. Between 1673 and 1692, Françoise would
give Bernard 12 more children, 10 daughters and two sons, 13
children in all, including a son and nine daughters who would create
families of his own.51
François
Girouard dit La
Varanne, a farmer from
Martaizé or nearby La Chaussée south of the middle Loire in the region of
Loudun,
had come to the colony in the
early 1640s and married Jeanne
Aucoin in c1647. Between 1648 and 1660, Jeanne had
given him five children, two sons and three daughters. He was
age 50, and she was 40 in 1671. They were living on eight
arpents of land with two unmarried children, a son and a daughter,
and owned
16 head of cattle and six sheep. Also in the census were three married
children, a son and two daughters: Older daughter
Marguerite, age 20, was counted with husband Jacques Blou
or Belou, a cooper, age 30. They owned no
recorded land but had an infant daughter, seven head of cattle, and a sheep.
Younger daughter Marie-Madeleine, called Madeleine, age 17, was
counted with her husband Thomas Cormier, a carpenter, age
35, and their infant daughter. Older son Jacques dit
Jacob had married Marguerite, daughter of
François Gautrot and Edmée Lejeune, at Port-Royal in
c1670. Jacques dit Jacob was age 23, and Marguerite age 17 in
1671. They owned no land,
at least none recorded by the priest, but they had an infant son and
owned seven
head of cattle and three sheep. Between 1673 and 1698,
Marguerite would give Jacques dit Jacob 13 more children,
nine sons and four daughters, 14 children in all, including nine
sons and three daughters who would create families of their
own, at Port-Royal. François and Jeanne's younger son Germain
also would marry and create a family of his own, at Chignecto,
which, like his brother-in-law, Thomas Cormier, he
would help pioneer .57
René
Landry l'aîné, a farmer perhaps from La Chaussée, had come to the colony
in the early 1640s and married Perrine, sister
of Antoine Bourg and widow of Simon Pelletret, at Port-Royal
in c1645. Between 1646 and 1663, Perrine had given René l'aîné
five children, three daughters and two sons. René was age 52, and Perrine 45 in 1671. They were living
on 12 arpents of land with three unmarried children,
a daughter and two sons. They owned 10 head of cattle and six sheep.
Two of their married daughters were counted in the census:
Marie, age 24, with husband Germain Doucet,
fils, age 30; and a second Marie, age 23 or 24, with husband Laurent Granger,
a seaman, age 34. Also in the census were René l'aîné's married stepdaughters:
Henriette Pelletret, age 30 or 31, was counted with husband Pierre Doucet, age 50,
who was her half-sister Marie's
brother-in-law; and Jeanne Pelletret, age 27, was counted
with her husband Barnabé Martin, age 35. Both of René' l'aîné's
sons and their youngest daughter would create families of their own.58
Jean
Poirier, a fisherman, and
wife Jeanne
Chebrat of La Chaussée had
come to the colony aboard the St.-François
in 1641 to work in the fisheries established by Nicolas Denys. Jean died in c1654, 17 years
before the first census was taken, but not before fathering a
daughter and a son in 1648 and 1650, both of whom appeared in the first census.
In 1671, Jean's daughter
Marie-Françoise, age 22, was counted with husband Roger dit Jean
Kuessy, Quessy, or Caissie, an Irishman, age 25. Jean's son Michel, who Father Molin called a
Poirié, was a 20-year-old bachelor in 1671. He lived
alone on "no cultivated land," owned two head of cattle, and soon
would create a family of his own.65
Abraham
Dugas (Father Molin
called him Habraham Dugat), a gunsmith from
Chouppes south of La Chaussée, had come to the colony in the early 1640s and
married Marguerite, daughter of Germain
Doucet, sieur de La Verdure and his first wife, in c1647.
Between 1648 and 1667, Marguerite had given the gunsmith eight
children, five daughters and three sons. In 1671, Abraham
was age 55, and Marguerite, called Marie-Judith by Father
Molin, was 46. They lived on 16 arpents of land with six
unmarried children, three sons and three daughters. They owned
19 head of cattle and three sheep. Also counted in the census were two
married daughters: Marie, age 23, with husband Charles
Melanson dit La Ramée, age 28; and Anne, age 17, with
first husband Charles Bourgeois, age 25. All of Abraham
and Marguerite's other children would create families of their own. In his later years, according to
Antoine Laumet dit Le Mothe de Cadillac, Abraham, père "'carried out the functions of general
representative of the King (in civil and criminal matters).'"62
Two Hébert brothers, probably not kin to Louis Hébert
of Paris and Québec, perhaps from La-Haye-Descartes, Touraine, a
village on the Creuse, a tributary of the Vienne, east of the
Loudunais villages, had come to Port-Royal in the early 1640s.
Antoine, the older brother, a cooper, married Geneviève
Lefranc in c1648. Between 1649 and 1656, she had given him
three children, two sons and a daughter. In 1671, Antoine
(Father Molin called him Anthoine) was age 50, and Geneviève was 58.
They lived on six arpents "of cultivated land at
two locations" with their three unmarried children--the sons grown,
the daughter still a a teenager--and owned 18 head of cattle and
seven sheep. Two of their children, the daughter and the
younger son, would create families of
their own. Antoine's younger brother
Étienne
had married Marie, daughter of Jean Gaudet, in c1650,
but had died a year or so before Father Molin took his census
(Étienne's age at
the time of his death was not recorded). Between 1651 and
1670, Marie had given Étienne 10 children, five daughters and five
sons. She was age 38 in
1671 and lived on three arpents of cultivated land with eight
unmarried children, her five sons and three of her daughters, the youngest son only a year old. The widow Hébert owned
four
head of cattle and five sheep. Also counted in the census was her oldest
daughter, Marie, age 20, with husband Michel (originally Gereyt)
de Forest, age 33, a Dutchman who had converted to Catholicism
to marry his Acadian sweetheart. The widow Hébert's younger daughter Marguerite,
age 19, had recently married Frenchman Jean-Jacques, called Jacques,
Le Prince, who would have been in his mid-20s in 1671, but they
were not counted in the census. Jacques probably had taken
Marguerite to another part of the colony where Father Molin did not
venture, or perhaps they had gone to Canada. No matter, they
returned to Acadia by the 1680s and settled near Marguerite's younger siblings in the Minas
Basin. All of the widow Hébert's younger children would create families of their own.63
Clément Bertrand, a carpenter
perhaps from one of the Loudunais villages,
who Father Molin called a Bertrant, had come to
L'Acadie in c1642. He married Huguette Lambelot
in c1645. He was age 50, and she was 48 in 1671.
They were living on six arpents of land and owned 10
head of cattle and six sheep. They had no children, nor would they have
any, so none of the Acadian Bertrands descend from
this couple.59
Daniel
LeBlanc, perhaps from
Martaizé, had
come to the
colony in c1645 and married Françoise, daughter of Jean Gaudet
and his first wife, in c1650. Between 1651 and 1664, Françoise had
given Daniel seven children, six sons and a daughter. Daniel
was age 45, and Françoise 48 in 1671. They lived on 10 arpents of land along the north bank of the basin
"to the northeast of the marsh at Bélisle, about nine miles above
the fort at Port-Royal, and a half mile below the chapel of
Saint-Laurent," near Prée-Ronde, with six unmarried
sons. They also owned 18 head of cattle and 26 sheep, placing
them among the most prosperous settlers in the colony. Also in the census was
their second child and only daughter, Françoise, age 18, whom Father Molin counted with her recently-wedded husband, Martin
Blanchard, age 24. Beginning in 1673, five of
Daniel's sons would take wives of their own and help create what
would become the largest family in the colony.55
Antoine
Belliveau, a farmer
perhaps from La Chaussée, had come to Acadia
in c1645 and married Andrée Guyon, widow of ____ Bernard,
at Port-Royal in c1651. She gave him two children, a son and a
daughter, in 1652 and 1654. Antoine was age 50, and Andrée was 56 in 1671. They
were living on "no land" with their two children, still
unmarried, and owned 11 head of cattle and eight sheep. Both of their
children would marry, their son twice.60
François
Savoie (Father Molin
called him a
Scavois), a farmer from Martaizé, had come to Acadia in the late 1640s and married Catherine,
the other
Lejeune sister, in c1651. Between 1652 and 1670, Catherine had given François
nine children, six daughters and three sons. François was age
50, and Catherine was 38 in 1671. Living with them
on six arpents were eight
unmarried children, the youngest a
daughter who was only a year and a half old. They owned four head
of cattle and no sheep. Also in the census was a married
daughter, Françoise, age 18, who was counted with husband Jean
Corporan, age 25. Their other daughters also would create
families of their own. Of François and Catherine's three sons, only the oldest,
Germain, age 16 in 1671, would carry on the family line.54
Vincent
Brot or Breau dit Vincelotte, a farmer, whose sister had married Vincent
Brun
back at La Chaussée in the 1640s, had come to Port-Royal in c1652
and married Marie, daughter of Antoine Bourg and Antoinette
Landry, there in c1661. Between 1662 and 1670,
Marie had given Vincelotte four children, two daughters and two sons. Vincelotte was
age 40, and Marie was 26 in 1671. Father Molin called him a
Brot. The couple lived on four arpents with
their four children and owned nine head of cattle and
seven sheep.
Marie was pregnant when Father Molin came around and gave birth to
another son later in the year. Between 1673 and 1685, she
would give Vincent seven more children, four daughters and three
sons, a dozen children in all, including five sons and four
daughters who would create their own families.61
René
Landry le jeune, a
cousin of René
l'aîné of La Chaussée, had reached the colony by c1659, when he married
Marie, daughter of ____
Bernard and Andrée Guyon, a native of Port-Royal and a stepdaughter of
Antoine Belliveau. Between 1660 and 1690, Marie gave
René le jeune 15 children, eight sons and seven daughters.
Strangely, Father Molin did not count this family in the 1671 census, but they
did appear in the second and third Port-Royal censuses of 1678 and
1686. The 1678 counting
did not give any ages or the names of their children, but it did
give the size of their farm. The 1686 census provides more
personal data. René le jeune, who Father Molin most
likely would have called a farmer, would
have been about age 37, and Marie about age 26 in 1671. They
would have been living with six children, four sons and two daughters,
the youngest a newborn, that year. (One wonders how they
escaped Father Molin's notice.) In 1678, René le jeune
and Marie owned 12 arpents of land
and 20 head of cattle, so their farm in 1671 probably would have a
bit larger than most. Of their 15 children, all of their sons
and all but one of their daughters created
families of their own. The result would be an even larger
branch of the Landry family in Acadia.80
François
Guérin (Father Molin
called him a Gudcin), a farmer perhaps from Martaizé,
had come to Port-Royal by c1659, when he married Anne, a daughter
of Jean Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert. Between
1660 and 1669, François had given Anne five children, three
daughters and two sons. François died just before the first
census was taken. In
1671, his widow Anne was age 26 and living with their five children
on six arpents of cultivated land. She also owned six cattle and
three sheep.
Older son Jérôme, whom Father Molin called Frivoline in the census,
would perpetuate the family line, and his sisters also would create
families of their own.78
Antoine
Babin, a farmer perhaps
from La Chaussée, had
come to Acadia by c1662,
when he married Marie, daughter of ____ Mercier and Françoise Gaudet, at
Port-Royal. Between 1663 and 1670, Marie gave Antoine five
children, three daughters and two sons. In 1671, Antoine, who
Father Molin called Anthoine, was age 45, and Marie was 25.
They were living on two arpents of cultivated land with their five
children and owned six head of cattle and eight sheep. Marie
evidently was pregnant when Father Molin appeared. Between
1671 and 1684, Marie would give Antoine six more children, four
daughters and two son, 11 children in all, including three sons and
seven daughters who would created families of
their own.82
Michel
Dupuis, a farmer perhaps
from La Chaussée, had come to
Port-Royal by c1664, when he married Marie, daughter of François
Gautrot and Marie _____ and widow of ____ Potet, there. Between 1665 and 1671, Marie had given Michel
three children, two sons and a daughter. In 1671,
Michel, whom Father Molin called a Dupont, was age 37, and
Marie was 34. They were living on six arpents of cultivated land
with their three children, the youngest, a
son, only three months old. Also living with them was 14-year-old
Marie Potet from Marie's first marriage. Michel and
Marie owned five head of cattle and one sheep. In 1675 and
1679, Marie would give Michel two more children, a son and a daughter,
five children in all, including three sons and a daughter who would
create families of their own.84
Early settlers from other parts of
France who were counted in the first census had come to Acadia in the late
1630s and into the 1640s,
during the years of struggle between La Tour and d'Aulnay:
Michel
Boudrot of Cougnes, near
La Rochelle, a farmer, had come to Port-Royal in the late 1630s and
had married Michelle Aucoin, sister of François Girouard's wife
Jeanne Aucoin, at Port-Royal in c1641. Between 1642 and
1666, Michelle had given Michel 11 children, four daughters and seven
sons. Michel served as one of the first syndics at
Port-Royal soon after his arrival. He was age 71 in 1671, and
Michelle was 53. They lived on eight arpents with eight unmarried children, six
sons and two daughters, and owned 20 head of cattle and 12 sheep.
Also in the census were three married daughters: Françoise,
age 29, was counted with husband Étienne Robichaud, age
31, but they refused to give Father Molin any information about
themselves. Jeanne, age 26, was counted with husband
Bonaventure dit Venture Thériot, age 27.
Marguerite, age 23, was counted with husband François Bourg,
age 28. Michel's oldest son Charles, age 22 and still a
bachelor in 1671, would marry within a year, so he likely was
"engaged" to Marie, daughter of Jean Corporon and Françoise
Savoie, at the time of the census. Michel's six younger sons
and his youngest daughter also would create families of their own.
By the early 1780s, Michel, who was literate perhaps in
English as well French, was serving as
lieutenant général civil et criminal, or colonial judge,
at Port-Royal. In August 1688, in his late 80s, he would be replaced
in that position by French bureaucrat Mathieu de Goutin.
Michel would die at Port-Royal by 1693, in his late 80s or early
90s.66
Jacques
dit Jacob or Jacobus Bourgeois,
surgeon, born in c1619 perhaps at La Ferté-Gaucher on Rivière
Grand-Morin in Champagne east of Paris,
had been recruited by Claude de Launay-Rasilly, brother of Isaac de
Razilly, and came to Acadia
aboard the St.-François in 1641.
Jacques married Jeanne,
daughter of Guillaume Trahan and François Corbineau, in c1643.
Between 1644 and 1667, Jeanne gave Jacques 10 children, seven
daughters and three sons. In February
1653, along with Germain Doucet, Jacques had witnessed the
signing of the marriage contract between Governor Charles La Tour
and Jeanne Motin, widow of former governor Charles d'Aulnay.
The following year,
Jacques was serving as the lieutenant of Sieur Germain Doucet,
commander at Port-Royal, when the English captured the fort there.
The surrender document the English dictated, dated 16 August 1654,
said Jacques was Sieur Germain's brother-in-law, an obvious mistake. The English
seemed to have forced Germain to leave the colony, but Jacques
remained as a hostage at Port-Royal to insure that the members of
the garrison obeyed the terms of surrender. In 1671, Jacques
was age 50, and Jeanne was 40. They lived with eight
unmarried children, two sons and six daughters, on "more or less 20 arpents of
cultivated land at two different locations" along the basin.
In addition, they owned 33 cattle and 24 sheep, making them among
the wealthiest couples in the colony. Also in
the census were two of the couple's married children: Marie, age 18,
was counted with husband Pierre Sire or Cyr,
a gunsmith, age 27. Oldest son Charles had married Anne, daughter of Abraham Dugas
and Marguerite Doucet, at Port-Royal in c1668. Anne
gave him a daughter in 1670. Charles was age 25, and Anne 17
in 1671. They lived with their
young daughter on two
arpents of lands and owned 12
head of cattle and seven sheep. Between 1673 and 1678, Anne
would give Charles three more children,
two sons and another daughter, four children in all, including two sons
and a daughter who would create families of their own. Jacques dit
Jacob and Jeanne's two younger sons and five younger daughters also would create families of their own.
A year or two after Father Molin's census, Jacques would lead a
small exodus of Port-Royal settlers to Chignecto, where expansive
salt marshes
lined a lovely basin at the head of the Baie Française.64
Jean (Father Molin called him
Jehan)
Blanchard,
a farmer, had come to the
colony by c1642, when he married Radegonde
Lambert
at Port-Royal. Between 1643 and 1656, Radegonde had
given him six children, three daughters and three sons. Jean was
age 60, and Radegond 42 in 1671. They lived on five arpents
of cultivated land with three unmarried children, two sons and a
daughter, and owned 12
head of cattle and nine
sheep. Also in the census were three of their married
children: Madeleine, age 28, was counted with
husband Michel Richard dit Sansoucy, age 41.
Anne, age 26, widow of François Guérin, was counted with five
young children. She would remarry to Pierre
Gaudet
l'aîné the following year.
Oldest son Martin had married Françoise,
daughter of Daniel LeBlanc and Françoise Gaudet, at
Port-Royal earlier that year. At the time of the census,
Martin was age 24, and Françoise 18. They lived on 15 arpents of land with no children, but they
owned five head of cattle and two sheep. Françoise may have
been pregnant when Father Molin came around. Between 1672 and
1677, she would give Martin three daughters. He would remarry
to Marguerite Guilbeau in c1686. Between 1689
and 1712, she would give him eight more children, four daughters and
four sons, 11 children in all by two wives. All of his sons and
all but one of his daughters would create families of their own.
Jean's younger son Guillaume, age 21 in 1671, would marry Huguette
Gougeon two years after Father Molin's census and
produce an even larger family, a dozen children, five daughters and
seven sons, between 1674 and 1697, and five of their sons and all of
their daughters would marry.67
René
Rimbault or Raimbeau
(Father Molin called him a Rimbault), a farmer, had
come to the colony in the early 1640s and married Anne-Marie,
surname unknown, the widow of
a settler named Pinet, at Port-Royal in c1655. According to genealogist Bona Arsenault,
Anne-Marie may have been a métisse. Between 1656 and
1666, Anne-Marie had given René four children, a son and three daughters. René was age 55 in
1671, and Anne-Marie was 40. They were living on 12 arpents
of land with
five children, one of them a son by Anne-Marie's previous marriage, and owned 12 head of cattle and
nine sheep. Anne-Marie was pregnant when Father Molin
appeared. Between 1671 and 1675, she would give René three
more children, two daughters and a son, seven children in all, including an
older son who married but fathered no children
of his own. Five of their daughters would marry, so the blood
of the family would survive in the colony.67a
Anne-Marie's son
Philippe
Pinet,
fathered by her first husband, was age 17 in 1671 and living with
his mother and stepfather. Father Molin called the young man a
Rimbault. Philippe would marry Catherine, daughter of Étienne
Hébert and Marie Gaudet, at
Port-Royal seven years after the census. Between 1680 and
1703, she would give him a dozen children, six sons and six
daughters. All of his sons and all but one of his daughters
would create families of their own.68
Robert Cormier, a master ship's
carpenter from La Rochelle, had signed in that city on 8 January 1644 an indenture for three years
service, at 120 livres per annum, with
Louis Tuffet, commander of Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island. That spring,
Robert,
his wife Marie Péraud, and their two young sons sailed to Cape Breton aboard Le
Petit St.-Pierre. When Tuffet's Fort St.-Pierre leased was
forfeited in 1645, Robert and his family, along with the other
engagés, were taken back to France aboard the supply ship
L'Étoille. Robert, wife, Marie, and younger son Jean
never returned to New France, but older son
Thomas
did, perhaps in 1667, the year the English returned Acadia to France. In his early 30s,
Thomas married Marie-Madeleine,
called Madeleine, teenage daughter of François Girouard and
Jeanne Aucoin, at Port-Royal in c1668. She gave him a
daughter in 1670. In 1671, Thomas, who Father Molin called a
Cormié, was age 35 and described as a carpenter,
and Madeleine
was 17. They were living with their daughter on six arpents
of land and owned seven head of cattle and seven sheep.
Madeleine probably was pregnant when Father Molin came around.
Between 1672 and 1688, she would give Thomas nine more children,
four sons and five daughters, 10 children in all. All of the sons
would marry, to
three sisters and a first cousin, all
LeBlancs from
Minas, and five of Thomas and Madeleine's daughters would marry.
Within a decade of the 1671 counting, Thomas and Madeleine would
follow Jacques Bourgeois and other
Port-Royal habitants to Chignecto, among the first French families
to settle there.70
Claude
Petitpas, sieur de La
Fleur, a clerk who became a notary, had come to Acadia in c1645 and
married Catherine, daughter of Bernard Bugaret, at Port-Royal
in c1658. Between 1659 and 1670, She had given him seven children,
four sons and three daughters. In 1671, Claude was age 45 and Catherine was
33. Living with them on 30 arpents of land were their
seven children. They owned 26 head of cattle and 12 sheep and
were among the wealthiest couples in the colony. Between 1674
and 1684, Catherine would give
Claude six more children, two daughters and four sons, 13 children
in all, including three
sons and five daughters who would create their own families.17
A young French army captain who had come to the colony
in the early 1650s as an associate of Governor Charles La Tour
was granted a seigneurie of his own in a corner of the
Acadian peninsula. Two recruits who had come to the colony
during the early 1650s with Emmanuel Le Borgne, Governor
d'Aulnay's formidable creditor,
remained in Acadia, married, and became prominent settlers:
Philippe
Mius, sieur
d'Entremont
(Father Molin spelled his name Filhipe
Mieux cenier sieur de Landremont), the seigneur
of Pobomcoup, now Pubnico, near Cap-Sable, was a former La Tour
associate who royal governor Grandfontaine appointed as the King's attorney for Acadia
the year before Father Molin's census.
Philippe had married Madeleine Hélie in France in c1649, and
they came to the colony with at least one child, a daughter, born in
c1650. Between 1654 and 1669, Madeleine gave Philippe four
more children, three sons and a daughter, five children in all.
Philippe was age 62 in 1671. Father Molin did not give wife
Madeleine's age, but she would have been 45.
Father Molin did say that Philippe and Madeleine lived with four
of their unmarried children, two sons and two daughters, and that they
owned 26 cattle, 29 sheep, 12 goats, and 20 hogs on their barony at
Pobomcoup. One historian suggests that there may have raised
chickens as well. Father
Molin counted Philippe and Madeleine's oldest child, Marguerite, age 21, at Port-Royal with husband Pierre Melanson, fils, age 39.
Philippe and Madeleine's three sons but not their younger daughter would create families of
their own.44a
Michel
Richard dit
Sansoucy of Saintonge, whose dit was "a regimental nickname
which confirms in some degree his occupation as a soldier," had married Madeleine, daughter of Jean
Blanchard and Radegonde Lambert, at Port-Royal in c1656. Michel
had "obtained" from the seigneur of
Port-Royal, Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle, "two grants at
some ten to fifteen miles from the fort..." Between 1657 and
1671, Madeleine had given Sansoucy seven children, four sons and
three daughters. In 1671, Michel, who Father Molin called a
farmer,
was age 41 and Marguerite 28. They were living on 14 arpents
of land with their seven children, including a set of twin girls who
were only a few weeks old. They owned 15 head of cattle and 14
sheep. Between 1674 and 1677, Madeleine would give Sansoucy three more daughters,
10 children in all. In c1683, in his early 50s, Michel would remarry
to Jeanne, daughter of Antoine Babin and Marie
Mercier, and father two
more sons in 1684 and 1686--a dozen children by two wives, six sons
and six daughers, all of whom would create families of their own.73
Pierre
Thibodeau (Father Molin called him a Thibaudeau), born in
c1631 perhaps at Marans on the southwest edge of Poitou near La
Rochelle, had been recruited by Le Borgne in 1654.
In c1660, Pierre had married Jeanne, daughter of Jean
Thériot and Perrine Rau, at Port-Royal.
A miller by trade, he had built a mill at
Prée-Ronde on the hautre rivière above the colonial capital
and soon became prosperous. Beween
1661 and 1670, Jeanne had given him six
children, five daughters and a son. In 1671, Pierre, who
Father Molin called a farmer, was age 40 and Jeanne
27. They were living on seven arpents of land with
their six children and owned 12
head of cattle and 11 sheep. Jeanne probably was pregnant when
Father Molin came around. Between 1672 and 1689, she would
give Pierre 10 more children, four daughters and six sons, 16
children in all, every one of whom would create families of their
own! In c1700, Pierre
would pioneer the Acadian settlement at Chepoudy on the northern
shore of upper Baie Française in what came to be called the
trois-rivières.72
Many of the families counted in 1671
had come to the colony during the English occupation of 1654-70,
when immigration to Acadia from France and Canada was supposed to
have been curtailed. At least two of them were Englishmen, one
was a Dutchman in English service, one an Irishman, and another from
Flanders. Most of them, of course, were Frenchmen, one of them
perhaps from La Chaussée. Some were Huguenots. And
most of them married into established families:
Antoine
Gougeon, also spelled
Gueguen and Guoguen, a farmer, had married Jeanne,
daughter of Antoine Chabrat and Françoise Chaumoret of La Chaussée and widow of Jean Poirier, probably at Port-Royal in c1654,
and she gave him a daughter in 1655. In 1671, Antoine was age 45, and Jeanne
also was 45. They were
living on 10 arpents of land with their daughter and owned 20
head of cattle and 17 sheep. Antoine and Jeanne would have no more children, so only the blood of this family
survived in the colony. Two years after the census, at age 16,
daughter Huguette would marry Guillaume, younger son of Jean Blanchard
and Radegonde Lambert, and give him a dozen
children. During the late 1690s, Guillaume
would help pioneer the
Acadian settlement at Petitcoudiac in the trois-rivières
area west of Chignecto and establish Village-des-Blanchards
there.74
Pierre
Laverdure, a
French Huguenot in English service, had come to the colony in
the spring of 1657 aboard the ship Satisfaction with English Governor
Sir Thomas Temple.
With Pierre were his English wife Priscilla, whose family
name is unknown and who he had married in England in c1631, and three sons who, like their mother, had
been born in England. Pierre and his family lived at Charles
La Tour's old fort at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean before moving to Port-Royal, where Pierre served as tutor of former governor
d'Aulnay's children, then under the care of their
stepfather, former governor La Tour. After
a treaty returning Acadia to France was signed at Breda in the
Netherlands in
1667, Pierre, his wife, and their youngest son John, still Huguenots and
fearing religious persecution in a Catholic colony,
retreated to Boston. John served at Naskeag and Machias in
Maine during the north phase of King Philip's War (1675-78).
He also engaged in commerce, including illegal Indian slave trading.
After his arrest and release on bail in September 1676, John
disappeared, leaving his poverty-stricken parents liable for his
bond. Pierre, père died during the following winter
at either Boston or Port-Royal, where he had gone to find John, who
he suspected may have gone into hiding with one of his brothers.
Possibly, Pierre, père may have died on the return trip to
Boston, when, "being very aged[,]" the rigors of the voyage
and his failure to find his son "went to his heart."
Priscilla remarried at Boston to thrice-widowered Captain William Wright,
Sr., a native of England, in
April 1680, the same year her son John married Sarah ____
at Boston. Between 1681 and 1689, at Boston, Sarah gave John
five children, four sons and a daughter. Priscilla Wright died
at Boston in 1691/92, survived by her second husband. Of her
three sons, only one of them was living in Boston. In 1667,
her older sons had remained at Port-Royal, where they had abjured
Protestantism and taken Acadian wives.
The older sons favored the surname Mellanson, later
Melanson, not Laverdure, for reasons yet
unexplained, though
Pierre,
fils would be called Pierre
dit Laverdure and also Pierre, sieur La
Verdure. Pierre, fils,
in his early 30s, had married
Marie-Marguerite, called Marguerite, daughter of Philippe Mius
d'Entremont, seigneur of Pobomcoup, and Madeleine
Hélie, at Port-Royal in c1665. Between 1666 and 1670,
Marguerite had given him three children, two sons and a
daughter. In 1671, Pierre, fils was age about 39 and
was described
as a tailor, and Marguerite was 21. Father Molin
noted that Pierre, fils and his wife refused to answer any questions about
their farm or their family. Pierre, fils and Marguerite would have
been living with their three young children, all of whom suvived
infancy, but the size of their farm in 1671 remains a mystery.
Between 1673 and the early 1690s, Marguerite would give Pierre, fils
eight more children, five daughters and three sons, 11 children in all, including four sons
and six daughters who would create families of their own. His two youngest daughters
would marry French soldiers serving in Acadia, one of them an
officer. Pierre, fils's younger brother
Charles,
called La Ramée, had married Marie, daughter of Abraham
Dugas and Marguerite Doucet, at Port-Royal in c1663.
Between 1664 and 1671, Marie had given him four daughters. Charles,
a farmer, was
age 28 in 1671, and Marie was 23.
Unlike the older brother, the younger brother and his wife
cooperated with the inquisitive priest. Charles and Marie lived with
their four daughters on 20
arpents of land and owned 40 head of cattle and
six sheep, making them one of the wealthiest couples at Port-Royal.
One suspects that older brother Pierre also owned as much, if not
more, land and livestock on his habitation along the lower
basin. Between 1673 and 1693, Marie would give Charles 10
more children, five daughters and five sons, 14 children in all.
All of their sons and all but one of their daughters would create families of their own.44c
Laurent
Granger of Plymouth,
England, also in English service, had come to Acadia during the late
1650s, converted to Catholicism, and married Marie, daughter of
René
Landry l'aîné and Perrine Bourg, at Port-Royal in c1667.
In 1668 and 1671, Marie gave Laurent two children, a daughter and a
son. Laurent, who Father Molin
called a matelot or seaman and spelled his family name
Grangé, was age 34, and Marie was 24 in 1671. They
were living on four arpents of land with their two children
and owned
five head of cattle and six sheep. Between 1673 and the early
1690s, Marie would give Laurent seven more children,
four sons and three daughters, nine children in all, including five
sons and three daughters who would create families of their own.76
Jean
Pitre dit Bénèque,
another edge-tool maker, sometimes described as a gunsmith, perhaps from Flanders,
had come to the colony in the late 1650s.
In c1665, he had married Marie, daughter of Isaac Pesseley,
former major of Port-Royal who had been killed during the
civil war between La Tour and d'Aulnay, and
Pesseley's wife Barbe Bajolet. Marie, an
infant when her father died, returned to France with her mother. In c1654, Barbe returned to Acadia with
her third husband, Savinien de Courpon, sieur de La Tour.
Marie, still a girl, returned with them. Between 1666 and
1671, she had given Jean three children, two daughters and a son.
In 1671, Jean, who Father Molin called an edge-tool maker, was age
35, and Marie was 26. Her mother Barbe, a widow for the third
time, age unrecorded (she would have been in early 60s that year),
also was counted in Father Molin's census. Evidently living
alone, Barbe owned a cow and five sheep. Jean (Father Molin
called him Jehan) and Marie were living on "no land" with three
young children, the youngest only nine months old. They owned
no sheep, but they did own a cow. Between 1673 and 1688, Marie
would give Jean eight more children,
five sons and three daughters, 11 children in all, including four sons
and four daughters who would create their own families.77
Gereyt
de Forest of Leyden,
Holland, had come to Acadia in c1659 as a soldier in English service.
He also had converted to Catholicism
before taking an Acadian bride, Marie, daughter of
Étienne
Hébert and Marie Gaudet, at Port-Royal in c1666. In Acadia, the "de" in
his name did not survive, nor did his given name. Between 1667
and 1670, Marie had given Michel, as he was called by his Acadian
neighbors, three sons. In 1671, Michel, who Father Molin
called a farmer, was age 33, and Marie was 20. They were living on
two arpents of cultivated land
with their sons. Michel and Marie owned 12
head of cattle and two sheep. Between 1673 and 1677, Marie
would gave Michel three more children, two daughters and a son, six
children total, all of whom would create families of their own.
Marie would died at Port-Royal in 1677 or 1678, and in c1686 Michel,
in his late 40s, would
remarry to
Jacqueline dite
Jacquette, daughter of Martin Benoit and Marie
Chaussegros, at Port-Royal. She would give him another daughter
in 1687--seven children in all by two wives--and his youngest
daughter also would create a family of her own.79
Pierre
Morin dit Boucher,
born in Normandy in c1634, a farmer, had come to the colony by c1661, the year he
married Marie-Madeleine, daughter of Pierre Martin and
Catherine Vigneau, at
Port-Royal. Between 1662 and 1671, Marie-Madeleine had given
Boucher five children, three sons and two daughters. In 1671, Pierre was age 37, and Marie 35.
They were living on a single arpent with their five children, the youngest only 10 months old. They
owned three head of cattle and four sheep. Between 1672 and
1686, Marie-Madeleine would give Pierre seven more children, six
sons and a daughter, a dozen children in all, including six sons and
three daughters who would create families of their
own. By the 1680s, Pierre and his family would follow other
Port-Royal habitants to Chigneco, which would lead to a
tragic end: because of an indiscretion committed by his second
son Louis in 1688, the 24-year-old would be deported to France, and
the entire family, including in-laws, would be banished from the
colony by the royal governor.81
Pierre
Vincent, a farmer, had
come to Acadia by
c1663, when he married Anne, a daughter of Denis Gaudet and
Martine Gauthier, at Port-Royal. Between 1664 and 1669,
Anne had given Pierre five children, two daughters and two sons.
In 1671, Pierre was age 40, and Anne was 27. According to
Father Molin, they owned 18 head of cattle and nine sheep
on 16 arpents of land. With them were four young children, two sons and
two daughters. For some reason, Father Morln did not count
their younger daughter, who would have been age 3 that year and very
much alive. In 1674, Anne would give Pierre another son, six children in all, including three sons
and two daughters who would create families of their own.83
Étienne
Robichaud, farmer, had
come to
Port-Royal by c1663, when he married Françoise, daughter of Michel
Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, at Port-Royal. Between
1664 and 1669, Françoise gave Étienne three children, a daughter and
two sons. Father Molin noted in the census that Éstienne
Robichaut, as he called him
"did not want to see me. He left and told his wife that she
was not to tell me the number of his livestock or land." Nor
did Françoise reveal the names and ages of their children. In
1671, Étienne would have been age 31, and Françoise 29, and they would have been living with three young children. Thanks
to Étienne's stubbornness, the size of his farm and the numbers of
his livestock in 1671 remain a mystery. In 1678,
however, he would own two arpents of land and 19 head of cattle, so his farm was small, but
the number of his animals was respectable. Between 1672 and
1677, Françoise would give
Étienne three more children, a daughter and two sons, six children
total, all of whom would create families of
their own.85
François
Pellerin, a farmer, had
come to Acadia
from Québec by c1665, when he married Andrée, daughter of Pierre
Martin, père and Catherine Vigneau, at Port-Royal.
Between 1666 and 1671, Andrée gave François three daughters. In 1671,
François, who Father Molin called a Pelerin, was age 35, and Andrée was 30. They lived on a single
arpent of land with their three daughters, the youngest only
two days old. They owned one sheep. Between 1674 and
1678, Andrée would give François
four more children, three daughters and a son, seven children in all,
including a son and five daughters who would create their own
families.86
Olivier
Daigre, a farmer, had
come to the
colony by c1666, when he married Marie, daughter of Denis
Gaudet and Martine Gauthier, at Port-Royal. Between
1667 and 1670, Marie had given Olivier three sons. In 1671, Olivier
was age 28, and Marie was 20. They lived on two arpents
of cultivated land with their three sons and owned six head of
cattle and six sheep. Between 1678 and 1681, Marie would give Olivier seven more children, three
daughters and four sons, 10 children in all, including two sons and two
daughters who would create
families of their own.88
Barnabé
Martin, a farmer, probably not kin
to Pierre Martin of St.-Germain de Bourgeuil, had come to Acadia
in c1666, when he married Jeanne, daughter of Simon Pelletret
and Perrine Bourg, at Port-Royal.
In 1667 and early 1671, Jeanne had given Barnabé two children, a
daughter and a son. At the time of the census, Barnabé was age 35, and Jeanne was 27. They lived on
two and a half arpents of land with their two children and owned
three head of cattle and two sheep.
Between 1672 and 1682, Jeanne would give Barnabé six more children,
four of them daughters and at least one of them a son, eight children
in all, including two sons and five daughters who would help create a
second branch of the Martin family in
Acadia. Barnabé's descendants, especially those from older son
René, tended to use their father's given name as a dit to
distinguish themselves from the other Martins in the colony.112
Pierre
Lanoue, a "young scion of
a noble Huguenot family in France," after converting to Catholicism,
had come to Acadia in c1667 as a cooper and settled at Port-Royal.
When asked his age, Pierre, the last resident of Port-Royal Father
Molin listed in his census, told the priest that "he felt fine but
would not give an answer." Like two of the other habitants
listed at the end of the census, Pierre refused to give the size of
his holdings. In 1671, Pierre would have been age 23. He
was still a bachelor, so he may have owned no property. The former
Huguenot would not appear in the Port-Royal censuses of 1678 and
1686, but he would remain in, or return to, Acadia. In c1682,
he would marry Jeanne, daughter of François
Gautrot and Edmée Lejeune, at Port-Royal. Jeanne
would give him only one child, a son, who would create a large
family of his own.113
Jean
Corporon, a farmer, had
come to the colony
in the late 1660s and married Françoise, a daughter of François
Savoie and Catherine Lejeune, only a year before the census. In 1671, Jean, whom
Father Molin called Jehan, was age 25, and Françoise was 18.
Their daughter, "6 weeks of age," the priest noted, was "not yet
named." They would call her Marie. They lived on "no cultivated land," but they owned
one
head of cattle and a sheep. Between 1672 and 1696, Françoise
would give Jean 14 more children, seven daughters and eight sons, 15
children in all, including three sons and seven daughters, Marie
among them, who would create families of their own.114
Pierre
Guilbeau (Father Molin
called him a Guillebault), a farmer, had come to Acadia by c1668, when he
married Catherine, daughter of Jean Thériot and Perrine
Rau, at Port-Royal. In 1669 and 1670, Catherine had
givenPierre two daughters. In 1671,
Pierre was age 32, and Catherine was 20. They lived on 15
arpents of land and owned six head of cattle and five
sheep. For some reason, Father Molin did not count the
couple's youngest daughter, Jeanne, who would have been a year old.
Between 1673 and 1685, Catherine would give Pierre five more children,
two sons and three daughters, seven children in all, including a son
and five daughters who would create families of their own.115
Roger
dit Jean Caissie,
an Irishman, had come to the colony probably during the late 1660s as a
soldier in English service. After his enlistment ended, he
had married Marie-Françoise, daughter of Jean Poirier and Jeanne
Chebrat, at
Port-Royal in c1668. The following year, Marie-Françoise gave
him a daughter. Roger, whom Father Molin called a
Kriessy and a farmer, was age 25 in 1671, and Marie was 22. They
lived on "no cultivated land" with their 2-year-old daughter, but they
did own three head of cattle and two sheep. Between 1676 and
1697, Marie-Françoise would give Roger
six more children, four sons and two daughters, seven children in
all, including four sons and two daughters who would create families
of their own.
An historian of the Acadian experience says Roger may have
introduced fruit trees to the Beaubassin settlement, where he and
Marie-Françoise resettled probably in the late 1670s. Some of Roger's descendants would use his given name as a dit,
which would evolve into the surname Roger.117
Jacques
Blou or Belou, a
cooper, had come to the colony by c1669, when he married Marie, daughter
of François Girouard and Jeanne Aucoin, at Port-Royal.
Marie gave him a daughter in early 1671. At the time of the
census, Jacques
was age 30, and Marie was 20. Living with them was their
8-month-old daughter. They owned seven head of cattle and one sheep on "no
land." In c1679, Jacques would follow one of
Marie's brothers and brother-in-law Thomas Cormier
to Chignecto, and there Jacques and Marie would remain.
Between 1681 and 1695, she would give him six more children,
five daughters and a son, seven children in all, including six
daughters who would create families of their own. Their only
son, Joseph, would not survive childhood, so only the blood of this
family endured in the colony.117a
Pierre
Cyr, an armurier
or gunsmith, had come to the colony by c1670, when he married Marie, daughter of Jacques Bourgeois
and Jeanne Trahan, at Port-Royal. Marie gave
Pierre a son in the year of the census. Pierre, who Father Molin
called a Sire, was age 27, and Marie was 18 in 1671.
They lived on five arpents of land with their 3-month-old son and owned 11
head of cattle and six sheep. In 1677 and 1679, Marie would
give Pierre two more sons, all of whom would create families of their own.118
Members of a number of
important Acadian families do not appear in Father's Molin's count.
Some were of an exalted status, others much more humble:
Ironically, members
of the very first family of La Cadie did not appear in the first Acadian
census. In 1671, Charles
La Tour had been dead for eight years. His oldest child, daughter Jeanne, by his first wife,
a Mik'maq, would have been age 45 that year, but neither she nor her
husband appear in Father Molin's census. Neither did her younger sisters,
one of them named Antoinette, who had
become nuns. If they were still living, they likely were in France. Charles La Tour's other surviving
children, all by his third wife Jeanne Motin de Reux, also do not
appear in the 1671 census, taken nine years after Jeanne's death,
which had followed the birth of her youngest child. Daughter Marie
would have been age 17, son Jacques 16, Marguerite 13, Anne 10, and
Charles, fils 8 in 1671. One wonders where they were and who
would have been watching over them while Father Molin took his
census.75
No one named de
Menou d'Aulnay de Charnisay appeared in Father Molin's
census for the simple reason that no member of the family still
lived in the colony. Twenty-one years before the first Acadian
census, Charles d'Aulnay had drowned at Port-Royal,
leaving his widow, Jeanne Motin de Reux, with eight
children, four sons and four daughters, ages 11 to newborn.
Jeanne had remarried to Charles La Tour in February
1653, and d'Aulnay's old rival had helped raise his
children while they remained in the colony. Jeanne had died in
March 1663, survived by all eight of her children by
d'Aulnay. None of them, however, had remained in
Acadia, and none of them would marry. The daughters had been
sent to convents in France, where three of them--Renée, Jeanne, and
Anne--became nuns. Marie, the oldest, known as Damoiselle de
Poussay, became a chanoisse, or canoness, at Poussay in
Lorraine, where she would die in 1693 in early 50s. All four of Charles
d'Aulnay's sons--Joseph, Charles, René, and
Paul--became army officers, and all would die on the battlefields of
Europe. The youngest, Paul, born the year of his father's
death, became a major in the regiment of Maréchal de La Ferté and
would die in the siege of Luxembourg in 1684,
age 34. In June 1688, during the governorship of
Louis-Alexandre des Friches de Meneval, d'Aulnay's
surviving children--Marie, Renée, Jeanne, and Anne, all of the sons
having died by then--would petition King Louis XIV for compensation for
their father's holdings in Acadia. One wonders if they
received anything for their trouble.69
Martin d'Aprendestiguy
or Arpentigny, born at Ascain, Guyenne, in c1616, was a
Basque. He had come to the colony by c1655, when he married
Jeanne, oldest daughter of Charles La Tour and his Mi'kmaq
wife, at Pentagouët on
the coast of Maine. About that time, "'in partnership with
merchants of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Aprendestiguy equipped a
vessel which annually traded and fished on the Acadian coast....'"
The operation evidently had run afoul of Nicholas Denys's
monopoly, and in 1656 Martin "'was taken to Denys's
headquarters at Saint-Pierre, Cape Breton and then to France.'"
He did not return to Acadia until 1660. In October 1672, a
year after Father Molin's census, the
intendant of New France, Jean Talon, would grant Martin a
seigneurie at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean once held by Martin's his
father-in-law. With it came the title Sieur de Martignon.
Martin also would receive a seigneurie at Jemseg, farther up the
St.-Jean, along with the title Sieur de Jemseg. Jeanne,
meanwhile, gave him five children, a son and four daughters.
The son, Jean, would die at La Rochelle in March 1668, age 12. Only one
of the daughters, Marie-Anne, would marry, into the Bourgeois
family, so the blood of this seigneurial family would survive in the colony.75a
Alexandre
Le Borgne de Bélisle,
the last proprietary governor of French Acadia, had come to the
colony with his father and older brother in the late 1650s, when
Alexandre was still in his teens. He would have been age 31
in 1671 and still a bachelor. Father Molin did not count him
in the census though Alexandre had returned to the colony with Governor Grandfontaine in the summer of 1670 and was with
members of his family at
Port-Royal the following year. Alexandre would marry Marie, daughter of
former governor Charles
de Saint-Étienne de La Tour and his third wife Jeanne Motin de Reux,
widow of former governor Charles d'Aulnay, probably
at Port-Royal in c1675, but they would not be counted at Port-Royal until 1686.
Marie would give Alexandre seven children, three sons and four
daughters, including two sons four daughters who would create
families of their own. Calling himself
Bélisle or Belle-Isle, Alexandre was the seigneur of
Port-Royal. According to
his biographer, "Very little is known about Belle-Isle's
activities in connection with Acadia between 1670" and his death at
Port-Royal in the early 1690s. Evidently he would not get along well with
some of Acadia's royal governors. Grandfontaine would do what he
could to limit Bélisle's powers, considering him just another
habitant, and François-Marie Perrot, who governed during the
mid-1680s, would inform his superiors that Alexandre "was addicted
to wine. When drunk he was capable of granting the same piece
of land to several settlers at once, which could not but cause the
farmers considerable vexation." Louis-Alexandre des Friches de
Meneval would throw him in prison in November 1689 "because of
irregularities of this nature." Joseph Robinau de Villebon,
commander of the colony in the early 1690s, also would have problems with the
Port-Royal seigneur. During most of that time, heirs of
d'Aulnay and Charles La Tour would hotly
contest Alexandre's claims in Acadia.44b
Another important family in the colony not appearing in Father Molin's census,
or perhaps only mentioned in passing, was that of future capitaine de
sauvages
Jean-Vincent
d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, born in
c1652 at Saint-Castin
in the province of Béarn at the far southeastern corner of France.
Jean-Vincent was the third child and second son of French nobility.
After having served as a teenage ensign in the Carignan-Salières
Regiment in Canada, where he had seen action against the Iroquois in
1666, Jean-Vincent had come to French Acadia in the summer of 1670
with royal governor Grandfontaine, a captain in his former regiment.
An 18-year-old ensign when he arrived at Pentagouët, Jean-Vincent
promptly married a Native "princess," Pidianske, called Marie-Mathilde and Mathilde, daughter of Penobscot
sagamore Madokawando. Between 1671 and the late 1690s,
Mathilde would give Jean-Vincent 10 children,
five daughters and five sons, including three sons and five
daughters who would create families of their own.
Jean-Vincent's
remarriage to Mathilde's sister Pidiwammiskwa or Pidiwamiska, called
Marie, in c1685 would
give him two more daughters, one of whom would marry--a dozen
children in all by his two Penobscot wives. In 1674, upon the death of
Jean-Jacques II, Jean-Vincent's older, unmarried brother, back in
France, Jean-Vincent would become the third
baron de Saint-Castin--one of the few Acadian seigneurs
with such an elevated title of nobility.297
At least four families,
much more humble in social stature, somehow missed the count:
Pierre
Lejeune dit
Briard of Brie had come to Port-Royal by
c1650, when he married a daughter of Germain Doucet, sieur de
La Verdure and his first wife, there. Like her mother's,
Pierre's wife's name has been lost to history. By 1671, she
had given him two sons, who would have been ages 15 and 10 when the
census was taken. Father Molin counted no member of this
family
at Port-Royal in 1671. They were living either in another
Acadian settlement or outside of the colony.
The two sons and their families would be counted at La Hève on the
Atlantic coast in 1686, so the family would not have ventured far
from Acadia. Both of the sons would create large families of
their own.71
François
Viger or Vigé,
probably a Frenchman, had married in c1661 a woman whose name has
been lost to history. Their son François, fils,
evidently their only child, had been born probably at Cap-Sable in
c1662. The family did not appear in Father Molin's census
probably because he did not count them at Cap-Sable, a clue, perhaps, that François's wife was a
Mik'maq or Métis. In February 1672, a colonial official
would note
that François, père purchased some of the clothing of
the late René Bonnin, evidence that he was still in
the colony. François, fils would marry Marie, daughter of Philippe Mius
d'Azy, fils and his first wife, a Mi'kmaq, probably at Pobomcoup
near Cap-Sable in c1697. Between 1698 and 1712, Marie would
give François, fils
seven children, four sons and three daughters, including a set of
twins. One of their sons and two of their daughters would create
families of their own.257
Guyon, Dion, or Denis
dit La Vallée, son of Pierre Chiasson
or Giasson and Marie Péroché
of La Rochelle, had come to the colony by c1666, when he married Jeanne,
daughter of ____
Bernard and Andrée Guyon and a stepdaughter of Antoine Belliveau,
at Port-Royal. Between 1667 and 1670, Jeanne gave Guyon three
children, two sons and two dauthters. By June 1668, they had moved to Mouchecoudabouet, now Musquodoboit
Harbor, near present-day Halifax, and evidently were among the 13 inhabitants
at Mouchecoudabouet whom Father Molin counted in 1671 but did not
name. The couple would still be living at Musquodoboit in
October 1674, after which they would move on to Chignecto.
Between the early 1670s and 1680, Jeanne would give Guyon five more
children, at least two sons and two daughters, eight children in
all. Jeanne would die during the early 1680s, and Guyon would
remarry to Marie-Madeleine,
daughter of Canadians Pierre Martin and Joachine Lafleur
of Sillery, at Québec in October 1683 and return to Chignecto, where
she would give him four more daughters, a dozen children by two
wives, including four sons and six daughters who would create families of their own.87
Jacques, or Jean-Jacques,
Leprince,
born in c1646, probably a Frenchman, may have been serving in the household of notary
Séverin Ameau at Trois-Rivières on the St. Lawrence at the time of the 1666
Canadian census. He had moved to Port-Royal before 1671, the year he married Marguerite,
daughter of Étienne Hébert and Marie Gaudet. Acadian genealogist Stephen A. Whites says
Father Molin did not count Jacques and
Marguerite in the first census because they probably "lived at a place that
was far removed from the rest of the [Hébert] family." Nor
would
they appear in the 1678 census. However, New-French intendant
Jacques de Meulles would find them at Port-Royal in 1686 and record that Jacques was age 40, and Marguerite
35. He found them living with four children, who the intendant did not
name, and owned five sheep and three hogs. Between 1678 and
1681, Marguerite had given Jacques
four children, two daughters and two sons, including a set of twins,
so the couple had lost no children by 1686. In 1688 and 1692,
Marguerite would give Jean-Jacques two more sons, six children in
all, including three sons and two daughters who would create families of their
own. The family's surname was later shortened to Prince.121
Settlements Old and New
Soon after the counting of heads by the
new Acadian governor, some of the inhabitants of the Port-Royal basin became
pioneers again--"the first swarming of the Acadians to establish
their own hive," as one historian describes it. Through the
lens of history, the movement from Port-Royal seems inevitable.
"It was colonization by settlement of the land first, and the
registration of ownership later," Naomi Griffiths tells
us. "The absence of French officials for some sixteen to
seventeen years after 1654, and the lack of interest shown by Temple
in establishing formal institutions registering land ownership
during this same period, has meant that the written records of the
early expansion of the Acadians from Port Royal between 1671 and
1686 are few and far between. Those who settled on land
without an obvious and recorded title of settlement during these
years were understandably wary of any attempt to introduce formal
registration practices to confirm titles to their holdings."
But resettle they did, and "in a small and closely related society,
such as that which existed among those of European descent in the
colony at this time, claims of land ownership would be a matter of
communal memory, something to be registered with civil officials
when such was in existence." With the return of French
control, this would be soon.89a
"Not long after 1671," writes another historian of the
colony, "Jacques Bourgeois, the former surgeon of
d’Aulnay and a well-to-do farmer of Port Royal,
decided to move...." His new settlement stood nearly a hundred
miles northeast of Port-Royal, along the lower Rivière Missaguash
just north of today's Cumberland Basin, an arm of the Baie de
Chignecto that, in turn, is an extension of the Bay of Fundy.
The Mi'kmaq had long been familiar with the place, and early in the
colony's history Frenchmen had noted it marvels. Jesuit Father
Pierre Biard, with proprietor Jean de Biencourt, visited Chignecto in 1612 and saw "'many large and
beautiful meadows, extending further that the eye can reach."
The priest concluded that " ... the country ... would be very
fertile if it were cultivated," but that had to wait for six long
decades. Historian Andrew Hill Clark notes that Bourgeois
"had known the area in younger days in the course of extensive
fur-trading activities and his move was undoubtedly aimed at the
freer activity of Indian trading as well as of farming. But he
persuaded five other families to go with him and the prospects of
farming were certainly bright enough with a situation on the edge of
the largest continuous expanse of dykable marshland in eastern North
America [the Tintamarre]. Even without dyking, the resources
of salt-marsh hay, and of grazing, must have seemed limitless.
Within five years the group was well established, other settlers
followed, more and more land was reclaimed, and the flocks and herds
increased." Nevertheless, as an official visitor to the area
attested in the mid-1680s, ""the
first years at Beaubassin were particularly difficult because of the
lack of dry pasture and the amount of work and resources it took to
establish the dykes."
No matter, the location of a new settlement so far from the
prying eyes of French officials at Port-Royal doubtlessly was
another incentive to settle the place. The Acadians at
Port-Royal who had moved higher up the valley found themselves stuck
in a virtual cul de sac which tended to remove them from the New
English trade. Now, New-English merchants could slip quietly
past Port-Royal up to Chignecto Bay, make their way into the narrow
basin, and, minding the tides, trade with the Acadians at the mouth of Rivière
Missaguash (originally Mésagouèche).
Moreover, the portage along
the Missaguash connecting Chignecto Bay with Baie-Verte, despite its
difficulties, "was an important relay station in
the sea communications between Acadia and Canada and a strategic
position commanding the isthmus and Baie Française."89
Among the men who followed Jacques
Bourgeois to this distant new settlement were his older
sons Charles and Germain; his son-in-law Pierre Cyr, and
future sons-in-law Jean
Boudrot
and Germain Girouard; Germain Girouard's
brothers-in-law Thomas Cormier and Jacques Blou, one a
carpenter, the other a cooper; and Pierre Arseneau, a
former pilot who had recently arrived at Port-Royal aboard L'Oranger.
In October 1676, Canadian
Michel
Le Neuf de La Vallière, son of a governor of Trois-Rivières and son-in-law of
Nicolas Denys, secured seigniorial rights from Governor-General
Frontenac and Intendant Duchesneau to a 10-square-league area around the new settlement.
La Vallière called his seigneurie Beaubassin and "established himself on an 'island' of higher ground in
the marshes" that flanked the Missaguash, today's Tonge's Island.
Bourgeois and his companions named their settlement
Mésagouèche after the nearby river. The collection of
settlements that arose in the area also was called Chignecto, after the narrow, 15-mile-wide isthmus that these
settlements straddled. Acadian tradition insists that the
grant to La Vallière specified that "he leave undisturbed any
settlers there, together with the lands they used or had planned to
use for themselves; the Bourgeois group was thus protected,"
but in March 1682, the Bourgeoiss and other original settlers were being referred to as
La Vallière's "tenants." During the late 1670s
and early 1680s, the seigneur was the commander and then governor of
Acadia, so Beaubassin served as the colony's capital until it
returned to Port-Royal in 1684. During the following years,
settlements appeared on either side of the Cumberland
Basin and Rivière Missaguash at
Rivière-des-Hébert,
Menoudie, Maccan, Nappan, La Planche, and Ouescouque east of
the Missaguash; and at Veshak, La Coupe, Aulac, Le Lac,
Les-Richards, Tintamarre, and La Coupe
west of it. Several church parishes were created for the
area: Notre-Dame-du Bon Secours, called
Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption-de-la-Trés-Ste.-Vierge after 1686,
at Beaubassin; St.-Louis at Pointe-de-Beauséjour; and St.-Anne at
Tintamarre.90
With La Vallière came new settlers to
the Chignecto area in the late 1670s, among them Guyon Chiasson
dit
Lavallée, then in his middle age and married to his second wife; and
Michel Larché
or Haché dit Gallant, a young
servant of the seigneur who married Anne, daughter of Thomas
Cormier. From Port-Royal in the late 1670s and
early 1680s came Michel, son of Jean Poirier; and
Poirier's brother-in-law, Irishman
Roger dit
Jean Caissie. An
historian of the Acadian experience says Roger may have
introduced fruit trees to Beaubassin. During the following years,
other settlers in the Chignecto area bore the names Belliveau,
Bernard,
Boucher,
Bourg, Brun,
Carret, Clémençeau, Daigre, Doiron, Doucet,
Dugas, Forest, Gaudet,
Gravois, Guénard, Hébert, Hugon, Labauve,
Lambert, Landry, Lanoue, Livois,
Martin,
Melanson, Morin dit Boucher, Mouton, Olivier, Orillon, Pothier,
Quimine,
Richard, and Thériot.91
Meanwhile,
the Acadians who remained in the Port-Royal valley built more
aboiteaux on both sides of the river above and below the fort,
claiming more arable land from the basin and its tributaries.
Settlers moved as far upriver as the terrain and the salt marshes
allowed, and others fanned out along the many smaller streams that
flowed from the uplands into the basin. New settlers arrived,
took up new land, and married into the families already there.
Despite living under the noses of the French, and later the British,
officials who ran the colony, Port-Royal Acadians went about their
business much as their cousins and compatriots did in the newer,
more distant settlements. Two church parishes served the
Port-Royal area: the original parish for the colony,
St.-Jean-Baptiste, in the village near the fort on the lower river;
and St.-Laurent on the upper river. Here was "the oldest
settlement in the colony, ... almost always linked to the other
communities of the colony by kin ties," Naomi Griffiths tells us.
"Until the founding of Halifax in 1749, it was most often the
administrative centre of the colony and its population was the most
varied. Its permanent settlers saw a greater number of
transients--administrators, soldiers, ecclesiastics, and merchants"
than did the newer Acadian settlements. "Finally, the attitude
of those who lived at Port Royal was built on a greater awareness of
the general politics of the region, the influence of both French and
English upon events, than those who lived elsewhere in the colony
exhibited." Some "permanent" residents in the colonial capital built houses near the fort
and engaged in legitimate commerce, among them Abraham Boudrot, a son of
the colony's first
lieutenant général civil et criminel, Michel Boudrot.
Most administrators did not remain in the colony when
their term of service ended, but Mathieu
de Goutin, head clerk or recorder and conseiller
du roi, whose long tenure began in the late 1680s, married into an
Acadian family, the
Thibodeaus, and remained at Port-Royal. From the
restoration of French control in Acadia through the first decades of
British rule in Nova Scotia, Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle
and his descendants held the seigneurie at
Port-Royal. Other families there, old
and new, also bore the names
Allain,
Babineau, Bastarache, Belliveau,
Blanchard,
Bonnevie, Bourg, Bourgeois, Breau,
Broussard, Brun, Comeau, Doucet, Dugas,
Duon,
Dupuis, Forest, Gaudet, Gauthier, Gautrot,
Girouard,
Gousman, Granger,
Guédry, Guilbeau, Hébert, Henry, Jeanson, Landry,
Lanoue, Lavergne, LeBlanc, Léger,
Levron,
Martin,
Martin dit Barnabé, Melanson, Michel, Moyse,
Orillon, Part, Pellerin, Préjean,
Prince,
Richard,
Robichaud, Roy, Savary, Savoie, and Thériot.98
A
comparison of the surnames found at Port-Royal with those at
Chignecto reveals that members of the families who pioneered newer
settlements also remained at Port-Royal. Griffiths
observes: "The question of land shortage has often been given
as the motive for internal migration within a colony. But, in
Acadia, the continued population growth of the older settlements
would argue that this was only one of many reasons, including
social, political, and religious tensions within the older
communities as well as the lure of the frontier itself." She
adds: "As well as people, Port Royal had also provided the new
communities with stock, tools, and, perhaps as important as anything
else, the knowledge of skills necessary to survive and prosper,"
especially in the construction of aboiteaux.98a
The Acadians and the Indians
An interesting and seemingly unique
aspect of life for these Acadian habitants was their relationship
with the local Natives. Unlike the English and Dutch colonists
down the coast, whose burgeoning settlements rose up suddenly where
the Indians also dwelled, the Acadian settlements never became
populous or intrusive enough to threaten the Natives' way of life. The Mi'kmaq, when the Europeans
came, occupied present-day
Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton Island, eastern New Brunswick, the Gaspé peninsula, and Prince Edward Island--Esisgeoagig,
they called their part of the world, also Megumagee, "red
earth country"--Mi'kma'ki. Unlike most of the Eastern Woodland nations, they were not sedentary agricultural Indians but hunters, gatherers,
and fishermen.
The Portuguese explorer Joao Álvares Fegundes may have
interacted with them during the early 1520s. Jacques Cartier
encountered them in the Baie des Chaleurs during his first voyage to the Gulf of St. Lawrence
in 1534. During
his exploration of the Atlantic coast of Acadia and the Bay of Fundy
in early 1583, Rouen merchant Étienne Bellenger also encountered them and described
some of their customs to English scholar Richard Hakluyt:
"'They weare their hayre hanging downe long before and behynde as
long as their Navells,'" Bellenger observed, and added that "'they go all naked saving
for their privates which they cover with an Apron of some Beastes
skynn.'" Bellenger noted that the Indians he encountered "from
60 to 80 leagues westward from Cape Breton he found cunning, cruel,
and treacherous; he lost two of his men and his pinnace to them as
he made his way back along the Nova Scotia shore" towards the end of
his four-month voyage. "The Indians farther to the west," Bellenger insisted, "were gentle and tractable."
He may not have realized it, but these Indians, both the "cruel" and
the "gentle," belonged to the same nation. The Mi'kmaq
closer to Cape Breton had been subjected to the depredations of the
coastal fishermen longer and more intensely than their kinsmen to the west,
hence their "cruel" behavior.
Continuing their journey westward, Bellenger and his men "visited an
Indian village of 80 houses on a river 100 leagues from Cape Breton,
not far, that is, from Cap de Sable. He had a quantity of
small merchandise for trade, and acquired from the Indians in return
for it dressed 'buff' (probably elk), deer, and seal skins, together
with marten, beaver, otter, and lynx pelts, samples of castor,
porcupine quills, dye-stuffs, and some dried deer-flesh." The beaver
pelts alone, Bellenger claimed, could make 600 hats.139
Called Souriquois and Gaspésians by
early French settlers, the Mi'kmaq, or mi'k'makik, numbered about 3,000 during the
first decade of the 1600s, down from an estimated 35,000 before
first contact with the Europeans nearly a century before.
During these times, only the Mi'kmaq lived in the interior of
peninsula Acadia, where they hunted during the winter in the shelter
of the forest, but they spent most of their time along the shore,
taking advantage of the wealth of food there throughout all but six
weeks of the year. On the long, rocky coast of the Atlantic,
facing the offshore fishing grounds, they had endured the abuses of
the European fishermen for decades and sometimes had responded with
spears and arrows. Yet they got along well with the early
French interlopers, who seemed interested mainly in the fur trade and
seemed to come and go with some frequency. To be sure, there
was potential competition in the acquisition of furs, but from the
beginning the French and Indians in Acadia chose cooperation, not
competition, in the mutually beneficial trade. As a recent
historian of French-Indian relations avows: "Not one fur would
have made it to Europe without the intervention of Native trappers
and the consensual trade of Indians." This was true in every
corner of New France, including Mi'kma'ki. But the
Indians paid a price for their cooperation. Like many
nations of North America, the exigencies of the fur trade
dramatically altered Mi'kmaq cultural patterns. The Indians
trapped and skinned the animals and traded the pelts for goods that
only Europeans could provide. The resulting frontier exchange
economy provided an eager market among the Mi'kmaq for European
goods. Unlike the nations of Canada, who traded with the
English and the Dutch as well as the French, geography kept the
Mi'kmaq beholden to the
French, who "deliberately settled very near the Indians and were
comfortable in their presence. In a country of enormous size,
they did not attempt to drive the Indians off the land or to push
them away." When European families finally appeared among the
Mi'kmaq in the late 1630s, the Natives could ignore what the
Frenchmen built beside the Fundy marshes "because they did not
hinder the traditional way of life" of a non-agricultural people.
The
Acadian farmers, in fact, with their running dykes and clever aboiteaux, created new
land where only salt marsh had stood--terrain the Indians had
utilized only tangentially. On these new lands, the
Acadians grew grains, cabbages, peas, and other vegetables, not a
nutrient-depleting cash crop like tobacco, which in other colonies
forced Europeans to drive the Natives from their land in order to
produce more of the lucrative commodity. Moreover, the French
population in Acadia grew at a glacial pace, while in the New
England and Chesapeake colonies to the south the European
populations exploded. So, while colonists in Virginia, New York,
and New England died by the score in Indian uprisings, the Acadians,
until their last few years in the colony, knew only peace with the
Mi'kmaq and their Algonquian cousins.139b
Both religious and secular factors
contributed to this remarkable relationship. Naomi Griffiths offers the wide perspective: "... the issues of
conversion of the Mi'kmaq and of Christian observance among the
settlers [of Acadia] did not hold the same measure of intensity as
elsewhere. The Mi'kmaq neither burnt nor tortured those who
came among them. There were no saints, by martyrdom or through
the practice of heroic virtue, among the seventeenth-century
settlers in the colony. The indigenous religious beliefs of
the Mi'kmaq reflected the importance to them of the environment in
which they lived. Such an orientation would not have been
alien to the many Franciscans who worked among them, whose lives
were governed by a discipline established by a man who talked to the
birds and called the moon his sister, the sun, his brother.
Further, the Jesuit missionaries who did work among the Mi'kmaq seem
to have been more closely connected to the colonists than they were
in [Canada] and
much less likely to emphasize the necessity of cultural change for
their converts."139c
Genealogical records, as well as Native oral history, reveal that the relationship of the Acadians with the
Mi'kmaq was more than economic and religious. Members of many Acadian
families--d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Aucoin, Blanchard,
Bourgeois, Cellier,
Clémenceau, Damours/Louvière, Denys de la Ronde,
Doucet,
Guédry,
Haché dit
Gallant,
Labauve,
Lambert,
Landry,
LeBlanc,
Lejeune, Martin, Mius d'Azy, Pellerin,
Pinet,
Petitpas, Roy, Saint-Étienne de La Tour,
Serreau de Saint-Aubin, some of high rank, others more humble--practiced
métissage. As a result, their descendants can count
members of the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet nations among their ancestors.
Historian David Hackett Fischer reminds us that "These mixed
marriages were actively encouraged by French leaders and were
blessed by the Catholic clergy. French Catholic leaders," in
fact, Fischer asserts, "were more tolerant of marriages with Indians
than of unions with Protestants." Acadian historian Patrice Gallant has noted that "When their father was an
Indian, Métis children sometimes adopted as their family name that
of their French mother. That is why the children of" a Mi'kmaq
named Joseph, husband of Jeanne Lejeune dit Briard,
"were known by the name [dit] Lejeune."
When Mi'kmaq Chief Jean-Baptiste Cope of Shubenacadie signed a treaty with
British Governor Hopson at Halifax in November 1752, two of the Mi'kmaq
headmen who put their mark to the document were
Andrew Hadley Martin and Gabriel Martin.139a
Long before the Europeans arrived, the Mi'kmaq
had "retained an overarching political structure called the Sante
Mawi'omi, which translates to 'Grand Council' or 'Holy
Gathering.' Legendarily founded hundreds of years earlier in
response to Iroquois raids from the east, the council brought
together the 'captains' of seven Mi'kmaq districts for talks on
'peace and war, treaties of friendship, and treaties for the common
good.'" During historical times, the Mi'kmaq considered
themselves part of a loose confederation of Algonquin-speaking
nations, collectively called the Wabanaki. Other Wabanaki
nations included the Maliseet, or Wolastoqiyik, of
the St.-Jean valley, called the Etchemin by early French explorers; the Passamaquoddy of the Rivière Ste.-Croix
area, who early explorers threw in with the Etchemin; the Penobscot, who sometimes were thrown in with
the Etchemin; and the Eastern Abenaki or Wabenaki of the Kennebec
valley, who early French
explorers called Abenaquais
or Abenaqueoit. These nations, in turn, were
related by language, if not culture, to other Algonquin speakers in
the region, such as the Ottawa (Odawa) of the Great Lakes and the St.
Lawrence region. All of them had in
common an ancient rivalry with the Iroquoian tribes of the St.
Lawrence valley and upper New York, though, to the chagrin of early
French leaders, the Algonquin also fought among themselves.
The French also had a long history of conflict with the Iroquois. Cartier antagonized
the Laurentians during the early 1500s, and Champlain interjected
the French into the ancient Indian rivalry by building Québec on the
site of an abandoned Iroquoian village and then allying with the
Montagnais and Huron against the Mohawk. In historical
times, at least, the Iroquois did not raid as far east as the
Acadian peninsula, but the Mohawk and other Iroquois nations enthusiastically fought their fellow
Iroquois-speaking Huron, as well as the Wabanaki and other Algonquin
nations that threatened their hegemony in the
region. In these wars along the Indian frontier, the French
Canadians played their part as allies of the Huron and Algonquin,
though in the 1630s and 1640s, the Abenaki, with their ready access
to New English traders, were perceived by Canadians as a threat to
their commerce.
The founders of Acadia--de Mons, Poutrincourt, Biencourt, La
Tour, and later Razilly and d'Aulnay--emulated Champlain in
Canada by using the Mi'kmaq and other nations not only to gather
precious furs, but also to provide a buffer of protection against
the enemies of the colony, be they Indian or European.
Following the humiliating defeat of the Algonquin nations of New
England in
King Philip's War of 1675, their linguistic cousins up the coast
formalized a Wabanaki Confederacy, which
became an essential weapon in their struggle against the
English interlopers, whose colonies always far outnumbered the
French settlements to the north. Unfortunately for these proud
people, there was a price to pay for allying themselves to an
overweening European power. French officials plied the
Wabanaki with gifts and promises, while French traders threatened to
withhold their trade goods if the Wabanaki refused to help them in the wars
against the English. Missionary priests, especially the
Jesuits, were keen to the realities of trade and security and took
advantage of Wabanaki
vulnerabilities in order to convert them to Roman Catholicism.
Jesuits from Canada were especially successful among the Eastern
Abenaki of Maine. It was not unusual for Wabanaki bands to
take to the warpath with a black robe padding
along to give spiritual sustenance to the painted warriors.
"Their methods were often cruel and ruthless, being based chiefly on
political necessities, and the higher principles of the Christian
faith were subordinated for the time being to these considerations,"
a Canadian historian has described these warrior-priests. But one doubts
if these sturdy Jesuits were troubled by their consciences. In
their eyes, the English and the Dutch were unrepentant heretics who
were worse than heathen savages.140
The traders and priests were not the
only ones who maintained influence with the Wabanaki nations.
One of the seigneurs of Acadia was a capitain
de sauvages, or captain of the Indians, as the Canadians would
have called him--a member of the French elite "who," according to one
historian, "trained Indians for the defence[sic] of
territories put in their charge." Jean-Vincent de
Saint-Castin was the second son of Jean-Jacques d'Abbadie,
sieur
de Saint-Castin, Herrère, d'Escout et d'Escou, first baron
de
Saint-Castin. In 1665, as a teenaged ensign in the Carignan-Salières
Regiment, Jean-Vincent went to Canada to fight the Iroquois.
He came to Acadia in 1670 with royal
governor Grandfontaine, whose headquarters on the lower Penobscot
stood near the territory of the eastern Abenaki. Jean-Vincent was an
18-year-old bachelor when he came to Pentagouët. In the early
1670s, still in his teens, he
married Marie-Mathilde, called Mathilde, daughter of Penobscot
sagamore Madokawondo, and
created
at Pentagouët "a kind
of feudal principality that was half Indian...." According
to Acadian historian Bona Arsenault, Saint-Castin "soon became the supreme chief of the
entire Abenaki tribe," to which the Penobscot belonged, "subjecting them to dictatorial rule."
One of Saint-Castin's
biographers offers a more nuanced take on the Frenchman's relations
to his in-laws' people: "Until his death in 1698, Madokawando was the
sole chief of the Penobscots," Georges Cerberlaud Salagnac
informs us. The sagamore "had his lieutenants who were
in command of the warriors, led expeditions, and parlayed with the
enemy when truces were made. But it was known everywhere that
nothing was done without his son-in-law's advice, and that the
latter had only to express a wish for it to be instantly complied
with." In
1674, upon the death of his older, unmarried brother in France,
Jean-Vincent was named third baron de Saint-Castin,
the name of his birthplace in Béarn. The French governors of
Acadia, like the governors-general in Canada, used capitaines de sauvages like
Saint-Castin to protect their settlements from the
English. "It was an ingenious defence system for the Acadian
territory," Arsenault tells us, "integration of the Indians into the organization
helped the comparatively small Acadian colony against the more
populous English colonies in New England, especially Massachusetts,
bordering Acadia. When war broke out, these captains ordered
out the Indians who repelled attacks or carried out bloody raids
directly into the heart of the English colonies." But there
also was a price to pay for such a scheme. "[E]xpeditions
carried out by some of these captains and their Indian infantry into
enemy territory often were for reasons other than mere defence;
consequently, the peaceful Acadian colonists often suffered painful
counterattacks as as result. Furthermore," Arsenault reminds
us, "the raids built up animosity and hate for the Acadians among
the Massachusetts settlers in particular." This became
manifest in the long series of imperial conflicts that erupted in
North America after 1689.141
And then there is the long view of
Acadian history from the perspective of the Natives. In all their time together,
from the first encounters with De Mons and Champlain to the disaster
of French defeat a century and a half later, the Mi'kmaq never
surrendered sovereignty over Mi'kma'ki to the French, their
esteemed allies, nor to their "conquerors," the English. They,
in fact, claim sovereigny over their land to this day. The
peaceful, unobtrusive Acadians, then, caught in the middle of all
this conflict, were able to exist in their agricultural paradise for
as long as they did only
because their kinsmen, the Mi'kmaq, allowed it.141a
The Acadians and Their Seigneurs
A creature of France, Acadia from its
earliest days was burdened with French institutions more suitable
for the mother country than the North American wilderness. One
of these was the medieval institution of feudalism, especially its
component, manorialism, which in New France was called
seigneurialism. A seigneurie, like the Old World manor, was a
grant of land from the King to a vassal. In France, only
nobles held seigneuries. Not so in North America. Grants
were made to military officers, successful merchants, and favorites of
the governors and intendants. Along with land came
other feudal rights enjoyed by the seigneur. It was assumed
that a seigneur would attract to his land settlers known as
censitaires or habitants, who in turn would employ hired,
often indentured, workers called engagés. As part of the feudal arrangement, the seigneur was empowered to collect from his
habitants cens et rentes, or quit-rents, which were taxes for use of the land.
The seigneur also could impose inheritance taxes called lods et
vents and require his habitants to work for him for three days
of the year, usually on projects beneficial to everyone living on
the seigneurie. The seigneur also held the right of
seigneurial justice, by which he decided disputes over land usage
and over inheritance of land within his seigneurie.100
The institution had been introduced to
New France in 1541, when King François I authorized Jean-François de
la Rocque, sieur de Roberval, to grant seigneuries in Canada,
which had recently been explored by Jacques Cartier. The
Cartier-Roberval venture failed miserably, and no seigneuries
were ever granted there, at least none that could stand the test of
time. In 1578 and again in 1598, kings Henri III and
Henri IV granted Troilus du Mesgouèz, marquis de La Roche, the first
viceroy of New France, permission to grant seigneuries there,
but, again, because of the failure of La Roche's ventures, none
were actually issued. Not until 1627 did Cardinal Richelieu, in the
name of King Louis XIII, impose a seigneurial system on all of New France
similar to the one Champlain had introduced in Canada four years earlier. In 1665,
Canada's intendant, Jean Talon, as direct
representative of King Louis XIV, was given the power
to grant and oversee the many seigneuries that lined both banks of
the Fleuve St.-Laurent, "the Highway of New France." Talon
demanded that the seigneurs actually live on their "long lots"
beside the St. Lawrence. Following French custom, women were
allowed to inherit their husbands' or fathers' seigneuries. There was nothing in Acadia like
Canada's St. Lawrence, with its miles upon miles of long-lot
seigneuries lining both banks of the river. No great fleuve
ran for dozens of leagues into Acadia's interior, serving as a great
highway of commerce as well as communication. There was the
Bay of Fundy, to be sure, with its smaller bays, its inlets, and its
wide, marsh-lined basins, but the generally rocky coast of La Grand
Baie Française precluded settlement directly on its shores.
The seigneurial system nonetheless came to Acadia.101
Beginning in 1603, de Mons himself had been the first
"seigneur" of the province, though the institution did not take root there
until many decades later. As holder of the King's concession,
he possessed the power to grant seigneuries. His first grant
was that of Port-Royal to Jean de Biencourt, sieur
de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just, awarded in 1606. Upon Poutrincourt's death,
his oldest son, Charles de Biencourt de Saint-Just, inherited the
seigneurie. After Biencourt's death in 1623, Charles La Tour,
in partnership with Biencourt's younger brother, Jacques de Salazar
de Saint-Just,
lay claim to Biencourt's seigneurial rights not only for
Port-Royal, but for all of Acadia. Meanwhile, in 1612,
Antoinette de Pons, marquise de Guercheville, acquired from de
Mons's successor, the Prince de Condé, a seigneurie in Acadia
for the benefit of the Jesuits that included an extent of territory
much larger than Poutrincourt's. After Isaac de Razilly became
governor of Acadia in 1632, he granted Port-Royal to his
cousin and lieutenant, Charles de Menou, sieur
d’Aulnay de Charnisay.
Another of Razilly's lieutenants, Nicolas Denys, held
wide-spread seigneuries at Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island; at
Canso, Chédabouctou, and Port Rossignol on the Atlantic side of the
peninsula; and along the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore at Miscou, Nepisiguit,
and Miramichi, where his son, Richard de Fronsac, held sway in a
four-bastioned stone fort during the 1680s. A Denys associate, Bernard
Bugaret dit
Saint-Martin of Bordeaux, may have received a concession at
Mirliguèche, on the Atlantic coast above La Hève. Charles La Tour was granted, or, more
accurately, confirmed to have been holding, seigneuries at
Cap-Sable, on lower Rivière St.-Jean, and at Machias in Maine.
"During these early years," Naomi Griffiths tells us, "the
seigneuries were basically statements of administrative rights and
responsibilities rather than blueprints for action." Quoting
Joan Bourque Campbell's study of "The Seigneurs of Acadie,"
Griffiths reminds us that the early seigneurs were little more than
"land settling agents."102
After Razilly's death in 1636,
his successor, d'Aulnay, assumed his cousin's hold on the
other concessionaires in the colony, even going so far as to destroy
or seize some of their holdings when they resisted him.
Meanwhile, d'Aulnay transferred the colony's agricultural operation
from La Hève to Port-Royal. There, likely under the
seigneur's supervision, the habitants began the practice of
reclaiming the salt mashes lining the basin with extensive dykes
called aboiteaux. Not only the construction, but also the
maintenance of these mounds of earth and the delicate wooden clapper
valves that kept the salt tides out and allowed the rain water to
cleanse the soil behind the aboiteaux, required the collective effort of the
habitants. Three days a year of required collective labor made
no sense to these hard-working farmers. They worked together,
neighbor helping neighbor, not at the behest of a pushy seigneur but
when necessity required it, which was often. This collective
labor, along with their kinship networks, not seigneurial
obligations, became the glue that bound them tightly together and
helped to create a unique Acadian culture.103
After the death of d'Aulnay in 1650,
the Acadian seigneurial system was shaken up again. Charles
La Tour granted a seigneurie at Pobomcoup near Cap-Sable to his boyhood friend
and lieutenant, Philippe Mius d'Entremont, whose descendants
retained it for nearly a century. One biographer insists that
Mius d'Entremont was among the few Acadian seigneurs who not
only lived on his manor, but also encouraged immigrants from France
and especially habitants from Port-Royal to settle there and engage in agriculture.
La Tour, meanwhile, could not hold on to Port-Royal, even after
marrying d'Aulnay's widow. The largest settlement in the
colony fell into the hands of d'Aulnay's chief creditor in France:
Emmanuel Le Borgne, a wealthy La Rochelle merchant, secured
the seigneurial rights to Port-Royal and its
environs and passed them on to his second son, Alexandre de
Bélisle. The seigneurial rights in the Minas Basin were
long disputed by the heirs of La Tour and
Le Borgne, some of whom had conveniently--or perhaps
inconveniently--married one another. The Le Borgnes,
La Tours,
Mius d'Entremonts, Nicolas Denys, and others, held their
rights even after the colony was lost to England in 1654.104
The governors-general and intendants of New
France, who after 1670 held sway over royally-controlled Acadia, awarded
seigneuries
to their favorites, especially Canadian aristocrats, in hopes of
encouraging settlement in the recovered colony. In July 1672,
Intendant Jean
Talon granted to Pierre Denys de La Ronde, Nicolas Denys's nephew, and
Denys de
La Ronde's partners Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye and Charles Bazire, "'a
tract of land extending from Percé to La Malbaei," on the tip of the
Gaspé peninsula, at the northwestern edge of greater Acadia; "there they established
a sedentary fishery, ... which Denys de la Ronde managed" in an area
once held by his uncle. In October 1672, hoping to encourage
settlement on the most important transportation link between Québec
and Acadia, Talon awarded four seigneuries on lower Rivière
St.-Jean. On October 17, he confirmed the rights of Martin d'Aprendestiguy of
Ascain, Guyenne, France, a Basque, to a seigneurie near the mouth of
the St.-Jean, once
controlled by Charles La Tour. D'Aprendestiguy's wife
was Jeanne, La Tour's oldest daughter by his first wife, a
Mi'kmaq, so the family connection was essential in the
elevation of d'Aprendestiguy to the title of Sieur de Martignon and
the recognition of his seigneurial rights on the river.
Later, he and his wife received an additional seigneurial grant
farther upriver at Jemseg. D'Aprendestiguy planned to
establish a cattle-raising venture on his seigneurie, producing
enough beeves, he hoped, not only to feed Québec, but also to import
meat to the French West Indies. He also made plans to develop
a dry fishery in the area. On October 18, Talon granted a
smaller concession, "of some two leagues of river frontage," to
Jacques Potier, sieur de Saint-Denis, who, unlike d'Aprendestiguy
and other seigneurs on the river, seems to have been an absentee
landlord. On October 20, Pierre de Joybert de Soulanges de Marson,
Acadian Governor Grandfontaine's second in
command, who had been living at the fort at Jemseg for the past two
years, received a seigneurie named Joybert on Rivière
St.-Jean, running "four leagues from the mouth of the river and ...
one league in depth, including the site of the present-day city of
Saint John," New Brunswick; on the same day, Joybert's younger brother, Jacques de Joybert,
received a grant "on one side the grant to ... his brother."
Four years later, in October 1676, soon after he was named commander of the colony,
Pierre de Joybert received two more grants, one named
Soulanges at Nashouat, the other called Marson at Jemseg, both on
the St.-Jean, where he died in July 1678 while serving as governor of
Acadia. In March 1691, Pierre de Joybert's widow was secured in her
rights to her husband's seigneurie at Jemseg. Meanwhile, in October 1676, Michel
Le Neuf de la Vallière, who also would serve as commander and governor of
Acadia, was awarded a large seigneurie at Chignecto, which he called Beaubassin. He then
became Michel Le Neuf de la Vallière et de Beaubassin.
Tradition has it that La Vallière was ordered to respect the
rights of the Chignecto settlers already established there, but this
proud Canadian likely would have ignored any diminution of his
seigneurial powers, even if the caveat existed. In March 1683,
Jean Martel de Magos, who would marry a Robinau in his late
middle-age, received a grant of seigneurie at Mégais, or Machias, on the
Maine coast, once held by Charles La Tour. In June
1684, Jean Serreau de Saint-Aubin, native of Poitou and
recently domiciled on Île d'Orléans, near Québec, was granted a large
seigneurie at
Passamaquoddy, including Île Ste.-Croix, site of de Monts's original
settlement, despite his having killed a man in Canada. Saint Aubin set himself up on Île
Archimagan, today's St. Andrews, New Brunswick, at the mouth of
Rivière Ste.-Croix. In the 1680s, the older sons of
Mathieu D'Amours, sieur de Matane, a native of Paris and a prominent member of
Québec's Sovereign Council, received seigneurial grants at Rivière Richibouctou on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore and especially along the
middle stretches of Rivière St.-Jean above Jemseg. These D'Amourss--Louis,
whose seigneurie lay at Jemseg; Mathieu, fils, whose
seigneurie lay between Jemseg and Nashouat; and René--managed to
lure a few families from the Port-Royal basin to their holdings.
During the 1690s, younger D'Amours, sons Charles and Bernard,
also received seigneuries along Rivière St.-Jean. In 1683, Port-Rossignol on the Atlantic coast, once held by Nicolas
Denys, was granted to Aubert de La Chesnay. In 1684, a
seigneurie along the Atlantic coast from the Mouscoudabouet area up to and past
Canso and Chédabouctou, was granted to Claude Bergier, ____ Gauthier, and others, in an area also once held by Nicolas
Denys.
In July 1688, Governor-General Denonville and Intendant Bochart de
Champigny awarded a seigneurie to Antoine Laumet dit La Mothe,
sieur de Cadillac, a Gascon poseur recently married into a prominent Canadian
family, the Guyons. Cadillac's huge grant, confirmed in May 1689,
"included a tract of
land two leagues in extent, on the sea, at Frenchman's Bay near Megeis (Machias),
the river Douaquet (Douaquec), running through it it but not being part
of the grant. Also included in the seigniory was Mount
Desert Island and all others near by," hence the
ridiculous breadth of the poseur's name--Antoine de La Mothe
Cadillac, seigneur de Douaquet et des Monts Déserts. Cadillac,
whose humble origins remained a secret in New France, went on to
found Détroit and to serve as governor of Louisiana.
In 1689,
Jean-Baptiste Le Gardeur and Demoiselle Marie-Josèphe Le Neuf, daughter of the
sieur de La Vallière of Beaubassin, received grants at Shubenacadie, also
called St.-Joseph,
"'to make settlements and to trade with the Indians,
there,'"
a year after the 18-year-old demoiselle bore an
illegitimate child by one of her father's tenants (The demoiselle
married Le Gardeur's son Jean-Paul in 1692). That same year, the governor-general and
the intendant awarded a seigneurie to Michel Diguez, "an inhabitant
of Pokemouche, of 'a league of frontage by a league of depth on the
Pokemouche River, in the Bay of Chaleurs, Miscou coast, twenty-five
leagues from Île Percée, the said grant to begin at the mouth of the
said river and to run inland, with the right to trade with the
Indians and to hunt and fish in the whole extent of it.'" In 1696, Sieur Duplessis received at grant
at Rivière Cocagne on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore above
Baie-Verte. The following year, a number of fiefs were awarded
along the same shore southwest of Cocagne: at Linoville to Mathieu
Martin de Lino; at St.-Paul to Sieur Paul Dupuy; in March
at Outelas to John Outlaw, called Jean Outlan, or
Houtelas, sieur d'Outlas,
whose second wife was a niece of Nicholas Denys; at
Tatamagouche to Jean-Paul Le Gardeur in April; at Cap-Louis to the Sieur de La Boissellery Noël (perhaps made earlier, in 1690);
to Charles Denys de Vitré, a nephew of Nicolas Denys,
at Antigonish on the peninsula's north coast; to Marc-Antoine,
sieur de Cottentré,
at De Cottentré; and to Hughes Randin at Mirliguèche on the Atlantic
coast, where a fort was built. In May 1697, Governor-General Frontenac and
Intendant Bochart de Champigny awarded to Jacques Cochu a grant on
Grande-Rivière "situated in the Bay of Chaleurs, with a league and a
half of frontage by two of depth, to begin from the seigneury of
Grand Pabos belonging to Sr. René Hubert in following the coast from
Cape Epois towards Île Percée. In fief only." In
June 1698, Jacques Gourdeau of Québec, whose son Pierre would
marry a daughter of Prudent Robichaud of Port-Royal, received a grant "of a back fief" along
Rivière Miramichi on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore once held by
Nicolas Denys; however, Gourdeau sold it the
following February to Pierre Rey-Gaillard. After being held
prisoner in Boston during the first year of Queen Anne's War, Thomas Lefebrve, a native of Rouen and former resident of Canada who served
as an interpreter among the Abenaki, received a seigneurie at Koessanouskek, near
Pentagouët on the coast of Maine, in May 1703.
The Saint-Castins of Pentagouët also could be counted among
the colony's seigneurs; Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
in fact, was the only Acadian resident seigneur who held an
elevated noble title, that of baron.105
Canadian leaders
also awarded seigneuries to well-connected Acadian officials, most, if not
all of them, natives of France. Interestingly, several of
these officials married Acadians. In May 1683,
Jean Martel dit Magos, seigneur of Mégais, or Machias, on the Maine
coast, "granted half of his seigneury" to Pierre Chênet, a native
of Paris, who, after working as a schoolmaster at Port-Royal, became the King's attorney
for the colony in March 1687. In January 1689, the
governor-general and intendant granted Chênet, now referred to as sieur
Dubreuil, "'two leagues' frontage" along Rivière St.-Jean "at a
place called by the Indians Kanibekachiche and little Nakchouac
[Nashouat], to wit one league on one side and one league on the
other, the said places ... being in the centre of his grant, with
the island and islets that are found opposite, and three leagues in
depth'"; two years later, Chênet Dubreuil married Louise
dite Jeanne, a daughter of Pierre
Doucet. Mathieu de Goutin, who from August 1688 served as King's lieutenant général civil et criminel,
or general representative for justice; écrivain, or colonial
secretary; conseiller, or counselor; and trésorier,
or paymaster, was granted a
seigneurie at Mouscoudabouet, also called Musquodoboit, on the Atlantic
side of the peninsula, in August 1691; de Goutin's wife was
Jeanne, a daughter of
colonist Pierre Thibodeau. In 1695, de Goutin received a second grant,
at Pointe-aux-Chênes, or Oak Point, on Rivière St.-Jean. On 21
August 1700, Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villieu, described as
"Administrator of Acadia," received a seigneurial grant at
Chepoudy, on the upper Bay of Fundy; de Villieu was the
son-in-law of former governor La Vallière, who
controlled the seigneurie at nearby Beaubassin. This relationship
could only have helped the "Administrator" in securing his grant at
Chepoudy despite Pierre Thibodeau's claim to the area.
In 1704, another La Vallière son-in-law, Louis-Joseph de
Gannes, sieur de Falaise, then serving as major de l'Acadie,
received a seigneurie at La Hève. Jean-Chrysostôme Loppinot of
St.-Nicolas-des-Champs, Paris, clerk of court and notary at Port-Royal from
April 1699 and King's attorney from May 1704, was awarded the
seigneurie of Cap-Fourchu, on the western Atlantic shore north of Pobomcoup,
in 1706;
Loppinot's wife was a daughter of
Germain Doucet, fils. After the fall of
Port-Royal in 1710, de Goutin and Loppinot were among
the French officials who were transported out of the colony, the one
to France and
then to Louisbourg, the other to Plaisance, Newfoundland. Neither
official returned to British Nova Scotia, so one can assume that
their seigneurial rights left the colony with them.106
Save for the La Vallière fief at Chignecto
and some of the D'Amours holdings on Rivière St.-Jean, the
seigneuries granted by the government at Québec from the
1670s to the end of French control in peninsula Acadia never
amounted to much in the way of long-term settlement. Most of
these grants evidently were devoted to the fur trade and to a lesser
extent the fishery, not to intensive agriculture, which worried
royal officials in France. In 1687, the King's concerns over
the size and purpose of many Acadian concessions were reflected in
his instructions to his new royal governor, Louis-Alexandre des
Friches de Meneval, whose attention was brought to "those who
'claimed to have exclusive rights over vast stretches of the
country, with the right to grant land to others, without having
worked either to cultivate the land, animal husbandry, or the
fishery, occupying themselves exclusively with trade in the forest,
with scandalous debauchery, and reacting violently against the
French [government], on the pretext of the said right.'" Yet
the King himself, since the early 1670s, had signed off on these
large Acadian grants. If he had expected them to result in
settlements devoted to intensive agricultural on the Atlantic coast
of the peninsula, on the coast of Maine, in the Rivière St.-Jean
valley, and on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore, it could only reflect
his ignorance of the geography of those places, especially soil
conditions and the vagaries of climate. As a result,
especially after the furs gave out, the great majority of these new
concessions came to nothing. In the end, the
older seigneuries held by the La Tours, the d'Entremonts,
the Le Borgnes, and La Vallière at Port-Royal,
Pobomcoup, Minas, and Chignecto, and new holdings that appeared in
the upper Fundy region beginning in the 1690s, were the only ones
that encompassed the majority of the dyke-building habitants,
who remained the only true tillers of Acadia's soil.107
The new holdings on the upper Fundy did
much to enhance the intensity and breadth of Acadian agriculture. During the late 1680s and late
1690s, several habitants at Port-Royal with no claims to nobility,
much less official distinction, received seigneuries in unsettled parts of
the upper Fundy region or on lower Rivière St.-Jean, no doubt to encourage further settlement
there. In late March 1689, Mathieu
Martin, perhaps the first Frenchman born in the colony, received
the seigneurie of Cobeguit, on an interior bay northeast of the Minas
Basin; a Nova Scotia official noted many decades later that the area
had never been a part of the La Tour family's claims in the
basin. According to Bona Arsenault, in c1691 Joseph Robinau de
Villebon, the colony's commander, granted to Gabriel Godin
dit Châtillon of Montréal and Chignecto a siegneurie
on lower Rivière St.-Jean near Villebon's fort at Nashouat.
The result, according to Arsenault, was the creation of the Acadian
settlement of Ste.-Anne-du-Pays-Bas at present-day Fredericton,
across from Villebon's fort. After receiving his grant,
Godin styled himself sieur de Bellefontaine.
The new sieur's father, Pierre dit Châtillon, a
Canadian master carpenter, had been employed by the Sieur de
La Vallière at Beaubassin in the late 1670s, so one wonders
if the seigneur of Beaubassin had coaxed the commander into
granting the son a concession. On 20 June 1695, Governor-General Frontenac and
Intendant Champigny granted to Pierre Thibodeau, "a resident
of Port-Royal," a grant on "the K8askag8she River between Mount Desert Island and Machias, 'with a league on either side of the said river by two
leagues of depth, to be measured from its mouth, with the islands
and islets if any be found there.'" During the late
1690s, citing a grant from Robinau de Villebon, the colony's commander at the time, Pierre Thibodeau
claimed a seigneurie also at Chepoudy on the north shore of
the upper
Fundy, and his colleague, Guillaume Blanchard, claimed
another grant on nearby Rivière Petitcoudiac. Both
"seigneurs" soon ran afoul of the Sieur de La Vallière of Beaubassin, who insisted that his
seigneurial grant at Chignecto, now two decades old, included the areas claimed by Thibodeau and
Blanchard. But there may have been other such grants in
the area. "According to
tradition, preserved by the elders of Memramcook, Jean-Baptiste
Forest," son of the family's progenitor and "husband of
Élisabeth LaBarre, was the seigneur of Menoudie" at Chignecto
"before the Expulsion." If this was so, then Forest
also would have run afoul of the Sieur de La Vallière and his
descendants. These habitants-turned-seigneurs,
actual or imaginary, were
no more successful in collecting cens et rentes from their
Acadian tenants as were their aristocratic "betters."
Acadians already were being described as a hospitable people, clever in trade,
hard-working, devoted beyond measure to their wives and children,
ready and willing to help their neighbors, who more often than not
were family members, but they also were stubborn, contentious,
litigious, and jealous of the few rights they enjoyed as Frenchmen.
Paying rent to a seigneur, even if he was a kinsman, was not
an obligation they practiced with enthusiasm. Still, the
obligation was real, and, even after the British took control of the colony, the
obligation did not go away.108
Andrew Hill Clark notes: "Every Frenchman
of the seventeenth century, at least every Frenchman north of the
Roman Law area, must have believed that the only way to hold land
was, as always, from a lord, a seigneur, who held it in turn from
the king. There is no reason to suppose that this was not true
of the Acadian emigrés from France. With whatever freedom they
took land in the Port Royal area, or moved to the new lands to the
north, on which they settled and farmed, they must still have
assumed always that their use of it was, somehow, by way of
concession from some individual or institution who, or which, in
turn, held it from the crown."109
And: "The degrees of reality in
the seigneurial forms and procedures, such as they were, were
largely restricted to the settled areas of Port Royal and its river,
Minas, Beaubassin, and, to some degree perhaps, in the Pisiquid,
Cobequid, and Pubnico areas. These were, of course, the only
agricultural settlements. It is probable that the other
seigneurs had been more interested in fish or fur then in
agricultural lands in any event." Clark notes that the
Acadian seigneuries were as large as those in Canada but "infinitely
less practical."110
Clark further observes: "One may
conclude that the Acadian seigneurs, such as they were, performed
few if any of the traditional seigneurial functions, even in the
emasculated form in which these were represented along the St.
Lawrence. There is no record that they built mills, or
bake-ovens, for example, or, indeed, did anything but act as
landlords whose only role was that of rent-collector. One the
other hand they do appear to have confined their demands largely to
cens et rentes, with perhaps occasional lods et ventes (the
seigneur's commission on the sale of a roture, in effect, a fine of
alienation). We do not hear of corvée [forced labor],
of charges for fishing, for timber cutting, or the use of a common.
One hesitates to be too certain about many of these things because
we are so grievously lacking in evidence. Much of what paper
record may have existed from the activities of the notaries of Port
Royal, Beaubassin, and Minas has not been found and very likely has
been destroyed. But we do suspect that official correspondence
would have contained more hints if the 'system' had been more
elaborate or had had deeper impact on the people. Yet, flimsy
and fragmentary as the institution undoubtedly was, it provided the
only framework in which the Acadians could identify the land they
held for right of occupation, for devisement to their heirs, or for
sale and exchange, and, as such, it may have performed a vital
service for the settlers." The seigneurial system also had
another purpose, or at least revealed a significant aspect of
Acadian life. Naomi Griffiths observes: "... there is no
doubt that the existence of the seigneuries implied social
divisions within the emerging communities and this greatly
influenced the structure of their political life," such as it was.
Pointing to the grants made by Talon on the lower St.-Jean in
October 1672, she concludes: "These grants
signify, among other matters, the reinforcement of French
land-ownership customs in Acadia. ... [T]he turmoil of the d'Aulnay-La
Tour era, followed by the superficial control of Temple over the
settlers, worked against the establishment of a strongly
hierarchical seigneurial system. But it must be remembered
that even along the St. Lawrence, as R.C. Harris has shown, the
seigneurial system did not mean a 'feudal' society, one dominated by
a landowning class, with the lives of the majority of the settlers
circumscribed by the privileges of a few. Throughout the
seventeenth century, no French settler argued about the final
authority of the king, as the ultimate landlord of all territory
governed by France, and thus the need to establish land ownership by
grant and to have such a grant recorded. Yet the existence of
vast tracts of land, in the eyes of the Europeans, entirely open for
settlement meant a fundamental change in the power of the seigneurs.
In Europe, even in France, land was scarce and people numerous.
In North America, land was plentiful and European subjects scarce.
Almost endless litigation arose as settlers challenged seigneurial
control, arguing about what had been granted by whom, when, and on
what conditions. In both Canada and Acadia, the settlers
believed in private property and in land ownership regulated by the
state. Until 1710, the seigneurial system remained the legal
foundation of land titles for Europeans in Acadia, and even after
that date it still held some legal force in the English courts.
Still, ... the founding of settlements at Beaubassin, between 1672
and 1676, and at Minas in the early 1680s took place with a very
minimal application of the classic seigneurial obligations, the
payment of dues on the one hand and the provision of communal
services, such as grist mills and sawmills, on the other."111
The Acadians and Their Royal
Governors
The settlers of Acadia had known only turmoil from the arrival of
their first families in 1636 to when the English seized the colony
18 years later. Ironically, English control, which lasted 16 years,
brought peace at last to the hard-pressed settlers, and peace
continued for 19 more years after the return of Acadia to France.
The "peace," of course, was a relative thing: there
was plenty
of conflict, both political and economic; there was just no war,
at least not a declared one, between France and England at the time, though a brief war between France and Holland
plagued the colony during the mid-1670s. During these 19 years, half a dozen royal
governors presided over French Acadia, two of them serving as
colonial commander before promotion to the higher office:
Grandfontaine's tenure as
governor lasted less than three years. During that time, much of
his attention was directed to the question of boundaries
between Acadia and New England that had not been addressed by the
treaty of 1667. Grandfontaine proclaimed that the boundary
between the French and English colonies lay along the St. George
River, between the Kennebec and the Penobscot, "and," his biographer
chides, he "flattered himself that by his honest dealings he could win
for France the allegiance of the English settlers who were
established on his side of the river." He failed to win
the hearts and minds of these English settlers, but he nevertheless maintained good relations with Boston, where his garrisons,
like the Acadian settlements,
obtained most of their supplies. He bought a ketch from former
Nova Scotia governor Thomas Temple, hired New English carpenters,
and, most importantly to the New Englanders, "granted fishing
permits to ships from Boston."290c
Grandfontaine devoted his
energies during his short term as governor not only to defining and protecting the colony's borders
and maintaining good relations with his New English neighbors; along with his superiors in New France,
he also sought to improve the
lives of the Acadian settlers, the great majority of them still
clinging to their dyked lands in the Port-Royal valley. During
the early 1660s, while Acadia was still under the thrall of the English, the young King Louis XIV, ruling without
a chief minister, had transformed New France--that is to say,
Canada--into more or less a royal colony by creating a vice-regal
position, the governor-general. Augustin de Saffry de Mésy was
the first to hold the office at Québec. In March 1665, the King
appointed Jean Talon as royal intendant for New France.
When Grandfontaine came to Acadia in 1670, Mésy had been replaced as
governor-general by
Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle, who gave way to Louis de Buade, comte de Palluau
et de Frontenac, in
1672. Talon held his position until 1668, was superseded by Claude de Boutroue
d'Aubigny in 1668, and returned to the post in 1669, serving for another
three years. Talon "was
fortunately interested in Acadia, and there was consequently a
serious and concerted effort on both sides [of the Atlantic] to take this colony
in hand again and to develop it." Reflecting the
intendant's
interest in the colony, Grandfontaine encouraged boat building at
Port-Royal, while Talon asked for looms to
be sent to the Acadian settlers. In an attempt to end the
chaos of proprietary misrule, including abuse of the settlers by
their semi-feudal seigneurs, Grandfontaine "revoked the authority of the
seigneur Alexandre Le Borgne de Belle-Isle, whose misdemeanors had
caused complaints, and enjoined the settlers to live in peace until
a representative of the king could arrive to settle their disputes
and lay down statutes for them." Grandfontaine instructed the
habitants to consider Le Borgne de Belle-Isle "as having no
more authority than they in the affairs of the colony. All
other claims and counter-claims to the heirs of d'Aulnay and La
Tour were referred to France for adjudication." This
weakened the stranglehold of the proprietary-era seigneurs on the
colony, but the seigneurial system itself was far from ended in
French Acadia; even the traduced Le Borgne de Belle-Isle
retained his seigneurial rights at Port-Royal. One proprietary-era
seigneur, however, won Grandfontaine's favor. He appointed Philippe Mius
d'Entremont, seigneur of Pobomcoup and former Charles La Tour
associate, as procureur du roi, or King's attorney, in 1670.
According to historian Naomi Griffiths, "This selection, for an
important administrative post, of the head of a family that had been
in the colony since 1650 and was related, by marriage, to both the
La Tours and the Melansons was astute. It established
an important link between the new administration and the settlers of
Port Royal," not to mention its effect on the retention of
seigneurial power in the colony.290
Grandfontaine encouraged
the soldiers and engagés he had brought to the colony to
remain there after their terms of service expired and to find wives
among the established settlers. In 1671, soon after Grandfontaine conducted a census of the colony, the ship
L'Oranger arrived from La Rochelle with more settlers for the
colony, including women and girls. Among the passengers were
young bachelors who soon would establish families of their own. Some remained at
Port-Royal, while others followed Jacques Bourgeois to a new
settlement at Chignecto. Few, if any, settled at
Grandfontaine's headquarters at Pentagouët, where arable land was in
short supply and the position was even more exposed to attack than
Port-Royal. In 1672, in fact, "famine raged at Pentagouët,"
compelling Grandfontaine to send some of his soldiers to winter at
Port-Royal. By the late 1670s, one of the oldest posts in
greater Acadia ceased to exist as a settlement of any note.
Pentagouët remained for a time a military outpost/headquarters, but
by the late 1670s it was little more than an abandoned post serving
as the fortified home of Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie, third baron de Saint-Castin,
former army ensign and now a capitaine de sauvages, who had
come to the colony with Grandfontaine. The Ministry of Marine urged Grandfontaine to
establish more permanent fishing stations on the Acadian peninsula,
but the governor's other activities gave him no time to get around to it.
Nonetheless, Grandfontaine's biographer reminds us, "It is
impossible to determined exactly how many new settlers took up
residence in Acadia" during Grandfontaine's governorship, "but it was certainly the greatest number to arrive
since the time of Razilly and d'Aulnay," three decades before.290a
Intendant Talon gave
Grandfontaine a task that could not be set aside: establishing a direct link
between Acadia and Canada to enhance the defense of both colonies.
Talon sent two search teams led by Canadian officers down into
present-day Maine to find a river-portage from the Atlantic coast up
to the St. Lawrence valley. Grandfontaine was able to spare
two Frenchmen and two Indians, probably Abenaki, for the mission.
The Canadians "discovered" the Kennebec-Chaudière portage and sited
a settlement at Kidiscuit, but the route up the Kennebec via Rivière Chaudière soon "proved to be too difficult and not very dependable."
Another river-portage farther to the east, just as ancient as the
Kennebec-Chaudière route and "already very much used," followed Rivière
St.-Jean, which flowed into the lower Bay of Fundy. From the
Canadian end, this long portage ran overland from Rivière-du-Loup on
the lower St. Lawrence to Lac
Pohénégamook and, down Rivière St.-François, to the upper St.-Jean. The Acadian end of this
route was much closer to Port-Royal than to Pentagouët, another
reason why the latter place soon ceased to exist as a major French
settlement. The mouth and lower reach of Rivière St.-Jean, below Jemseg, had been occupied by French fur traders since the days of Gravé du
Pont and the La Tours. The Maliseet capital of
Meductic, fortified as a defense against the Iroquois even before
the French came to the region, lay on the west bank of the St.-Jean a hundred miles above Jemseg
and was an important
transportation center for the region. Just below Meductic, the
Eel River, flowing from the west, fell into the St.-Jean. The
lower 12 miles of the Eel, "broken by rapids and falls, was unsuitable for a canoe," a
Canadian historian tells us, "and, it was found more practicable to
portage from Meductic itself to a point above the rapids, a distance
of five miles. The head of Eel River lay in a south-westerly
direction, in a region abounding in lakes, which were connected with
one another by portages, and included direct water routes to
Passamaquoddy, Machias, and Penobscot. The latter was separated only
by a short portage from the eastern branch of the Kennebec. In
times both of peace and war, there was a constant stream of travel,
all of which passed through Meductic." Here was "a
communication with Quebec by way of the upper St. John, with
Miramichi and the east coast, with the lower St. John, with
Chignecto and the peninsular part of Acadia to far distant Cape
Breton." It was important, then, to establish settlements, not
just fortified outposts, along this essential route. In October 1672, over a three-day period,
Talon conferred four seigneurial grants on the lower St.-Jean. More grants followed later in the
decade and into the 1680s--a clear plan by New-French authorities
"to settle soldiers and families on that river as an aid in
establishing an inland route of communication between Quebec and
Acadia" and other parts of the francophone realm.290b
Grandfontaine was
recalled to France in May 1673. His short tenure as royal governor
"was constructive," his biographer insists, but he was not without
his critics. The most persistent one was former lieutenant and
second in command Pierre Joybert de Soulanges et de Marson, who traduced the
governor to the authorities in France after Grandfontaine had
criticized Joybert for a botched mission to
Boston during the fall of 1670. Grandfontaine had sent Joybert to
Québec to explain his misconduct to Talon, but the lieutenant was
not punished for whatever misdeeds he may have committed.
Instead, he returned to
Acadia not only with a wife from an influential Canadian family, but also with
his new grant on Rivière St.-Jean for "good and praise-worthy" service
to the King! One complaint against
Grandfontaine would become a recurrent theme in the evaluation of
Acadia's royal governors: he was accused "self-seeking," of
using his position to enhance his personal fortune through illicit
commerce or official malfeasance. In Grandfontaine's case,
however, the charges were largely baseless. After his
replacement arrived at Pentagouët that autumn, Grandfontaine
returned to France, arriving there in December. He promptly
confronted the intendant of Rochefort, Colbert de Terron, who also
had been one of his critics, and demanded reimbursement of 13,000
livres for expenses incurred in Acadia. Colbert de Terron knew
full well that Grandfontaine had received funds from the navy at
Rochefort for only two of his three years as governor, but the
intendant, after accusing the former governor of "being
self-seeking," refused to sanction the compensation, and
recommended, instead, that Grandfontaine be awarded a post in the navy
instead. Grandfontaine acquiesced in the offer and became a
lieutenant commander at Roquefort before becoming a ship's captain.
He fought in the Caribbean region against the Dutch later in the
decade, was wounded in the arm at Cayenne in South America, and broke an
arm at Tobago, leaving him a cripple. He retired to Brest on
an annual pension of 800 livres, was named a chevalier of the Order
of St.-Louis in 1693, and died at Brest in July 1696, in his late
60s, having never married.290d
.
Grandfontaine's
successor, Jacques de Chambly, scion of an ancient but impoverished
noble family, had served as a regimental commander in Hungary before
he came to North America in June 1665, and as a captain in the Carignan-Salières Regiment. Alongside Grandfontaine
and Joybert, he had
fought the Iroquois in today's upstate New York. He also served in the
garrison at Fort St.-Louis, which stood below the rapids of the Iroquois, later
the Chambly and now the Richelieu, River, which flows northward into the upper
St. Lawrence between Trois-Rivières and Montréal. Fort St.-Louis, at
first an unprepossessing wooden structure later rebuilt in stone,
protected the approach from Lake Champlain to Montréal. The
King was so impressed with Chambly's service in the province that he
awarded him a gratuity of 400 écus. When his regiment
was disbanded in 1668, Chambly, like Grandfontaine, returned to
France. In 1670, Chambly returned to Canada as a captain of
troupes de la marine and took up his post again at Fort St.-Louis. In
1672, he was granted a seigneurie near the fort, renamed Fort Chambly, and set up an agricultural establishment at today's
Chambly, Québec. Soon after Chambly received his seigneurie,
Governor-General Frontenac named him commandant of the vast area south of the St.
Lawrence from Montréal down to Rivière-du-Loup. Chambly was appointed royal governor of Acadia in
May 1673. That autumn, he sailed aboard the Saint-Jean
from Québec to Pentagouët, where he relieved his old regimental
colleague.291
Chambly's tenure as royal
governor was brief and troubled. In 1672, during
Grandfontaine's governorship, war broke out in Europe between France
and Holland, called by the French La Guerre de Hollande but
known to most historians as the Franco-Dutch War. The Dutch, in fact,
also were at war
with England in what historians call the Third Anglo-Dutch War.
In the spring of 1674, the governor of the Dutch West Indies sent Jurriaen Aernoutsz, a Dutch privateer out of Curaçao, to attack English and French ships and settlements in the
North Atlantic. Aernoutsz, in command of the frigate Flying
Horse, eight guns, descended on
New York, formerly the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, where he
learned the war with England had been settled by the Treaty of
Westminster, signed in February. Holland, however, was still at war
with France. Encouraged by "Massachusetts adventurer" John Rhoades, who
volunteered to serve as pilot and even took an oath of allegiance to
the Dutch, Aernoutsz and his 50 Dutchmen fell on Pentagouët on August 10 and
quickly overwhelmed the smaller French force commanded by Governor
Chambly. After a brief engagement, the Dutchmen captured the
severely wounded Chambly
and his young ensign, Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin. After destroying the fort
at Pentagouët, Aernoutz and his men then moved on to Fort Jemseg on
Rivière St.-Jean, where they nabbed Chambly's lieutenant, Major
Pierre de Joybert de Soulanges et de Marson, whose force consisted of only nine troupes de la marine,
before plundering the
settlements on the lower St.-Jean. Aernoutsz and Rhoades remained a month in Acadia, which the
Dutchman renamed "New Holland." Evidently
during the sojourn in Acadia, Saint-Castin, after being
tortured "with a brimstone match" by his captors, escaped with a letter surreptitiously
written by Chambly. With the help of friendly natives, the
hardy young ensign was able to carry news of the Acadian disaster to Frontenac at Québec. Aernoutsz
disposed of his plunder at Boston, selling to the Massachusetts government the
ordnance he had seized at Pentagouët. Leaving his remaining
prisoners, along with Rhoades and some of his men, in the care of
the New Englanders, Aernoutsz returned to Curaçao in
October. Massachusetts authorities sent Rhoades and some
of Aernoutsz's men to occupy Acadia, but the privateers promptly
seized New English vessels who attempted to renew trade with the
Natives and French settlers.
Massachusetts Governor John Leverett would have none of that.
He sent a force from Boston to
seize Rhoades and the errant Dutchmen, who made the mistake
of resisting Leverett's force. Overwhelmed in a naval
engagement in the Bay of Fundy, Rhoades and the Dutchmen were hauled
back to Boston, where they were convicted of piracy. Leverett
pardoned the Dutchmen but ordered Rhoades to be hanged.
Luckily for the New Englishman, his execution was delayed by the outbreak of King
Philip's War in 1675. Governor Leverett had more important
fish to fry. In October, he ordered Rhoades's release after securing
a promise never to return to Massachusetts.291a
Meanwhile, Chambly, with Joybert, languished
at Boston. Governor-General Frontenac, and later
Colbert in France, believed from what they had learned from
Chambly's letter and from Saint-Castin's eyewitness testimony that the Massachusetts authorities had not
given sanction to the Dutchman's attack despite the presence of New Englishmen in Aernoutsz's party. Although Chambly's letter
insisted "he had been attacked by 'Buccaneers coming from Santo
Domingo via Boston," Frontenac could see the raid had been
hatched in New York, not Boston, and that Rhoades and his henchmen
had been motivated by greed, not by politics. Frontenac,
however, "was of the opinion that, unofficially, the authorities in
Boston had done little to hinder the raid and much to encourage it."
He agreed to the ransom of a thousand beaver skins for Chambly and
Joybert,
but they were not
released from confinement in Boston until sometime in 1675.
Instead of returning to Acadia, Chambly sailed to France. In
May 1676, despite Colbert's disapproval of his actions in Acadia, Chambly again was named royal governor of Acadia, but
he went to the French Antilles instead, where he was appointed
military commander in September 1677 and governor of Granada in
April 1679. Chambly, in fact, never returned to Acadia and died at Martinique while serving as governor
there in 1687. As a result of Chambly's refusal to return to
North America, Acadia was without a royal governor from August 1674
to 1677.291b
One wonders what the
inhabitants at Port-Royal and Chignecto thought of this entire business,
especially of the absence of a distant governor who had spent little,
if any,
time among them. The absence of royal governance did not slow
immigration into the colony, as a list of new settlers during that
period would have revealed. If anything, it only hardened the typical
Acadian's frontier resolve to rely on himself, his family, and his
neighbors, not on some arrogant, disinterested official
who represented a monarch living an ocean away.291c
.
Chambly's successor in
Acadia was another former officer of the Carignan-Salières Regiment.
Pierre de Joybert
de Soulanges et de Marson, a native of Champagne, had come to Canada
with the regiment in 1665 as a lieutenant in Grandfontaine's company
and returned with him to France in 1667 to fight in the Spanish
Netherlands. Still tying his star to his former captain,
Joybert came to Acadia with Grandfontaine in 1670 and served as the
royal governor's second in command, this time as a captain on a
larger stage, but Joybert soon became his Grandfontaine's most
severe critic. Ordered to Québec
to explain his conduct to Intendant Talon, Joybert married
Marie-Françoise, daughter of New French attorney-general Louis-Théandre
Chartier de Lotbinière, in 1672. In October, "in recognition
of his 'good and praise-worthy service to the King, both in Old and
New France,'" Joybert received a large seigneurial grant on
the east bank of Rivière St.-Jean measuring a league in depth and
four leagues up from the river's mouth--a clear vindication of his
conduct and a repudiation of Grandfontaine.
With the grant came promotion to major des troupes in Acadia
and command of Fort Jemseg and the lower St.-Jean. Joybert remained the chief lieutenant of Grandfontaine's successor, Jacques de Chambly.
In
August 1674, Joybert was captured by Dutch privateers at his post at
Jemseg and, with the governor, was held to ransom at Boston.
After learning of the raid in September, Frontenac sent canoes down
the St.-Jean portage to retrieve Madame Joybert and her
infant daughter from the ruins of Fort Jemseg, but not until late
1675 was the governor-general able to ransom Joybert and Chambly
with the thousand beaver pelts the New Englanders demanded.292
Unlike Chambly, who
returned to France after his release from Boston, Joybert returned to Acadia via Québec,
where Frontenac re-appointed him commander on Rivière St.-Jean, now
the principal route of communication between Canada and Acadia. In October
1676, as a reward for his service in Acadia and probably as an
attempt to keep him there, Frontenac and Talon's successor as intendant,
Jacques Duchesneau de la Doussinière et d'Ambault, granted Joybert another fief on Rivière
St.-Jean, this one above Jemseg at Nashouat. Days later, the
King renewed Joybert's grant at Jemseg, which Joybert had
rebuilt with his own funds. Joybert now held three
concessions on Rivière St.-Jean, comprising "more than 100 square
miles." In 1677, when it was clear that
Chambly would not return to Acadia, the King appointed Joybert
governor of the colony. Spurning the destroyed post at Pentagouët,
he established colonial headquarters at Jemseg, where he
died in July 1678, in his late 30s, survived by his wife and three young children. In March
1691, the Widow Joybert secured the rights to yet another seigneurie,
this one across the river from Jemseg, where she oversaw her
family's fur-trading interests when she was not living on a pension
at Québec.292a
.
In June 1675, while
Chambly and Joybert languished in a Boston prison, open warfare
broke out in New England between the Puritans and a Native coalition
led by Metacom--King Philip to the English--son of Massasoit of
Thanksgiving fame and head of the Wampanoag
Confederacy. What began as a reaction to the growing power of
the colonists over their long-time Native allies erupted
into one the most destructive wars in the region's
history. The conflict began in Plymouth colony but soon
spread into neighboring Massachusetts, as far west as the
Connecticut River valley, and into Rhode Island to the south.
The New Englanders created a confederation of their own, including
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut colonies,
and eventually the dissenters of Rhode Island and Providence
Plantations--that is, nearly all of New England. The Wampanoag coalition included the Podunk, Nipmuc, Narragansett, and other nations.
The New Englanders could expect little or no help from the other
English colonies scattered along the seaboard. New York was
still recuperating from the recent war with Holland, so Governor
Edmund Andros could urge only that colony's Iroquois bands to come
to the aid of New England. Indian raids plagued
the Chesapeake region, and Bacon's Rebellion erupted in Virginia
during the summer of 1676. King Charles II, who had no love
for Puritans, only reluctantly sent aid to New England, forcing them largely to fend for themselves. Despite the New-English
alliance with the Pequot, Mohegan, and the so-called Praying Indians,
and help from the Mohawks of upper New York, the conflict quickly evolved
into a protracted war of racial extermination, though, ironically
but perhaps not surprisingly, it was a Christianized Indian who
killed Metacom during an attack against the Wampanoag refuge in a Rhode Island
swamp in August 1676.
The Indian leader's body was dragged through the mire, decapitated, drawn and quartered, and
his head displayed at Plymouth for 20 years. The war--a
resounding victory for the New-English confederation--did not end
until 1677.
Dozens of New-English settlements lay in ruin. Hundreds of New Englanders and
thousands of Natives forfeited their lives, most of them dying not
from battle wounds but from starvation and disease. Hundreds
of Natives were tried and executed, dozens more, including Metacom's
son, enslaved and sold in Bermuda. Entire nations, including
the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmunk, and Podunk, virtually ceased
to exist.292b
In September
1675, the war in Massachusetts spread into Maine when the Abenaki
joined the fight against the English. This part of the
conflict, which led to the destruction of many Maine settlements,
ended finally in 1678 and resulted in the death of 260 Maine
settlers out of a population of 3,500--a higher percentage of
colonial loss than in the rest of New England. The war
with the Abenaki temporarily halted New English expansion up the coast of Maine.
During the negotiations that ended the conflict, the sachems of
Kennebec warned the New Englanders that they, the Abenaki,
not the English or even the French, were the owners of this "wide"
country, and they reminded the New Englanders that they were
entirely capable of driving them away. So dire was the warning
that Massachusetts officials agreed to recognize Abenaki claims
"over Maine" and "agreed to pay the tribes" there "an annual
quit-rent of 'a peck of corn for every English family'" that lived
there. But what was agreed to in Boston meant little to the
English settlers swarming into Maine. Naomi Griffiths reminds
us that
"English settlement in Maine had been successful enough to establish
a number of small communities, intent on further expansion but not
able to produce a civil government of any great strength. As a
result, lawlessness was rife and control by the appointed officials
over the settlers, in particular over their hostile and belligerent
responses to Abenaki activities, was weak. From 1670 onwards,
the Maine settlers showed increasing contempt for Abenaki ways.
They refused to abide by the 1678 treaty terms or pay quit rents to
the Abenaki. They paid no attention to Abenaki farming and
fishing practices. Their cattle damaged the Abenaki's unfenced
corn fields, and, on the Saco River, settlers placed nets that
interfered with the spring runs of fish, an important Abenaki food
source." But these New-English intruders were not the only
ones the Abenaki faced. In 1677, while the Wampanoag war still
raged in Massachusetts, New Yorkers had taken advantage of New-English weakness by
establishing a presence at Pemaquid, between the mouth of the
Kennebec and Penobscot Bay and near the heart of Abenaki territory.
A council meeting at Manhattan in September 1677 that addressed the
new Maine venture promulgated a hard policy towards the Indians
there, including the construction of a fort at Pemaquid, which could
only antagonize the Natives. This aggression on the part of these New Yorkers, as well
as the New-English intrusions in Maine, compelled the Abenaki
and their cousins--the Penobscot, the Maliseet, the Passamaquoddy,
the Mi'kmaq--to form a Wabanaki Confederacy.292c
New-English fears over
Native intentions "fundamentally changed the relationship between
Acadia and New England by encouraging the belief in Massachusetts
and Maine that the French-speaking and Catholic settlers of Acadia
were the covert allies of the Amerindians," Griffiths
relates. Boston officials looked askance when a former French army officer, Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
married the daughter of a Penobscot sagamore and ensconced
himself in a trading venture at Pentagouët, in territory claimed by New
England. That Saint-Castin had joined his Abenaki
kinsmen in fighting the New Englanders in Maine was commonly known in Boston. As expert traders, the New
Englishmen's first instinct was to win over the obviously independent-minded Saint-Castin,
an effort that failed utterly. Nor did intimidation work.
What man with a nation such as the Abenaki behind him could be
intimidated by anyone? And what of the French settlers of
peninsula Acadia and their powerful Mi'kmaq allies? Though
these Natives had not joined
their Wabanaki cousins in the fight against the English, "a
number of Mi'kmaq in the Cap Sable area had been captured by slavers
from Massachusetts and sold in the Mediterranean, which led to
Mi'kmaq reprisals against Massachusetts fishing vessels the
following year." Griffiths maintains that "This raid
and reprisal were small matters in comparison to the bloodshed of
the more southerly conflicts," but, she points out, "In terms of
their relationship between Acadia and Massachusetts ... they marked
the beginning of a significant change. Over the next ten
years, the relationship between the two colonies become increasingly
tense. The obviously amicable connection between Mi'kmaq and
Acadian, the Acadian role as middlemen in the fur trade between
Massachusetts and the Mi'kmaq, and Acadian
attempts to control both offshore fishing rights and the coal fields
and gypsum deposits of Cape Breton led to growing exasperation in
Boston with the Acadian communities. What had been a porous
border on the northeastern approaches of New England was now
becoming a much more impermeable frontier. This was due in
part to the existence of an official French presence, however weak,
and in part to the growth of Acadian settlements, however slow."292d
.
In French Acadia, the dead Joybert's successor, Michel
Le Neuf de la Vallière et de Beaubassin, served from 1678 until 1683
as colonial commander before his appointment as royal governor. Born at Trois-Rivière in
1640--his father was the governor of that community at the time of
Michel's birth--La Vallière had been educated in France before returning to
Canada to seek his fortune. He married twice, first to Marie,
only daughter of Acadian pioneer Nicolas Denys and Marguerite
de Lafitte, in c1666. She
gave him eight children, including four daughters who married onto
the Le Gardeur de Saint-Pierre, Le Bassier de Villieu,
de Gannes de Falaise, and Aubert de La Chesnay de Forillon
families. Three of their four sons--Alexandre de
Beaubassin, Jacques de La Poterie, and Jean-Baptiste de Canceau--never married but became officers in the
King's service; Alexandre's service was so distinguished, in fact,
that he became a chevalier of the Order of St.-Louis. Michel's
fourth son Michel de La Vallière, fils, who also
became an officer and a chevalier de St.-Louis, married Renée, daughter of militia colonel François
Bertrand and Jeanne Giraudet of Plaisance, Newfoundland,
in February 1710; as father of 15 children, including three sons who
created families of their own, Michel, fils carried on the Le Neuf family line.
Michel, pere's second wife was his first wife's niece:
Françoise, daughter of Simon Denys de La Trinité and
Françoise Dutertre. Like his
younger brother Nicolas, Simon Denys had lived in Acadia from the time of Razilly
and d'Aulnay. Michel, père and Françoise married in
c1683, about the time that he became Acadia's royal governor;
she gave him no more children.293a
Governor-General Frontenac
had supported La Vallière's appointment as governor from the beginning, but
political rivals on both sides of the Atlantic delayed the
appointment for five long years. Like Joybert, La Vallière was
allowed, at first, to choose his seigneurie as the colony's new headquarters.
Unlike Grandfontaine and Chambly, who had no experience in the
colony before becoming
royal governor, La Vallière the Canadian was, in a sense, an
Acadian himself, though he likely would not have
considered himself one. He had served with his father-in-law,
Nicolas Denys, on Cape Breton Island during the 1660s, while the
English controlled the rest of Acadia. From the late 1660s to
the mid-1670s, La Vallière and his family resided at his
father-in-law's various posts along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including
Nepisiguit and Miscou, and Michel engaged there in fishing,
agriculture, and the fur trade. In 1670, he was back in
Canada, where he was part of an expedition against the Iroquois, so
he had military as well as commercial experience when he was
appointed colonial commander. In 1671, he
returned to French-controlled Acadia to help his brother-in-law, Richard
Denys de Fronsac, to look after his father-in-law's interests in the region.
The following year, during the
governorship of Grandfontaine, La Vallière sought to supplement his
fishing interests by setting up a
fur trading venture at Chignecto, about the time that settlers from
Port-Royal, led by surgeon turned fur trader Jacques Bourgeois,
moved up the Bay of Fundy to the salt marshes at the mouth of Rivière Missaguash.
In May 1676, during the war with the Dutch, Frontenac commissioned
La Vallière and Richard Denys to
cruise the Acadian coasts for enemy prizes. On Cape Breton
Island, La Vallière seized three New English ketches taking on coal.
Though
France was not officially at war with England, French officials
declared two of the vessels lawful prizes. In October of that
year, in answer to La Vallière's petition and probably as a reward for his services
against the Dutch, Frontenac and Duchesneau granted La Vallière a
large seigneurie that extended along the south shore of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence from present-day Shediac southeast to Pugwash,
including Baie-Verte and Cape Tourmentine, and inland from Rivière
Memramcook southeast to present-day Springhill, Nova Scotia. The grant
included the Chignecto isthmus from the Cumberland Basin up to
Baie-Verte. At its center was Rivière Missaguash, where a
portage ran between the basin and Baie-Verte, connecting the Bay of
Fundy with the Gulf of St. Lawrence--one of the most important
transportation links in the entire region. Determined to
develop his Chignecto holdings, La Vallière brought his
family to an "island" overlooking the Missaguash and named
the surrounding area
Beaubassin.293
When Frontenac
recommended La Vallière for promotion to royal governor of Acadia, he
described the first native Canadian to serve in that office as a "'nobleman who has all the qualities of
mind and heart necessary to acquit himself well in such as post.'"
Intendant Duchesneau was not so impressed with the Canadian,
however, and his opposition to Frontenac's support of La Vallière's governorship added fuel to a
growing political rivalry
that threatened all of New France. After finally receiving
permission to appoint him governor in 1683,
Frontenac ordered La Vallière to move the colony's headquarters back
to Port-Royal, where he was no more popular among the settlers than
at Chignecto. Perhaps it was not the new
governor's fault. Naomi Griffiths reminds us that the
delay in confirming La Vallière's governorship "was of no help ...
in his attempts to bring together the colony under a single
administrative control, to cope with the incursions of Massachusetts
fishing vessels in waters claimed by France, and to impose some sort
of seigneurial system in Beaubassin and the settlements which
developed in the Minas Basin after 1680." Frontenac was always
ready to defend the Canadian, taking every opportunity to praise the
seigneur's efforts in commanding an intractable people. In a
November 1679 letter written while La Vallière was still Acadian
commander, the governor-general informed King Louis XIV that "'M.
de
la Vallière ... has told me that he has been to Port Royal,
where the inhabitants have shown little care for receiving his
order, whether because they have been accustomed to be without a
commander, or because of the divisions among them, or whether,
indeed, from some tendency towards Englishness and parliaments,
which has been brought (as) the result of the visiting and trade
with Boston.'" While Frontenac labored under the delusion
that La Vallière had overawed the colonists by imposing on
them a new oath of fidelity to Louis XIV, followed by public
celebrations of the King's victories in the war against the Dutch,
La Vallière, in fact, looked
the other way when his fellow Acadians indulged in illicit trade
with Boston. In 1684, La Vallière
returned to Beaubassin, taking the colonial headquarters with him--a
sign, perhaps, that he was not as effective in guiding the colony as
his mentor had insisted, or that he preferred to place himself as
far as he could from the illicit dealings with New England.293e
La Vallière's
relationship with the settlers did not improve. According to
Griffiths, "La Vallière made little attempt to establish cordial
relationships with the established settlers of the colony,"
especially the ones who lived on his seigneurie at Chignecto.
In 1682, while he was still colonial commander, he brought before the
Superior Council at Québec a suit against many of the inhabitants
of Beaubassin who refused to accept seigneurial contracts he imposed
on them. Griffiths points out that "None of
the settlers whom La Vallière had brought from Canada was party to
this suit, which seems to have been the result of an attempt by La Vallière to extend his authority over the whole of the isthmus, in
spite of the possible existence of orders against this."293f
The colonial commander nevertheless was obligated to look to the
welfare of the colony's habitants. In late 1678 or early 1679,
La Vallière, or a designee, conducted a census at Port-Royal. Unlike Father Molin's
counting of 1671, this census taker noted only the
names of family heads and their spouses, not the names of their
children, who were delineated only by gender and age. However,
the official did record economic data such as arpents under
cultivation, number of cattle owned, even the number of "guns" in
each household. Most of the families
who had been counted in 1671 were still living along the basin.
Some had moved on to other settlements, including the new one at
Chignecto, and so they do not appear in La Vallière's
census. Most importantly for the future of the colony, new family names--Rivet,
Gareau, Godin, Levron,
Labat, Brossard--appeared
in this latest counting, hinting that the Acadian population
continued to grow not only by natural increase, but also by
immigration.45a
La Vallière's severest critic
was not a lowly habitant but a fisherman of sorts, whose persistent complaints did more than
anything to bring the governor down. Clerbaud
Bergier was a Huguenot merchant from La Rochelle with "more than
twenty years' experience in trading ventures linking New England and
the Caribbean." In 1682, while La Vallière was still colonial
commander, Bergier was appointed director of
an influential fishing company headquartered at Chédabouctou on
the Atlantic coast. During the 1650s, when the English
controlled Acadia, and even after the English returned the colony in
1670, the French had shifted their fishery center from Canso and the
Atlantic coast to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, particularly the Baie des Chaleurs,
Percé on the Gaspé peninsula, and Plaisance, on the western shore of
Newfoundland. New English vessels promptly took up the slack
along the peninsula's Atlantic coast. Seeing this, in 1680, Bergier had obtained permission
from Nicolas Denys, then at Paris, to visit his concessions in
Acadia, where he and his associates, also Protestants, hoped to
build a fishery of their own and overawe the New Englanders. Protests from influential Roman Catholic
clergy poured into the ministry. They complained that the "project would be contrary to the
interests of the state and the religion and to the intentions of the
king in founding the colony." This compelled Bergier and his fellow
Huguenots to take on as partners "Gabriel Gautier, Boucher, and de
Mantes, of Paris," all proper Catholics. Bergier's most influential associate,
however, was Charles-François Duret de Chevry, marquis de Villeneuve,
a Roman Catholic. The marquis agreed to "sponsor" the Compagnie des
Pêches Sédentaires de l'Acadie, chartered by the King in
February 1682. The grant included not only the Atlantic coast
of Acadia, but also Rivière St.-Jean "as a suitable area for fishery
and trade." Bergier chose Chédabouctou, west of Canso, as the company's center of operations.
After establishing 18 men and a woman there in May, he returned to Paris to report his findings and was back in Acadia
in 1683, the year La Vallière was appointed governor. Bergier
was tireless not only in resurrecting the Acadian fishery out of
Canso, but also in establishing an agricultural base for the fishery at Chédabouctou. He even lured farmers from the Port-Royal
basin to his Atlantic-shore settlements. The Compagnie de l'Acadie,
as it was called, with its
backing by powerful merchants in Bordeaux and La Rochelle, became so successful that, later in the decade, as many as "150 residents,
including 80 fishermen," were reported at Chédabouctou and Canso; only Port-Royal boasted a larger population in the colony at
the time. This success came later, however. Soon after he
re-established the Atlantic coast fishery, which processed seal
skins as well as fish, Bergier sent out half a dozen small boats
into the Atlantic, which were promptly destroyed by New English
fishermen! Bergier complained to his superiors that La Vallière
was issuing too many fishing licenses to ships out of Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, even New York; this, the Company manager insisted,
threatened the
security of the colony as well as the Company's bottom line. Bergier
also was troubled by the ease with which New
English merchants traded with Acadian settlements; predictably, he sought
permission to use force to end that trade. La Vallière, on the
other hand, was determined to maintain good relations with the new
Massachusetts governor, Simon Bradstreet, and considered it within
his power as governor to regulate the fishing fleets in Acadian
waters, be they English or French. With Frontenac's
approval, La Vallière, like his predecessor, Grandfontaine,
accommodated the New Englanders with liberally-issued fishing
permits. French retaliation against the New English fishermen
could only hurt the colony. Bergier pushed his complaints to the
marquis and the minister,
especially in regard to the illicit trade with New England.
In the ensuing conflict, La Vallière was not without powerful
allies of his own. Frontenac, unfortunately for him, was gone
from the scene after the autumn of 1682, but Jacques de Meulles,
sieur de La Source, who had succeeded Duchesneau
as intendant that same year, had not liked it one bit that the
Compagnie de l'Acadie was created without consulting him and
that a Huguenot had been placed at its head in Acadia.
De Meulles ordered La Vallière, as commander in the colony, "to
prevent Bergier from establishing his fishery without express
permission." Frontenac's successor as governor-general of
New France, Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de
la Barre, also complained to the minister about Bergier, who he
said had twice declared bankruptcy and failed to inform Québec of
his activities. Le Febvre de La Barre warned the Minister that allowing a
member of the "reformed" religion to "'build an establishment so
close to the English of New England, who are also of the religion
that is called reformed" would be harmful to Acadia. The vicar
general of the Church in Canada, as well as Bishop Laval at Québec,
also registered complaints with Minister and King about the ill
effects of allowing "heretics" to operate in New France. Inevitably,
such a conflict between so many
shakers and movers caught the rapt attention of Paris and Versailles. In the end, Frontenac's removal did prove fatal to
La Vallière's governorship. By 1684, the King had taken sides
in the unseemly dispute; he, too, looked to the bottom line, to the
importance of the Acadian fishery in the French economy. On 10
April 1684, the King removed La Vallière as commander, King's
lieutenant, and governor in Acadia. On the same day, Bergier
was named the
King's lieutenant in the colony and was
tasked with "governing" Acadia until La Vallière's
successor as governor reached Port-Royal. With his enhanced
powers, Bergier promptly turned on the New-English fishermen plying
their trade off the Acadian coasts, and a virtual war broke out
between him and these fishermen. To complicate matters, La Vallière's oldest son,
Alexandre de Beaubassin, doubtlessly encouraged by his father, joined the fray by attacking Bergier's base
at Chédabouctou. Bergier was absent at the time of the attack, but the young Beaubassin,
only 18 years old,
captured and held Bergier Deshormeaux, the Huguenot's son, and
absconded with furs "that allegedly belonged to the Compagnie de
l'Acadie." By the end of 1684, only months before the King's revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, Bergier was stripped of his lieutenancy and replaced by
Charles Duret de Chevry de La Boulaye, a kinsman of the Marquis de
Villeneuve.293b
La Vallière remained at
Beaubassin after his tenure as governor, assisting Intendant de
Meulles in 1685-86 by providing him not only with shelter over the
winter, but also a sailboat to send him on to Port-Royal. De Meulles
used the Chignecto seigneur as his chief source of information on
the colony. Later in
1686, the new governor-general, Jacques-René de Brisbay, marquis de Denonville,
who had replaced Le Febvre de La Barre in 1685,
ordered La Vallière to go to France "to report on the situation in
Acadia." Denonville, like Frontenac, tended to favor the
Chignecto seigneur over his political enemies.293c
Back from France in 1687,
La Vallière handed over his Chignecto seigneurie to son-in-law
Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villieu and returned to Canada, where, despite
being in his late 40s, he began a new career as a military officer. He returned to Acadia briefly in 1689 as King's
lieutenant and then returned to Québec, where he served under his
old benefactor, Frontenac, restored to the governor-generalship in
time for the outbreak of war with England. It was La Vallière
who arranged the prisoner exchange below Île d'Orléans after
Frontenac defeated Phips at Québec in the fall of 1690. The
following year, La Vallière was promoted to captain. Four
years later, he was assigned to command the frontier post on the
upper St. Lawrence at Catararcoui, which its founder, the late Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, had dubbed Fort
Frontenac during the governor-general's first tenure in office.
La Vallière and his 48 men were tasked with reaching an accord with
the nearby Iroquois. Back at Québec in the late spring of 1696,
La Vallière joined two of his sons, Alexandre and Jacques, and
another Canadian officer, with a crew of 150, on a foray to the
Acadian coast aboard the ship Bouffone to prey on English
shipping. Their vessel being out of position, they were unable
to prevent New English Colonel Benjamin Church from falling on
Chignecto in September. In May 1699, the war with England
over, the King appointed La Vallière town major of Montréal.
That autumn, Frontenac's replacement, Louis-Hector de Callière,
perhaps informed of La Vallière's good relations with former
Massachusetts Governor Bradstreet, sent the major to Boston to set
up a prisoner repatriation and to discuss Indian relations with the
new Massachusetts governor, Richard Coote, first Earl of Bellomont.
Back in Canada, word got around that La Vallière, because of his
military service, "was in bad financial straits." The King
awarded him a gratuity of 500 livres in 1702 and permission to set
up a porpoise fishery in Acadia, but the scheme never came to
fruition. In the autumn of 1704, now in his sixty-fourth year,
La Vallière was
appointed by Governor-General Philippe Rigaud de
Vaudreuil and Intendant François de Beauharnois de la Chaussaye,
Baron de Beauville, not only to deliver official dispatches to the
Minister of Marine, but also to inform the court of conditions in
Canada. Another war had broken out with England and its allies
two years before, so the mission was as hazardous as it was
important. In France, La Vallière took the opportunity to
secure his grant in the Chignecto region, which, since the late
1690s, had been threatened by new settlers from Port-Royal who were seeking
to put even more distance between themselves and the authorities in
the colonial capital. La Vallière and his son-in-law,
de Villieu, insisted, that the new establishments at Chepoudy,
Petitcoudiac, and Memramcook--the so-called trois-rivières--were encroachments on the family's seigneurial grant.
At court and in Paris, La Vallière was entirely successful in his
efforts to maintain his seigneurial hold on the area. Unfortunately for
the old campaigner, he was unable to enjoy his victory.
He died in July 1705, age 65, on the crossing back to
Canada. Ironically, none of his four sons remained
at Chignecto to complete their father's efforts there.293d
.
Within a decade after the founding of
the Chignecto settlement, during La Vallière's tenure as governor, the Acadians swarmed again, this time to
a fertile basin half way between Port-Royal and Beaubassin.
The Bassin-des-Mines, or Minas Basin, 60 miles northeast of
Port-Royal and 50 miles south of Beaubassin, took its name from the
copper deposits at Cap d'Or, at the northern entrance to the
basin, noted by Champlain and other early explorers. Pierre Melanson,
the elder son of a French Huguenot who had come to Acadia with the
English, married a daughter of Philippe Mius d'Entremont and
became one of the most prosperous settlers at Port-Royal. In c1680,
Pierre sold
his property there and moved his large family to Grand-Pré, which
lay between two small rivers flowing into the basin, the
St.-Antoine, later called Rivière-des-Habitants and now the Cornwallis,
to the north, and the Gaspereau to the south. Two years
later, Pierre, the 26-year-old son of Jean Thériot, started
another settlement on Rivière St.-Antoine not far from
Pierre Melanson's homestead. "Being a popular and
generous man," one historian attests, Thériot "supplied wheat
without interest and housed many while their homes were being
built." Thériot had married a daughter of René
Landry
le jeune in c1678. They were not blessed with
children, but Pierre's nephews Germain, Jean, and Claude, fils,
sons of his older brother Claude, followed their uncle to Minas and
spawned a huge extended family there. Soon the Melansons and Thériots
were joined by other pioneers and their families from Port-Royal who
settled along the many streams that flowed into the basin, including
Rivière-aux-Canards north of the St.-Antoine. Antoine,
Claude, and René, fils, sons of René Landry
l'aîné; Jacques, René, André, and Antoine, four of
the five sons of
Daniel LeBlanc; Étienne and Michel, sons of Étienne Hébert;
their cousin Jean, son of Antoine Hébert; and Claude, son of
Michel
Boudrot, filled the basin with their progeny in the decades that
followed, as did other colonists from Port-Royal and Chignecto,
along with
new arrivals from France. Two church parishes arose in the lower
part of the basin: St.-Charles at Grand-Pré, whose church was
built by 1687, and
St.-Joseph farther north on Rivière-aux-Canards.
Other settlers at Minas bore the names
Allain,
Aucoin, Babin, Bélisle, Benoit,
Bergeron, Bertrand, Blanchard,
Boucher, Bourg, Brasseur, Breau, Brun,
Bugeaud,
Célestin dit Bellemère,
Clouâtre,
Comeau, Daigre, Darois, David, Doucet,
Dugas, Dumont,
Duon, Dupuis, Flan, Gautrot, Girouard,
Granger,
Henry,
Labauve,
Lalande, Lebert, Longuépée, Mazerolle, Mouton,
Part, Pinet, Pitre, Précieux,
Renaud,
Richard, Robichaud, Saulnier, Semer,
Surette, Thibodeau, and Trahan.92
As the number of new settlers at Minas
attests, the place became an agricultural marvel. "This area,
which was to assume demographic and economic leadership among the
three Acadian farming regions in the eighteenth century, was the
last of the three major Acadian centers to get started," Andrew Hill Clark reminds us. "But its fine marshlands, the weakness
of its nominal seigneurial control [claimed by the Le Borgnes],
and, perhaps above all, its relative freedom from the attention of
both New England raiders and French officials, allowed it to expand
rapidly. From only 57 people in the Grand Pré area in 1686 the
population soared to more than 580 in 1707." Clark goes on:
"There is no doubt that agriculture flourished in Minas beyond any
experience at Port Royal or Beaubassin. It was the better
balanced than the latter; not neglecting livestock, in which
Beaubassin rather specialized, it developed the best and most
extensive arable farming in Acadia." Another plus for the
settlements at Minas was easy access to the basin from the
Bay of Fundy, allowing the Acadians there to enjoy their essential trade with merchants from New England.93
Beginning around 1685, settlers from
Minas and Port-Royal moved a few miles southeast of Grand-Pré into
the upper stretches of Rivière Pigiguit, today's Avon River, just
above its confluence with the smaller Rivière Ste.-Croix. They
settled on both sides of the larger river around present-day
Falmouth and Windsor, Nova Scotia. The Acadians called the
settlement Pigiguit, Mi'kmaq for "junction of the waters." The
first church parish there, Ste.-Famille, was founded in August 1698
and lay on the west side of the river. A second parish,
dedicated to Notre-Dame-de l'Assomption and usually shortened to l'Assomption, was founded in June 1722 for
inhabitants living on the east side of Rivière Pigiguit, whose wide
tidal flats made it difficult to cross to the west bank.
About the time of the founding of Ste.-Famille parish, the vicar-general of Acadia, Father Louis-Pierre Thury, founded a Mi'kmaq
mission at Pigiguit. Settlers there bore the names Arsement,
Babin,
Barillot, Benoit, Boudrot, Boutin, Brasseur,
Breau, Broussard, Bugeaud, Chauvet
dit La Gerne, Comeau,
Corporon,
Daigre,
Doiron, Forest, Gaudet, Gautrot, Girouard,
Guédry, Hébert, Landry, LeBlanc,
Lejeune,
Martin,
Michel,
Mire, Pitre, Prince, Richard, Rivet, Roy, Savary,
Thibodeau,
Trahan, and Vincent.94
While Acadians on the peninsula were
establishing settlements at the head of the Bay of Fundy and in the
Minas Basin, another, much smaller Acadian community, at least in
population, arose along lower Rivière St.-Jean, or, rather, came into its
own there. This was an area once controlled by Robert Gravé du Pont, Charles La Tour, and
Charles de Menou d'Aulnay, and for a time was the
center of the fur trade in greater Acadia. During the 1670s,
control of the lower stretches of the river was shared by one of
La Tour's sons-in-law, Martin d'Aprendestiguy, and by Acadian royal governor Pierre de Joybert de Soulanges et de Marson.
Marson's widow maintained her husband's seigneuries above and below Jemseg until she lost
her rights in the early 1700s for "non-fulfillment of conditions."
During the 1680s, more grants were made above Jemseg to sons of
Canadian shaker and mover Mathieu D'Amours, sieur de Matane.
During the late 1600s and early 1700s, agricultural settlements
appeared on the river above Jemseg at Ste.-Anne-du-Pays-Bas,
also called Pointe-Ste.-Anne, now
Fredericton, which, according to Bona Arsenault, began as a
concession to Gabriel Godin dit Châtillon
dit Bellefontaine in 1691; at Nashouat, also called
Nashwaak, the site of Acadian commander Villebon's Fort St.-Joseph across the river from Ste.-Anne-du-Pays-Bas;
and at Ékoupag, now Meductic.
In the late 1600s, the La Tours were still on the river, in the third generation, as
were descendants of Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, who once held sway at
Pentagouët down the coast. Joining the
La Tours and the Saint-Castins, some with seigneuries of
their own, were families that bore the names Le Borgne de Bélisle,
Bergeron dit
d'Amboise, D'Amours dit de Louvières,
Dugas,
Godin dit Beauséjour, dit Bellefeuille,
dit
Bellefontaine, dit Boisjoli, dit Châtillon dit
Préville,
dit Lincour, and dit Valcour, Henry,
Part, and
Roy. The church on this part of Rivière St.-Jean, located at Meductic,
an Indian mission above the main Acadian settlements, was dedicated to Ste.-Anne.97
Another Acadian community that had
sprung up during the early 1600s also came into its own later in the
century. Cap-Sable, at the southwestern tip of the peninsula,
had long been controlled by the La Tours. The most populated
settlement near the cape was Pobomcoup, now Pubnico, Nova Scotia, north of the
cape. Philippe Mius, sieur d'Entremont of
Cherbourg, childhood friend of Charles La Tour, had received
the seigneurie of Pobomcoup from the governor in July 1653.
Half a century later, his family was still there, in the third
generation, and still in possession of their ancestor's seigneurial
rights. The d'Entremonts had coaxed a few families from
France and Port-Royal to settle on their lands near
the cape, where they engaged in limited agriculture and extensive fishing.
The largest family at Pobomcoup were the Amireaus.
Families there and at Cap-Sable also bore the names
Landry,
Moulaison, Pitre, and Viger. Despite its relatively
small population, two church parishes arose in the Pobomcoup/Cap-Sable area: Ste.-Anne at Cheboque northwest of Pobomcoup; and Notre-Dame at Pobomcoup,
said to have been built by Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre on a hill near
present-day Argyle, Nova Scotia.99
.
La Vallière's successor
as royal governor in Acadia,
François-Marie Perrot, a Parisian, was, like his predecessors, a
soldier, having served in the Picardie regiment. His influence
and power came not from his military record, however, but from an
efficacious marriage; his wife, Madeleine Laguide Meynier, was a
niece of Jean Talon, the first royal intendant of New France.
In April 1670, through Talon's influence, Perrot was named governor of Montréal by
the Sulpician fathers, who owned the island. Perrot sailed to Canada with Talon in May and
arrived in August. Although the Sulpicians welcomed him, they
soon regretted their decision. Perrot accompanied
Governor-General Courcelle to the Iroquois country in 1671 and
helped to avert war with the Six Nations. In 1672, Courcelle
and Talon granted Perrot a seigneurie on the large island in the St.
Lawrence at its junction with the Ottawa, just downriver from
Montréal, today's Île Perrot. To the chagrin of Montréal the
fur dealers, Perrot established an illegal trading venture on his
island and employed coureurs de bois to enforce his will, using
violence when necessary. The following year, the new
governor-general, Frontenac, set up a fur trading venture of his own
at Catararcoui, far up the St. Lawrence, where the
governor-general's protégé, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, built a new
fort he named after Frontenac. Perrot joined the Montréal
traders in denouncing Frontenac's activities. Frontenac
retaliated by having Perrot arrested and held to trial
before the Superior Council. Perrot, pointing to his
commission from the King, refused to recognize the right of the
Council to try him. Despite pressure from Frontenac, the
Council relented and referred Perrot's case to the King.
Frontenac sent Perrot back to France to face charges for refusing to
obey the orders of the governor-general. Perrot did not fare
well with Louis XIV or Minister Colbert and spent three
"comfortable" weeks in La Bastille. Upon Perrot's release, the King
reinstated him as governor of Montréal and enjoined Frontenac to
treat him with more respect. Back in Canada, Perrot and
Frontenac formed an uneasy alliance in the effort to dominate the
western fur trade. Emboldened by his "victory" over his
enemies, Perrot became a virtual dictator at Montréal, breaching no
challenge to his authority and especially to his control of the
local fur trade. His rough-and-tumble coureurs terrorized the
town, and Perrot was not above imprisoning a judge who dared to
order the arrest of one of his men. In this, he went too far.
In 1679--the year that the English Parliament passed the Habeas
Corpus Act--the King and Colbert enjoined Frontenac to prevent a
governor, or any other colonial administrator, from arresting his
subjects and interfering with the local courts. Perrot,
certain of Frontenac's protection, continued his abuse of the
unfortunate residents of Montréal, especially those with the
temerity to criticize his fur-trading activities. Perrot's
venality was evident for all to see, and his illegal activities
netted for him an impressive personal fortune.294
In 1680 and 1681, the
Superior Council tried to curtail Perrot's activities, but Frontenac
blocked their efforts. The following year, however, Frontenac
was sacked and replaced by Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre.
Perrot's many enemies--the intendant, the members of the Superior
Council, the residents and other seigneurs of Montréal, and of
course the local merchants--pounced on the Parisian, and not even
his influential friends at court, including his brother Perrot de Fercourt, could save him. In May 1682, the King informed
Governor-General Le Febvre de La Barre to dismiss Perrot as
Montréal's governor. By then, however, Perrot had won the
favor of the new governor-general, who defended the governor while
at the same time covering his own illegal activities in the western
trade. Minister Colbert was not impressed by the new
governor-general's case in favor of the errant governor. In
1683, during his final days, Colbert ordered Perrot stripped of his
powers and threatened to recall him to France. Louis-Hector de
Callière, a future governor-general, replaced Perrot as governor of
Montréal and François-Marie Perrot was named royal governor of
Acadia on 10 April 1684.294a
Perrot did not go
directly to his new post at Port-Royal but traveled from Montréal to
France instead, probably to repair the damage to his reputation at
court. He also may have attempted to dodge what he doubtlessly
considered a forced exile to a neglected corner of New France where
large profits in illicit trade would be hard to come by.
Perrot did not reach Port-Royal until September 1685, a year and a
half after his predecessor, La Vallière, had been removed
from the post and nearly two years since a governor had lived there.
He was not impressed with what he saw. He described his new
post "as a straggly collection of houses with considerable distances
between the buildings, in no way a compact village." He was
especially repelled by what he observed in relations between the
Acadians and the Mi'kmaq. The governor "was convinced that the
very structure of Port Royal led to its people 'taking to the woods
and leading a scandalous life with the savages.'" He blamed
much of what he saw on Alexandre Le Borgne de Belle-Isle, the
Port-Royal seigneur, "who was, in Perrot's opinion, a
drunkard who had granted the lands, with little or no thought, to
the first comer." Perrot's
personality, perhaps, compelled him to look at the dark side of
human behavior. Another official who had been living among the
Port-Royal Acadians for nearly a decade, Abbé Louis Petit, the vicar
general of Acadia, a former soldier like Perrot, found the Acadians to be an
entirely different sort of people. In a letter written to the
new bishop at Québec a month after Perrot's arrival, and perhaps in
reaction the new governor's dark opinions, Abbé Petit made "no
mention of loose living among his flock. Instead, Petit
describes his congregation as sweet-natured, with a tendency to
piety and given to swearing or drunkenness, and the women as chaste.
He was pleased with the attendance at Mass on Sundays and holy days
and their reception of the sacraments."294b
No matter, Perrot would
make the most of his new situation among these confounding people. Colbert had died in the
autumn of 1683, before Perrot could attempt to win his favor.
Colbert's successor as Minister of Marine, his son Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, marquis de Seignelay, had warned Perrot to act responsibly
in Acadia, but, like any accomplished shake-down artist, Perrot behaved
at Port-Royal "exactly as he had done at Montréal."
Shortly after his arrival, he asked the new Minister for "a large
seigneury" at La Hève, but Seignelay refused. No matter,
Perrot "lost no
time in seeking to monopolize the fur trade of the colony, traded
brandy over the counter in his own house, shipped contraband to
Boston, and, in complete disregard for the king's orders, allowed
New England seamen to fish in Acadian coastal waters upon purchasing
a permit, for which he charged L5 per ketch." Many voiced
complaints to the Minister, probably including La Vallière's old enemy, Clerbaud
Bergier, still ensconced at
Chédabouctou. Word of Perrot's venality reached Québec and de
La Barre's replacement as governor-general, Jacques-René de Brisay,
marquis de Denonville. In 1686, Denonville recommended
Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin as a replacement for
Perrot, but evidently nothing came of it, and the Parisian remained
at Port-Royal.294f
Soon after Perrot reached Port-Royal, the
intendant of New France, Jacques de Meulles, visited the colony to
conduct a census and to look in on the new governor.
According to Naomi Griffiths, "De Meulles came by sea from Quebec, leaving there on 11 October
1685." He traveled in a barque captained by
Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, a grand nephew of Nicolas
Denys,
who evidently remained with him throughout the Acadian tour.
Griffiths
continues: "He arrived at Île Percé nineteen days later, on October
30. Departing for Baie Verte and Beaubassin, he was
wrecked off Miscou the next day, October 31, but had the courage to
continue, four days later, in one of the ship's small boats
[actually, three canoes].
He arrived on November 12 at the seigneury of Richard Denys de Fronsac,
the son of Nicolas
Denys, at [the] mouth of Miramichi."
They slept in Denys's secluded manor house, surrounded by a small stone
fort with four bastions. "It took de Meulles another ten days to journey to Beaubassin, by way
of the coast and a bitter portage from Baie-Verte. He arrived
at his destination on 23 November, having been delayed by an early
and severe frost, which made the terrain difficult both for canoes
and for foot travel. In all, the voyage from Quebec to La Vallière's settlement had taken over six weeks," providing the
intendant with an object lesson in the great distances and the
difficulties in reaching the Acadian settlements via the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
La Vallière was not at Beaubassin when de Meulles arrived. The
season was late, so he chose to winter at the seigneur's
manor house before moving on to Port-Royal. He and his
entourage spent five long
months there, and, Griffiths tells us, de Meulles was
"bored by the life among the company he found at Beaubassin...," but
he was impressed by the meadows there, which he believed could
pasture "more than 100,000 cattle." Not until the third week
of April 1686 could he leave Chignecto in a 12-ton sloop
called the St.-Antoine, which La Vallière loaned
to him. When the vessel entered today's Cumberland Basin, it was "blown onto 'a point of clayey land which one could
hardly see at that time.' The tide, which had been so high
that it 'overflowed into the meadows,' began to ebb. In an
hour or two, the ship was 'balanced, half of it being in the air,'
leaving de Meulles and his crew teetering three stores above the
water's surface 'as if we had been put there on purpose.' The
water's return saved the high-centered Frenchmen," giving the
intendant and his companions another object lesson in what
the Acadians had to endure in their settlements along the Grand
French Bay. De Meulles once again took to his canoes and
paddled and sailed along the north shore of the bay to today's St.
Martins, New Brunswick, and then on to the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean,
which he briefly explored. He then crossed the bay to Port-Royal,
which he reached on May 2. He spent two weeks at the colonial
capital with
Perrot, again haranguing the habitants as he had done at
Chignecto, and settled their differences. He took the time to
visit all of the habitations from Port-Royal to the head of
Rivière-au-Dauphin. Influenced, likely, by the equally-irascible governor,
the intendant also noted the unseemly relationship between the
Port-Royal habitants and the local band of Mi'kmaq, and issued
ordinances "concerned 'with ways of remedying the libertinism of
several of His Majesty's subjects, who keep Indian women in their
dwellings, who desert father and mother and follow these Indian
women into the woods.'" (One wonders if de Meulles and the
Abbé Petit spoke at all about the true nature of these
settlers.) He noted that the
Acadians "built boats capable of coastal travel and that they made
their own clothes, the women making stockings, gloves, and bonnet."
He also reported that "every spring three or four English ships
came, loaded with every necessity, bartering for furs and other
goods," the habitants thus securing for themselves the
necessary items that trade with France, both Old and New, did not
provide for them. Continuing his tour of the colony after his
stay at Port-Royal, de Meulles endured the difficult overland
portage across the southern peninsula to Port Rossignol, today's
Liverpool. From there, he canoed up the coast to La Hève before
moving on to
the fishing establishments at Canso and Chédabouctou, visiting all
of the settlements and Mi'kmaq camps along the way, including Île du
Port Rossignol, today's Coffin Island, and Chébouctou, now Halifax,
where he found a ship on which to continue his voyage. At
Canso, he rebuked the recently-converted Huguenots among the fishing
crews who insisted on continuing their heretical practices, as they
had done during the directorship of Clerbaud Bergier. After
exploring the head of Chédabouctou Bay and noting the potential for
agriculture there, he returned to Canso, planning to continue on to
Nicolas Denys' home at St.-Pierre on Cape Breton
island but was told the aging proprietor was still in Paris.
His mission completed, de Meulles hurried back to Île Percé via the
Strait of Canso and the north shore of Île St.-Jean, at the time
inhabited only by Mi'kmaq, and returned to Percé by June 19, having
sailed only three days from Canso. After spending a day
resolving differences between French fishing captains at Percé and
exploring an unproductive lead mine on nearby Gaspé Bay, he made his
way back to Québec, which he reached on 6 July 1686, having spent a
little over eight months in greater Acadia.294e
De Meulles's primary mission in Acadia
had been "to report on the resources of the area and particularly on the
possibility of establishing sedentary fishing stations, which would
provide employment for the Canadians and a market for [Canada's]
agricultural produce." He also was tasked with conducting a
detailed census of the Acadian population, which he began in the late autumn of 1685
and continued into late spring of 1686. Again, as in the 1678 census at
Port-Royal, familiar names were found in Acadia in even greater
numbers, and many new names appeared. Happily for historians
and genealogists, de Meulles's census was more detailed and
comprehensive than that of 1678, though it was not as detailed as the first one 15 years
earlier, perhaps because he himself did not make all the countings.
Nevertheless, the intendant and Governor Perrot and their
assistants counted Acadians not only at Port-Royal, but also at most
of the other settlements in the colony. At Port-Royal, they found 592 persons and 95 families,
including 395 children, as well as 30
soldiers, with 377 arpents under cultivation, 643 head of
cattle, 627 sheep, and 351 wine; at Minas, only recently
established, 57 persons and 10 families; and at Chignecto, 127 persons and 19 families,
with 426 arpents under cultivation, but less than a third
of the cattle found at Port-Royal.
In the Atlantic-shore settlements of Pobomcoup
and Cap-Sable, they found 15 persons and 3 families; at La Hève and
nearby Mirliguèche, 19 persons and 6 families, with 9 guns and only
3 arpents under cultivation; for Canso, where de Meulles chided the Huguenots, he provided no population figures, so the persons there likely were itinerant fishermen; and
at nearby Chédabouctou, 50
fishermen, a royal lieutenant, and 21 settlers, including 15 or so servants and 3
or 4 habitants. Along the lower Fundy shore and the
coast of Maine at the southwestern edge of greater Acadia stood
small settlements at Rivière St.-Jean, Rivière Ste.-Croix, Passmaquoddy,
and Mégais
(Machias), where lived 16
persons, excluding servants, and half a dozen families. At the northern edge of greater Acadia, de Meulles counted 59 persons, most of them fishermen,
with five families at Île Percé; at Nepisiguit, two habitants, including an Indian wife, and
three or four
servants; and at Miramichi, six persons, including four
or five servants in the seigneur's stone fort--a
grand total of 885 men, women, and children in the colony from Percé
down to Baie-Verte on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on three of the
major inlets of the Bay of Fundy, and along the Atlantic coast from
Maine up to the Strait of Canso, with 222 guns,
986 head of cattle, 759 sheep, 608 hogs, and 896 arpents under
cultivation, a doubling of the colony's established population since
1671 and a substantial increase in its material resources.
Naomi Griffiths laments that de Meulles exhibited "no
historical sensitivity about his work, and perhaps he did not know
about the 1671 census. Certainly he was less meticulous;
daughters were not named and the reports of domestic animals were
haphazardly recorded. The lack of historical reference is also
apparent in the way in which he talks of the development of the
colony. There is little appreciation that the colony had not
only survived, in spite of continued neglect by France, but actually
developed. Port Royal had endured while Beaubassin and Minas
had been established, the acreage of land cleared throughout the
colony had doubled, there had been close to a 50 per cent growth in
the number of cattle reported, the number of sheep kept had
approximately doubled, and the herds of goats and pigs had grown
significantly." Especially apparent from the census results
was Acadia's potential as a cattle-producing region, which likely
already had caught the attention of New-English as well as Canadian merchants.45
Another distinguished visitor during Perrot's tenure was
32-year-old Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrières de Saint-Vallier,
the aging Laval's replacement as Bishop of Québec. The
prelate, like the intendant, also reported on the state of the
colony after experiencing the rigors of the country. Instead
of going there by sea, as de Meulles had done, the young bishop chose to follow the
old Indian portage from the St.
Lawrence valley to Rivière St.-Jean, which Grandfontaine had
surveyed 15 years before. The bishop and his party,
consisting of two priests and five expert canoe men, left
Rivière-du-Loup, below Québec, on 7 May 1686, and entered "a
countryside 'where winter still held sway.'" Following the
portage via Lac Pohénégamook to the upper reaches of the St.-Jean,
they reached what the bishop called Le Grand Sault Saint Jean
Baptiste, at present-day Grand Falls, New Brunswick, 10 days
later. "Sometimes they had to break the ice to get the canoes through,"
the bishop's biographer tells us.
"At one time they thought they would die of starvation. Then
came the summer, the unbearable mosquito bites, the humid heat."
At the Maliseet capital of Meductic, the bishop sent all but one of
the priests on to Port-Royal. With a single companion, he made
his way cross country to the southwest branch of Rivière Miramichi
and visited Richard Denys's establishment at the mouth of the
Miramichi, where Intendant de Meulles had stayed the previous
autumn. The bishop's
journey now had consumed over seven weeks; the previous autumn, on
his way to Acadia, it had taken de Meulles "roughly a month" to
reach this same point via the Gulf of St. Lawrence despite a
shipwreck at Île Miscou. The bishop, however, had begun his
mission as soon as he had left his seat, having stopped "a number of
times en route between Quebec and Rivière-du-Loup." "Everywhere they met Frenchmen or Indians,"
such as at Grand Sault and Meductic, the young bishop "preached,
catechized, rebuked, praised. He ate little, scarcely slept,
and worked unceasingly," his biographer goes on. He remained
at Miramichi and
nearby Richibouctou
for a week, ministering to the Mi'kmaq who came out to greet him.
Continuing down the gulf shore via Shediac, he lingered at the
fishing post at Chédabouctou before heading back up the coast to
Baie-Verte. Complaining "bitterly about the clouds of
mosquitoes," he endured the short but difficult portage down the
Missaguash to Beaubassin. He now would be touring the heart of
Acadia--the settlements along the south shore of the Bay of Fundy
where the largest population centers could be found. The
bishop conversed at length not only with the seigneur, with whom he
likely stayed, but also with some of the Chignecto settlers.
He noted in his journal the difficulties of the early years at
Chignecto, especially in constructing the aboiteaux, information the
bishop would have best gotten from the habitants themselves.
Naomi Griffiths notes that Bishop
de Saint-Vallier was "one of the
few seventeenth-century commentators who seems to have realized how
much work was involved in the building and maintenance of dykes."
The bishop noted that many Chignecto settlers fished for salmon and
cod as well as planted crops and raised impressive herds of cattle.
He also commented on the weaving skills of the Chignecto women but
also noted the frontier roughness of the finished product. He
was charmed by the beauty of the Missaguash valley, especially "the many
little streams that flowed through its broad meadows." He
commented that the settlers on La Vallière's seigneurie "would be
above reproach if only they were a little more restrained in the
matter of the brandy trade with the Mi'kmaq." ... As he had done for the
intendant earlier in the spring, La Vallière probably loaned the bishop a
sailboat, perhaps the St.-Antoine. From Chignecto,
Bishop de Saint-Vallier and his companion journeyed by water to the Minas
Basin before continuing on towards Port-Royal. At Minas, the
bishop noted that the habitants of this recently-created settlement
also were "draining the marshes." As did de Meulles months
before, the bishop also experienced the rigors of traveling in the
Bay of Fundy. "The seas were
rough," Griffiths relates, "and, after nine days on board
the small ship, having run out of supplies, his party came to shore
and walked the rest of the way overland." From Minas, they likely
followed the old Indian portage up today's Cornwallis River and then
across the divide to the upper reaches of Rivière-au-Dauphin. The
bishop and his
companion arrived at Port-Royal via the haute-rivière late on the evening of July 25, two
months after de Meulles had spent his two weeks there. He
"found the church at Port Royal pretty and adequately furnished."
Doubtlessly influenced by the testimony of Abbé Petit, the new
bishop reported that the Acadians in general were faithful to the
Church and its teachings. The settlers at Beaubassin and Minas
beseeched him to send more priests to their settlements.
Unfortunately, the young prelate urged La Vallière
to replace the Récollet priest at Beaubassin with a Sulpician, which
would sow further discord between the seigneur and his
settlers. One of the
bishop's few complaints, that Acadian women "immediately baptized"
their newborns, can "be read," Griffiths notes, "as the
result of strong convictions, held by the women, about the
importance of the sacraments as the rite of admittance to membership
in the Catholic Church." De Saint-Vallier
"returned to Quebec via Beaubassin, Baie-Verte, and the sea route,
ending his journey" by the third week of August. His tour to
the far reaches of his diocese had taken him a bit over four months
to complete. Thanks to what he had seen and heard there, and
to the reports of his hand full of priests, he had a good idea of
the spirituality of his distant Acadian "children."
He would return to them three years later, in 1689.294c
One wonders what the
Acadian habitants thought of all this official attention.
Judging by the thoroughness of de Meulles's census, the majority of
them must have interacted with the intendant as he made his rounds
from settlement to settlement, but they likely were repelled by his
irascible, officious nature. "De Meulles was in his late
thirties or early forties at this time," Naomi Griffiths tells
us, "and in his diary and dispatches comes across as cantankerous,
critical, and self-important." Evidently not impressed with
Governor Perrot's performance, or with the many Acadians he met, de
Meulles "reported that the colony was much in need of more effective
government and its inhabitants of greater discipline, noting
constantly in his diary the times he issued ordinances to regulate
the lives of the inhabitants and the number of times he exhorted
them to live in peace with one another." One suspects that
fewer of the habitants heard the words of their religious mentor
from Québec, and that fewer still took to heart the young
bishop's paternal rebukes. His gentle
nature, however, would have appealed to them, except when he chided
them for trading brandy with the Mi'kmaq.294g
.
In April 1687,
François-Marie Perrot finally was dismissed as governor of Acadia. "He
did not, however, return to France but remained in Acadia and
continued his malpractices, despite warnings from the minister to
desist or learn what it meant to incur the king's serious
displeasure," his biographer relates. Perrot ignored the minister's warnings and was
still in the colony in May 1690 when Sir William Phips captured
Port-Royal and transported Perrot's successor to Boston. Perrot
managed to avoid capture and joined French forces on Rivière St.-Jean later that summer. It was then
that Perrot's luck ran out and his venality caught up to him.
A few days after sailing into the lower river with colonial
Commander Joseph de Villebon and his
troupes de la marine, "two pirate ships from the English colonies
entered the river, captured the French vessels, and Perrot with
them. Believing that he had hidden large sums of money, they
tortured him to make him divulge its whereabouts, with what success
is not known. Subsequently he was rescued by a French
privateer and landed at a French port. He then took up
residence in Paris and sought, unsuccessfully, to obtain his
reappointment as governor of Acadia." Perrot died in his
native city in October 1691, "allegedly as a result of his
sufferings at the hands of the English freebooters." He was
only 47 years old.294d
Perrot's
successor was not Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, the
choice of Governor-General Denonville. French authorities
chose, instead, Louis-Alexandre des Friches de Meneval, a native,
most likely, of the Orléanais region south of Paris. Meneval, of course,
was a soldier, having served
at Indret, near Nantes. His service there as a lieutenant was
so distinguished he gained the attention of Marshal Turenne. According to Meneval's biographer, it was
Charles-François Duret de Chevry, marquis de Villeneuve, who recommended to the King the lieutenant's appointment as royal governor of
Acadia. The appointment came on 1 March 1687. The new
governor's compensation would be 3,000 livres per annum and
1,000 livres for further expenses, "a considerable increase
over those guaranteed his predecessor" of 17 years before,
Grandfontaine, but it paled in comparison to the 24,000 livres
per annum paid to Governor-General Denonville, Naomi Griffiths points out. In April, the
Minister of Marine instructed Meneval "to encourage
colonization and agriculture and prevent the English from trading
and fishing in Acadia." Meneval sailed to
Acadia aboard a ship of the Compagnie de
l'Acadie, which the marquis directed. The vessel took Meneval not
directly to his post at Port-Royal but to company headquarters at Chédabouctou,
where the marquis's nephew, Charles Duret de Chevry de La
Boulaye, commanded. From there, Meneval had to wait for the King's frigate,
the 16-gun, 150-ton
La Friponne, to return from Québec before it could ferry
him around to Port-Royal, which he finally reached in October.
The Friponne, under orders "to drive away any foreign vessels
attempting to fish or trade there," a mission which its captain
already had commenced, would remain in Acadian waters as part of the
colony's defense. Already at the capital, having come via Chédabouctou
aboard the naval transport Le Bretonne in July and reached
Port-Royal two months before Meneval, were two French
officers who would assist the new governor in administering the
colony: M. de Gargas, a scribe
for the Ministry of Marine, who would serve as scrivener, or chief recorder, in the
colony; and
M. de Miramont, a lieutenant, who would command Port-Royal's small garrison
of 30
troupes de la marine. Meneval and his officers had been
charged with the reconstruction of the Port-Royal fort, but the new
governor's first concern was to examine the mess Perrot
had made of the colony's accounts and pay the salaries of the
garrison's soldiers, which Perrot had allowed to fall in arrears.
Winter was nigh, so reconstruction of the fort would have to wait
for spring. Meanwhile, Meneval gave thought to rebuilding the fort at
Pentagouët and even building a new post west of Penobscot Bay on the
St. George River,
which the French still insisted was the boundary between Acadia and
New England.295
.
Though the new governor opposed it, perhaps because of de Meulles's
recent effort, scrivener Gargas conducted yet another "census" of
the colony, in 1687 and 1688. In some ways, no Acadian
counting was more thorough than this one. It enumerated not only European
inhabitants, men, women, and children, both boths and girls, but
also Indians, including men, woman, and children; not only secular
souls, but also priests, monks, and nuns in every settlement where
they could be found; and of course the colony's animal assets,
including "horses and mares," colts, "horned cattle of all kinds,
and "wool-bearing cattle of all kinds, likely sheep. Gargas
also noted the number of churches "or houses used as such,"
hospitals, houses, mills, sawmills, even "wigwams"; the number of
guns, swords, pistols; "acres of marshland under cultivation," and
"acres of upland under cultivation." He or his assistants
visited 49 separate settlements, most of them isolated and only
lightly occupied along the Bay of Fundy, both upper and lower; and
along the Atlantic shore from Canso down to Maine. He does not seem to have visited the Gulf shore from Baie-Verte up to the Baie des Chaleurs.
The
counting's major failing, if it was intended as a census, was that it included
none of the
settlers' names, not even heads of households, either by design or perhaps because of an
unfortunate encounter with a prominent habitant soon after
Gargas reached Port-Royal. The scrivener himself tells it
best: "In pursuance of my orders I visted the lower part of
the River of the Dauphin, the River Imbert and the River Aubar in
canoes of bark and wood," Gargas wrote to a superior in France after
he was recalled from the colony. "As I intended to visit these
rivers, I asked M. Perrot, the former Governor of the said country,
who had recently arrived from Port Razoir" on the Atlantic coast,
"to do me a favour of lending me a bark canoe which he owned for the
next day. He was kind enough to assent. Sieur de
Miramont," in command of the garrison, "who also wished to learn
about the country, desired to accompany me and for this purpose he
borrowed a wooden canoe from a man named Bourg, in
which to carry some few provisions which I promised him. The
next day M. Perrot had his bark canoe delivered to me. Sieur
de Miramont, as an added precaution, borrowed from an inhabitant of
Port Royal named Peyrière another wooden canoe to leave in the place
of the one belonging to ... Bourg, which he was
going to take for his trip, as he did. Upon our return from
this trip, which was late, we landed at a store-house at Port Royal,
which was at the water's edge and in which was stored the King's
gunpowder. There was a sentinel on duty and Sieur de Miramont
charged him to take care of this canoe [Bourg's]
and to see that the tide did not bear it away. He also told
him not to let anyone take it without his order, fearing lest some
stranger should wish to use it and should do so. He further
ordered the sentry to transmit these orders to all who should
relieve him. Very early the next morning the said
Bourg, hearing that we had returned, went to the river-bank
to get his canoe without saying anything to Sieur de Miramont.
At this hour the sentinel was a soldier of the new levy [recently
arrived in the colony] who did not know any of the inhabitants and
he stopped Bourg and forbade him to take the canoe
without having spoken to an officer. Now Bourg,
who is one of the most rebellious and independent inhabitants of
Acadie, was much displeased and went home in great anger, saying
that his canoe had been seized by force, that he had not been
allowed to take it back, and that it was not his business to come
and ask for it. He grew so angry that he insulted us in terms
which my respect (for you) prevents me from inserting here."
Gargas then described the formidable habitant, likely one
of Antoine Bourg's remaining sons--Jean, then age
41; Bernard, age 39; Martin, age 37; or Abraham, age 25, all married
and residents of Port-Royal at the time. "Now this man [Bourg]
possesses more relations than almost anyone else in Port Royal,"
Gargas continued, "and without looking into the matter all his
relations took his side and grumbled about the affair. I was
told of this and, very shortly afterwards, I went to see him and
pointed out that he was wrong to cry out and complain, that the
sentinel had not known him and that there had been no intention of
refusing to give him back his canoe. (I explained) that Sieur
de Miramont was going to have it delivered to him or even have it
brought to his house as he wished. If he was annoyed that he
had lent the canoe to Sieur de Miramont, I offered to pay him
whatever rental he wished, and (I put forward) several other reasons
to calm him. All his relatives, before whom I made these
explanations, were appeased and took my side. Only two or
three of his brothers treated me very insolently, adding that they
desired neither the canoe nor the money, but that they would make a
complaint to the Governor just as soon as he came. This they
did not fail to do the day after M. Meneval arrived, in spite of the
fact that Sieur de Miramont had had the canoe delivered at
Bourg's house. I had the honour of appearing before
the Governor, and, although I gave him the same explanations of the
affair as I have set forth above and although these were proved to
him to be true, he, through some extraordinary prejudice, never
ceased to treat me publicly as in the wrong, even though I was in no
wise responsible for the canoe. He used such insulting terms
about me and abused me so strongly that all the inhabitants became
convinced that I had forged orders from the King to come into their
country" to conduct another census. "I had the greatest
possible difficulty in disabusing them of this idea," the scrivener
complained, "an idea which made it impossible for me to extract any
information about the country from them. However, my
consequent behaviour was so conciliatory that these very
Bourgs were the most eager to give me pleasure, coming
almost every day to eat with me. I could not forbear from
relating these incidents; inasmuch as this complaint was the cause
of my being recalled...."
In all other respects, Gargas's count was a paragon of detailed observation.
Early twentieth-century scholar William Iglis Morse, writing in the
1930s, summarizes the scrivener's effort: "This hitherto unknown
census shows an Acadian population of much the same size as in
1686, actually slightly less, but Gargas had difficulty in getting
evidence," perhaps because of Meneval's opposition to the count.
"Total given is 877 and 1,119 Indians (these being assessed for
first time ?)." De Meulles's total was 885 inhabitants.
"Numbers at Port Royal--," Morse goes on, were "100 less;
cattle much the same as before (580 cattle; 687 sheep). Less
land cultivated--only 350 acres (approx.). Les Mines,
however, had increased: 163 persons, 50 being Indians; 130
cattle, 70 sheep. Chicnitou remained about the same
with 122 persons, about same number of cattle, etc., but less land
recorded. Cape Sable showed an increase to 22
Europeans with 24 Indians. Port Rochelois, mentioned
1671, showed a corresponding increase to 20 Europeans.
Lahève was populated mostly by Indians (48 out of 60).
None of these south coast communities were agricultural.
Merliguech is also reported." Gargas then moved up the
coast. "Chedabouctou seems to have flourished," Morse
continues, "having now 51 inhabitants and 52 Indians:
Canceau was a small Indian station, and Chibouctou was
another Indian settlement (33) with 3 Frenchmen. Chedabouctou
was a well-armed post with 40 guns, 20 swords, 6 pistols.
Chicnitou and Les Mines had 25 and 40 guns respectively. Port
Royal seems to have been poorly supplies with guns, but there were
17 cannon there and another small detachment of men near by at Le
Cap, and other guns were scattered up the river and valley."
These numbers, however, are only the smaller part of Gargas's contribution to
Acadian history. In his report to the Ministry of Marine in
1688 after his recall, Gargas described in detail the colony's assets
and liabilities, as well as many of its settlements, large and
small, and offered advice on how to minimize what he believed were
the colony's major shortcomings. ...295h
.
Acadia's governor was another animal;
Gargas would have described him as
the quintessential poseur. An irascible
bachelor with a tendency towards ill health, Meneval could not have been
pleased with his new quarters in what must have seemed a forsaken
outpost of King Louis's realm. But surely his French heart
must have been touched by the loveliness of his new surroundings.
"His home for the next three years was, in terms of the landscape,
as beautiful as ever it had been," Naomi Griffiths informs us:
"a sheltered bay, ringed with forested hills, a fort, a church, and
a sprinkling of houses built on the estuary, with farms stretching
back along the meadowlands of the Rivière-du-Dauphin. The
population was small, somewhere between four and six hundred,
counting all those established within the valley and along the
hillsides." During his short time in Acadia, Meneval would
never warm up to these clannish habitants, whose stubborn
independence, especially their eagerness to trade for New-English
goods, would serve only to alienate them farther from their royal governor.295g
In 1688, the
Friponne returned to Port-Royal with 30 more
troupes de la marine. Now, 90 gray-clad troupes, including 20 at Chédabouctou,
protected the colony. Also aboard the frigate was an engineer
officer assigned to inspect the Acadian posts and draw up
plans for the reconstruction of the fort at Port-Royal, and two
other officers, one military, the other
civil. M. de Soulègre would serve as captain of troupes. Mathieu de Goutin,
age 25, would serve as the King's lieutenant général civil et criminel,
or general representative for justice, which
made him both a judge and a clerk of court. He also had been
sent to Port-Royal to replace the ousted Gargas. To complete the
judicial organization of the colony, Meneval re-appointed Parisian
lawyer Pierre Chênet Dubreuil as King's attorney.
Chênet Dubreuil had come to the colony earlier in the decade to
escape a scandal in Canada, where he had fathered an illegitimate
daughter. At Port-Royal, he had become a schoolmaster and was
a favorite of Acadia's first vicar general, Abbé Louis Petit.
Chênet Dubreuil also held a seigneurie at Mégais,
today's Machias, on the Maine coast and soon became a favorite of Meneval.295a
Not so the general
representative for justice. Among Meneval's more
trying ordeals during his three years in office were conflicts with the headstrong de Goutin
and the general representative's father-in-law,
Pierre Thibodeau. In late 1689, for instance,
about the time that de Goutin was considering marriage to
Thibodeau's daughter Jeanne, the harried governor imprisoned Thibodeau
briefly
for trading brandy with the Indians. This served to alienate
not only de Goutin, but also a good part of the Acadian
population, many of whom were related to Thibodeau and his
wife, Jeanne Thériot. Moreover, the stuffy Meneval
disapproved the marriage of his general representative for justice "to a
peasant's daughter," as he called de Goutin's
bride. But Pierre Thibodeau was hardly a peasant.
A native of Poitou, he had come to the colony as a young soldier with Emmanuel Le Borgne nearly four decades
before, built a mill at Prée-Ronde on the haute rivière,
fathered 16 children, and was, at the time of daughter Jeanne's
marriage to de Goutin, one of the wealthiest men in the
colony. His older daughters, all of them named Marie, had
married into the Landry, Lejeune dit Briard,
Robichaud dit Cadet, and Boudrot families, all
well-established like the Thibodeaus and the
Thériots, some of them living in the Minas Basin, a community
founded earlier in the decade. Thibodeau had seven
sons, none of them married yet, one of them still a newborn, but they all
were healthy and gave promise of creating families of their own.
Pierre Thibodeau was wealthy, then, in more ways than one.
De Goutin's connection to the settlers could not have
been more solidly established. This tested his judicial
objectivity of course, something that Meneval, still the bachelor,
was happy to point out to his superiors.295b
Meneval clashed
constantly not only with Gargas, but also with de Goutin and
his many friends and associates, among them Antoine Laumet
dit La Mothe de Cadillac, future founder of Détroit and
governor of Louisiana. The young Gascon--Cadillac was
only in his mid-20s when he had come to Acadia in c1683--was five
years older than de Goutin and still a bachelor when the new
general representative for justice reached Port-Royal.
Cadillac and de Goutin
hit it off immediately. Meanwhile, De Goutin formed a trading partnership
with the new Port-Royal garrison commander, M. de Soulègre.
"When Meneval informed Soulègre and de Goutin that as
officers they were forbidden to engage in trade, the three partners
schemed against him," one of Cadillac's biographers informs us.
"They sought to alienate the priests from him," including
vicar-general
Abbé
Petit, "and, when this failed, tried to turn the people
against the priests by urging them not to pay the tithe." Meneval traduced de Goutin and his partners to the
Minister of Marine,
accusing them "of insubordination and intrigue." As a result,
factions arose among the officials and colonists, one in favor of Meneval, the other in favor of de Goutin
and his "cronies," as Meneval called them.295c
In a report to the
Minister in autumn of 1688, Meneval "painted a pessimistic picture
of his government: the cost of living was high; there was a
shortage of flour and of workers; some of the soldiers were old and
disabled and had ceased to be of any use; the contingent of the
preceding year had received bad muskets and that of 1688 had only 19
muskets between 30 soldiers, so that half of them were without arms;
the surgeon was a drunkard, and the court had neglected to supply
funds with which to pay him; a hospital and medical supplies were
needed; his own gratuity had not been renewed, and he sought
permission to go to France to report to the minister and settle some
personal affairs." The fight with de Goutin et al., and
the lack of work on the Port-Royal defenses, only darkened Meneval's
view of the colony and the role he was playing in its
administration. However, there were a few positive elements in his
report to the Minister which revealed that he harbored hope for the colony: He
had encouraged soldiers to marry the daughters of settlers, and some
of them did. He recommended that "fishing, the country's best
resource, be developed by advancing loans to the settlers and
protecting the coasts with armed barks." He could report that
the new settlement at Minas, particularly at Grand-Pré, was
developing nicely, as was the older settlement at Chignecto.
But his letter ended with an ominous warning: "the English
'very much wanted Acadia.'"295d
Here was Meneval's greatest challenge as governor: the
colony's defense against an aggressive neighbor. Three months
before he reached Port-Royal, La Friponne had seized two New-English ketches from Salem, Massachusetts, fishing off the coast
near Chédabouctou. This elicited a strong response from Boston
authorities, whose representative reached Port-Royal and returned to
Boston before Meneval's arrival. The following spring, 1688, the governor of
the New English Dominion, Sir Edmund Andros, crossed the French
"boundary" at the St. George River and pillaged the old Acadian
capital at Pentagouët. That autumn, while Meneval was
reporting at length to the Minister, Massachusetts pirates descended
on the fishing center at Chédabouctou, pillaged the fort there, and
captured the company's ship along with 12,000 livres worth of
merchandise intended for the settlers at Port-Royal--all "under the
very nose" of La Friponne's captain, Barthélémy de
Beauregard. The
humiliated Meneval blamed the captain for the mishap, and Beauregard
blamed the governor. And then there was the fort at
Port-Royal. Upon his arrival there in October 1687, Meneval had put
off reconstruction of the fort until the following spring; months
then turned into years, and, during his tenure as governor, nothing substantial was
ever done. In 1688, an experienced military
engineer, M. Pasquine or Paquine, arrived aboard the Friponne,
but Paquine was there to inspect the colony's defenses and return to
Paris to draw up detailed plans and a cost analysis for rebuilding
the fort at Port-Royal. The ministerial bureaucracy approved
the plans and the projected expense, but the Minister sent another
engineer to supervise the work. Vincent de Saccardy reached
Port-Royal via Chédabouctou in early October 1689--five months after
English King William III declared war against France. Saccardy's instructions were to build a fort at Port-Royal, not
anywhere else. Turning from Paquine's original plans,
"Saccardy had the old fort razed completely and drew up a plan for a
vast enciente with four bastions, enclosing the governor's
house, the church, a mill, and the guard-houses; it would also be
able to hold barracks and receive the settlers in case of attack."
With the actions at Pentagouët and Chédabouctou serving as
harbingers of troubles to come, there was no time to lose.
"Saccardy set to work briskly, and in 16 days, with the help of the
soldiers, settlers, and 40 sailors, succeeded in building half of
his enciente. But [in November] the ships had to leave
again," and Saccardy had orders to go with them. The new fort at Port-Royal was
left unfinished, its bastions and walls incomplete.
Also ordered to go to France with Saccardy was Meneval's second in command,
34-year-old Joseph Robinau dit
Promville, sieur de Villebon, a former officer of dragoons
and captain of troupes de la
marine. Villebon
was a native of Canada, had been educated in France, and was nephew of
La Vallière
of Beaubassin. He also was
a competent young officer whose
absence would be sorely missed.295e
By the time Saccardy and
Villebon departed for France, Meneval was ready to wash his hands of
Acadia and its inhabitants. In a letter to the Marquis de
Villeneuve, "he said that he
was determined to go to France even without authorization,
'preferring a hundred times to remain three years in the Bastille
rather than one single week here.'"295f
.
Nievertheless, the 1670s and 80s was an important period in the development of the
Acadian culture, Naomi Griffiths reminds us, "the years when migration from France to 'Acadie'
added to an existing population rather than created a new colony,
and when European heritage interacted with the North American
environment...." Since the first census of 1671, new settlers
had come to Acadia
aboard L'Oranger, which left La Rochelle in December 1670 and
reached Port-Royal only months after Father Molin's counting. Others arrived on ships from France the names of
which have been lost to history, and some, including a family of seigneurs and their retainers, had come to Acadia from Canada.
"There had been a certain amount of migration since 1671...,"
Griffiths explains. "On the whole, however, the
growth in population was due to natural increase. People were
fertile and the children lived. Throughout the settlements the
average family sizes seems to have been five or six children.
... In common with the experience of much of New England,
infant mortality was low, at least 75 percent of the children
surviving to adulthood. This was a very different reality from
Europe. In France, no more than 50 per cent of children
reached adulthood. Another 25 per cent died between the ages
of twenty and twenty-five. Immigration continued to Acadia
during the next twenty-five years but, by 1686, the colony was close
to being self-generating demographically." Razilly,
d'Aulnay,
even Charles La Tour, likely would not have recognized what
they had resurrected on the Acadian peninsula half a century earlier. "[T]he settlements throughout the colony [were]
sufficiently interconnected, to allow us to consider Acadia at this
time as a society in the making, not merely a trading outpost of
Europe," Griffiths continues. "Kinship structures within and between the differing
settlements, established economic relationships, and legal,
political, and religious custom are all to be found by the
mid-1680s. Together, these networks built a pattern of social
interaction which made Acadian society an entity that differed
substantially from its neighbours" to the west and south.
Moreover, "Acadia was a border colony, not only because it was
situated at the meeting place of empires, or because it was ruled
alternately by France and by England, but because its larger and
more powerful neighbours treated it as such." As time would
tell, "Neither New England nor New France were ever able to
assimilate Acadia fully into their own territory, and only
occasionally attempted so to do. There was always a measure of
independence accorded, willingly or unwillingly, to Acadia by its
more powerful neighbours." By the the late 1680s, Griffiths concludes, "the colony," meaning its people, both
immigrant and native-born, "established itself as a presence in
North America, not strong, not powerful, but there, something that
both New England and New France had to take into consideration"
during their decades-long struggle, both cold and hot, over control
of this corner of America.46
Many of the new arrivals contributed to
the colony's natural increase by taking wives from established families, now in their second and third
generations. The new arrivals, too, helped create "a society in the
making" in the burgeoning settlements along the Fundy shore:
François
Amireau dit
Tourangeau, born in c1644 in Touraine, France, hence his dit,
may have come to the colony aboard
L'Oranger in 1671. He married Marie, daughter of Jean Pitre
and Marie Pesseley, in
c1683. De Meulles counted them at Port-Royal in 1686.
François, whom the intendant called a Tourangeau, was age 42, and Marie was 22.
They were living with a daughter, age 2. De Meulles did not
give the size of their farm or the number of their animals.
Marie gave François 11 children, including five sons who created
families of their own. Many of them settled in the Cap-Sable
area and became the largest family there.220
Pierre
Arsonneau, generally Arseneau, born perhaps at La
Flamancherie in the Saintonge region in September 1646,
became a coastal pilot. He may have come to the
colony aboard L'Oranger. He married Marguerite, daughter of Abraham Dugas
and Marguerite Doucet,
in c1675. Pierre does not appear in the Port-Royal census of
1678 because, not long after his marriage, he and Marguerite moved to the
new Acadian settlement at Chignecto, where land had been held for
them. Pierre remarried to
Marie, daughter of François Guérin, in c1686. That
year, De Meulles noted in his census that "Arsenault, who
resides in Port-Royal[,] owns in the seigneurie of Beaubassin
1 gun, 30 arpents, 8 cattle, 4 sheep, 6 hogs." De Meulles
insisted that Pierre was age 40 in 1686, and Marie was 24.
They were counted at Port-Royal with Pierre's two sons by his first
wife, who created families of their own. Second wife Marie
gave Pierre seven more children, including five more sons who
created their own families.119
Nicolas
Barrieau, also called
Barriot, Bariault, and Barillot, born in France in
c1648, may have come to Acadia aboard L'Oranger. He married Martine, daughter of Étienne
Hébert and Marie Gaudet, at Port-Royal in c1682. De Meulles counted them at Port-Royal in 1686,
on the eve of their move to the Minas Basin.
Nicolas, who the intendant called a Barillot, was age 40, and Martine was 28.
They were living with a two-year-old daughter. De Meulles did
not give the size of their farm or the numbers of their animals.
Martine gave Nicolas nine children, including four sons who created
families of their own.218
Martin
Benoit or Benoist dit Labrière, born probably at Rochefort in
c1643, may have come to the colony aboard L'Oranger. He married Marie
Chaussegros at Port-Royal in c1672. They were counted at
Port-Royal in 1678 and again in 1686. In 1686, Martin, called
a Benoist, was age 42, and Marie was 30. They lived
with six children, four sons and two daughters. De Meulles did
not give the size of their farm, but he noted that they owned 4
hogs. Marie gave Martin 10 children, including five sons who
created families of their own.122
François
Brossard, later
Broussard, born in c1653, perhaps in Anjou, may have come to the
colony aboard L'Oranger. He married Catherine, daughter of Michel dit Sansoucy Richard
and Madeleine Blanchard, at Port-Royal in c1678. De Meulles found them still at Port-Royal in 1686. François was
age 33, and Catherine was 22. They lived with three children,
a son and two daughters, the younger daughter "not yet ... baptized"
at 11 days old. They owned 1 gun, 7 cattle, 6 sheep, and 5
hogs. Catherine gave François 11 children, including six sons,
five of whom created families of their own. The activities of two
of those sons would
write the family's name large in Acadian history.131
Jean
Doiron may have come to the
colony on
L'Oranger. In c1671, either in France or at Port-Royal,
he married Marie-Anne
Canol. They do not appear in the 1678 census. In
1686, de Meulles called him a Douaron and said Jean was age
37 and Marianne 35. They lived at Port-Royal with seven
children, six sons and a daughter. De Meulles did not give the
size of their farm, but he noted that they owned one gun, seven head
of cattle,
and sheep. Marie-Anne gave Jean four more children,
including two more sons. In the early 1690s, Jean remarried to
Marie, daughter of Guillaume
Trahan and Madeleine Brun, and she gave him eight more children, four sons and
two daughters--so he fathered 19 children in all, including 11 sons
who created families of their own!120
François
Levron dit
Nantois, probably of Nantes, may have come to Acadia aboard L'Oranger.
He married Catherine, daughter of
François Savoie and Catherine Lejeune, in c1676. De Meulles counted them at
Port-Royal in 1686. François was age 33, and Catherine was 20.
They lived with four small children, a son and three daughters. The
intendant did not record the size of their farm, but he noted that
they owned 8 cattle and 7 sheep. Catherine gave François 10
children, including three sons who created families of their own.128
Martin
Aucoin was once thought to be a half-brother of the
Aucoin sisters, Michelle, wife of Michel Boudrot, and Jeanne,
wife of François Girouard, but Martin evidently hailed from a different
line of the family in France. He married Marie, daughter of Denis Gaudet
and Martine Gauthier, at Port-Royal in c1673, but they
did not appear in the 1678 census, which counted habitants
only at Port-Royal. Perhaps they were living at Chignecto, on
Rivière St.-Jean, on the Atlantic-side of the peninsula, or in
Canada that year. De Meulles noted that Martin,
fils was age 35, and Marie was 27 in 1686. The
intendant found them at Minas with eight children, four sons and
four daughters, the youngest one, a daughter, only 7 months old.
They owned 1 gun, 15 cattle, 10 sheep, and 6 hogs. Marie had
been age 16 at the time of her marriage, bore her first child
the following year, and gave birth to her last child at age 50!
She gave Martin 19 children, including nine sons who created
families of their own.123
Julien
Lord, also Laure, Lor,
and L'Or, dit LaMontagne married Anne-Charlotte,
called Charlotte, daughter of François Girouard, in c1675.
(Genealogist/historian Bona Arsenault says Julien had been a
soldier in the Carignan-Salières Regiment.) De Meulles counted them at Port-Royal in 1686. Julien was age
33 and Charlotte 26. They were living with four children, the
youngest one, a daughter, age 1. The intendant did not give the
size of their farm or the number of their animals. Charlotte
gave Julien nine children, including four sons who created families
of their own.124
Étienne
Pellerin, born in c1647,
was, according to one authority, the younger
brother of François Pellerin, who came to the colony during
the mid-1660s. However, another authority on the Acadians, followed here,
disagrees. Étienne came to Acadia after the first census and
married Jeanne, daughter of François Savoie and Catherine
Lejeune, at Port-Royal in c1675, and there they remained.
Jeanne gave Étienne 10 children,
including five sons, all born at Port-Royal, four of whom created
families of their own.125
Jean
Serreau de Saint-Aubin, born in Poitou in c1621, emigrated to Canada in c1660 and
set himself up on the Argentenay seigneurie at Île d'Orléans.
He married Marguerite, daughter of René
Boileau or Boisleau, sieur de La Goupillière and Joachine
Ferrand of St.-Jean Dersé, or Dercé, Diocese of Poitiers, probably
at Québec in c1663. Marguerite gave Jean four children, born
on Île d'Orléans. All was not happy in the Saint-Aubin
household, however. A neighbor, Jean Terme of Switzerland,
became obsessed with Marguerite and, despite Jean's warnings,
"visited [her] too familiarly." Threats were exchanged between
the husband and the neighbor. One day in July 1665,
Jean surprised Terme with his wife. In the encounter that
followed, Terme made the mistake of placing his hand on the hilt
of his sword. Jean "dealt him a blow with a stick which proved
fatal." The aggrieved husband was exonerated of the act,
which, in the eyes of his fellow colonists, was clearly
self-defense. He received "letters of remission and pardon" signed by King Louis
XIV in February 1666, which were certified by the Supreme Council at Québec
the following January. Nevertheless, at the request of his seigneuress, Madame d'Ailleboust,
Jean and his wife were expelled from Île d'Orléans. In
September 1676, Jean sold
his property at Baie St.-Paul, on the north shore of the St.
Lawrence below Île d'Orléans, to Msgr. Laval for 1,100 livres and took his family to Acadia. They settled at
Passamaquoddy, on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy. In
June 1684, Jean was granted the seigneurie of Passamaquoddy,
which included Île Ste.-Croix on Rivière Ste.-Croix, site of de Monts's first settlement. The seigneur and his family built their manor
house on Île Archimagan, at the mouth of Rivière Ste.-Croix, near
present-day St. Andrews, New Brunswick. In 1686, de Meulles
found the seigneur with his wife and "his older and younger sons and a few
servants" on Rivière Ste.-Croix. Marguerite gave Jean four
children, including two sons who created families of their own.126
Robert
Henri or Henri of Rouen, France, evidently raised a Huguenot, also came to Acadia from Canada, where he was
counted at Trois-Rivières in 1666 and 1667. He worked there as
a domestic servant for Quentin Moral and was confirmed into the
Roman Catholic faith at Trois-Rivières on 6 June 1666. Robert
moved to
Chignecto in c1676 perhaps with the seigneur of Beaubassin,
Michel Le Neuf de la Vallière. In c1678, Robert married
Marie-Madeleine, daughter of Pierre Godin dit
Châtillon and Jeanne Rousselière. De Meulles counted them at Port-Royal in 1686; one
wonders why they left Chignecto. Robert was age 43, and
Marie-Madeleine was 20. They were living with four small
children, including two sons and a daughter, the youngest child,
only a baby, gender and name unrecorded (probably daughter Geneviève, born in January), who had not yet been baptized. De
Meulles did not record the size of their farm, but he did say they owned 1 gun, 4 cattle, and 10 sheep. Marie-Madeleine gave
Robert 13 children, including six sons who created families of their
own.138
Dominique Gareau, born in France
in c1626, was a sergeant in the King's service when he married Marie,
daughter of Jean Gaudet and first wife and widow of Étienne Hébert,
at Port-Royal in c1676. De Meulles counted them at Port-Royal
in 1686. Dominique, called Garault, was age 60; Marie's
age was unrecorded. They were living with two of Marie's
Hébert sons, ages 20 and 16, and with their only child, daughter
Marie, called Elarie, age 9, on three arpents. They
owned 4 sheep and 3 hogs.127
Étienne
Rivet or Rivest
married Marie-Jeanne or Marie-Anne, daughter of Pierre Comeau
and Rose Bayon,
in c1676. De Meulles found them at Minas in 1686.
Étienne was age 34, and Marie was
24. They lived with three small children, two sons and a
daughter. The intendant did not record the size of
their farm, but he noted that they owned 3 cattle and 1 hog.
Marie gave Étienne five children, including a son who created a
family of his own.129
Jacques
Triel, Triguel,
or Triquel dit Laperrière, born in c1646, came to Acadia by c1676, the year he
married Marie, daughter of François Savoie and Catherine
Lejeune, at Port-Royal. De Muelles
found them there still in 1686. Jacques was age 40, and Marie
was 30. They lived with four children, three sons and a
daughter, the youngest, a son, only age 2. De Meulles said
nothing of their livestock or other holdings. Marie gave
Jacques five children, including a son who created a family of his
own.130
Louis-Noël, called Noël,
de Labauve
or Labove
married Marie, daughter of René Rimbault and Anne-Marie
____, in c1678.
De Meulles counted them at Minas in 1686. Louis-Noël, called
de la Boue, was age 27, and Marie was 22. Living
with them on a single arpent were four young sons, the
youngest one only 2. They owned 1 gun, 1 cow, 3 sheep, and 3
hogs. Marie gave Noël a dozen children, including five sons who created
families of their own.132
François
Lapierre dit
Laroche married Jeanne, daughter of René Rimbault and
Anne-Marie ____, probably
at Port-Royal in c1680. De Meulles found them at Minas
in 1686. François was age 38, and Jeanne 24. They
were living with three children, two sons and a daughter, ages 5, 3,
and 1. De Meulles did not give the size of their holdings, but
he did note that they owned a gun. Jeanne gave Laroche 10
children, including three sons who created families of their own.135
Claude
Guédry dit Gravois
dit La Verdure married first to Kesk8a, a Mi'kmaq, in
c1680, and then to Marguerite, daughter of Claude
Petitpas and Catherine Buguret and widow of Martin Dugas, in c1681.
They lived at Mirliguèche, on the Atlantic side of the peninsula, as
well as at Port-Royal and Chignecto. De Meulles found them at
Mirliguèche in 1686. Claude, called La Verdure, was age 35,
and Marguerite, whose given name was not recorded, was 25.
They were living with one child, whose gender and age the
intendant did not record. Claude's daughter Jeanne by his first wife (their
only child) had been born at Beaubassin in June 1681, so she would
have been age 5 at the time of the census. Only three of Claude's
children by Marguerite--sons Claude,
fils, Jean-Baptiste, and Charles--would have been born by the
time of the census. Of these four children, only the second
son, Jean-Baptiste, seems to have survived childhood, so the child
de Meulles counted at Mirliguèche may have been Jean-Baptiste. Marguerite
gave Claude 11 children, including four sons who created families of
their own.136
Michel, son of Pierre
Larché
of St.-Pierre parish, Montdidier, Picardie, France, and an
unidentified Indian woman, was born at Trois-Rivières, Canada, in
c1664. He came to Acadia as a young servant of the Beaubassin
seigneur, Michel Le Neuf de la Vallière, between 1678 and 1682. De Meulles found him still
serving in the seigneur's
household in 1686. The intendant recorded that Michel was age 22 and single.
He remained at Chignecto and married Anne, daughter of Thomas
Cormier and Marie-Madeleine Girouard, in c1690.
Anne gave Michel a dozen children,
including six sons who created families of their own. Michel's
surname evolved into Haché. His sons used
his dit,
Gallant, which, in some of their lines, evolved into a
surname.133
Emmanuel
dit Tavare, son of
Emmanuel Mirande and Catherine Spire of Ste.-Croix,
Île de Gratiose, in the Azores, was a Portuguese sailor. He
settled first in Canada, at La Canardière, where, in 1670, at age
22, he contracted for marriage with Françoise Duval. The
contract "was subsequently cancelled," however, and Françoise
married someone else. A few years later, Emmanuel, described
as "a Spaniard," was "keeping company" with Catherine Basset, who,
in August 1675, was ordered by city authorities at Québec "'to clear
out of this city and its outskirts within three days, owing to her
bad reputation.'" Evidently Emmanuel thought it best to
"clear out," too. He moved to Chignecto, where he married
Marguerite, daughter of Jacques Bourgeois and Jeanne
Trahan and widow of Jean
Boudrot, at Beaubassin, in November 1679; witnesses to the
marriage were not only two of young widow's brothers, but also the
seigneur of Chignecto, Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière, then
serving as the colony's commander, who may have encouraged the
Portuguese to settle on his seigneurie. De Meulles
found Emmanuel and Marguerite still at Chignecto in 1686, and
recorded that Emmanuel was age 38, and Marguerite was 28. With
them was a 9-year-old daughter from Marguerite's first marriage, and
four children, three sons and a daughter, ages 5 to 2, from their
own marriage. They owned 3 guns and were raising 18 cattle, 8
sheep, and 30 hogs on 25 arpents. Marguerite gave Emmanuel nine children, including a son who created a family of
his own.133a
Jean-Aubin
dit Châtillon, son of
Jean Mignot or Migneau and Louise Cloutier of
Beauport, below Québec, moved from his native Beauport to Chignecto,
perhaps at the behest of the seigneur at Chignecto, Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière, and
married Anne, daughter of Abraham Dugas and Marguerite
Doucet and widow of Charles
Bourgeois, at Beaubassin in April 1679. De Meulles, who
called him a Mignault, found Jean-Aubin and his family still
at Chignecto in 1686 and noted that Jean-Aubin was age 36, and Anne
was 34 With them were two sons and a daughter, ages 14, 12,
and 7, from her first marriage, and three children of their own,
ages 6, 2, and 3 months. They owned 2 guns, 20 cattle, 4
sheep, and 14 hogs, and lived on 8 arpents. Anne gave Jean-Aubin
six children, including three sons who created their own families.133b
François
Léger, age 55, probably
another Canadian, also was counted by de Meulles as a servant in the
seigneur of Beaubassin's household in 1686. There is no evidence, however,
that François created a family of his own. One wonders if he
was the Léger who genealogist Bona Arsenault says
had been a soldier in the Carignan-Salières Regiment, which had
served in Canada. François likely was not kin to the other
Léger who settled in the colony a few years later.134
Jean
Labarre, born in c1636,
probably in France, married Catherine ____, in c1680 and
settled at Chignecto, where de Meulles found them in 1686.
Jean, called simply Labarre, was age 50, and his unnamed wife
was 46. Jean died by c1691, when Catherine remarried probably
at Chignecto. She gave Jean one
child, a daughter, who married into the
Forest family, so the blood of the family, at least, survived in
the colony.136a
Pierre
Godin dit
Châtillon, born at St.-Vorle de Châtillon-sur-Seine,
France, in May 1630, was descended from Belgians who lived at Namur.
Pierre's grandfather, a dyer, settled at Châtillon-sur-Seine in
Burgundy during the late 1500s. Pierre's father Claude was a
master carpenter. Pierre emigrated to New France in his early 20s and
married Jeanne, daughter of Louis Rousselière and Isabelle
Parisé of Moëze,
diocese of Saintes, France, at Montréal in October 1654.
Pierre and Jeanne
were living at Charlesbourg, below Québec, in 1666, and at Verdun,
near Montréal, in 1681, before moving on to Acadia. Pierre
worked as a carpenter at Chignecto probably in the employ of the
seigneur of Beaubassin, Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière.
Pierre and his family, in fact, lived with Irishman Roger Caissie
at Chignecto while Pierre completed his work there. He also
owned property at Port-Royal, where he died before de Meulles's
census was taken.
De Meulles counted Pierre's widow, Jeanne,
age unrecorded, living at Port-Royal with three unmarried children, two grown sons
and a teenage daughter: Gabriel dit Châtillon, age 25;
Pierre dit Châtillon dit Desrochers, age 20; and Anne, the
youngest child, age 13. De Meulles did not give the size of
Jeanne's farm or the number of her animals. The intendant
also counted in
the census two of Pierre and Jeanne's married children.
Son Laurent dit Châtillon
dit
Beauséjour, called Laurens, was age 32, and his wife Anne, daughter of François Guérin
and Anne Blanchard,
also was 32. Laurens had been counted at Port-Royal in
1678-79, along with Anne, so he may have been the first of his
family to come to the colony. Living with Laurens and Anne in
1686 were three young children, two sons and two daughters, the
youngest, a daughter, only five months old. De Meulles did not
give the size of their farm, but he did note that they owned seven cattle and
seven
sheep. Laurent was a miller, which may explain why the
intendant did not detail the size of his holding. Also
counted in the 1686 census were
Pierre and Jeanne's fourth daughter, Marie-Madeleine, age 20, with
husband Robert Henry, age 43, and their four young children.137
Jean
Préjean dit Le
Breton, evidently from Brittany, married Andrée, a daughter of
François Savoie and Catherine Lejeune, in c1683. De Meulles counted them at
Port-Royal in 1686. Jean was age 35, and Andrée was 21.
They were living with a two-year-old daughter on an arpent of land.
They owned 2 guns and 1 hog. Andrée gave Le Breton a dozen
children, including eight sons who created families of their own.219
Mathieu, son of Louis
d'Amours,
conseilleur de Roy at the Chatelet in Paris, and Élisabeth Tessier,
was born at Paris in c1618. His "ancestors belonged to
the French nobility and had possessed seigneuries in Anjou."
Mathieu reached Québec in October 1651 and
the following April married Marie, daughter of Nicolas Marsolet de
Saint-Aignan, the famous explorer and interpreter to the Algonquins,
and Marie La Barbide; Mathieu was 33 years old, and his bride
was 14, at the time of their wedding. Mathieu served as
major of Québec and commanded "'a flying column.'"
Evidently his service caught the eye of the powers that be. Beginning in
September 1663, Mathieu served as one of the seven founding members
of the Conseil sourverain de Québec and served on the Council
until his death in October 1695, age 77. His power and
influence enriched him materially as well as politically. In November 1672,
he obtained a seigneurie at Matane, on the south shore of the
lower St.-Lawrence; he thus became Mathieu d'Amours,
sieur de Matane. He also received grants on Rivière
St.-Jean and on Rivière Métis, as well as fishing rights on the lower St.-Lawrence.
In the summer and fall of 1681, after receiving a fur trading
license for Matane, he was imprisoned for two months in the Château
Saint-Louis by his political enemy, Governor-General Frontenac.
Nonetheless, considering the sieur de Matane's power and influence, and his wife
having come from a prominent Canadian family, it was
expected that their surviving sons, Louis, Mathieu, fils,
René, Charles, and Bernard, also would receive seigneuries in New
France. All five of them, in fact, received land grants on Rivière
St.-Jean, in present-day New Brunswick, during the early 1680s,
after Frontenac's recall to France. Louis received his
seigneurie at Jemseg in 1683 and became Louis d'Amours, sieur
de Chaffours et de Jemseg; he received a further grant along Rivière Richibouctou, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence coast, in September 1684.
In October 1686, at Québec, Louis married Marguerite, daughter of
Simon Guyon and Louise Racine, and would remarry to
Anne, daughter of Acadians Jean Comeau
l'aîné
and Françoise Hébert, at Port-Royal in January
1708. Mathieu,
fils's grant, which he received in September 1684, lay along
an upper stretch of the river between Jemseg and Nashouat (also
called Nashwaak). With the
grant came the title, sieur de Freneuse. In October 1686, at
Québec, the sieur de Freneuse married Louise, daughter of Simon
Guyon and Louise Racine and widow of Charles Thibault, a sister of Mathieu,
fils's older brother Louis's first wife Marguerite. De Meulles counted the D'Amours brothers on Rivière St.-Jean in
1686. Louis, sieur de Chauffours, was age 32, but wife
Marguerite's age was unrecorded. The intendant found them with
no children. Mathieu, fils, sieur de Freneuse, was age
28, but wife Louise's age was not recorded. Nor did de Meulles
record them with any children. Also in the census, on Rivière
St.-Jean, was Louis and Mathieu, fils's younger brother,
René, sieur de Clignancour, still a bachelor, who, like his older
brothers, had received a grant along Rivière St.-Jean in September
1684. De Meulles did
not give the young seigneur's age, but he would have been 26.
René would marry Charlotte-Françoise, daughter of Charles Le
Gardeur and Geneviève Juchereau, at Québec in 1689 but
return to his seigneurie on Rivière St.-Jean. Two
younger sons of the sieur de Matane who also would be
associated with greater Acadia--Charles de Louvières and
Bernard de Plaine--were not counted on Rivière St.-Jean in
1686; bachelors like older brother René, they likely were
still in Canada.221
Pierre
Chênet, Chesnet, Chenais,
or Chesnay, a lawyer born in Paris in c1646, came to Acadia during the early 1680s.
In Canada, Pierre had fathered an illegitimate daughter, Marie-Madeleine, born
at Québec in July 1682. Pierre, however, did not marry his
daughter's mother: Marguerite, daughter of Jacques Boissel and
Marie Héripel. Pierre evidently thought it prudent to relocate to
another part of New France; his own mother,
in fact, "made it known that she would give him ten thousand écus,
if he found he could be honestly married in Acadia." Pierre
fulfilled his mother's wishes, eventually. In May 1683, he became a
seigneur at Mégais, today's Machias, on the Maine coast, becoming the
Sieur Dubreuil, but he also spent time in Port-Royal,
where he served as a schoolmaster under Abbé Louis Petit, the vicar general of Acadia. In
October 1685, the abbé wrote of Pierre to the Bishop of Québec:
"... 'this man is the only one with whom I can discuss God with an
open heart, there having been in this neighbourhood no spiritual
help in the nine years I have been without a companion, and without
counsel, in the midst of a thousand difficulties.'" In 1686, de Meulles, calling him Dubreiul, counted
him on his seigneurie at Mégais with only "a few servants."
Finally, in c1691, Pierre would take a bride: Louise dite
Jeanne, daughter of Pierre Doucet and Henriette Pelletret,
who he married probably at Port-Royal.222
Jean or Joannis
Bastarache
or Basterretche dit Le Basque of southwestern France married Huguette
dite Agathe, daughter of Pierre Vincent and Anne
Gaudet,
at Port-Royal in c1684. De Meulles counted them at
Port-Royal in 1686. Jean, called Jean de Bastarache,
was age 25, and Huguette was 22. They lived with a daughter
who was only 7 months old. De Meulles did not give the size of
their farm or the number of their animals. Huguette gave Jean
five children, including three sons who created families of
their own.223
Pierre
Bézier dit
Joan dit La Rivière married Madeleine, daughter of Vincent
Brun and Renée Breau and widow of Guillaume Trahan, in c1684. De
Meulles counted them at Port-Royal in 1686. Pierre, called
Pierre
Joan, was age 60, and Madeleine was 47. They lived with
six of her unmarried Trahan
children, ages 19 to 9, and their own child, a daughter,
Susanne, age 2 months, on 8 arpents of land. They owned 10
cattle, 10 sheep, and 2 guns.224
Claude
Bertrand, no kin to the
childless Clément, married Catherine, daughter of Jean Pitre
and Marie Pesseley,
in c1685. De Meulles counted them at Port-Royal in 1686.
Claude, called a Bertran, was age 35, and Catherine was 18.
De Meulles noted that "they live at Cap de Sable." He counted
no children with them at Port-Royal. Oldest child Claude,
fils was born the year of the census, so they probably were
childless when de Meulles counted them. Catherine gave Claude
10 children, including four sons who created families of their own,
but oldest son Claude, fils was not one of them.225
François
Michel dit La
Ruine, born probably in France in c1651, married Madeleine
Germon
in c1686, on the eve of de Meulles's census. He lived with
her briefly on Rivière-Ste.-Croix, but the intendant counted them at La
Hève in 1686. François was 35 years old, and Madeleine was 40
at the time. They had no children. However, "a servant," Charles
Gourdeau, age 40, lived with them. Madeleine gave La
Ruine no children; his descendants came from his second wife,
Marguerite, daughter of Jean Meunier and Marguerite
Housseau, who he would marry in c1695 and who would give him a
dozen children, including two sons who created families of their own. One wonders if François dit La Ruine
was kin to Sr. Jacques Michel dit Saint-Michel,
born probably in France in c1658, who came to the colony by c1689.226
Also in the colony during the
1680s were men who did not appear in de Meulles's census but who
created family lines of their own in the colony. One of them, in fact, was a high colonial
official who came to Acadia after de Meulles and married an
Acadian girl:
In September 1678,
René
Lambert,
probably not kin to Radegonde Lambert, wife of Jean
Blanchard, was
indentured to Marie-Françoise Chartier de Lotbinière,
the wealthy widow of former commander and governor of Acadia, Pierre de Joybert de
Soulanges and Marson, who held a seigneurie on Rivière
St.-Jean. In July 1680, René stood as godfather for several
Maliseet children who
were baptized at Jemseg on the river. Soon after, he married to a woman whose name has been lost to history.
They do not appear in the 1686 census, so René may have still been
living on
Rivière St.-Jean when de Meulles came to the colony. René's wife gave him two sons who created
families of their own.227
Jean
Le Roy or Roy dit
La Liberté of St.-Malo, France, perhaps a former soldier, now
working as a fisherman, came to the colony in the early 1680s and married Marie-Christine, called
Christine,
Aubois, also called Hautbois and Dubois, an
Indian, perhaps a Métisse, in c1686, evidently after the census
was taken. They settled at Cap-Sable, likely near her kin, but
moved to Port-Royal in the 1690s. Christine
gave La Liberté nine children, including four sons who created families of
their own.231
François
Moyse dit Latreille, born at Arcachon, today's Arcasson, near
Bordeaux, France, in c1655, stood as godfather
to a Maliseet girl, perhaps on Rivière St.-Jean, in February 1681.
He married Madeleine, daughter of Pierre Vincent and Anne
Gaudet, in c1685. They were
not counted in the census of 1686 perhaps because they had settled
on Rivière St.-Jean or at Passamaquoddy, and de Meulles noted only the seigneurs there. Madeleine gave François six children,
including three sons who created families of their own.228
Louis
Saulnier or
Sonnier, a
sailor, married Louise Bastineau
dit
Peltier in c1684, but they, too, were not counted in de
Meulles's census. Louise gave Louis 14 children, all born at
Minas. Five of them were sons who created families of their
own.229
Pierre
dit
Baptiste, son of Élie Maissonat, born at Bergerac, Guyenne,
France, in c1663, came to Acadia during the 1680s as a privateer and
served with distinction in King William's War during the 1690s.
He married Judith Soubiran, place unrecorded (his biographer
says she lived at Port-Royal), in c1686. She gave him five
children, including thee sons, but only his two daughters created
families of their own. Historians aver that Pierre dit Baptiste was "reputed to have
many" wives other than the three he married. His second and
third wives were daughters of prominent Acadians. He "remarried"
to
Madeleine, daughter of François Bourg and Marguerite
Boudrot, probably at Port-Royal
in 1693. Two years later, she gave him a daughter,
Marie-Madeleine dit Baptiste, who, despite the circumstances
of her birth (her parents' marriage was annulled), became a shaker
and mover in the colony. Pierre dit Baptiste's third wife was Marguerite, daughter
of Chignecto pioneer Jacques Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan
and widow of Jean
Boudrot and Emmanuel Mirande dit Tavare; Baptiste
married her at Port-Royal in January 1707. Marguerite gave the war
hero
another daughter, who, like her older half-sisters, created a family
of her own.230
François
Savary, a
mason and stone cutter, was indentured to Antoine Héron "for the
company of Acadia" in 1686. In c1689, free from his contract,
he married Geneviève Forest probably at Port-Royal. She
gave him a son, André, who created a family of his own.232
Nicolas
Babineau or
Babinot dit Deslauriers came
to Acadia probably as a soldier. He also worked as a fur
trader and a fisherman before marrying Marie-Marguerite, daughter of Laurent
Granger
and Marie Landry,
in c1687 probably at Port-Royal, where he turned to farming.
Marie-Marguerite gave Nicolas
six children, including four sons who created families of their own.
Jean
Babineau, who,
according to Acadian genealogist Placide Gaudet, was Nicolas dit
Deslaurier's younger brother, married Marguerite, daughter of Michel
Boudrot and Michelle Aucoin, in c1693. She gave Jean two daughters but no
sons.233
Denis
Petitot dit Saint-Seine or Sincennes, master surgeon, married Marie,
daughter of Étienne Robichaud and Françoise Boudrot, at Port-Royal in c1687.
She gave him four children, including a son who created a family of
his own.233a
Louis
Allain, a blacksmith, who may have been a recent arrival in the
colony, received in July 1687 permission from the seigneur of
Port-Royal to build a sawmill on Petit Rivière, below Port-Royal.
Louis also became a successful merchant. He married Marguerite, daughter of Antoine Bourg
and Antoinette Landry,
in c1690. She gave Louis two children, including a son who
created a family of his own and a daughter who married the
wealthiest man in the colony.234
Guillaume
Le Juge married Marie,
daughter of ____ Mercier and Françoise Gaudet
and widow of Antoine Babin, at Port-Royal in c1688.
Marie gave Guillaume two children, both daughters. Their older
daughter married, so the family's blood, at
least, survived in the colony.236
André
Simon dit Jacques Boucher, born in c1663, was a butcher, hence his dit,
and was variously called Jacques Le Boucher and Jacques Boucher
in Port-Royal censuses. He married Marie
dit Pelletret, daughter of Barnabé Martin and Jeanne
Pelletret, at Port-Royal in
c1688. Marie gave André nine children, four sons and five
daughters. Three of André's
sons created families of their own, and each used the dit
Boucher.288
René
Bernard, born in France in c1663 and probably not kin
to the other Bernards in the colony, came to Acadia during
the late 1680s, perhaps at the behest of the seigneur of Chignecto. René married Madeleine, daughter of Pierre
Doucet and Henriette Pelletret, in c1689, in
Port-Royal or Beaubassin. Madeleine gave René eight children, all born at
Chignecto, including three sons who created families of their own.237
Mathieu
de Goutin, born in
France in c1663 to a family of the lesser nobility, ingratiated
himself to an influential marquis. Mathieu came to Port-Royal in 1688
aboard the frigate Friponne to serve as the King's lieutenant général civil et criminel,
or general representative for justice, replacing the aging Michel
Boudrot in August of that year. De Goutin also served as écrivain,
or colonial secretary; as conseiller, or counselor; and as
trésorier, or paymaster, at Port-Royal. Despite the
disapproval of Acadian Governor Louis-Alexandre des Friches de Meneval, who considered de Goutin
a political enemy, Sr. Mathieu married
an Acadian girl, Jeanne, 17-year-old daughter of Pierre
Thibodeau and Jeanne Thériot, at Port-Royal in c1689.
She gave him
13 children, including six sons, only two of whom created families
of their own. One of them, Joseph de Ville, became the first
Acadian to settle in French Louisiana.235
Sr. Jacques Michel dit
Saint-Michel, born probably in France in c1658, married Catherine, daughter of Étienne
Comeau and Marie-Anne Lefebvre, at Port-Royal in c1689. Catherine gave Sr.
Jacques 13 children, including four sons who created families of his
own. One wonders what Jacques dit Saint-Michel had done
to earn his honorific, Sr., or sieur. Was he kin to François dit
La Ruine Michel of La Hève, born probably in France in c1651,
who had come to the colony in c1686?238
Pierre
Cellier, also called
Le Solier, dit Normand married Marie-Josèphe, also
called Aimée, Lejeune in c1689. They settled at Minas.
Marie-Josèphe gave Pierre 10 children, including two sons who
created families of their own.239
André
Célestin dit Bellemère, a blacksmith, married Perrine
Basile in France in c1685. They came to Acadia in
the late 1680s and settled at the new community of Minas. Pérrine gave
André seven children, including two sons who created their own
families.240
It was
during the unhappy Meneval's time as governor that
the two-decades-long
interregnum of "peace"
after 1670
finally ended. For nearly a quarter of a century, until
1713, the peace-loving Acadians again would live in a world
gone mad all around them. The colony nevertheless survived,
even thrived, during this unhappy time despite the neglect of its
king and his governors.
The Acadians and Their
Sun King
The end of the long peace had much to do with the man to whom the
Acadians tried to be loyal subjects. Following the death of his
co-regent, Cardinal Mazarin, in March 1661, Louis XIV, who would
fashion himself the Sun King, dramatically streamlined the
administrative institutions of his kingdom by creating a High
Council of only three members with whom he met weekly. Through
the application of will and calculated ruthlessness, Louis created
for France a divine-right monarchy the likes of which Europe had not
seen since the time of the Roman emperors. During his long
reign, he never once called into session the ancient national
legislature of France, the Estates-General. Nor did he feel constrained to answer to his
people. His rule, he and his ministers believed, was absolute.
His famous words, if they were ever uttered, L'état, c'est moi
("I am the state"), would not have been an idle boast of the Sun
King. He created his magnificent palace at Versailles not only
to control his unruly nobles and provide a center for the arts, but
also to erect a personal monument of glory and splendor worthy of an
absolute monarch. The heady atmosphere of Versailles, however,
did not blind the king to the realities of the French character.
He did his best to respect the ancient laws and customs of his
kingdom and to consult regularly with his ministers, especially with
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his minister of finance, who became as close
to a chief minister as the Sun King allowed.142
One of the goals of Louis's reign was to establish borders for
France that he could defend against attack from his enemies.
The English with their superb navy were not the worst of these
enemies. He was especially vexed by the powerful Habsburg
kingdoms of Spain and Austria, whose far-flung possessions--much of
the Low Countries (today's Belgium, Luxembourg, and the
Netherlands), and most of Germany and Italy--hemmed France in on
three sides. The dangerous northern frontier in what was then
called the Spanish Netherlands, which stood so close to Paris and
Versailles, worried Louis most, and it was there that most of his
wars were fought. Coupled with his determination to secure
defensible borders for France was Louis's ambition to place on the
throne of Spain one of his Bourbon heirs. Louis had married
Marie-Thérèse, the eldest daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, in
1660. "The marriage was arranged via a treaty that explicitly
excluded Marie's heirs from inheriting the Spanish crown once Philip
had paid her dowry. However, the full dowry was never paid.
Consequently, Louis refused to relinquish his family's claim to the
Spanish inheritance...."143
The result was almost constant warfare
during the last three decades of Louis's long reign of 72 years.
During the War of the Devolution
(1667-68) that followed the death of Philip IV of Spain, Louis
invaded the Spanish Netherlands to secure the vulnerable northern
border and to assert his family's claim to the Spanish throne.
The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the fighting soon after it
began. Louis returned some of the fortified towns he had
captured in Belgium and secured rights to the Spanish throne if
Philip's Hapsburg successor, Charles II, should die without an heir.
This sudden French aggression along their southern frontier alarmed
the Dutch, who had fought long against Spanish rule to secure their
independence and refused to be threatened by the French as well.
War erupted between Holland and France in 1672 and lasted for six
long years. "In a sweeping campaign, Louis almost succeeded in
conquering Holland. To protect themselves, the Dutch opened
their dykes, flooded the countryside, and turned Amsterdam into a
virtual island." During the struggle, in August 1673, the
Dutch were joined by Spain, Austria, and Lorraine, but not England.
Louis had signed a treaty with London in June 1670 "to keep the
English navy neutral." It was this agreement with the English
that had restored French control of Acadia in 1670. But Acadia and
its royal governor, Jacques de Chambly, did not escape the war
with the Dutch unscathed.144
La Guerre de Hollande, as the
French called it, ended with the
Peace of Nijmegen in 1678. "Louis had achieved a defensible
perimeter around the core of his inheritance," but he also had
alienated his northern neighbors, those Protestant stalwarts, the
Dutch. And he was not done with Spain. In October 1683,
Louis invaded the Spanish Netherlands ... again ... and France was
at war with Spain until the following August.145
But it was religion that led to the
most important decision of Louis's long reign, one that would plunge
France deeper into conflict with her Protestant neighbors, with far
reaching consequences for her colonial possessions. Cardinal
Mazarin had taught Louis the intricacies of statecraft, but his
mother, Anne of Austria, a devout Catholic like all of her Habsburg
kin, had given her son his spiritual education. "Throughout
his life Louis remained devoutly religious and attempted to
eliminate Protestantism in France." His grandfather, Henri IV,
had been a Huguenot before he declared that Paris was well worth a
mass. Henri had granted the Protestants freedom of worship and
protection from persecution with his Edict of Nantes in April 1598.
Louis's father had honored his own father's edict, and, despite
continued pressures from the Catholic majority to conform to Roman
orthodoxy, the Huguenots thrived in the fortified cities that Henry
had granted to them for their protection. "Within these cities
dwelled highly skilled Huguenot craftsmen, who were an integral part
of Colbert's economic program," a program that kept France happy and
prosperous throughout much of the first half of Louis's reign.146
The Sun King was determined to rule
absolutely in the spiritual as well as the temporal realm. He
"had grown increasingly impatient with Huguenot beliefs and had
worked to limit both the participation of Huguenots in public life
and their observance of their own religious practices. In 1681--in
the so-called dragonnades--Louis authorized the billeting of troops in the houses of Protestants,
with the understanding that life would be made as difficult as
possible for the householders unless, and until, they converted to
Catholicism. Other brutal measures followed...." In
1685, two years after Colbert's death, while the Acadians thrived in
the Port-Royal valley, at Chignecto, and in the infant communities
of the Minas Basin, their King, "by an extravagant act of piety and sovereignty,"
issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the Edict of Nantes
and plunged their mother
country into social and economic turmoil. Protestant churches
were destroyed, their schools were closed, and forced conversion to
Catholicism became the law of the land. Religious toleration
in France was now a thing of the past. Between 1685 and 1710, hundreds
of thousands of Huguenots fled France rather than convert to
the Roman Catholic faith. Most of them went to Holland and
Britain, "where they were greeted as martyrs. The loss of many
highly productive citizens depressed the French economy." By
this time, "France was recognized as the dominant continental power,
and its strength threatened other European nations. The
Catholic powers, especially Austria, were fearful of Louis's designs
upon Spain's possessions. Meanwhile, the Protestant states,
especially England and Holland, worried about the revival of
religious warfare." The English were so worried about French
designs on their North American colonies that they
negotiated with the Sun King a treaty signed at Whitehall on 16
November 1686 that guaranteed
"a True and Firm Peace and Neutrality" between the
colonies in North American if war should break out in Europe.
A major concession of the treaty was a prohibition against drying
fish on Acadian soil by Massachusetts fishermen, "a drastic measure,
if enforced, would significantly affect the entire Massachusetts
economy." However serious the opposing diplomats may have been
when they cobbled together such a treaty, it was, from the beginning, utterly
unenforceable. Only a spark was needed to ignite the powder
keg of frustrations that had long built up between France and her
enemies. And one could be certain that the resulting explosion
would rock America as well as Europe.147
"The Glorious Revolution" and King
William's War
The spark came with Louis's attack
across the Rhine in September 1688 to intervene in German politics
and England's so-called Glorious Revolution of the same year.
Three years before, in 1685, the year Louis XIV had revoked the
Edict of Nantes, King Charles II of England, who had been restored
to the throne 25 years earlier, died without a legitimate child to
succeed him. His younger brother, James, Duke of York, became
King James II of England and James VII of Scotland. James had grown
up a Protestant, married a Protestant wife, Anne Hyde, daughter
of an English earl, and raised his two daughters, Mary and Anne, as
Protestants. He converted to Catholicism, however, in 1668,
when he was 35 years old and still married to Anne. She died
in 1671, and two years later James remarried to Maria of Modena, a
devout Roman Catholic from Italy. In 1677, however, he
consented to the marriage of 15-year-old Mary to her diminutive,
asthmatic, but Protestant first cousin, William, Prince of
Orange, stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht, captain general, and admiral of the United
Provinces of the Netherlands--the implacable enemy of Louis XIV.
When Parliament declared Mary and William next in line to the throne
behind James, the English Protestant majority breathed a sigh of
relief that the Duke of York would not be able to create a Catholic
dynasty for England. James's succession to the throne in 1685
was peaceful enough, but his attempts to rule autocratically
like his father, coupled with his policy to place Catholics in
influential positions, fueled his political opposition and ruined what little
popularity he had with the people. The birth and baptism of a
son in 1688, insuring that his heir would be Catholic,
precipitated the so-called Glorious Revolution against the unpopular
king. Staunch
Protestant nobles, with the consent of Parliament, invited William
of Orange and an army of 15,000 Dutchmen to land in northern
England, march to London, and seize the throne from the hapless
James, who could muster virtually no support. James fled, was
captured, and allowed to escape to France. In 1689, with the
consent of Parliament, William and
Mary ruled jointly as William III and Mary II. Louis XIV, ever the
staunch Catholic, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the
Protestant accession and clung to the fiction that James, not William, was the
legitimate king of England, Scotland, and Wales.
It was William who, in 1672, had opened the dykes
in Holland to save Amsterdam from the invading French.
After the conclusion of the six-year struggle with the Sun King,
William had strived to build a European coalition against Louis to
block further French aggression on the continent. This effort
came to fruition in 1689, the year William succeeded to the English
throne. By then he had created a "Grand Alliance" with Austria, Holland,
Spain, and Savoy to halt the French offensive in western Germany.
In May, his alliance fully formed, William declared war against
France. For nine years war raged between William's alliance and
the forces of Louis XIV. But the conflict was not confined to
Europe and the high seas. Despite the treaty of November1686, it erupted also in
North America ... and war came to Acadia yet again.148
.
The English made the first aggressive
moves that brought war to greater Acadia. Soon after ascending
to the throne of England, James II had revealed his autocratic tendencies by
abolishing self-government in the New English colonies. The
year before his accession, in 1684, the English crown had suspected
the charter of Massachusetts Bay colony. James
appointed a fellow champion of autocracy, Sir Edmund Andros, as governor of a new
colonial entity that would be ruled by decree, not assembly--the
Dominion of New England. In 1686, while Perrot was serving as
governor of Acadia, this new dominion subsumed the
colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, New Haven,
Connecticut, and New Hampshire--that is, New England--and eventually
New York, which Andros had once governed, and East and West Jersey. The people of these
colonies were very unhappy, not only with the loss of self-rule, but
also with the despotic character of their new governor. Political
chaos ensued, and Andros became even more tyrannical in his
treatment of the colonists. He also alienated the Indians of
the region and looked for any excuse to antagonize the French,
violating the spirit of the treaty signed at Whitehall, which, among
other things, guaranteed neutrality for
the colonies in America if war should break out in Europe.149
His New York minions acted first.
During the summer of 1686, when Perrot was still serving at Port-Royal,
New Yorkers seized a cache of supplies that Boston merchant John
Nelson, who traded frequently with the Acadians, was delivering to
the French trading post at Pentagouët. During the
governorships of Grandfontaine
and de Chambly (1670-78), this site on the lower Penobscot had been the capital of French
Acadia. Though subsequent governors moved the capital to Beaubassin and then back to Port-Royal, the French still clung to
Pentagouët. Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de
Saint-Castin was still seigneur there, and his hold on the
Indians in the area was sealed by marriage to two daughters of a
Penobscot sagamore. Nelson's cache of supplies seized
by the marauding New Yorkers was intended for
Saint-Castin. Governor Perrot cared little for Saint-Castin,
but he was a champion of the ubiquitous John Nelson, principal heir
of his uncle, Sir Thomas Temple. In 1682, during La Vallière's tenure as governor, Nelson had
been instrumental in negotiating a dispute between Boston and Québec
over fishing rights in Acadia. This action gained for the
young Englishman "permission, effective to 1684, to sell fishing and
trading permits for the Acadian coast." Perrot
promptly protested the seizure of Nelson's goods to New York governor Thomas Dongan, reminding him
that the Treaty of Breda of 1667 had given Pentagouët to
France. Dongan quickly responded to the Perrot's complaint,
remarking sarcastically that "he was 'not aware that anything has
been done to the French on their territories.'" Parroting his
superior Andros, Dongan insisted that the Penobscot basin lay in
Dominion territory. The following summer, in June 1687, "some
eighty men," probably New Yorkers, returned to Pentagouët and
informed Saint-Castin that the land there, as well as the
coast "as far as the St. Croix River"--all of
Maine!--belonged to England. Here was a clear attempt to
intimidate the captaine de sauvages and to assert English
rights over French territory.149a
Meanwhile, Andros and other New English
authorities complained of French encroachment on their fishing
rights along the coast of Nova Scotia. On 22 July 1687, the frigate La Friponne,
recently arrived from France with orders to patrol the Acadian
coast, accosted two fishing ketches out of Salem, Massachusetts,
near the fishery headquarters at Chédabouctou. The
ketch Margaret, captained by her owner, Stephen Sewall,
managed to get away, but the master and crew of the other vessel
were held as prisoners at Port-Royal. Sewall promptly informed
Andros of the incident, and on August 7 the governor laid the matter
before the magistrates at Boston. The council promptly sent
English army Captain Francis Nicholson to Port-Royal to protest the
action, as well as to evaluate the strength of its fortifications.
Based on what he saw in the way of church attendance at Port-Royal,
he estimated about 80 families living in the area, with no more than
15 houses in Port-Royal itself. The old fort, an earthen
structure, had contained "'only three old Guns'" until recently,
when "'15 very fine and large ones'" had arrived from France.
The fort's garrison consisted of only 40 or so troupes de la
marine, "whereof tenn were old ones," most of the others having
recently come "in the Mann of Warr, withe the Lieut. a Comisary and
two other Gentlemen," as well as the 15 cannon. Perrot's successor, Meneval,
was not among the new arrivals "in the Mann of Warr," Le Bretonne, so Nicholson soon returned to Boston. He brought
with him valuable intelligence on the state of Port-Royal,
but not the Salem fishermen and their ketch, nor compensation for their seizure,
nor
"assurances against such seizures in the future."149b
During the spring of 1688, while James II
still occupied the English throne and Meneval served as
Acadian governor, Andros, using the boundary dispute as an excuse to
commence hostilities with the French and their Indian allies, descended on Pentagouët. When
he and his men arrived at the French outpost, Saint-Castin was still in Canada with a detachment
of Abenaki assisting Governor-General Denonville against
the Iroquois in upper New York. After seeing the ramshackle
condition of Saint-Castin's fort, Andros changed his mind
about holding the place. Instead, he plundered Saint-Castin's house
and storerooms and attempted to
lure the Frenchman's father-in-law, Penobscot sagamore Madokawando,
into an alliance with the English, without success. This insult to the
most influential Frenchman in the region, accompanied by more depredations
against the Indians of coastal Maine and Andros's establishment of new garrisons there, stirred the Abenaki
into action. War between them began in earnest, about the
time a new conflict was erupting in Europe.150
The first English town to suffer at the
hands of the Abenaki was Dover, formerly Cocheco, New Hampshire, on
the border with Maine. In late June 1689, warriors from two
bands sneaked up on the village during the night and massacred many
of the settlers. After subduing the men, the Indians burned
the garrison-houses and forced many of the women and children into
captivity, where they were kept or sold as slaves, as the New
English had done to their people years earlier.151
Saint-Castin, meanwhile, planned
his revenge against Andros and the New English. In early
August 1689, he fell on Pemaquid, now Woolwich, Maine, near the mouth of the Kennebec River,
the farthest English outpost along the Maine coast. With him,
with their war paint on,
were two bands of Abenaki, including Penobscot led by his
father-in-law, Kennebec led by their sagamore Moxus, and
Maliseet from distant Rivière St.-Jean. Also along was Father
Louis-Pierre Thury, the Seminarian who the New Englanders called
"the Fighting Priest." Saint-Castin and the
Indians
completely surprised the settlers, killing many of them in the open
fields, and the next day forced the surrender of the survivors who,
fleet of foot, had managed to make it into their stockade, Fort
Charles. Again, the victorious Indians took women and children
into captivity and treated them as slaves. The English
complained of such barbarity, though they, too, in previous wars with
the Indians had acted just as barbarously. That same August,
in fact, their allies, the fierce Iroquois, 1,500 strong, descended
on the Canadian town of Lachine, near Montréal, and butchered or
captured nearly everyone in the place, prompting the French
authorities to abandon some of their fortifications on the upper St.
Lawrence and the Great Lakes.152
In the weeks that followed, the Maine
frontier erupted in almost continuous warfare. So far, the
fight there had been between the Indian allies of the French--the
Abenaki bands of Maine--and the hapless New Englanders, first under
the despised Andros, then, after his ouster in April 1689 when the New Englanders
learned of the Glorious Revolution, under the new governors of the
restored, independent colonies. In the summer of 1689,
however, word arrived in Boston that, in the spring, war had
officially been declared between England and France.
Word of the war came to Québec in July. In October, the
newly-arrived governor-general of New France, 69-year-old Louis de Buade, comte de Palluau et de Frontenac,
who had been ousted from the position seven years earlier, stood poised to jump
into the fight against the English colonists alongside his Indian allies.153
Frontenac, an old soldier of formidable
talents, chose late winter as the moment in which to surprise the
New English from his base on the St. Lawrence. From
Montréal, using the relatively swift route via the Richelieu River,
Lake Champlain, and Lac-du-St.-Sacrament, today's Lake George, 300 Canadian militia,
coureurs de bois, and "Christianized" Iroquois, led by
Canadian officers, hit Schenectady, then called Corlaer, New York, on
a frigid night in February 1690. The result can be described
as nothing less than a massacre. The New Yorkers suffered so
keenly from the raid that it essentially took them out of the war,
leaving New England to fight it out alone. Another, smaller
column of Frontenac's fighters, this one from Trois-Rivières, struck
Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, near the burned-out village of Dover,
in late March and destroyed that settlement, too. The third of
Frontenac's expeditions, including a column from Québec under René
Robinau de Portneuf and Abenaki from Pentagouët under Madokawando
and Saint-Castin, hit in late May the Maine
village of
Casco, at present-day Portland, defended by ramshackle Fort Loyal. Despite the neglected
condition of the palisade fort, the survivors of the initial ambush
defended Fort Loyal gallantly for three days before agreeing to
surrender. The English
commander asked for terms, but the French refused to hold back their
Indian allies. More Maine settlers, men, women, and children,
became Indian slaves, and for the next several months, the Abenaki
pillaged as many Maine and New Hampshire settlements as they could
get at.154
The overland raids on Schenectady,
Salmon Falls, and Casco in 1690 were the only fruits of a grand
campaign to defeat New York and New England. An even grander
scheme had been cobbled together by Louis-Hector de Callière, the
governor of Montréal, and Louis XIV himself. With war clouds
gathering over North America, Denonville had sent Callière, his
second in command, to coax the Court into sending reinforcements and
more funds to Canada. At Versailles, the governor could see
that the war in Europe would leave precious few resources for the
war in America. Seeing an opportunity, Callière proposed to
the King the use of two warships to cooperate with an overland
campaign of a thousand troupes de la marine and 600 militia
whose mission would be the capture of Albany and New York City.
The warships would wait at the mouth of New York harbor to assist in
the conquest of the province. The King, with modifications,
approved the plan, but a long delay in fitting out the two vessels
did not bode well for this phase of the operation. Callière,
with Frontenac in tow, finally set sail from La Rochelle. The
King's instructions to his New French officials, as transcribed by New Englishman Francis Parkman, contained these chilling
details: "If any Catholics were found in New York, they might
be left undisturbed, provided that they took an oath of allegiance
to the king. Officers, and other persons who had the means of
paying ransoms, were to be thrown into prison. All lands in
the colony, except those of Catholics swearing allegiance, were to
be taken from their owners, and granted under a feudal tenure to the
French officers and soldiers. All property, public and
private, was to be seized, a portion of it given to the grantees of
the land, and the rest sold on account of the king. Mechanics
and other workmen might, at the discretion of the commanding
officer, be kept as prisoners to work at fortifications and do other
labor. The rest of the English and Dutch inhabitants, men,
women, and children, were to be carried out of the colony and
dispersed in New England, Pennsylvania, or other places, in such a
manner that they could not combine in any attempt to recover their
property and their country. And, that the conquest might be
perfectly secure, the nearest settlements of New England were to be
destroyed, and those more remote laid under contribution."
After a crossing of 52 days, the new governor-general and his second
in command reached Chédabouctou, site of the French fishery in
Acadia, on 12 September 1689. The inordinately long crossing,
and further delays in transporting Frontenac and Callière to Québec,
ruined the seaborne phase of the operation. Albany, New York
City, and the rest of the colony, with the exception of Schenectady,
remained unmolested.154a
After over a year of fighting on the
northern frontiers, and despite the failure of the French grand offensive, King
William's War was proving to be a disaster for the English and their
northern colonies. It
was time to devise a new strategy that would take the war
to the enemy. "Up to this time," notes an historian
of the conflict, "the people of New England seem to have had no
thought of invading Canada themselves, or felt much fear of being
invaded from there. Thus far the war, on their part, had been
a purely defensive one. But it was now clear to everyone that
the real struggle was not so much between the English and Indians,
as between the English and French, who kept the Indians constantly
supplied with the means of carrying on hostilities, while enjoying
entire immunity from its ravages themselves. The relation was
as close as that between the hand and the weapon. Two
flourishing provinces lay at the mercy of hostile incursions, which
no power could foresee or prevent. The entire depopulation of
both was imminent. All this continuous harrying of
defenceless[sic] villages, with its ever-recurring and
revolting story of captivity and massacre, was fast turning the
border back into a wilderness, which, indeed, was what the enraged
savages aimed at. Every attempt to reach and destroy these
vigilant foemen in their own fastness proved worse than futile.
New England was losing ten lives for one; and in property more than
fifty to one."155
.
Accordingly, in early May 1690,
delegates from New York and three of the New England colonies met at
New York City to plan an offensive against New France.
New York pledged 400 men, and Massachusetts, Plymouth, and
Connecticut a total of 350 militiamen for an attack on Montréal via
Albany and Lake Champlain. The Iroquois later promised to join
the expedition with nearly all their warriors. It would be
Frontenac's turn to suffer the trauma of invasion.155a
But the New Englanders did not invade
Canada first. They chose, instead, a closer, much easier target
which, in truth, contained Frenchmen who had done them no harm.
The New Englanders, however, did not see it that way. "For
years Acadia and its harbors had been a safe retreat for privateers
and corsairs, who robbed and ill-used the New England fishermen
until those seas were become no longer safe," the good Puritans
believed. "Bad as it had been, the evil was now made tenfold
worse by a state of war. For depredations of this sort,
Acadia, or Nova Scotia, is remarkably well placed, and as New
England subsisted mostly by her fisheries the alternatives were
either to see them destroyed or to put them beyond the reach of
future spoliation." This was the same Acadia to which New
England trading ships had sailed for years to ply their wares among
the peaceful farmers of Chignecto and Minas. Miraculously,
those vessels had entered and exited the Bay of Fundy without being
molested ... but truth is an enemy of rationalization.156
On April 23, before the conference in
New York and the attack on Casco, but after the French and Indian
assault on Salmon Falls, an expedition of seven ships bearing 78
cannon and 736 men, 446 of them New-English militia, set sail from Nantasket, Massachusetts, for Port-Royal. In command of this expedition was a remarkable fellow,
38-year-old Sir William Phips, born "of humble parents" on the
Kennebec in Maine. Phips had once been a humble ship's
carpenter but, through luck and pluck, had risen to the rank of a
gentleman in his native New England. His most notable exploit,
besides marrying a rich widow, had been the recovery of a
fantastic treasure from the hull of a sunken Spanish ship off the
coast of Santo Domingo, an effort which earned him his title. After
"calling at Pentagouët and other posts," Phips's expedition passed
through the Gut and arrived in the lower basin on May 9. The
Acadian governor, Louis-Alexandre des Friches de Meneval, "alerted
the same evening by the sentries, had a gun fired to warn the
settlers, but only three hastened to the fort." Meneval's
biographer asserts that "42 young men of Port-Royal were absent,"
implying that many of the settlers along Rivière-au-Dauphin fled their
homes when they heard the signal cannon. The following day,
Phips moved his flotilla up the basin. Port-Royal's new fort
was still unfinished, and "its 18 cannon had not been brought into
firing position." Moreover, Meneval had only 70 soldiers to
defend the colonial capital, which was virtually defenseless against
any size invasion.156a
The master of one of Phips's vessels,
the Porcupine, was Huguenot sailor/merchant David
Basset, son-in-law of prominent Port-Royal settler Charles
Melanson, whose habitation was located on
the north shore of the basin above Goat Island, near de Mons's old
settlement. Basset ordered sailors to take
him in a ship's boat to the landing nearest his father-in-law's
house. There, he told Charles what Phips was about.
Charles returned with his son-in-law to Phips's flotilla and
informed the admiral of the sad state of Meneval's garrison, perhaps
in hopes of avoiding bloodshed. The following day, May 10, Phips and his officers
hurried ashore to plan an assault against the hapless garrison.
Seeing the size of Phips's flotilla and fully aware of the weakness
of his position, Meneval asked for
terms. His designee in the negotiations, vicar-general Abbé Louis Petit, attempted to extract from Phips the promise
that he would spare private property, leave the church untouched,
and send Meneval and his troops to Québec or to France. "[D]eclaring
that his word as a general was sufficient," Phips refused to sign a
written agreement, but he accepted a verbal "capitulation under the
following conditions: the fort, the cannon, and the
merchandise belonging to the king and the company would be handed
over to him; the officers and soldiers would retain their liberty
and be transported to Québec; the settlers would keep their
possessions and enjoy the free exercise of their religion."
Hearing the terms, Meneval surrendered the post. On May 11,
Phips ordered Meneval to report to him aboard his flagship and
repeated "his promises" in front of Meneval's second in command, the
King's general representative for justice, Mathieu de Goutin.
Phips and his officers then entered Port-Royal, and what they saw
there did not please them. When Phips saw for himself "how weak the fort
and the garrison were, he was sorry that he had granted such
generous terms." (Had he not believed the testimony
of Charles Melanson?) Upon discovering that some of the
French soldiers had pillaged the company's warehouse and that Port-Royal
merchants had carried off property into the surrounding woods during
the parley with Meneval, Phips nullified the surrender agreement,
ordered the French soldiers held in the church, confined Meneval to
his house, and arrested de Goutin. Phips then ordered
his men ashore and turned them loose on the village. Over a 12-day period, "We cut down the
cross," remembered one of the Puritans, "rifled their church, pulled
down their high altar, and broke their images." They also
burned 28 houses near the fort, as well as the church, and pillaged
and plundered the remaining dwellings and storage buildings with
impunity. To protect his force from any irate settlers who
lived near the fort, Phips threatened to make them all prisoners of
war if the men did not assemble in the church and swear allegiance
to the King and Queen of England. Most took the oath, but it
did these habitants no good; their property, too, was pillaged and burned along
with that of the few who had refused to take the oath. Phips left
Port-Royal in charge of a council of officials and settlers who were instructed to
answer only to the government of Massachusetts. Head of
Phips's council was Sergeant Charles Chevalier dit La Tourasse, later
a French army officer, still a bachelor. Among the
councilors were Mathieu de Goutin, released from arrest; Pierre Chênet
Dubreuil, the King's attorney and assistant to Abbé
Petit; Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle,
the seigneur of Port-Royal, who, with Pierre Melanson,
had acted as interpreters during the surrender negotiations; René Landry le jeune; and Daniel LeBlanc.
Pierre Melanson's younger brother Charles, who was
as fluent in French and English as his brother, was not a part of
the original council. While Phips oversaw the destruction of
Port-Royal, he sent an expedition under Captain Cyprian Southack,
captain of the Porcupine,
to attack La Hève, Chédabouctou, and other Acadian settlements on
the Atlantic side of the peninsula. This was not the first
time New Englanders had struck the important fishery center at
Chédabouctou. A pirate attack in the autumn of 1688 had
devastated the fishery center; Southack's
attack essentially ended its operations. Another of Phips's
lieutenants, Captain John Alden, Jr. of Plymouth, who already had seized
Saint-Castin's post at Pentagouët, took his sloop Mary into
the Bay of Fundy to overawe the settlements at Minas and Chignecto,
where the Acadians were compelled to take Phips's oath of
allegiance. With Meneval, two priests (Abbé Petit and his
assistant, Father Claude Trouvé), 21 cannon, and 59 captured French
troupes de la marine in tow, the victorious treasure hunter
hurried back to Boston, leaving no troops behind to hold the Acadian
capital.157
[map]
On June 15, the French warship Union
out of La Rochelle
appeared at Port-Royal, weeks too late to save the post from New-English depredation.
Aboard the ship were engineer Saccardy, who had left the new fort uncompleted
and had been ordered to return to finish it, and Meneval's former second in command, Captain Villebon,
now in charge of the colony. On June 18, the Union
moved on to Rivière St.-Jean and worked its way up to Jemseg, from where Saccardy and
Villebon hoped to secure the rest of
the colony. As it turned out, they had only set themselves up
in a dangerous cul-de-sac. Taking advantage of Phips's easy
victory over Meneval, at the end of June English freebooters in two ships belonging to
Lieutenant Governor Jacob Leisler of New York attacked the Union
anchored off of Jemseg. The pirates captured Saccardy and the vessel and sent Villebon flying
upriver to
Québec. Leisler's freebooters descended on the
defenseless former capital, plundered what was left of it, and hanged two
unidentified Acadian settlers before continuing on their way.157a
Port-Royal was only a secondary
objective for the determined New Englanders. Their principal
objective was Québec, which they would assault with an even larger
force of 34 ships, including 4 men of war, and 2,200 men. The
Massachusetts council gave to the despoiler of Port-Royal the
command of this formidable force. Phips's expedition against
Québec would cooperate with a land force from Connecticut and New
York that would assault Montréal via Lake Champlain--the invasion of
Canada that had been planned at the New York conference in May.
The land expedition met one disaster after another, however, and got
no farther than the head of Lake Champlain. Only a small party
of 29 militiamen and 120 Indians under Captain John Schuyler of New
York made it to the St. Lawrence valley, where they fell upon the
settlement of La Prairie, across from Montréal, burned the houses,
barns, and hayricks, slaughtered the cattle, and killed or captured
25 Canadians, including several women, before hurrying back to the
main force on Lake Champlain. Meanwhile, Phips's fleet took
longer to assemble and leave Boston than he had anticipated.
Worse yet, Saint-Castin, alerted by his spy network in New
England, sent word to Frontenac via the St.-Jean portage of Phips's
intentions. Phips did not depart the rendezvous at Nantasket until August 9, and,
because he failed to take along a St. Lawrence River pilot, he did
not reach the river below Québec until mid October, late in the
campaigning season. Governor-General Frontenac and his lieutenants,
meanwhile, made Montréal safe and transformed Québec into a
fortress.158
Phips was no match for the wily old
Frontenac. Having lost a substantial number of men on
shipboard from a break out of small pox, Phips's first effort at
Quebec was not military but diplomatic. Before a single shot
was fired, on the morning of his arrival, Monday, October 16, he
sent an envoy with terms of surrender to Frontenac, who rebuffed
such arrogance and then invited the English commander to do his best to
take the city. That afternoon, Callière, still the
governor of Montréal, arrived with 300 fresh men, including regulars
and hot-blooded coureurs de bois aching for a fight, raising
Frontenac's force in Quebec to a formidable 3,000. But Phips
stayed, and for six days he and his militia commander, Major John
Walley, menaced Québec from land and water. Phips called
another council of war and cobbled together a plan that he was
certain would give him the fortress city. Walley would land
his 1,300 Massachusetts militiamen at Beauport, just downriver from
Québec, swing his column around to a ford on the St. Charles River
behind Québec and attack the city's rear, which Phips wrongly
assumed was unprotected. Walley's militiamen landed on the
morning of Wednesday, October 18 and fought their way up the slope
towards the St. Charles, driving off a small force of French
sharpshooters sent out to delay them. Before the New
Englanders could cross the St. Charles, however, Phips lost patience
and ordered his warships to open fire on Frontenac's defenses.
The exchange of cannon fire rumbled for two days, crippling Sir
William's warships and doing little damage to the city's
defenses. Walley, unable to regain contact with Phips's
vessels because of the fierce bombardment and not equal to the task
given him, waited helplessly in his camp above Beauport, his men
freezing, starving, and suffering from the small pox that they had
contracted during their long stay in the lower St. Lawrence.
On Friday, October 20, while Walley consulted with Phips aboard the
commander's battered warship, Walley's officers pushed their
Puritans to the ford on the St. Charles, where Frontenac met them
with three battalions of troupes de la marine and a
Canadian flanking force under two of the Le Moyne brothers.
The New Englanders fought valiantly, but they were no match for the
French troupes and
the Canadian militia, who laid one ambush after another. The
following day, Saturday, October 21, Walley withdrew his militiamen
from in front of Québec against token opposition. Frontenac and his
Frenchmen were exhausted, too. Phips and his beaten Puritans
lingered aboard their ships for two days, the men resting, the
officers counseling their harried commander, until Phips finally
weighed anchor and fell back down the St. Lawrence on Tuesday,
October 24. Phips anchored several leagues below the Île
d'Orléans to repair his battered ships so that they could be made
seaworthy for the long sail back to Boston. Leaving the
English unmolested, Frontenac agreed to a prisoner exchange, mostly
women and children captured in the fighting in Maine for Frenchmen
captured in Acadia, Newfoundland, and the lower St. Lawrence.
Two of the exchanged prisoners were none other than abbés
Petit and Trouvé, who Phipps had gathered up at Port-Royal in May. Phips's
expedition suffered more damage at the hands of Nature when it
retreated into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A storm drove at
least one ship onto Anticosti Island. Back in the Atlantic,
another storm blew some of his vessels all the way down to the West Indies! The only
success of the expedition was Captain William Mason's assault on the
French settlement of Percé, on the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, which
he destroyed with two frigates.159
The victory at Quebec saved Canada from
capture, if not from famine and attack by the Iroquois, but
the English still clung to Acadia. Except for the fishery at
Chédabouctou, Southacks's thrusts against the Atlantic settlement
after the fall of Port-Royal inflicted little damage to the colony,
and Alden's forays to Minas and Chignecto did relatively little
damage there as well. Port-Royal, on the other hand, lay in
ruin, as did many of its outlying habitations. In the
spring of 1691, two Port-Royal merchants, Abraham Boudrot
and Jean Martel de Mago, motivated no doubt by pity for their fellow
countrymen, but also with an eye on profits, informed Massachusetts
Governor Simon Bradstreet "of the needs and poverty of Acadia since"
Phips's expedition of the previous spring. They asked the
governor "for the right to trade, at least with Boston, and revive
the place." The governor issued the appropriate licenses.
Boudrot secured "mostly textiles and some
spices" from trading partners André Faneuil and David Basset,
Huguenot merchants of Boston, the latter his brother-in-law, and
headed back to Port-Royal at the end of April. There,
Boudrot "traded his cargo for furs, poultry, etc." Hs
return trip to Boston was a disaster. Perhaps to trade with
the Indians there, he stopped at Pentagouët, which Phips had
"visited" the year before on his way up the coast to Port-Royal and
a New-English force had raided the previous September. The
Natives were not happy to see a "Boston" trader plying his goods in
their territory. They seized part of Boudrot's
cargo, "including L150 worth of pelts," and the hapless Acadian
continued on his way.159a
.
While Phips was dallying on his way to
Québec and the Acadians were rebuilding their broken capital, a royal proclamation in London, dated 7 October 1690,
had decreed that Acadia was now part of Massachusetts. In July
1691, Governor Bradstreet named Colonel Edward
Tyng of Maine as the new governor of the conquered province.
The colonel's commission also named the inhabitants of the province
who would assist him in its governance: Charles
Chevalier dit La Tourasse and Pierre
Chênet Dubreuil again; René LeBlanc,
Daniel's third son, who had recently resettled at Minas; and Charles
Melanson, who still lived on the lower basin at
Port-Royal. Charles was younger brother of Pierre the
interpreter, who had resettled at Minas in the early 1680s, and
father-in-law of Abraham Boudrot, who lived on his
father-in-law's habitation.
Tyng went to Port-Royal later in the year, but his stay was short
and disappointing. When "the inhabitants would give him no guarantee
against Indian attacks," he decided to return to Boston.
Meanwhile, the authorities in Massachusetts were determined to
chastise the Abenaki. They chose as the leader of a new
expedition the noted Indian fighter from the old Pilgrim settlement
of Duxbury, 51-year-old Major Benjamin Church. Fourteen years
earlier, Church had won fame by defeating the Wampanoag chief
Metacom, whom the Puritans dubbed King Philip, during the
bloodiest Indian war in New-English history. In September 1689, Church
had fought the Abenaki in a small expedition in the Casco Bay area
with mixed results. He now took command of a force of 300 men
and headed back to Casco Bay, which he reached on 11 September 1690.
This expedition, which lasted two weeks, was no more successful than
Church's earlier venture against the Abenaki. For the rest of
1690 and into 1691, the Abenaki still held the upper hand in the war
along the Maine frontier.160
With the defeat of Phips at Québec,
Frontenac had turned his attention to the liberation of Acadia. In
April 1691, back in France, the captured Meneval's second in
command, Captain Joseph Robinau dit Promville, sieur de Villebon,
nephew of former governor Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière, had been appointed by
the King as commander in Acadia. The choice was a wise one.
Though educated in France, Villebon was a typical Canadian officer.
Haling from a line of Canadian aristocrat-warriors, he was familiar with
rugged frontier service, during which he had earned the esteem
of the Indians. He returned to Canada
aboard the Soleil d'Afrique, under command of fellow Canadian Simon-Pierre
Denys de Bonaventure, who the year before had accompanied another
Canadian, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, to Hudson Bay and then sailed
on to France with a cargo of furs. Villebon and Denys de
Bonaventure crossed without incident and reported to Frontenac at Québec. The
governor-general ordered Villebon to hurry back to Acadia with Denys
de Bonaventure, secure Port-Royal, where the New Englanders
had left no garrison, and unite with Saint-Castin and the
Abenaki to take the war to New England. Back at Port-Royal by
November,
Villebon
removed the English flag, replaced it with the fleur-de-lys, and
left the post in charge of Charles Chevalier dit La Tourasse, whom
both Phips
and the Massachusetts governor had appointed as head of the colonial council. Having been ordered not
to set up his headquarters at Port-Royal, Villebon chose Rivière
St.-Jean, with its valuable portage, as his base of operations.
Either at the mouth of or in the lower stretches of the river, Denys de Bonaventure captured a New English
merchantman. Aboard was a rich prize:
merchant John Nelson, long familiar with Acadia and its settlers, who had recently secured permission to post a
New-English garrison at Port-Royal in exchange for a monopoly of the region's
trade. Denys de Bonaventure also captured Captain John
Alden, Jr. of Plymouth, former Phips associate and master of the
captured merchantman; Alden's son William; and the erstwhile
New-English
governor of Acadia, Colonel Edward Tyng. Villebon released the
elder Alden in Nelson's ketch to continue on to Boston to arrange a
prisoner exchange. Nelson, Tyng, and the younger Alden he held
as hostages. Remembering the disaster at Jemseg the year
before that almost had led to his capture, Villebon moved farther upriver to a more easily-defensible site
at Nashouat, where he built Fort St.-Joseph across from the Acadian community of
Ste.-Anne-du-Pays-Bas, today's Fredericton, New Brunswick, in the
land of the Maliseet. After
learning there would be no prisoner exchange, Villebon sent his
hostages up the St.-Jean portage to Québec, and Denys de Bonaventure returned to
sea.161
As Villebon's biographer reminds us: "a solder was needed in
Acadia, a man who was capable of holding out with very little aid.
The choice of Villebon seems to have been a good one; a native of
the country, he knew Acadia," having served there under Perrot and
Meneval during the late 1680s. His instructions from the King
were precise and revealed confidence in the young captain of troupes
de la marine: "Villebon was 'to take advantage of the
favourable dispositions of the Canibats (the Abenaki Indians,
allies of the French) towards serving His Majesty, of their hatred
of the English and the proximity of the New England centres, to use
them in waging continual and violent war against the aforementioned
English, creating at the same time a diversion to secure Canada from
their ventures...."161a
In early January 1692, while Villebon
and his men worked on Fort St.-Joseph, weather permitting, a French
privateer, Pierre Maissonat dit Baptiste, appeared at
nearby Passamaquoddy Bay with a prize he was taking to Port-Royal.
Here was another factor Villebon had to address--the presence
of these provocateurs in Acadian waters and their recruitment of
local settlers. Based at Port-Royal and Chignecto, "They
gathered their crews from among the young Acadians of these
settlements who were attracted by their free life and the hope of
plunder. The activities of the privateers were opposed by the
clergy who felt that they had a bad influence on the local youth."
Baptiste, as he was called, had married a woman from Port-Royal but
was reported to have several other "wives" in France and Holland.
He evidently had been operating in North Atlantic waters for some
time, having been imprisoned in Boston and purporting to know the
waters off of New York. Baptiste appeared in the St.-Jean in
early May, where he outfitted two small vessels and set out again to
prey on New English shipping. Here was another guarantee that
Rivière St.-Jean would be a prime target for English retribution.161b
Not long after Maissonat's
appearance at Passamaquoddy, Villebon and Saint-Castin took the war
to the enemy's door with as much energy and violence as Frontenac's
attacks two years earlier. In February 1692, a force of Indians
from Pentagouët, under the leadership of Saint-Castin and
again accompanied by Abbé
Louis-Pierre Thury, laid waste the Maine town of York, massacring
many of the settlers and taking more women and children into
captivity. In late May, a sea-borne expedition of three ships
that Phips had sent to destroy Villebon's new fort and to clear out
privateers appeared in the
lower St.-Jean. Villebon was back at Nashouat, but most of his
soldiers and Indians were still in Maine. He prepared to meet
the English with the small force at hand. In early July,
however, the English ships disappeared from the lower river. They
sailed across the bay to Port-Royal, instead, "where an effort was
made to induce the settlers to submit to English rule, but no
definite promise could be obtained from them. With the
announcement that a strong garrison would soon be sent from Boston,
[the English] took their departure."162
In June, Baptiste Maissonat
returned to Rivière St.-Jean with a 45-ton brigantine loaded with
wheat and flour that he had captured in sight of Boston--the ninth
English vessel he had captured in six months! Later that
month, a force of Abenaki
under Saint-Castin, with a hand full of Canadian
officers under René Robinau de Portneuf, Villebon's younger brother,
descended on the fortified Maine outpost of Wells. This nut
proved too hard to crack, however, and Portneuf and his force gave
up the siege. But they had done damage enough to liberate this
part of Acadia from English occupation, except for Pemaquid.
There, in late summer of 1692, at great expense, the New Englanders
began erecting a sturdy edifice of stone which they named Fort
William Henry, providing them a base from which they could continue
their harrassment of Acadia and the nearby Abenaki villages.
In October, Frontenac sent a sea borne expedition under Canadian
Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, to subdue the new
fort. With the ships Poli and Envieux, Iberville
rendezvoused with Villebon at Baie-Verte, at the north end of the Chignecto isthmus.
Commander of the Envieux was Villebon's old associate, Denys
de Bonaventure. Their plan was to rendezvous with another squadron, under Jean Du Paty or Patés, pick up Maissonat
at Pentagouët to serve as coastal pilot, destroy the new English
fort at Pemaquid, and then raid along the coast of New England.
At Mount Desert Island, up the coast from Pemaquid, Iberville
interrogated a boat load of suspicious Canadian captives and
concluded that the new fort's stone
walls and a reinforced garrison, plus the presence of powerful New
English ships in the area, likely would overwhelm his force. Moreover,
Maissonat could not make the rendezvous at Pentagouët because of
English activity at Port-Royal. Iberville abandoned the
proposed attack on Pemaquid, but, in fact, Fort William Henry
was still unfinished and could easily have been captured by the
force at hand. Also, against Phips's orders, the New English
vessels in the area had returned to
Boston. Iberville granted permission to Saint-Castin
and his Abenaki to attack Pemaquid, and then he and Denys
de Bonaventure sailed down
the coast as far as Nantucket to harass New English shipping. He
even lay off the harbor at Boston, hoping to destroy more English
vessels, before sailing on to France.163
Determined to neutralize Saint-Castin
and his Abenaki, still ravaging the Maine coast, Sir William Phips,
recently appointed governor of
the province of Massachusetts Bay, turned to two of the Acadian captives
being held in Boston in November 1692. Jacques Petitpas and his
brother-in-law, Charles Serreau de Saint-Aubin, both from
Passamaquoddy, had fallen into New-English hands during another offensive against the French along the
Maine and lower Fundy coasts led by Colonel
Benjamin Church the previous summer. Petitpas's
and Serreau de Saint-Aubins's families, including the
71-year-old seigneur of Passamaquoddy, Jean Serreau de
Saint-Aubin, also had been captured and taken to
Boston. The governor, in a desperate attempt to get at
Jean-Vincent de Saint-Castin, sent Petitpas and
Charles
Serreau de Saint Aubin "with two French deserters" to capture
the
capitaine de sauvages, "keeping their families as hostages."
The two Acadians doubtlessly gave serious thought to the mission
before turning on the wily governor. Instead of going after
Saint-Castin, "they betrayed the plan" to Commandant
Villebon at Nashouat and handed over the deserters, who were
promptly executed. "Villebon rewarded the two Acadians with a
sum of money sufficiently large 'to enable them to deliver their
wives and children from the English.'" Evidently the Acadians
could not garner enough funds to ransom all of their loved ones from
the Puritan lights. In 1695, the old seigneur paid 30
livres
to ransom his daughter, probably Geneviève, widow of Jacques
Petitpas, who had died the year before.163a
The war died down during the winter of
1692-93. Villebon left another brother, Daniel Robinau de
Neuvillette, in charge of the fort at Nashouat and spent the winter
at Chignecto, where he could be "in constant communication with
Minas and Port Royal and the other settlements. He dispatched
messages to the Indians in various parts of Acadia asking them to
join him in the spring to take part in a new expedition."
Beaubassin once again served as Acadian headquarters. "[T]o
obtain information about conditions there, and learn if any plans
were being made," Villebon
sent Abraham Boudrot, the Port-Royal pilot and merchant, back
to Boston. The commandant could not have chosen a better spy.
Boudrot, after his disastrous trading venture
between Boston and Port-Royal in the spring of 1691, had not given
up in his efforts to supply goods for the colony. The
Massachusetts authorities evidently saw him as an inocuous figure.
By 1693, Abraham had become master of the shallop Mary, on
which "he transported goods such as wheat, beaver pelts, moose and
bear skins, small animal furs, and feathers" from Port-Royal to
Boston. "He would return with items such as barrels of tobacco
and sugar." That fall, perhaps during his spy mission to
Massachusetts, "the office of the collector at Boston, Jahleel
Brenton, attempted to confiscate" the Acadian's "cargo of pelts,
etc., simply because he was a Frenchman. Upon hearing this,
Governor William Phips declared that Abraham and his crew were
as good or better Englishmen than the Collector is, & Let him Seize
them if he dare, if he doth I will break his head." This
from the man who had plundered Port-Royal three years earlier! The wily Acadian returned to
his still-shattered hometown with useful information.163b
In the spring of
1693, Villebon learned that a merchant from Boston who traded
regularly with Port-Royal was coming to Chignecto. Such was
the importance of trade between Acadia and New England that even
a full-blown war could not stop it. "The settlers were in urgent
need of various necessities," so the commandant "decided to make a
trip to Minas so that he might not be present when the vessel
arrived, for it would be impolitic for him to sanction such
unauthorized trade. When he returned at the end of April, he
learned that the vessel had arrived, but, instead of unloading
goods, a party of men had disembarked and fired on the settlers,
leaving an impression that they were pirates." This would not
be the last time in this war that Englishmen molested the settlers
of Chignecto.164
In August 1693, most of the Abenaki
chiefs signed a peace treaty at Pemaquid with Governor Phips and left five
of their leaders as hostages to seal the agreement.
The French authorities in Canada were alarmed by this development.
Employing Father Thury and Saint-Castin, the French did
their best to stir the Abenaki against their former enemy.
Meanwhile, the fleet the English had gathered at Boston for another
go at Québec was sent, instead, to the West Indies to capture the
French island of Martinique. Tropical disease devastated the
ranks of the English soldiers and sailors, and when the fleet
returned to Boston, it was in no shape to take on Frontenac again.
Other than an expedition in the far north by England's Hudson's Bay
Company to recapture three posts in St. James Bay which Iberville
had taken from them a few years earlier, and a mission to France by
Baptiste Maissonat to confer with the Minister of Marine
about plans to attack New England, the war in North America seemed
to be over. Peace had finally come to mainland Acadia, if not
the waters surrounding the peninsula. New-English settlers,
wanting to believe that the war was over, rebuilt and even expanded
the farms and villages that the French and Indians had pillaged over
the past four years. They also prudently strengthened their garrison towns
along the New Hampshire-Maine frontier and waited to see if the
Abenaki had truly buried the hatchet.165
.
Peace had come to peninsula Acadia as
well, or so it seemed. The council of inhabitants that Phips
and Tyng had set up and Villebon had left in place continued to run
Port-Royal, to which the English never bothered to send a garrison.
The habitants there rebuilt their homes and gardens and
restored their livestock as best they could, while they and their
compatriots at Chignecto and Minas built new aboiteaux and
transformed more salt marsh
into pasture and field. In 1693, Commander
Villebon took advantage of a break in the fighting and ordered a new
census to be taken of the Acadian settlements from Pentagöuet to La
Hève. Port-Royal, with its wide basin and gentle-flowing
river, remained the largest settlement with 504 inhabitants, and
this despite the recent depredations at the hands of the English.
The Minas settlements, which probably included Pigiguit, numbered
307 settlers, Chignecto 119, Cap-Sable 32, Rivière St.-Jean 21,
Pentagouët 14, Passamaquoddy and the Ste.-Croix
seven, and La Hève six, a total of 1,022 men, women, and children counted
in the colony, compared to 373 in the first census at Port-Royal in
1671 and not quite 900 in the census of 1686. Contrast this
with the number of Frenchmen in all of New France at the time, about
15,000, and in the English Atlantic colonies, over 100,000!166
No matter, new settlers
had come to greater Acadia during the early years of King William's
War. As did earlier arrivals, many of them married daughters
of the colony's established families and helped populate settlements both
old and new:
Pierre-Alain, called Alain,
Bugeaud of
Bois, Saintonge, France, christened a Huguenot, came to Acadia by
c1690, abjured his Protestant faith, and married Élisabeth or Isabelle, daughter of Pierre Melanson
dit Laverdure, fils and Marguerite Mius d'Entremont, in c1695.
They settled near her family at Grand-Pré, where Sr. Alain,
as his neighbors called him, served as a churchwarden, surgeon, and
notary. Élisabeth/Isabelle gave him six children, including four sons who
created families of their own. In honor of their father's
station, Alain's children and
grandchildren continued to be addressed as sieur and
mademoiselle.241
François
Robin,
born probably in France in c1643, came to the colony in c1690, the
year he married Marie, 45-year-old daughter of Isaac Pesseley,
former major of Port-Royal, and Barbe Bajolet, at Port-Royal. Marie had
been born the year her father
died while fighting alongside the Sieur d'Aulany against Charles
La Tour, so she never knew the major. At the time
of her marriage to François, she was the widow of Jean Pitre. Probably because of Marie's age, she and François had no children. However,
François helped to raise her many children by Jean Pitre.242
Claude-Sébastien,
fils,
son of Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villieu and
Jeanne-Marie LeBreton of Notre-Dame de Vielle-Vigne, Nantes,
born probably in Nantes in c1663, married Judith, daughter of former
governor Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière and Marie Denys,
at Québec in April 1692. Claude-Sébastien had served as a
garde-marine at Rochefort in the late 1680s, came to Canada by
1690, where he served as an army lieutenant, and came to Acadia in
1691, where he served as an army captain at Nashouat on Rivière
St.-Jean during King William's War. In July 1700, he was named
administrateur de l'Acadie. A month later, he was
granted a seigneurie at Chepoudy, at the edge of his
father-in-law's estates at Chignecto, and brought suit against
Pierre Thibodeau and Guillaume Blanchard over
seigneurial rights at Chepoudy and Petitcoudiac soon after.
After Commandant Villebon's death in July 1700, de Villieu
commanded the colony until the new royal governor, Mombeton de
Brouillan, arrived during the autumn of 1701. De Villieu was
appointed adjutant of the Port-Royal garrison in February 1702.
Suffering from asthma, he received a discharge from the King's
service in May 1704 with a pension of 600 livres.
Despite his retirement, he served as temporary commander of the
colony again in the summer of 1705. He returned to France
later that year and sold his house at Port-Royal to the Récollets
for 4,000 livres. The time and place of Claude-Sébastien's
death is unknown. Back in Acadia, the Récollets transformed his
house into the parish church for St.-Jean-Baptiste. Judith
gave him only one child, a son, born at Québec in June 1793, who did
not create a family of his own.299
Pierre
Brassaud or Brassaux married Gabrielle, daughter
of Michel Forest dit Michel and Marie Hébert, at Port-Royal in c1691.
They settled on Rivière-de-l'Ascension at Minas and at nearby
Pigiguit. Gabrielle gave Pierre nine children, including a son
who may have created a family of his own.243
Joseph
Gravois
married Marie, daughter of André Mignier dit La Gassé
and Jacquette Michel,
in c1691. Marie gave Joseph a son, Joseph, fils, born
at Port-Royal in c1692, who
married Marie, daughter of Pierre Cyr and
Claire Cormier, at Beaubassin in October 1718 and created a family of his own at Chignecto.244
Vincent
Longuépée
married Madeleine, a daughter of René Rimbault and Anne-Marie
____, at Port-Royal
in c1692. They moved to Minas and then moved to an even
newer settlement at Cobeguit. Madeleine gave Vincent six
children, including a son, Louis, who married Anne, daughter of
Pierre Brassaud and Gabrielle Forest, in c1720, and created a family of his own.245
Louis
Mezerrolet
or Mazerolle dit Saint-Louis married Geneviève
Forest, 29-year-old widow of François Savary, at
Port-Royal in c1692. Geneviève gave Louis four children, including a
son who created a family of his own.246
Joseph
Prétieux, later
Précieux, of Charente, France, married Anne Gautrot
probably at La Rochelle in c1688; Anne evidently was not kin to the
other Gautrots in Acadia. She gave Joseph two
children, including a son who created a family of his own.247
Michel
Poirier dit de France, born in c1667, was a nephew of the long deceased
Jean Poirier and younger first cousin of Jean's son Michel
l'aîné of
Chignecto, who was 17 years older than Michel dit de France. In c1692, Michel dit de France married
Marie, daughter of Guyon Chiasson dit La Vallée and
Jeanne Bernard,
probably at Chignecto, where they were counted a year after their
marriage. Marie gave Michel dit de France a dozen children,
including five sons who created families of their own.248
Pierre
Lavergne,
servant of the Père du Breslay of Port-Royal in the early 1690s,
married Anne Bernon
at Port-Royal in c1693. Anne gave Pierre five children,
including a son who created a family of his own.249
Michel
Deveau dit Dauphiné married Marie-Madeleine, daughter of Pierre
Martin and Joachine Lafleur and widow of Guyon Chiasson
dit La Vallée, probably at Chignecto in c1693.
Marie-Madeleine, from Sillery, near Québec, was not Acadian.
She gave
Michel six children, including four sons who created families of
their own.250
Jacques
Léger dit La Rosette, born probably in France in c1668, served as a drummer in the sieur
de Villeu's
company of troupes de la marine
at Fort St.-Joseph, Nashouat, on Rivière St.-Jean, during the early years of King
William's War. (Genealogist Bona Arsenault says Jacques
served in the Carignan-Salières Regiment, but Arsenault
may have confused the regular regiment, which served in Canada, with the colonial detachments
of Marine.) Around 1693, after his discharge from the King's
service, Jacques married Madeleine, daughter of Guillaume
Trahan, père and Madeleine Brun, at Port-Royal and took land on the
south side of Rivière-au-Dauphin, above Port-Royal. Jacques
and Madeleine had 11 children, including four sons, three of whom created families of their own.253
.
Except for a bloody raid by several
bands of Abenaki into New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the summer
of 1694, an expedition that autumn led by Iberville to retake the
Hudson's Bay posts, and sundry raids along the Maine coast the
following summer, the uneasy peace persisted for nearly three years.
In August 1695, English authorities evidently sent Captain Fleetwood
Emes to Port-Royal to impose on the Acadian inhabitants there
another oath of allegiance to King William III. Many family
heads--57 habitants, their seigneur, and their
priest--signed or made their marks, attesting to their having taken
the oath, including Louis
Allain; Jean Babineau, called Babinot;
Jean Bastarache; Jean
Belliveau; Martin and Guillaume Blanchard; Bernard and Martin Bourg; François Broussard; Pierre Cellier,
called Le Cellier; Étienne, Jean l'aîné, Pierre l'aîné,
and Pierre le jeune Comeau; Jean
Corporon; Pierre Doucet; Claude Dugas; ___
Dupuis; Jean Fardel, an Englishman whose wife was a Gaudet;
Pierre Gaudet; Jacob and Alexandre Girouard; Laurent
Granger; Giraud (Jérôme) Guérin; Emmanuel Hébert;
Claude and Pierre Landry; Daniel LeBlanc; Jacques
Léger dit La Rosette; Pierre Martin, fils;
Jacques Michel; Étienne Pellerin; Martin Richard; Charles Robichaud
dit Cadet; François Robin; Germain Savoie;
Pierre Sibilau; Claude and Bonaventure Thériot; Pierre
Tibaudeau; and
Jacques Triel dit Laperrière, who made their marks,
along with Abraham Bourg and his nephew Alexandre dit Bellehumeur Bourg;
Laurent Doucet; René Forest; Bernard Gaudet;
Claude Guédry, as Gaidry; Pierre Guilbeau;
Jean Labat dit Le Marquis; Pierre Lanoue;
Emmanuel Le Borgne de Bélisle, the recently deceased
seigneur's son and the new seigneur; Julien Lord; Mathieu Martin; Charles
Melanson; Vicar-general Abbé Louis Petit; Denis
Petitot dit Saint-Seine; Claude Petitpas, fils;
Alexandre Richard; and Prudent Robichaud,
who signed.167a
But this inconvenience to the Acadian populace spilled
only ink, not blood. The following winter, in February 1696, an incident
occurred outside the gates of Fort William Henry that ended the
tenuous peace and set the Maine frontier ablaze once again. Three Abenaki chiefs
appeared at the fort under a flag of truce to parlay for an exchange
of prisoners. Something went terribly wrong in their
negotiations with the hotheaded new commander of the post, and in
the resulting melee the New Englanders killed two of the chiefs.
Soon the inhabitants of the Maine-New Hampshire coast felt the wrath
of the vengeful Abenaki. York was hit, and Portsmouth,
and Dover. King William's War was on again.167
Even worse for the hopes of New English
security, Governor-General Frontenac, with urging from the King, launched
another sea-borne assault against Pemaquid. The
redoubtable Iberville set sail from Québec in two warships in July
1696. One of the vessels was commanded by Germain, son of
Jacques
Bourgeois, founder of the Chignecto settlement a
generation before; one of his "crewmen" may have been
French official Mathieu de
Goutin.
Also with Iberville were Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, perhaps
in command of the Envieux, and Baptiste Maissonat,
recently back from France, who would serve as coastal pilot. On the way down to Pemaquid,
near the mouth of the St.-Jean, Iberville
waylaid two English men of war, including the frigate Newport,
on July 14. He drove off one of the English ships and dismasted the
Newport, which he refitted as a third vessel for his
expedition. Continuing on to his objective, he picked up a
force of Indians and habitants under Commandant Villebon. Iberville's flotilla arrived at Pemaquid on August 14 and,
in cooperation with a contingent of Abenaki under Saint-Castin
and Father Thury from Penobscot, quickly
invested the stone bastion by land and sea. Amazingly, only
100 men defended Fort William Henry, and they were still under the command of
the hotheaded incompetent who had killed the Abenaki chiefs, Captain
Pascho Chubb. On the afternoon of the 15th, Iberville's
and Saint-Castin's batteries were ready, and
Iberville demanded that Chubb surrender the fort
or be blasted out. The New Englander retorted with defiant
words, and French shells soon exploded inside the fort. That
was enough for the New Englanders. Fort William Henry
surrendered after Chubb put up a cursory defense. Only Iberville's
intervention, and Saint-Castin's control, prevented the Abenaki from
massacring Chubb and his New Englanders. They were paroled, instead,
and some were allowed to return to Boston. The French
dismantled the stout stone walls before returning to Penobscot.
From there, Iberville sent messages to the Massachusetts governor,
William Stoughton, acting for Phips, offering to exchange the New
English prisoners he still held for
French prisoners languishing at Boston. Stoughton ignored him.
Shrugging off the stubborn Englishman, Iberville released his
remaining prisoners to Saint-Castin, who promised to return
them safely to Boston. Iberville then sailed his little
flotilla to Newfoundland to launch another offensive against the
English.168
The authorities at Boston, meanwhile,
had enlisted Benjamin Church to organize yet another expedition
against the Abenaki. When Chubb and his parolees returned from
Pemaquid, the Boston fathers threw the hapless captain in jail,
where he languished for nearly a year, and they urged Church to
hurry up his preparations for a strike against the enemy.
Meanwhile, five armed ships hurried from Boston to intercept
Iberville's flotilla, but the clever Canadian got clean away.
In September, Church and his 500 New Englanders, with 50 Indian
allies of their own, finally sailed out of Boston and headed north
for the coast of Maine. They hurried to Pemaquid and then to
Penobscot Bay, from which they ascended the Penobscot River to the
head of navigation, searching in vain for Abenaki to waylay and
destroy. Somehow the wily Indians had got word of Church's coming. Moving east to Mount Desert Island
and finding no enemy there, the angry Church swung out to sea again
and sailed northeast ... to Acadia.169
This time it was the settlements at
Chignecto that bore the brunt of New English vengeance and Church's
frustration at not finding the Abenaki. When Church arrived at
Chignecto, Germain Bourgeois, back from his adventures at
Pemaquid, met the old Puritan on the shore and "produced a document
which indicated that Phips after the fall of Port-Royal in 1690 had
promised immunity to those who swore fealty to King William.
Church accompanied Bourgeois to his house, but his men lost
no time in plundering and burning the settlement while the settlers
took refuge in the woods." Finding a paper "subscribed by
Count de Frontenac" containing "regulations respecting the traffic
with the Indians" nailed to the door of one of the dwellings, Church
"charged the inhabitants with a breech of their sworn neutrality"
and ordered him men to burn the church and to resume their
pillaging. The old New Englander remembered the scene vividly
in his memoirs. The people of Chignecto, he wrote years later,
"were troubled to see their cattle, sheep, hogs, and dogs lying dead
about their houses, chopped and hacked with hatchets." He
could not contain his Puritan righteousness in the face of his
hapless enemy. "The inhabitants, both French and Indian, fled
at his coming, but some of the former returned upon promise of good
usage. After reading them a sharp lecture upon the barbarities
practiced by the savages upon the English, and forcibly contrasting
it with his own magnanimity in now keeping his Indians from knocking
them all in the head, Church took his departure for the St. John
River."170
One must wonder if the sights and
smells of their burned-out buildings, of their dead
animals, even of their pets, lying butchered all around them, would
have brought the word "magnanimity" to the minds of these simple
farmers. It would take years for them to repair the damage the old
Puritan and his men had inflicted upon them.
On the St.-Jean, Church skirmished with
some workmen who were building a fort at the mouth of the river.
He killed one and wounded another, who revealed where the big guns
for the new fort were hidden. Church secured the pieces and
called a council of war to see what his lieutenants thought of the
notion of heading upriver to attack Villebon's fort at
Nashouat. They agreed that the season was too late and the
river too low, so they gathered up their spoils and headed back to
Boston. To Church's chagrin, on his way to Boston he encountered a
reinforcement coming up the coast to meet him. Head of the
reinforcement was Lieutenant Colonel William Hathorne, who outranked
him. Hathorne turned the force around and headed back to Rivière St.-Jean
to destroy Villebon's fort. They attacked the fort on October
18. Among the defenders was privateer Baptiste Maisonnat,
who, with partner Jean Martel de Magos, seigneur of Machias and Villebon's son-in-law, owned a homestead near Nashouat;
three years earlier,
Maissonat had "remarried" to a daughter of Port-Royal settler
François Bourg. Also defending the colonial capital as
well as their holdings on the river were the D'Amours
brothers, who held seigneuries below
Nashouat. Villebon was no friend of these fellow Canadians, but
he needed, if not welcomed, their support. After a spirited fight, Villebon and his
fellow defenders sent Hathorne and his New Englanders flying back to Boston.
Amazingly, Louis D'Amours's trading post at Jemseg
went untouched by Hathorne and his men because of
a fellow New Englander. In 1689, when he was 9 or 10 years
old, John Gyles had been captured by the Maliseet during
St.-Castin's raid at Pemiqud and lived among them
as a slave for six years, much of the time at Meductic, the Maliseet
enclave above Villebon's fort. D'Amours
purchased the teenager from local Indians and employed him as a
clerk at his riverside trading post. D'Amours
was in France when the New English struck, and it was Gyles who protected the nobleman's family as well as his
property. When D'Amours
returned to Jemseg, he allowed the young Gyles to "return" to
Boston, where he became a noted interpreter and a provincial captain
and commanded a fortified post on the St. George River at
present-day Thomaston, Maine.
And so
ended the latest English expedition against the French in
greater Acadia. Villebon turned over to Baptiste Maissonat two
sea-going
pirogues captured from the New Englanders. The privateer
sailed them to the shelter of the Minas Basin, fitted them out, and
recruited young Acadians as crewmen for another raid along the coast
of New England.171
Meanwhile, Iberville and his elusive
flotilla rounded the Acadian peninsula and Cape Breton Island and
sailed up to Plaisance, the French settlement on the west coast of
Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, which he reached on September 12. Since the early months of his
governorship, which began in 1691, Jacques-François de Memberton de Brouillan had beseeched French authorities to organize
a naval expedition against St. John's, the English fishery center on the Atlantic side of
the Avalon Peninsula, and the dozens of other English settlements in
the region. Two attempts, in 1692 and 1694, led by a privateer
and a naval commander, had failed
miserably. Brouillan, leaving Philippe Pastour de Costabelle,
one of his captains of troupes de la marine, in
command at Plaisance, went to France in the autumn of 1685 and
pushed his own plan there. Meanwhile, Iberville also put forward a plan of
attack against the Newfoundland fisheries. The ministry
decided to combine the two operations: "The orders provided
that Brouillan should look after the general conduct of the
operations and should direct the expedition at sea and that
Iberville should command the expedition by land." Once the
English defenses had been overwhelmed, Brouillan and Iberville "were
to destroy the colonies, send their inhabitants back to England, and
seize what booty they could." Brouillan would then return to
the mother country with the booty he could carry, while Iberville
remained in command at Newfoundland. Brouillan secured a
frigate from the Minister of Marine, and a St.-Malo privateer,
Joseph Danycan du Rocher, loaned him four merchantmen fitted out for
combat as well as two corvettes and two fire-ships--10 ships in all,
with hundreds of men. Back at Plaisance by September 1696,
Brouillan waited for Iberville to appear, but the Canadian's arrival
was delayed by his offensive against Pemaquid. Unaware of the fate of Iberville's force, Brouillan left Plaisance without him on September
9 and, with superior force, overwhelmed the English fishing posts of
Bay Bulls (Baie des Taureaux), Ferryland (Forillon), Firmoose (Fermeuse),
and Renews (Renoose). Brouillan used Renews as a base from
which to attack the most important prize of all, St. John's.
However, the fishing center's three forts, English warships in the harbor,
foul weather, and the reluctance of the St.-Malo sailors to risk
their vessels thwarted Brouillan's efforts. Frustrated, he
court-martialed some of the privateers and "consoled himself by
taking some 30 fishing barks and boats, a number of prisoners, and
several thousand codfish" before returning to Plaisance on October
17. Normally, it would have been too late in the year to resume the
offensive, but Brouillan was determined to launch another campaign,
even if it could not begin until winter. Iberville, meanwhile,
had reached Plaisance only three days after Brouillan had launched his offensive against the English side of the
island.
Iberville, though at the head of only a hundred men in two ships,
the Profond and the Envieux, was determined to join
Brouillan, but the Maine
offensive had exhausted his supplies. Costabelle, in charge of
the post again, showed no
eagerness in parting with what little was left of the supplies at Plaisance.
Iberville had no choice but to wait for a re-supply and reinforcements, which he expected from Canada,
before joining Brouillan. On October 3,
while Brouillan was still operating against St. John's, part of Ibeville's
reinforcement arrived in the Postillon, commanded by Nicolas
Daneau de Muy. Another ship, the Wesp, having become
separated from Daneau de Muy's ship on the voyage down from Québec, also
was expected. After the Wesp arrived, Iberville had
four vessels with which to launch his part of the offensive.
Unfortunately, Daneau de Muy informed him that his ship and the Wesp
had been sent to Brouillan; he had no orders to operate under Iberville's command! With the force he possessed, Iberville
prepared to attack Carbonear on Conception Bay, second only to the
St. John's in importance and population. And then Brouillan
returned. The governor's failure to attack St.
John's did not impress the younger commander, whose combat
experience was as impressive Brouillan's. Moreover, after the
debacle at St. John's, Du Rocher, with his ships and his men, had
headed home to St.-Malo, leaving Brouillan's force not only
defeated, but much reduced. During his first interview with
Iberville aboard the governor's ship, Brouillan's dark side again
emerged: he was certain that Iberville had failed to join him
in the campaign against St. John's because the Canadian did not want
to relinquish command to him. Worse yet, Brouillan attributed
his failure at St. John's to Iberville's failure to join him there!
Iberville kept his peace, hoping to find the governor more tractable
during a second interview, but there was no assuaging the angry Brouillan, who refused to read Iberville's instructions. When
the young commander ordered his men to prepare to return to France,
Daneau de Muy's Canadians protested vigorously and threatened to desert if
they were not allowed to serve only under Iberville. Brouillan,
his mind focused on getting at St. John's, reluctantly compromised
with the irate Canadians. He agreed to allow Iberville to
attack St. John's overland while he returned to Renews aboard the
Profond, commanded by Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, for an
attack against the fishing center via the sea. Daneau de Muy and his
Canadians, assuaged by the governor's compromise, agreed to
accompany him and Bonventure to the other side of the peninsula.
After the destruction of St. John's, Iberville, who was personally
financing his part of the expedition, would receive the bulk of the
captured booty and was authorized to attack Carbonear and
other English posts circling Conception Bay before returning to
Plaisance. Iberville and his force of 120 men set out across
the peninsula on November 1. With them was Father Jean Baudouin, who recently had clashed with Commander Villebon in
Acadia; the soldier-turned-priest would provide spiritual sustenance
in a campaign that Iberville and Brouillan expected to last all
winter. Iberville's aide-de-camp was one of his many younger
brothers, Jean Baptiste de Bienville, only 16 years old. It
took Iberville's force nine days to slog across land to Ferryland on
the Atlantic coast. He and his men were so hungry when they reached the place that they devoured wild horses they found on the beach. After
Iberville rendezvoused with Brouillan at Renews,
which lay a few miles south of Ferryland, the bickering
between the two commanders resumed. While Iberville
and his men were slogging overland, Brouillan had sent a
reconnaissance up the coast under a Chevalier de Rancogne, and that
worthy had only managed to alert St. John's to the presence of a
French force down the coast. Moreover, Brouillan announced
that he and Iberville now would divide the plunder in half, a violation
of the agreement they had made at Plaisance. Iberville also
clashed with Daneau de Muy, now an ally of the governor.
Iberville,
seeing that the governor was interested only in booty, but
determined to complete his mission, again gave in to Brouillan.
A
truce was called, and the antagonists turned their attention to the
destruction of the English fishery. Before they started out
from Renews, however, Brouillan sent Denys de Bonaventure in the
Profond back to France to inform the King and Minister of his
achievements. Iberville gave his friend Bonaventure a missive
for the Minister, which included not only an account of Brouillan's
recalcitrance, but also a request for reinforcements that would allow Iberville to "complete the subjugation of
the island" the following spring. From the third week of November through the
following February, Iberville and his Canadians, along with Brouillan and his Frenchmen, captured two dozen English fishing
settlements, including St. John's, which fell at the end of
November, killed at least a hundred Englishmen, captured hundreds of
others, deported 500 of them back to England, and left in ruin a
thriving fishery that took decades to recover.172
.
The French and their Indian allies could smile contentedly as 1696
drew to a close. "For the English this had been a year of
disasters, with hardly one redeeming feature for which to build hope
for the future," a New English historian concedes. "At its close the advantage rested wholly with
the enemy. East and west, the hostile tribes were now acting
together as one man. Acadia had been lost, Pemaquid
demolished. Much had been expected from the expeditions of
Church and Hathorne; nothing realized." Such was the
perception of the New Englanders and of Frontenac and his
lieutenants. The Acadians at Chignecto, however, would not
have given such a rosy summation of the year's results.173
But for a bloody raid by Canadian
Indians against Haverhill, Massachusetts, in mid-March and
Maissonat's depredations along the New England coast, 1697 proved
to be a much quieter year. Then news
arrived in Boston during the summer that a fleet of warships had
left France a few weeks before and was heading to North America to
do the New Englanders no good. It looked like Louis XIV was
determined to end the war by destroying Boston itself, and there was
some truth in the observation. In late winter 1697, Louis,
through his Minister of Marine, Louis Phélypeaux, comte de
Pontchartrain, appointed the Marquis de Nesmond to gather together
in Brest and Rochefort a squadron of 13 warships and four fire ships
to sail to North America for the purpose of laying waste the New
England coast from Boston up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, one of the Le Moyne brothers would take five other
warships from Rochefort to Plaisance and, after rendezvousing with
brother Iberville, head north to Hudson Bay to recapture the
valuable fur-trading posts that Iberville had seized twice during
the war but that the English had again reclaimed.
Pontchartrain sent Frontenac secret orders to prepare 1,500 men, a
formidable force in Canada, to move at a moment's notice when he
should receive further orders, the purpose of the expedition not
revealed to him in order to maintain strict security. Nesmond
would sail first to Plaisance, where Frontenac would meet him,
recapture St. John's, Newfoundland, to protect his rear, and then end
the war in North America once and for all by destroying Boston.
Luckily for the New Englanders, Nesmond's fleet did not reach
Plaisance until July 24, he did not appear before St. John's until
the end of August, and he failed to capture the place. By then
it was early September, too late in the season to move on Boston, so
Nesmond returned to France. The New Englanders nevertheless
prepared for a climactic battle that never came. Summer turned
to fall with only the usual Indians raids marring the relative quiet
of this ninth year of war.174
Peace came at last with the signing of
the Treaty of Ryswick that autumn of 1697, news of it reaching North
America by early December. Some territory had been won and
lost in Europe, but little had changed in America other than that
Acadia was guaranteed as a French possession despite English claims
to it, and, thanks to Iberville's end-of-the-war exploits, the
French controlled the posts in Hudson Bay. The Acadians, led
by their commander, celebrated wildly. Mathieu de Goutin,
the colony's acerbic colonial secretary, complained of Villebon's
excesses: "Sr. de Villebon caused to be used 112 pounds of
powder in a bonfire to mark the peace, and in drinking the health of
his mistresses he and Sr Martel his son-in-law became drunk."
One suspects that they were not the only ones in the colony who were
felled by the demon rum that day. The New Englanders
also celebrated the end of the war, as wildly as Puritans allowed such
things, and well they should have, for the war had cost them dearly.175
The war had cost Acadia, too, at
Pentagouët, Port-Royal, and Chignecto, but Acadia's wounds were minor compared to
those of New England. The Acadians nonetheless had learned
valuable lessons from the long struggle with England, the most
bitter lesson an ironic one. They could see that the thing
which made possible their peacetime trade with the English, the New
Englanders' dominance of the coastal waters, could turn against them
during wartime when their erstwhile trading partners--nos amis les ennemis,
"our friends, the enemy"--turned into implacable foes. They
also learned that when danger should come again from the sea, they
should be ready to defend themselves, not to submit meekly,
otherwise their homes and possessions would be destroyed for
nothing. The New Englanders also remembered, among other
important lessons, that, despite a long history of trade with the
peace-loving Acadians, these Papist Frenchmen still were the enemy,
still a part of the complex killing machine that sought to destroy
their homes and families as well as their way of life. With peace, trade would resume
in earnest between these two very different people, but they would
never look at one another quite the same again.175a
.
Happily for the colony,
more settlers came to greater Acadia during the final years of King
Williams's War and during the short peace that followed. They,
too, created families of their own by marrying into established
families:
Barthélémy
Bergeron dit d'Amboise, a soldier from Amboise, Indre-et-Loire,
France, came to Canada in c1685 probably in his early 20s as a "volontaire
de la marine." He lived in the lower village at
Québec from 1685 to 1690 and likely engaged in seaborne commerce.
He married Geneviève, daughter of Jean
Serreau, sieur de Saint-Aubin, seigneur of Ste.-Croix and
Passamaquoddy, and Marguerite Boileau and widow of Jacques Petitpas,
probably at Québec in c1695. Their first child was born at
St.-François on Île d'Orléans, below Québec, in January 1696.
Later that year, Barthélémy accompanied Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville,
the future founder of Louisiana colony, on an expedition to Hudson's
Bay and greater Acadia. King William's War ended in 1697, and
Barthélémy took his family to Port-Royal, where he resumed his work
as a merchant. In early summer of 1704, during Queen Anne's
War, New-English raiders led by Colonel
Benjamin Church captured the family probably at either Passamaquoddy
or Port-Royal and held them at Boston. On 24 June 1706, a
daughter was born to them in the Massachusetts city. On the
following September 18, Barthélémy and his family were among the 51 French
prisoners at Boston exchanged for English prisoners being
held at Port-Royal. Perhaps soon after the prisoner exchange,
Barthélémy took his family to "Villebon's fort" at Nashouat
on Rivière St.-Jean, "where
he improved his grant of land and also engaged in trading," but
they were back at Port-Royal by late September 1709, when a
daughter's baptism was recorded there. Geneviève gave
Barthélémy six children, including three sons who created their own families. Many of Barthélémy's descendants continued to use his
dit, d'Amboise, though his second son was called "de Nantes."
Some, if not all of them, returned to Rivière St.-Jean in the early
1700s perhaps to escape British rule in peninsula Nova Scotia.252
François
Coste
of Martigues, near Marseille, France, a carpenter,
navigator, and coastal pilot, married Madeleine, daughter of
Barnabé Martin and Jeanne Pelletret, probably at Port-Royal in c1695.
Madeleine gave François eight children, including two sons who
created families of their own. In 1714, they moved to Île
Royale, where François worked as a coastal pilot out of Port-Toulouse and L'Ardoise.
François was still living at L'Ardoise in 1752, age 90!254
Louis-Joseph, eldest son
of Louis de Gannes, seigneur de Falaise, gendarme
d'une compagnie du roi, and his second wife Françoise Le Bloy
of Buxeuil, Poitiers, was born at Buxeuil in August 1664. He
became a midshipman at Rochefort in 1683, a lieutenant in Canada in
1687, and came to Acadia as a captain in 1696, during King William's
War. Louis-Joseph married three times. His first wife
was Barbe, daughter of Simon Denys de La Trinité and his
second wife Françoise Duterte and widow of Antoine Pécody de
Contrecoeur, at Contrecoeur, Canada, in
November 1691. She gave him a
daughter, Louise, who became an Ursuline nun at Trois-Rivières.
Louis-Joseph remarried to Louise, daughter of Charles Le Gardeur
de Tilly and Geneviève Juchereau, at Montréal in July
1695. She gave him no children. Louis-Joseph remarried again--his
third marriage--to Marguerite,
daughter of former Acadian governor Michel Le Neuf de La Vallière and
Marie Denys, on Rivière St.-Jean in August 1700, while he was
serving at Villebon's Fort St.-Joseph at Nashouat. Marguerite
gave him a dozen more children, nine sons and three daughters.
Three of their sons created families of their own, and two sons
became priests. Only two of Louis-Joseph and Marguerite's
daughters married. In March
1704, Louis-Joseph was promoted to major de l'Acadie.
That same year, he was granted a seigneurie at La Hève.
According to the major's biographer, "Though he was severely
reprimanded in 1705 for lack of diligence, his superiors had
frequent occasion in the years following to write favourably of his
contribution to the service." After the fall of Port-Royal in
October 1710, de Gannes took his family to France, returned
to Canada, and then moved on to the French Maritimes.300
Charles
Chauvet dit La Gerne or La Jarne, born in c1669, married
Edmée or Aimée dit Lejeune, daughter of François Joseph
and Jeanne Lejeune, in c1696. They were counted on
Rivière St.-Jean two years later and moved on to Pigiguit by 1714.
Edmée gave Charles eight children, including three sons who created
families of their own.289
Étienne
Poitevin or
Potvin dit Parisien, evidently from Paris, married Anne, daughter of
Olivier Daigre and Marie Gaudet, at Port-Royal in c1696 and settled on the
haute-rivière. Anne gave Étienne a dozen children,
including a son who created a family of his own.255
Louis
Chênet,
Chenais, or Chesnay dit
La Garenne,
son of Bertrand, Sieur de Lothainville and Élisabeth Aubert,
was born at Québec in August 1678. He probably was not kin to
the Pierre Chênet who came to the colony from Canada during
the early 1680s and became a seigneur. The more
humble Louis dit La Garenne moved to Port-Royal and married
Jeanne, daughter of Barnabé Martin and Jeanne Pelletret,
in c1697, when he was only 19, and she was 21. Jeanne gave Louis two children,
including a son who created a family of his own.256
Jean
dit
Tranchemontagne, son of Pierre Garceau and Jacquette
Soulard of Poitiers, France, was serving in the company of
troupes de la marine under M. de Villieu in Fort St.-Joseph, Nashouat, in 1696. While a soldier in the
company of Chacornacle at Port-Royal, Jean married Marie, daughter
of François Levron dit Nantois and Catherine Savoie, in November 1703.
They settled at Port-Royal, where Marie gave him
three children, all sons who created families of their own.271a
François, son of Anne
LaVache
and an unknown father, was born in c1697, probably at Port-Royal.
His mother married Louis, son of Louis-Noël Labauve
and Marie Rimbault, probably at Annapolis Royal in
c1712, when François was in his mid-teens. He married
Anne-Marie, daughter of Pierre Vincent and Jeanne
Trahan, in c1725 perhaps at Pigiguit, and moved on
to the French Maritimes. Anne-Marie gave him at least eight
children, half of them sons, two of whom created families of their
own.301
Jérôme
Darois,
also called d'Aroy and Darouette, of Paris arrived in
Acadia by c1698, the year he married Marie, daughter of Dominique
Gareau
and Marie
Gaudet and widow
of ____ Lachapelle,
at Port-Royal.
They settled first at Minas, where Marie gave Jérôme 10 children, including two sons who
created families of their own.258
Jean
Naquin dit
L'Étoille, a master tailor, married Marguerite, daughter of
Jean Bourg and Marguerite Martin, soon after the census of 1698. They settled
at Bellaire, also called Bélair, near Port-Royal, where they had purchased land from
Étienne Pellerin in May 1700. Marguerite gave Jean five children,
including two sons who created families of their own.259
Jean-Chrysostôme
Loppinot, born at St.-Nicolas-des-Champs, Paris, was
commissioned as clerk of court at Port-Royal in April 1699. He
also served as notary and procurator. He married Jeanne,
daughter of Germaine Doucet, fils and Marie Landry, at Port-Royal in
c1702. She gave him five children, including four sons, two of
whom created families of their own.296
Jean
Pothier, also Poitiers, married Anne, daughter of Michel
Poirier l'aîné and Marie Boudrot, probably at Chignecto in c1699. Anne give
Jean three children, including two sons who created families of
their own. Jean remarried to Marie-Madeleine, daughter of Guyon Chiasson
and Marie-Madeleine Martin, in c1709. They remained at Chignecto.
Marie-Madeleine gave Jean seven more children, including three more
sons who created their own families.260
Queen Anne's War and the End of
French Rule in Peninsula Acadia
The peace that followed the end of King
William's War was frustratingly short and tenuous. Indian
raids continued along the New English frontier into 1698. No
treaty that was negotiated an ocean away could solve the Indians'
most pressing problem of losing land to the aggressive New
Englanders. In Acadia, new settlements appeared in the Minas
Basin and near
Chignecto, but, again, these habitants hugged the tide lands of the
upper Fundy and did not threaten the Mi'kmaq who lived near them:176
In late March 1689, Mathieu Martin,
perhaps the
first Frenchman born in Acadia, had secured a seigneurie at the extreme
northeast end of the Minas Basin, where he engaged in the fur trade.
Martin's seigneurie, called
Wagobagitik or
Wecobequitk (Mi'kmaq for "end of the water's flow," which refers to
the present-day Salmon River), also Ouëcobeguy, St.-Matheiu,
and eventually Cobeguit, lay 50 miles northeast of Grand-Pré and 55
miles southeast of Beaubassin. Decades later, a governor of
British Nova Scotia noted that "The seigneury of Cobeguit had always
been separate from the lands of the La Tour family...." Although
Mathieu Martin
married, he and his wife, a fellow Acadian whose name has been lost
to history, had no children. In 1701, while Martin
remained at Port-Royal with his wife, he allowed fellow Acadians Martin Bourg,
Jérôme Guérin, and Martin Blanchard, also from Port-Royal,
to move their families to his seigneurie, which, because of
the limited numbers of salt marshes and the distance from access to
the New English market, grew slowly at first. But after
construction of the French fortress at Louisbourg in the 1710s, an accessible
market opened up to the community, and Cobeguit, like nearby
Chignecto, soon became an important cattle-producing area. The
church parish at Cobeguit was
dedicated to SS. Pierre-et-Paul. Mathieu Martin, who
was not counted at Cobeguit until 1714, died a decade later, 24 years a widower,
perhaps at Cobeguit. In October
1731, settlers Noël Doiron, Jean Bourg, Louis Bourg,
and Joseph Robichaud, having been named as heirs in Mathieu
Martin's will, claimed his seigneurie. Settlers at
Cobeguit also bore the names Aucoin, Benoit,
Breau, Carret, Dugas, Gautrot,
Guédry, Guillot, Hébert, Henry, Lejeune,
Longuépée,
Naquin,
Pitre, Thériot, and Turpin.95
During the late 1690s and the early
1700s, another cluster of Acadian settlements sprang up in the
region, this time only a dozen miles west of Beaubassin, in an area
claimed by the seigneur of Chignecto. Chepoudy
settlement, now present-day Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, joined the
constellation of Acadian communities after Pierre Thibodeau explored a stretch of marshy coast on upper Baie de Chignecto
during the spring of 1698. Believing he had secured a
seigneurie from colonial commander Villebon,
who had sent him to the area, Thibodeau prepared to establish
a settlement at the Chepoudy estuary. Three of his sons
wintered at Chepoudy in 1699-1700 and traded furs with the natives.
One of Thibodeau's collaborators in the venture was François
Brossard, also of haute rivière. Though he liked the place,
Broussard remained at Port-Royal, but two of his younger sons
settled at Chepoudy in
c1730 before they moved on to Petitcoudiac.
Hearing of the Thibodeau venture, the seigneur of
Chignecto's son-in-law, Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villieu,
serving as a royal administrator in the colony, protested their
presence on his and his father-in-law's seigneurie and insisted they were squatters.
On 21 August 1700, de Villieu secured for himself a "grant of seigneury" at
Chepoudy. Despite
a question of their claim to the land, Pierre Thibodeau, his sons, and some of
their neighbors from Port-Royal built a flour mill and a
sawmill at Chepoudy, using machinery they had purchased from New
England. The church parish that arose at the settlement was dedicated to
Notre-Dame-de-la-Visitation and was also called Notre-Dame-des-Neiges,
Our Lady of the Snows.
Meanwhile, Guillaume Blanchard of Port-Royal claimed that he,
too, had secured a seigneurie from Villebon, this one on
Rivière Petitcoudiac, near present-day Hillsborough, New Brunswick,
not far from Chepoudy.
Blanchard, who started his new settlement about the same time his friend Pierre Thibodeau settled at Chepoudy, also clashed with the grasping
de Villieu. Pierre
dit Pitre Gaudet and René Blanchard were the first
settlers in the valley of the Memramcook, east of the Petitcoudiac.
In the years that followed, settlers at Chepoudy, Petitcoudiac,
and Memramcook, called by the local inhabitants the trois-rivières,
also bore the names Allain,
Babineau,
Bertrand,
Breau, Brun, Comeau, Cyr, Daigre,
Darois,
Doucet, Dubois, Hébert, Labauve,
Lalande, Landry, LeBlanc, Léger,
Martin,
Pitre, Préjean, Saulnier, Savoie,
Surette,
and
Trahan.96
.
A sticking point unresolved in the
Treaty of Ryswick of 1697 was the boundary between the expanding
colonies of French Acadia and New
England. The English still claimed the Ste.-Croix River, while the
French, noting that some of their Indian allies lived west of the
Penobscot, claimed the Kennebec as the true boundary. In 1700, the contending parties
compromised and named the St. George River, between the Kennebec and
the Penobscot, as the boundary between
the two provinces. Just as vexing was the question of fishing
rights in Acadian waters. Commander Villebon proposed a system
of permits for New Englanders fishing in Acadian water, "the revenues
from which would be applied to maintaining fortifications," but authorities in France ignored the proposal. As a result, the
issue of the fisheries remained a dangerous contention between the imperial rivals.177
A new century greeted the Acadians in
1701. In a few years it would be a full century since de Mons and his companions had founded Port-Royal and the Acadian venture. And it
was in Europe again that events piled one atop the other to threaten
the peace that had finally come to this corner of New France.
On 17 September 1701, James Stuart,
England's former king, died at Louis XIV's residence in St.-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, at
the age of 67. At least one account placed Louis XIV, now 63
and in the 59th year of his reign, at James's deathbed. Louis
promised the dying king that his son, James Francis Edward Stuart,
whom Louis insisted was the Prince of Wales, would be recognized as
the new English monarch when James breathed his last. Eleven years
before, early in the War of the Grand Alliance, in an attempt to
keep William III from leading troops to the Continent, Louis had
supported a counterrevolution in Ireland that he hoped would restore
James to the throne, but the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 had
frustrated that effort. And although one of the provisions of
the Treaty of Ryswick was French recognition of William III as the
legitimate ruler of England, if the story of James's deathbed
encounter is accurate, Louis obviously had not given up on his hopes
of restoring a Catholic monarch to the thrown of England.178
In March 1702, the Sun King's most
hated rival breathed his last. William III died in London from
injuries suffered in a fall from his horse. He had
ruled alone since the death of Mary in December 1694, and she had
given him no surviving children. He was succeeded by Mary's
Protestant sister, Anne, with whom he and Mary had fallen out early
in their joint reign. Louis XIV opposed the accession of Anne,
of course, but the Sun King's principal concern at the time was who
would be successor to the childless Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles
II. Louis feared that if the Austrian Hapsburgs regained the
throne of Spain after the passing of Charles II, France would again
be surrounded by implacable enemies. After years of
negotiations involving Louis's oldest son and then his oldest
grandson, it was the grandson, Philippe, duc d'Anjou, who, upon the death
of Charles II in November 1700, ascended to the Spanish throne as
Philip V. Now the Bourbons ruled Spain as well as France, and
Louis's southern flank was secure. Moreover, new Spanish and
French customs policies were keeping English and Dutch merchants
from exploiting the lucrative Caribbean trade, especially in
slaves--the coveted
asiento de negros. The English, the Dutch, the Austrians, and
many of the German states would have none of this. By early
1702, Louis's enemies had formed a new Grand Alliance against him,
and in May England declared war against France and her allies,
Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, and Savoy. The resulting conflict,
which lasted this time11 years, was called in Europe the War of the
Spanish Succession and in North America Queen Anne's War.179
.
In one of his final acts before dying
at Québec in November 1698,
Governor-General Frontenac had sent engineer Jacques L'Hermitte, the major at
Plaisance, Newfoundland, "into Acadia to prepare an account of its harbours,
as well as an inventory of its natural resources," no doubt better
to evaluate the colony's defenses. Meanwhile, Bishop
Saint-Vallier at Québec appointed former missionary to the Abenaki,
Father Louis-Pierre Thury, as his vicar-general in Acadia in 1698.
Father Thury founded a new mission among the Mi'kmaq at Pigiguit, at
the southeast end of
the Minas Basin. He intended to group the tribe into a single
settlement between Shubenacadie, northeast of Pigiguit, and
Chebouctou, southeast of Pigiguit on the Atlantic coast, but his death at Chebouctou in June
1699 ended that grandiose plan.179a
On the St.-Jean, Villebon, still commander
of the colony and ever the soldier, was convinced that another war
with England was imminent.
His proposals to attack Boston and Manhattan had been ignored by the
authorities in France, so he continued to strengthen his positions
on the river for the inevitable attack from Boston. The King
having allowed him to rebuild the old fort at the mouth of the
St.-Jean, Villebon pushed the reconstruction as rapidly as he could
and transferred his headquarters to the lower fort in 1698. He
also strengthened his position upriver at Nashouat.179c
Villebon died suddenly on Rivière
St.-Jean in
July 1700; he was only 44 years old. Although he had
successfully defended the colony during the decade following the
debacle under Meneval in 1690, many Acadian settlers did not mourn
his passing. M. de Gargas, whom Meneval sacked in
1688, "charged him with having intimidated and insulted the settlers
and with having extorted exorbitant sums from them for goods, among
other things." Gargas, in fact, "called Villebon the terror of
the country." In 1696, towards the end of the war with
England, the intendant of New France, Jean Bochart de Champigny,
"sent on to the minister other complaints against Joseph Villebon:
the seigneurs and the habitants of the Saint John River in
particular accused the governor[sic] of 'threats and bad
treatment' towards them and 'charge him with having secured for
himself all trade in his fort.'" The same complainants accused
Villebon's brothers "of aiding him in this business and of leading
scandalous lives." Villebon never married, but he was reported
to have fathered an illegitimate daughter, who married his
associate, Jean Martel de Magos. This kind of behavior, not
unknown among the Acadian settlers, was nonetheless looked down upon
by most of them and certainly by all of their priests. During
his nine years as commander, Villebon also had voiced complaints
against the settlers and particularly the St.-Jean seigneurs; he was
especially critical of Mathieu D'Amours, sieur de Freneuse,
and his brothers, who Villebon accused of being "too independent"
and lacking respect for governmental authority. Villebon
chided the settlers at Port-Royal for "indolently confining
themselves to making their land produce just what was necessary to
keep them alive," an oft-repeated complaint by French officials from
the first days of colonial settlement. Villebon was not above
accusing a priest, Father Jean Baudouin, a former soldier, "of
taking to the woods instead of attending to this parishioners and
having struck down an Indian." A short time before his sudden
death, Villebon had a falling out with Abbé Abel Maudoux, and the
priest insisted that he receive his honorarium before he
agreed to officiate at the commander's funeral. Villebon's
second in command was forced to pay in order that his predecessor
"would have a Christian burial." No matter, the Canadian
warrior was largely responsible for the defense of what was left of
French Acadia during most of King William's War. It was a time
when competence, not popularity, was needed to save the colony from
a much stronger English presence in the region.179d
Villebon's temporary replacement as
commander was
his second in command, who, not surprisingly, also was a kinsman. Claude-Sébastien
Le Bassier de Villieu, the
seigneur of Chepoudy and son-in-law of Michel Le Neuf de la Vallière de Beaubassin,
was a captain in the King's service. In 1700, he moved the colonial headquarters from the
upper St.-Jean back to Port-Royal.
In the autumn of 1701, de Villeu gave way to Jacques-François de Mombeton de Brouillan, the contentious governor
of Plaisance who had clashed with Iberville a few years earlier.179e
The new commander of Acadia "belonged
to a family of Protestant noblemen named Mombeton that came from
Gascony. His grandfather married Isabeau de Brouillan, the
last to inherit this title, and took the name, which their
descendants also bore." Jacques-François also sometimes used
the surname Saint-André. His family produced many warriors;
seven of his brothers died in battle! Jean-Jacques became a
captain and then an adjutant in the troupes de la marine and
suffered several wounds in battle "which he suffered all his life."
Brouillan, as he was called, came to Canada in 1687 as a 36-year-old
company captain. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic at Québec
and returned to France in 1689 with ousted governor-general Denonville
de Brisay; the two men were close. In June of that year,
Brouillan was appointed governor of Plaisance, also called Placentia
after the bay on which it was located. But Brouillan did not receive his
orders until February 1691, after King William's War was well along.
He left for his post that spring aboard the Joly and, upon
his rival in early summer, found Plaisance in deplorable condition. Brouillan's mission was to reorganize the colony, so important to
the French North American fishery. He promptly fortified the
town and its environs, "using the cannon fished up from the bay," just in time to
drive off a small English vessel that attempted to overawe the
settlement. Brouillan devoted the winter of 1691-92 to finishing
his defenses and constructing a new fort, named for the King. The following
September, an English squadron of five ships under Commodore Francis Gillam
attacked Plaisance. Though his garrison consisted only
of 50 troupes de la marine, Brouillan bolstered his defenses with fishermen and sailors, some of them serving aboard a frigate from
Québec, the Sainte-Anne, captained by Louis-Armand de Lom
D'Arce de Lahontan. Despite the presence of the enemy,
Brouillan continued to build new fortifications to protect the
approaches to Plaisance harbor. The English fired over 2,000
rounds against the French defenses, all to little effect, and
Brouillan managed to answer with 300 rounds, damaging the English
flagship. Gillam weighed anchor and attacked nearby
Pointe-Verte instead. The winter of 1692-93 was a hard one at
Plaisance; the annual supply ship having wrecked, the garrison and
local settlers found themselves on the verge of starvation.
Brouillan led a search "in order to unearth hidden provisions and
succor those most in need." The effort was successful, so much
so that the King ordered the Minister to grant Brouillan a gratuity
of 500 livres. When the ministry dispatched Lahontan to
Plaisance to serve as the King's lieutenant, Brouillan revealed the
darker side of his nature; disapproving of the promotion, he accused
Lahontan of intriguing for the position and feared that the naval
officer was seeking to replace him. Needless to say, "a sharp
rivalry sprang up between the two men." Brouillan
improved the post's defenses that summer, including redoubts built
of stone. In late August 1693, a fleet of 24 English vessels under Sir Francis Wheler appeared in Placentia Bay and attempted to force their way
into Plaisance harbor. Again, brilliant defensive tactics, Brouillan saved
his post from destruction. Wheler, defeated, weighed anchor and attacked Île St.-Pierre instead
and left Plaisance alone for the next two
years. Brouillan received more reinforcements in 1694 and was
able to form two companies of troupes de la marine under nephew
Joseph Mombeton de Brouillan de Saint-Ovide and Philippe Pastour de
Costabelle. An engineer, Jacques L'Hermitte, arrived in 1695
to help with the fortifications; a favorite of Brouillan, L'Hermitte served also as town major, as Brouillan's third in
command, and was "stationed" at Plaisance for the next 17 years,
until it was lost to the British. In 1696, despite bitter
rivalry between himself and Canadian naval officer Pierre Le Moyne
d'Iberville, Brouillan helped destroy the English fishing center at
St. John's, on the Atlantic side of the Avalon Peninsula.
After his triumph at St. John's, Brouillan returned to France.
In the autumn of 1697, the treaty ending the war with England
brought peace at last, and Brouillan took advantage of it by
prolonging his stay so that he could "take care of his health."
The King granted him another gratuity of 500 livres, this time for
his triumph at St. John's; he received the Cross of St.-Louis for
his years of effective service; and, miracle of miracle, a reimbursement of 16,000 livres which he had advanced to the crown
during the campaign against St. John's. Brouillan remained in
France for four years and retained not only the title, but also the salary, for
the governorship of Plaisance. To earn his salary, Brouillan
communicated regularly with the Minister and with his arrogant,
hot-tempered second in command at Plaisance, Captain Joseph de Monic,
a brother-in-law by marriage of the influential Le Moynes of Canada.
Ever alert to the augmentation of his personal fortune, Brouillan
took the opportunity to send Basque fishermen to Newfoundland to man
his small fleet of fishing vessels.179f
Following the sudden death of Robinau
de Villebon, the King appointed Brouillan as commander in Acadia in
late March 1701. As a result, Brouillan never returned to Plaisance.
The appointment was a promotion, with the requisite increase in
salary for the life-long bachelor, now 50 years old. Brouillan
sailed to Acadia in May with 40 troupes de la marine. Despite
the peace, his ship also carried munitions of war for the colony's garrisons.
Contrary winds forced him to put in at Chebouctou, the future
Halifax, on the Atlantic side of the peninsula. He took the opportunity to
inspect the small fort there and then headed overland to Port-Royal
via the
Rivière Shubenacadie portage and Cobeguit, at the
northeastern end of the Minas Basin, from which he traveled to Minas
at the western end of the basin. This
allowed him to visit the teeming settlements there. He was
especially taken with Grand-Pré. "He admired the prosperity of
this village," his biographer tells us, "but," like every royal commander before and after him,
"felt little sympathy for the independent spirit of its inhabitants,
whom he described as 'true republicans.'" To enhance the
defense of the colonial capital, he urged the Minas settlers to
improve the road, then nothing more than a cart track, between the
upper reaches of Rivière St.-Antoine, which flowed along the base of North Mountain
and into Minas basin, and the upper reaches of
Rivière-au-Dauphin, which led down to Port-Royal and its basin. The commander's request alerted the
Minas inhabitants to the
possibility of another war with England. Recalling the rough
handling of their kinsmen at Chignecto five years earlier, they likely saw an improved road between Minas and Port-Royal as
a potential escape route for them and their livestock as well as an
improvement of the colony's military lines of communication.179b
In Brouillan's entourage was a young
lieutenant of troupes de la marine whose life would change
dramatically in Acadia. Louis-Simon Le Poupet de
Saint-Aubin de La Boularderie, born probably at
St.-Germain-le-Vieux, Paris, in c1674, was son of a King's secretary,
Antoine Le
Poupet, sieur de Saint-Aubin. Louis-Simon entered the colonial service as an ensign in 1693 and
was posted to Plaisance in Philippe Pastour de Costabelle's company
soon afterwards.
The young ensign fought with Costabelle and Iberville on
Newfoundland in 1696-97 and followed Brouillan to Port-Royal in
1701. Nine months after his promotion to captain of troupes de la marine
and sub-lieutenant of the navy, Louis-Simon married Madeleine, a
younger daughter of Acadians Pierre Melanson dit
Laverdure, fils and Marguerite Mius d'Entremont, at Port-Royal in November 1702. By October 1705, he was
the father of two children, a daughter and a son, who created families of their own.179i
Brouillan's appointment as royal
governor was not issued until in February 1702, months after he and his
second in command, Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, the King's
lieutenant in Acadia and a friend of Iberville, had taken their
seats at Port-Royal. Peace did not require colonial
headquarters to be sited up a wide, twisting river with defense in
depth and its back to a portage leading up to Québec. Again,
Acadia's oldest settlement could serve as the colonial capital
despite its vulnerability to attack. Soon after he reached
Port-Royal, Brouillan "called a meeting of the inhabitants, but he
found them as intractable as those of Les Mines." However, he
did extract from them a promise to help in the construction of a new
fort at Port-Royal. He then journeyed to Rivière St.-Jean to inspect Villebon's fort at Nashouat, which "he judged to be useless and badly
sited." He ordered Fort St.-Joseph pulled down and the timbers
shipped to Port-Royal aboard the Gironde for the
reconstruction of the fort there. He evidently believed that a
fort at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean would be sufficient to defend
the cluster of upriver settlements and the essential portage up to
Canada. "During the autumn he had a
temporary enceinte constructed" at Port-Royal, "with a sunken road round it.
Inside the enciente he also built living quarters for the
soldiers, and he organized the settlers into a militia company."
Also that autumn he sent a long report to the ministry detailing the
problems with the colony and what he planned to do to about it.
He was impressed with the colony's new mast-producing industry but
was discouraged by the neglect of the fishery. "Fishing might well
become the country's principal industry," he reported, "but it had
been completely ruined by 50 years of war and privateering.
The settlers no longer possessed barks or rigging; they were
discouraged, and no longer even knew how to fish.
Brouillan offered to build barks, asked for rope to
make nets with, and suggest bringing in fishermen from Placentia
[Plaisance] to initiate the Acadians in the art of fishing.
Above all," he added in his report to the Minister, "one or two
frigates were needed to cruise along the shores, in order to protect
the fishermen." Evidently Brouillan was aware that the court
had decided "not to renew the privileges of the Compagnie de la
Pêche Sédentaire de l'Acadie," whose headquarters at
Chédabouctou still lay in ruin. Echoing Isaac de Razilly from
decades past and the opportunity to create a new Acadian fishery,
Brouillan recommended a new fortification at La Hève, which might
replace Port-Royal as the "chief post in the country." A
fortified Atlantic enclave not only could better protect a new
fishery, but also serve as a naval base with easier communication
with France. In time of war, such a base could provide a
greater opportunity to disrupt communications between England and
its North American colonies.179g
The new war came in May 1702.
News of it evidently reached Boston before it reached Port-Royal.
Brouillan's first hint of conflict between Acadia and New England
came after he sent Canadian Thomas Lefebvre, a voyageur and
interpreter for the Abenaki, "as his delegate" to Boston.
Instead of welcoming Lefebvre, the Bostonians imprisoned him "for
some time."179h
.
The war along the North American
frontier got off to a much slower start this time, but when it did,
the same savage pattern of warfare erupted between New England,
whose population had risen to 120,000, and Canada, with its much
smaller pool of settlers and a dwindling number of Indian allies.
The Abenaki and other Algonquian tribes, despite the recent treaties
they had made with the New Englanders, were as eager as ever to aide
their French benefactors. There were just fewer warriors to
take up the tomahawk this time because of New England retaliation in
the previous war and European diseases. When the war began in
Europe and he was certain that it would spread to the colonies
again, Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil, the new
governor-general who had replaced Frontenac's successor,
Louis-Hector de Callière, ordered the Abenaki to fall back into Canada and take up villages on
two rivers along the south side of the St. Lawrence between Québec
and Montréal. This would give Canada a buffer of protection if
the New Englanders struck the first blow.180a
Acadia, as usual, was left to its own
devices, with no protection from attack by sea. With this in
mind, Brouillan pushed construction of the new fort at Port-Royal--"an earthwork star-shaped
Vauban fort with four bastions and a ravelin," part of which
was authorized to be built of stone--though "A dispute
concerning the plans for the fort and the direction of the work put" Brouillan "at odds" with his chief engineer, Pierre-Paul de Labat or
Labatte." Brouillan also clashed with the local priest, still
Abbé Abel Madoux, over the relocation of a market and the town's
church. Brouillan also ran afoul of Port-Royal's "official"
curmudgeon, judge, scribe, and Marine commissary Mathieu de
Goutin, who had alienated every governor and commander of the
colony since his arrival during the governorship of Meneval a decade
and a half before. Brouillan persisted nevertheless in
improving the colony's defenses. By 1704, Port-Royal could
boast a garrison of 200 troupes de la marine organized in four
companies, and the settlers could boast half a dozen organized
militia companies.180
The first "confrontation" between the
Abenaki and the New Englanders, strangely enough, was not a bloody
raid but a peace conference in which only words were exchanged.
The new governor of Massachusetts, Joseph Dudley, invited the
Abenaki chiefs to parlay with him at the new fort at Casco, and
several of the chiefs from the Kennebec bands arrived there on 20 June 1703. Promises
were made by both parties, and they held a ceremony at a pile of
rocks called the Two Brothers, which stood near the fort. When
the council was breaking up and each side fired its customary
salute, the English fired first, using blank cartridges, but they
noticed that some of the Indian celebrants used real bullets when
they fired their salute. Years later, after the war had turned
bloody, Dudley sent a letter to then governor of Acadia, Daniel d'Auger de Subercase,
in which he laid bare what he
considered to be the treachery of Subercase's predecessor,
Brouillan. An historian of the conflict notes:
"Subercase had accused the provincial troops of committing a
sacrilegious act in digging up the heart of Brouillan from the place
where it was buried. Dudley responds in these terms:
'About five years since[,] I had gone to Casco Bay to make an
agreement with the Indians of my government.
There came to that place two Frenchmen of Port Royal, to whom M. de
Brouillan had promised two hundred pistoles to kill me. These
Frenchmen came to Casco Bay disguised as Indians, and were present
when I was making my agreement, but their hearts failed them in what
they had undertaken. Some time after, one of the two, being a
prisoner, and brought here [to Boston], acknowledged it to me, in my
house, on his knees.'" One wonders who the two cowardly
Acadians might have been, especially the humble penitent ... or if
they really existed.181
On August 10, two months after the conference at
Casco Bay, the frontier war erupted again when
Abenaki, Canadians, and so-called Mission Indians, under Lieutenant
Alexandre Le Neuf de Beaubassin, attacked coastal villages from
Wells east to Falmouth along the coast of Maine. After nearly a week
of fighting, the French and Indians had killed or captured 130
settlers and destroyed most of the coastal settlements of the
province. Meanwhile, other bands of Abenaki attacked
settlements in New Hampshire. Governor Dudley beseeched the
other New England colonies to help him throw together a retaliatory
force. Connecticut sent a troop of cavalry, but Rhode Island
ignored the plea. In October, a contingent of New Englanders,
360 strong, marched into upper Maine to chastise the Abenaki, but they lost their way on the seldom used trails, and
nothing came of the venture. Meanwhile, the Abenaki struck
again and again, and English retaliation remained feeble. In
exasperation, the Massachusetts authorities in September offered a
bounty of twenty pounds for each Indian scalp a settler would bring
in. At least one Puritan clergyman heartily applauded the
measure! This action led to the formation of at least seven
companies of rangers who scoured the Maine woods for the grisly
trophies that winter. The rangers, or "snowshoe men" as they
were called, enjoyed limited success, but they brought a new level
of intensity to the fighting that would characterize the rest of
this war. Indian attacks continued, with persistent savagery,
into early 1704.182
In Québec, Governor-General Vaudreuil,
no doubt mindful of the successes of his predecessor in the previous
war against England, set into motion a plan of attack against the
Massachusetts settlements in the Connecticut River valley.
At least 250 Canadian rangers and probably a larger force of
Indians, including Iroquois and Abenaki, under Jean-Baptiste Hertel
de Rouville, braved an especially severe winter to get at the valley
settlements. On the early morning of 28 February 1704, they
fell on the snow-covered town of Deerfield, burned most of the
houses, killed 50 or so of the inhabitants, and took into captivity
perhaps 100 more, 19 of whom perished on the long, cold trail back
to Canada.183
The New Englanders were
understandably horrified. Retaliation was sure to follow.
Again, the hero of Duxbury, Benjamin Church, promoted to colonel,
was empowered to lead an expedition against the French. And,
again, peninsula Acadia was chosen as the target of retribution.
But Port-Royal would escape violence this time. Massachusetts
"Governor Dudley would not sanction an attack on Port-Royal, though
Church strongly desired to destroy that nest of contraband traders,
among whom, it was whispered, some New England merchants might be
found, base enough to turn the enemy's wants for carrying on the war
against them to their own profit."184
In April, Church gathered a force of
550 men, including friendly Indians who were incorporated into the
colonial companies (North America's first "rangers"), and packed
them into 15 transports. Many of Church's men were armed with
fine new muskets that had just arrived from England. To convey
them up the coast, Church secured two British warships and a
Massachusetts armed vessel. Aboard these larger vessels were
whaleboats that would be used to land the troops at any point along
the coast. There were enough of these boats to propel half the
command against any point at once. "In short, the expedition
in all respects was as well, if not better, equipped as any that had
been sent out on the same errand."185
The colonel's strategy was predictable.
"Church was too old a campaigner not to know that the prospect of
coming upon the hostile Indians unawares was poor indeed.
Burning their deserted wigwams might be compared with burning so
much old brushwood. They were almost as easily rebuilt as
destroyed; and it was too early in the season to lay waste the
Indian cornfields. Church therefore had proposed to himself
the rooting out of as many of the French trading and fishing
stations of Nova Scotia as he should have time to visit, satisfied
in his own mind, as he was, that it was there he could do the enemy
the most harm. It being impracticable to reach Canada, he
argued that the next best thing to do was to strike where the enemy
was most vulnerable--that is through Nova Scotia. This was
rude strategy, to be sure, but it was the only means left of making
reprisals for such murderous raids as that of Hertel de Rouville."
Governor Dudley ordered that "all homes in Acadia be burned, that
dikes protecting recovered land be smashed and that everything that
could be carried be taken along with as many prisoners as possible."186
Sailing up the coast in early May,
Church picked up reinforcements in New Hampshire and then fell upon
the French settlements between the St. George River and Penobscot Bay.
At Koessanouskek or Kouesanouskek, near present-day Rockland, Maine,
he burned down the habitation there and captured the hapless
seigneur, Thomas Lefebvre, recently released from imprisonment at
Boston, and two of Lefebvre's sons, 28-year-old Thomas, fils,
and 23-year-old son Timothée. At Pentagöuet,
Church's men burned the fort and habitation and "killed or captured
everybody they found there"; luckily for the Saint-Castins,
neither the father nor the son was there, but Church did capture one
of the elder Saint-Castin's daughters. Next, the old
Puritan fell on
Mount Desert Island, which was deserted, and on Machias, where he
captured two men and their families, John Bretoon of the Isle of
Jersey and a M. Lattre. In early June, his expedition
reached the French settlement at the mouth of
the Ste.-Croix in Passamaquoddy Bay, where he may have secured more
captives. One of his units scoured nearby
Campobello Island, the future summer home of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, for anything French. A small settlement up Rivière Ste-Croix--Gourdain's--fell to Church's force on June 8. The
hand full of Frenchmen who had the temerity to resist Church's men
were "knocked in the head" on the old colonel's orders before he
moved the force up to the falls of the Ste.-Croix, where he
destroyed a tiny fishing settlement.187
Church next turned on
his primary target, peninsula Acadia. On July 2, he sent the
large ships to blockade Port-Royal. According to one report,
the sailors "burned down a few isolated houses, killed some cattle,
and captured a number of settlers." Church, meanwhile, led his whaleboats up
the peninsula to the Minas Basin. They arrived at evening low
tide and had to wait overnight for the morning flood before they
could run the boats into the basin. Aware of his approach, Minas
inhabitants drove off their cattle to keep them out of the hands of
the New Englanders. Church's men pursued the Acadians, who,
led perhaps by the King's lieutenant, Denys de Bonaventure, waited
in ambush for the incautious Yankees. A Lieutenant Baker and a
private died in the confrontation--Church's only fatal casualties
during the entire expedition. That evening, Church ordered his
men to burn the Minas settlements and to destroy the precious
aboiteaux, and with them the Acadians' ripening crops. Lands
that had taken the Acadians years to reclaim from the basin were
again covered with salt water. Church's men also moved deeper
into the basin and "burned dozens of houses and barns" at Pigiguit
and Cobeguit, rounded up as many hostages as they could find, threw them aboard the whaleboat
transports, and hurried back up to Port-Royal.188
Amazingly, Church and
his much superior force simply lay before Port-Royal and did not
attempt to take the newly-constructed fort that guarded the heart of
Acadia. Brouillan and his garrison put on a brave
demonstration, but mostly they held their collective breaths and
waited for the onslaught that surely would befall them, but it did
not come. In late July, after overseeing a feeble landing
operation which Brouillan's men easily repulsed, Church held a
council of war, which advised returning to Boston, burned and
pillaged what he could get at along the basin, rounded up more
prisoners, headed back into the bay, and turned his flotilla towards
Chignecto, which he had attacked eight years earlier.189
On 28 July 1704, Church
fell on Beaubassin during a heavy fog. This time, however, the
Chignecto Acadians did not attempt to negotiate with the old
Puritan. Having heard of Church's attacks down the coast and
suspecting that they soon would be his next target, they drove their
cattle out of harm's way and prepared to resist the invaders.
Church landed his force and deployed his men. The Chignecto
defenders fired a few shots and then disappeared into the
countryside. Some followed their priest, Abbé Claude Trouvé, all
the way across the peninsula to Chédabouctou, where, a few months later, the 60-year-old Sulpician
died of exhaustion. Meanwhile, Church and his men turned on
the recently-settled area called the trois-rivières--Chepoudy,
Memramcook, and Petitcoudiac--west of Chignecto. Again, the New Englanders plundered and
burned Acadian settlements before rounding up more unlucky
hostages to be used in negotiating for the release of the New-English captives the French were holding in Canada. The old
Puritan and his men
returned to Boston the way they had come, stopping at Passamaquoddy,
Mount Desert, and Penobscot again to chastise any French and Indians
there, but this time they found no one. At Casco, Church found
orders directing him to attack the French mission at Norridgewock,
up the Kennebec, but, responding to his men's desire to return to
their homes, he did not go there.190
And so ended Colonel
Benjamin Church's final raid on Acadia. The New Englanders had
expected him to take Port-Royal and expressed keen disappointment
when they learned that he had not. When it became public
knowledge that Governor Dudley had discouraged Church from taking
the Acadian capital before the expedition had even begun, a cloud of
gloom and frustration settled over the Bay colony. In late
July, the French and Indians from Canada struck in force again along
the Connecticut River valley and massacred more settlers in western
Massachusetts. The war had degenerated into another stalemate
and promised to drag on as long as the last one.191
.
Just before Church
appeared at Port-Royal in July, Brouillan had received permission to
return to France to look after his health--"he was afflicted with
gout, and a fragment of broken bone, the result of old wounds,
protruded from his cheek"--and to secure reinforcements for the
colony. He also had to address serious charges circulating at
court against him: "His authoritarianism and corrupt practices
had provoked a host of complaints against him; he was taxed with
having employed workmen from the fort on personal tasks, having
seized a settler's land in order to set up a menagerie on it, and
having melted silver coinage to make plates and dishes; with
carrying on trade through intermediaries and selling at excessive
prices, protecting a liaison between" his second in command, Denys
de Bonaventure "and Madame de Freneuse..., and himself keeping
Madame Barrat .... Denunciations rained down so thick and
fact," in fact, that the minister began to show disapproval.
Among other excesses, the governor had subjected to torture three
soldiers accused of stealing, by having matches burned between their
fingers. One of them, who had remained crippled and had
subsequently been acknowledged innocent, had gone to show the court
his mutilated hands, and the king, 'horrified at this cruelty,' had
sentenced Brouillan to allot half pay to this soldier out of his own
salary. Brouillan, whose three-year term had just expired,
felt it necessary to go and avert the thunderbolt which threatened
to strike him."191a
In December 1704,
Brouillan finally set sail for France, leaving King's Lieutenant Denys de
Bonaventure in charge of the colony. That winter offered hope for an end to the fighting when the belligerents in
Boston and Québec opened a dialogue for an exchange of prisoners.
Governor Dudley took advantage of this lull in the fighting to offer
Governor-General Vaudreuil a treaty of neutrality, which would
essentially have ended the war in the colonies. These
negotiations continued into 1706, and the frontier between Canada
and New England enjoyed a peaceful respite. A number of
prisoner exchanges during this period, some involving Acadian
settlers, gave colonists on both sides reason to hope that the war
at last was over. During the winter of 1705-06, Denys de Bonaventure,
now Brouillan's successor, took advantage of the quiet interval to continue
improvement of the
Port-Royal fortifications, including a new parade ground, the work supervised now by Jean-François Flan,
"clerk of the fortifications." This required the expropriation and
destruction of more settlers' homes, as had been done under Brouillan when he rebuilt the old fort, but it could not be
helped. The capital must be defended.192
The spring of 1706 brought not
only a renewal of nature, but also a resumption of hostilities. The French and Indians
from Canada struck the first blow in raids along the western
Massachusetts frontier that continued into summer. Prisoner
exchanges resumed nonetheless, giving promise of another
inter-colonial halt to hostilities. At
Port-Royal in late September 1706, a small merchant vessel arrived from Boston
under a flag of truce to make another prisoner exchange; among the 51
French prisoners transported aboard the ship were merchant Barthélemy Bergeron
dit d'Amboise, wife Geneviève Serreau de Saint-Aubin,
and their children Barthélemy, fils, Marie, Michel, Augustin,
and newborn Marie-Anne; also aboard may have been Louis
Allain of Port-Royal, and Thomas, père, Thomas, fils,
and Timothée Lefebvre of Maine, whom Church had captured at their
seigneurie near the Penobscot River during his raid up the coast two
and a half years earlier. The
New Englanders who owned the prisoner-exchange vessel were amenable to
trading goods with the Port-Royal Acadians, who were eager to receive them.
After the exchange of prisoners was made, the New Englanders
returned to Boston but soon
returned for another trade. The dubious business ended when
the good Puritans back in Boston learned of the contraband trading.
A public scandal erupted, followed by a trial that imposed heavy
fines on all of the merchants involved. Even Governor Dudley
was implicated in the scandal. As the strong public feeling
against trading with the enemy revealed, the war was far from over.193
During the spring of 1707,
Governor Dudley sought to redeem himself by organizing yet another
assault against Port-Royal. There would be no trading in goods
this time. The New Englanders were intent on destroying the
place. Colonel John March, who had been successful in earlier
fighting against the French and Indians in Maine, took command of a
force of two regiments of militia infantry raised in Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and a battery of militia artillery.
March's force numbered 1,100 men, twice the size of the expedition
that Church had taken to Acadia three years earlier. The force
would have been even larger if the governor of Connecticut had
cooperated with his fellow New Englanders. Still, it was
unusual for three New England colonies to join in such a venture.
The size of the force, which included Royal Navy Captain John
Stuckley's 50-gun frigate Deptford and 23 New English
sloops, as well as the perceived quality of its leadership,
gave every promise of success.194
.
Acadia, meanwhile, had
been given a new governor after Brouillan died at Chédabouctou, near
Canso, on 22 September 1705, on his way back from France. Denys
de Bonaventure, along with former King's Lieutenant
Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villieu, had commanded the colony during Brouillan's
10-month-long absence. Hearing of Brouillan's death, Denys
de Bonaventure "petitioned for the post of governor, but in
spite of his record of service and his popularity with the
inhabitants the appointment was denied him, owing to reports which
had reached France of his liaison with the widowed Madame Louise
Damours de Freneuse (Guyon)." He may, in
fact, have been replaced by de Villieu on the eve of Brouillan's
passing; if so, it would have been only temporary. Brouillan's
replacement as governor, also a commander troupes de la marine, a former governor of Plaisance,
and a recipient of the Order of St.-Louis, would
prove to be the last royal governor of French Acadia.194a
Daniel d'Auger de Subercase was born at
Orthez, in the Basses-Pyrénées, in February 1661 and was baptized in
the Protestant church there. Daniel's paternal grandfather,
Jean Dauger, a wealthy merchant of Nay, in Béarn, had the
wherewithal to purchase several noble estates, one of them the lay
abbey of Subercase, near Asson. "By virtue of these holdings,
he was ennobled on 6 July 1616, and sat in the States of Béarn."
Jean's two sons inherited his domains and, and one of them, Jourdain,
assumed the honorific Subercase. Jourdain's son Daniel
became a soldier, serving as an officer in the land forces for a
decade. By 1684, at the young age of 23, he was already a captain in
the Régiment de Bretagne. Shortly afterwards, he transferred
to the troupes de la marine, raised a company of 50 men, and
accompanied them to Canada in 1687, in time to lead them on an
offensive against the Seneca. By 1689, he was in command of a
flying column of 200 men. After the massacre at Lachine in
August 1689, the headstrong Captain Subercase wanted to pursue the fleeing
Iroquois, but his superior, Rigaud de Vaudreuil, held him back.
The following year, when Sir William Phips attacked Québec,
Subercase served in the defenses at Île d'Orléans, just below the
city, and assisted in preventing the New English from landing on the
island. He received promotion to lieutenant commander in 1693
and major in 1694
and served as garrison adjutant at Québec, replacing Joseph de Monic,
who was transferred to Plaisance, Newfoundland. Subercase
displayed the usual energy in the new position, but "his difficult
character gave rise to protracted differences" with at least one
other officer. Subercase served as adjutant in Frontenac's
campaign against the Onondaga in 1696. The governor-general
and intendant were so impressed with the lieutenant-commander's
performance that they sent him to France with official dispatches.
Subercase's big
promotion came in April 1702, when he succeeded Monic as governor of
Plaisance. He returned to France to take care of personal
matters and then sailed to Plaisance. Thanks to five years of
neglect under Monic, Subercase found the colony "in a sorry
state." He rebuilt the post's defenses in time to ward off several
English attacks from the other side of the peninsula. In
January 1705 came the expected counterattack against the English along the
Atlantic, including the rebuilt fishery center at St. John's. Two of Subercase's officers, Jacques L'Hermitte and Jacques
Testard de
Montigny, had accompanied Brouillan and Iberville on the expedition
against the English there eight years before. Subercase failed
to capture St. John's, but he was able to destroy the smaller
English posts above and below the center and on Conception and
Trinity bays. For lack of provisions, however, of the 1,200
Englishmen captured, only 80 could be brought back to Plaisance.
Subercase estimated the loss to the enemy of "4 millions," so, in
spite of the failure to destroy St. John's again, the operation was a
qualified success. At Plaisance, Subercase rebuilt the fort
partly in stone and organized privateer crews to prey on English
shipping as well as to harass English efforts to rebuild their
posts. Under Subercase, for the first time at Plaisance,
agriculture supplemented fishing as an economic pursuit. The
court was so impressed with his work at Plaisance that in July 1705
the King made Subercase a chevalier of the Order of St.-Louis.
Appointed
royal governor of Acadia in April 1706, he landed at Port-Royal on
October 28, during a lull in the fighting in that part of greater
Acadia.194b
Though disappointed in not receiving
the royal governorship, Denys de Bonaventure remained at Port-Royal to
serve as Subercase's second in command and was impressed by his
superior's conciliatory attitude. Subercase even impressed the
acerbic Mathieu de Goutin, who had said of Brouillan when he
had heard of the latter's death "that the country deemed itself well
rid of a tyrant." Subercase was not so impressed with the
state of the colony, at least in regards to its defense and
administration. "Everything was in short supply, and he had to
have stockings and shoes for the officers bought secretly in Boston,"
his biographer notes.
"In order to meet his needs and those of the administration, he
borrowed 1,000 livres and made 6,000 livres worth of
card money." Brouillan's rebuilt fort was showing age and had
collapsed in three places. "A wrangling spirit pervaded the
population and the garrison, while the English were constantly
threatening the colony with their privateers and warships, which
cruised unchallenged near the coasts," the biographer
continues. Dusting off Brouillan's
old idea, Subercase proposed fortifying a post on the Atlantic coast
of the peninsula and to shift some of the population there to
sustain a new colonial capital--a proposal that, if carried through,
would have alienated
the habitants not only at Port-Royal, but also in the Fundy
settlements. Turning to the Indians, Subercase requested gifts
for them and appointed the absent Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de
Saint-Castin's teenage son, Bernard-Anselme, to command the
Wabanaki contingent. That autumn, Subercase oversaw the
reconstruction of the Port-Royal fort and the building of a frigate,
the Biche. He beseeched the governor-general, his old
commander, Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil, to send him a
crew for the frigate as well as more troupes de la marine to
buttress the Port-Royal garrison. Vaudreuil sent 60 Canadians,
both sailors and soldiers, under command of Captain
Louis-Simon Le Poupet de La Boularderie, down the St.-Jean portage to Port-Royal the following
spring. Their arrival was timely and most welcome.194c
Alerted evidently by his
intelligence network, Subercase was ready for Colonel John March's
New Englanders when they dropped anchor in the Port-Royal basin
during the last week of May 1707. In the fort at Port-Royal
was not only the recently reinforced contingent of troupes de la
marine, now under command of naval officer Louis Denys de La Ronde,
Denys de Bonaventure's younger brother, but also Acadian militia from the surrounding
settlements, and 150 Wabanaki under Bernard-Anselme de Saint-Castin.
Subercase also urged the unarmed men and the woman and children of
the town to take refuge inside the walls of the fort. March's
New Englanders greatly outnumbered the armed defenders, but
Subercase's force made
up for it with the twin advantages of standing on the defensive
behind prepared works and, in the case of the Acadians, fighting to
protect their own homes and families.195
On the afternoon of May
26, March landed a thousand men in two columns seven or eight miles
below the fort, one on the north shore, across from the fort, to
serve as a covering force, the other, commanded by March himself,
along the south side of the basin, on the direct approaches to the
fort. Unfortunately for the New Englanders, because of the
late hour of its landing this main column could not reach the fort
before darkness fell. Subercase sent out skirmishers to delay
both columns, and armed inhabitants swarmed to the area to ambush
any New Englanders they could find. The next
morning, the 27th, a ragtag force of Acadians ambushed March's
advance along Allain's Creek, inflicting a number of casualties and
further delaying its arrival at the fort.196
When March's column
finally reached its objective on the afternoon of the 27th and threw
itself into battle lines beneath the ramparts of the fort, the New
English commander hesitated to assault Port-Royal with its rebuilt walls and
40 guns, including 36-pounders. He chose, instead, to
hold back his infantry and to knock down the fort with his
artillery. The artillery that could do that was not his,
however, but belonged to the Royal Navy, whose officers insisted
that their big guns could not be landed under the fire of the fort,
and so it was not done. Even March's own artillery commander
refused to bring up his guns under the fire of the fort. March
lay siege to the fort, instead, and the morale of his colonials
plummeted with every swipe of the pick and shovel. On May 31,
after investing the place for only four days and consulting yet
another council of war, March concluded that Port-Royal was just too
strong to subdue by siege. Sadly for many of the inhabitants in the
area, the New Englanders had plenty of time to pillage their farms.
Unfortunately for some of the New English marauders, the young
Saint-Castin, "at the head of a band of 35 settlers and Abenaki,
succeeded in trapping in an ambush a party that was busy setting
fire to some houses"; the Métis leader, only 18 years old, "himself killed 10 or 12" of them,
an amazing feat.
This stunning upset only fanned the flames of a rumor that hundreds
of armed settlers from the Fundy settlements, accompanied a hundred
Indians, soon would descend on the New English position "robbed the
besiegers of any courage they had left." On June 6, following
a skirmish between his New Englanders and Acadian militia under
Captain Pierre LeBlanc, March
lifted the siege, re-embarked his men, and retreated to Casco,
Maine. There he awaited further orders from the authorities in
Boston, to whom he sent three of his officers, including his
troublesome artillery commander, to inform them of his failure.197
Amazingly, the casualties among the
Port-Royal garrison were only one man killed and a few wounded, including
Captain LeBlanc, who was wounded in the thigh during the
June 6 skirmish. Marsh, on the other hand, "lost 40 to 50
men," but his force "had wrought considerable havoc by
burning down many houses, killing livestock, and uprooting grain and
crops." The Acadians, however, could feel proud of standing
their ground against the Yankee marauders and giving as good as they
got.197a
News of the disaster at
Port-Royal reached Boston before March's officers arrived in the
city. A virtual mob of colonists greeted them at the dock and
on the streets, mocking their military bearing and shouting, "Port
Royal! Port Royal!" Governor Dudley was mortified by the
official news and chose to send March right back to Port-Royal to
finish it off properly this time. Three prominent citizens,
including two fellow colonels, accompanied the hapless Marsh as
advisors and possessed the power to overrule him if necessary. Some
of March's original force refused to accompany him on the second
venture--men mostly from Plymouth and New Hampshire; and, again,
Connecticut did not join in the venture--but March's force remained largely intact and arrived
before Port-Royal on August 10. Subercase, meanwhile, had
strengthened his position by erecting field fortifications where
March's besiegers had camped beneath the guns of the fort.
Most importantly, Louis-Pierre, called Pierre, Morpain, a
21-year-old native of Blaye, near Bordeaux, and a privateer sailing
out of French St.-Domingue aboard his first command, L'Intrépide,
appeared at Port-Royal a week ahead of March despite marshalling
along two prizes, including a slave ship full of Africans.
Morpain warned Subercase of the enemy force sailing up behind him
and replenished the garrison with flour and other foodstuffs he had
captured aboard the frigate La Bonnitte in this, his first
foray up the Atlantic coast. According to Morpain's
biographer, "The arrival of the foodstuffs was viewed locally as a
manifestation of Providence..," the garrison's food supply having
been depleted by long-time neglect from France and March's earlier attack.
Subercase was surprised to see the New Englanders back so
soon, but, again, his soldiers and Acadians, with the help of
Saint-Castin's Abenaki and Morpain's buccaneers, stood ready to repulse another English
assault.198
March landed all of his
troops on the north side of the basin this time, evidently with the
object of using his artillery from that side to reduce the fort at a
distance. Subercase seized the initiative, however, and kept a
steady fire on March's camps with his big guns, limiting their
ability to maneuver during the day, while his skirmishers ambushed
and harassed any New Englanders who ventured out into the
countryside to gather provisions or to reconnoiter the approaches to
the fort. The besiegers soon became the besieged, with a
predictable result. Breaking under the strain of another
failure, Colonel March relinquished his command to a trusted
subordinate, Colonel Francis Wainwright of Massachusetts.
Wainwright wasted no time putting his troops into action. He
moved a column of infantry up the river to a point above and
opposite the fort, with artillery to follow under cover of darkness.
His plan was to cross at night with the infantry and artillery and
fall upon the rear of the fort the following morning.
Subercase learned of the movement from a loose-lipped New-English prisoner and foiled the
crossing by setting bonfires all along the upper river.
Wainwright pulled his force back to a point opposite the fort, but
Subercase shelled him out of the position and back into the woods. Wainwright then
moved farther down the basin, out of the range of the fort's big
guns. Desperate to get at the fort and overwhelm it with raw
numbers, on August 20, ten days into the siege, Wainwright crossed
the lower basin with his entire force to attack Port-Royal from the
south side, as March had tried to do two months earlier. The
ever watchful Subercase sent out men to build hasty trenches at
Rivière Allain, south of the fort, to slow the New Englanders as they approached his lines. Wainwright hoped
to draw Subercase's entire force out of the fort and into a
knock-down, drag-out fight in the open, but the wily Frenchman
refused to budge. When Wainwright's advance force hesitated
before the trenches at Rivière Allain, 60 men under Saint-Castin
and La Boularderie fell on
the New-English flank and rear but accidentally encountered a larger
force halted in a field of grain. "A sharp hand-to-hand tussle
followed, with axes and musket butts, during which La Boularderie
and Saint-Castin were wounded, together with some 15 of
their companions. The ensign, Antoine de Saillans, seriously
wounded, died a few days later." Jean Belliveau
le jeune of Port-Royal died of his wounds a few weeks
later. The New English, on the other
hand, lost 120 men on that day alone. In the days that
followed, more Indians and Acadians appeared at Port-Royal to
reinforce the garrison there. Fearing for the security of his
rear, on September 1 Wainwright ordered his men back to their boats,
and soon the big English ships opened their sails and headed back
from whence they had come.199
Thus ended the third
siege of Port-Royal in as many years, each a humiliating defeat for
the New Englanders. Would there be a fourth, or would the
New Englishmen finally relent and leave the Acadians alone?
Despite the victories, the colony, especially its capital, paid
dearly for its spirited defense. The autumn of 1707 "was
rather difficult at Port-Royal. The two sieges had ruined a
good number of settlers, for whom the governor vainly sought an
indemnity. The supply ship Loire brought no goods.
The governor was forced to give his sheets and shirts to the sick,
and to sell his silver table-service to pay for repairs to the
fort."199b
.
In 1707,
when he was able, Governor Subercase conducted a census of the colony. The
result showed "a continued advance in numbers" in Acadia's major
settlements: 570 were counted at Port-Royal; 271 at Chignecto;
585 at Minas, including Pigiguit; and 82 at Cobeguit, for a total of
slightly over 1,500 colonists, probably an undercounting. One
historian estimates that the "total for all of Chignecto and the
peninsula would be between 1,700 and 1,800" in 1707. The
following year, another census counted 53 at Cap-Sable, 15 at nearby Port Rachelois, and 42 at La Hève and Mirliguèche
farther up the coast.199a
Like the 1690s, most of the first decade of the new century was consumed by war,
but new settlers appeared in Acadia nonetheless and added their
bloodlines to the population. Reflecting the times, many of the
new Acadians were soldiers and sailors, and some even military
officers. Like most new arrivals, they tended to
marry into the established families, and some of them settled
away from Port-Royal:
François
Tillard, a
Protestant,
married Marguerite, daughter of Jacques Le Prince and
Marguerite Hébert, probably
at Port-Royal in c1700. On Holy Saturday, April 1713, he
abjured his allegiance to Protestantism. The following year,
he journeyed
to the new French colony of Île Royale to view land there, but he
and his family settled at Minas. Marguerite gave him four
children, including a son who created a family of his own.261
Joseph,
son of perhaps Jean Boutin
and Susanne
Rocheteau of
Québec, was a 25-year-old fisherman at
Port-Royal in 1701.
He married
Marie-Marguerite, daughter of Pierre
Lejeune
dit
Briard and Marie Thibodeau, at Port-Royal in c1708.
They moved to La Hève on the Atlantic side of the peninsula
and then to Minas, but they did not remain there either.
Marie-Marguerite gave Joseph eight children, including five sons who
created families of their own.262
Jacques
Bonnevie dit Beaumont of Paris, a corporal in the King's service, married
Françoise, daughter of Philippe Mius d'Azy and his
first wife, a Mi'kmaq, at
Port-Royal in c1701. Françoise gave Jacques five children,
including a son who created a family of his own.263
Maurice, son of Paul
Vigneau, Vignau, or Vignot
dit Laverdure and Françoise Bourgeois
of Île d'Orléans, below Québec, was born in the Canadian parish of
Ste.-Famille on Île d'Orléans in February
1674. In Acadia, he worked as a charpentier du roi
at Port-Royal and became a fisherman with his own boat.
In c1701, he married Marguerite, daughter of
Pierre Comeau l'aîné and Jeanne Bourg, probably
at Port-Royal. She gave Maurice 11 children, including six sons who created families of
their own.264
Mathieu
Brasseur dit La
Citardy also spelled his surname Brasseux and LeBrasseur, so he probably was not a kinsman
of Pierre
Brassaud/Brassaux, who had come to the colony by c1691. Mathieu married Jeanne,
teenage daughter of André Célestin dit Bellemère
and Perrine Basile,
at Port-Royal in c1702; Mathieu, interestingly, was 39 years
older than his wife. They settled at Minas, where Jeanne gave
Mathieu 11 children, including fives sons who created families of
their own.265
Pierre
Carret
or Carré, a soldier, may have been the Pierre Carret in
command of the inhabitants of Ste.-Anne-de-Beaupré who "captured
five cannons and a flag from Phips' army, at La Canardière, Québec,"
during King William's War in October 1690. He married Angélique, daughter of Guyon Chiasson
and Marie-Madeleine Martin,
probably at Chignecto in c1702. Angélique gave her soldier 13 children, including four sons who created
families of their own and remained at Chignecto.266
François, second son of
Hughes Dupont, sieur du Vivier et de Médillac, and
Marie Hérault de Gourville, was born at Sérignac,
France, in September 1676. Using the surname Dupont
Duvivier, he entered the King's service as a 15-year-old
naval midshipman at Rochefort in February 1692. By February
1702, he had been promoted to captain and serving in the Port-Royal
garrison. At age 28, he married Marie, daughter of Jacques
Mius d'Entremont and Anne de Saint-Étienne
de La Tour, at Port-Royal in January 1705. She gave
him seven children, five sons and two daughter, all but the two
youngest ones born at Port-Royal. Only three of them, two sons
and a daughter, created families of their own.302
Louis, fourth son of Hughes Dupont, sieur du Vivier et de Médillac, and
Marie Hérault de Gourville, was born at Sérignac,
France, in January 1680. He used the surname Dupont
Duchambon. In May 1702, he was a 22-year--old ensign
of troupes de la marine serving in his older brother's
company at Port-Royal. He was promoted to lieutenant in May 1704 and married Jeanne, another daughter of
Jacques Mius d'Entremont and Anne de
Saint-Étienne de La Tour, at Port-Royal in February 1709.
She have him 11 children, seven sons and four daughters, all but one
of whom created families of their own.303
Gabriel
Moulaison dit Recontre of Limoges, France, arrived in Acadia by 1702,
the year he fathered a natural daughter borne by Marie, daughter of Olivier
Daigre and Marie Gaudet and widow of Pierre Sibilau, at Port-Royal.
Gabriel dit Recontre and Marie did not marry. (Marie
went on to bear another natural daughter, this one by Canadian Louis
Blin, before she remarried to Jacques Gouzil in
c1711.) In July
1706, at Port-Royal, Gabriel legitimately married Marie, daughter of Julien
Aubois and Jeanne Aimée of the Cap-Sable area. They settled at Pobomcoup, near the cape.
Wife Marie gave Gabriel nine more children,
including four sons who created families of their own.267
Élie, son of Jean
Gentil and Marie
Jolet of St.-Nazaire-sur-Charente, Saintogne, France, and a
mason by trade, married
Cécile, daughter of Barnabé Martin and Jeanne Pelletret, at Port-Royal in
October 1702. Cécile gave Élie two children, a daughter and a
son, but only the daughter survived childhood and married, into the
Haché dit Gallant family at
Chignecto.268
Jean
Clémençeau dit Beaulieu of Bordeaux, France, a sergeant in the King's
service, reached Port-Royal before 1703, the year in which he ran
afoul of Acadian Governor de Brouillan.
The governor had authorized Clémençeau "to work on the
distribution of the King's provisions and munitions" at the
Port-Royal fort, but one of Clémenceau's superiors received
word that he "was involved in some malfeasance." The
superior complained to the governor, who ordered the sergeant's
arrest when Clémençeau returned to the fort, "but shortly
thereafter he was released and his clothing was returned to him
...." Evidently the sergeant had found an ally in one demoiselle Barat,
"who promised to represent him whenever and as often as would be
necessary." Two years later, while Queen Anne's War still raged,
Clémençeau married Anne, métisse daughter of Jean Roy
and Marie Aubois, at Boston, Massachusetts, so the English
must have captured him. Back at Port-Royal in 1706, Jean and
Anne's marriage was blessed by a priest. Anne gave him six
children, including a son who created a family of his own. Jean remarried to Marguerite, daughter of Jean Corporon
and Françoise Savoie, at Port-Royal in c1711.
Marguerite gave her soldier another son who created a
family of his own.269
Yves or Yvon, son of Olivier
Maucaïre, Maucaër,
Guaire, or Gure and Isabelle
Beauregard of Brest, France, came to the colony by June 1703,
when he served as godfather to Charles Savoie. Yves
married Élisabeth, or Isabelle, daughter of François Levron
dit Nantois and Catherine Savoie and widow of Michel Picot dit La
Rigueur, at Annapolis Royal in January 1712, and
remained there. Élisabeth gave him three children,
a son and two daughters, but only one of their daughters
married.269a
Charles
dit Champagne, son of Julien Orillon or
Orion and Anne Roger of
St.-Thomas de La Flèche, Angers, France, a mason by trade, arrived at Port-Royal in
c1703, early in Queen Anne's War. He served as a soldier as
well as a mason in
the garrison at Port-Royal and was a servant in the home of
Acadian governor de Brouillan; Champagne was in fact the "caretaker in
M. de Brouillon's residence" while the governor fulfilled his other duties Not along after he reached the colony,
Charles
dit
Champagne married Marie-Anne, a daughter of Jean Bastarache
and Huguette Vincent,
at Port-Royal in January 1704. This gave him good reason to
remain in the colony when the war finally ended in 1713.
Marie-Anne gave Champagne nine children, all born at Port-Royal, including
five sons who created families of their own.270
Jean
Mouton, son of Antoine, maître d'hôtel de M. de Grignan,
likely
the French aristocrat François de Castellane-Ornado-Adhémar
de Monteil, comte de Grignan, of Provence, and
Jeanne
Merlasse or Merlarse of Marsalle or Marsal, bishopric of d'Albi in Languedoc,
was
orn
at Marseille in c1689, perhaps at the comte's château.
According to Bona Arsenault, Jean arrived at
Port-Royal in c1703, when he would have been only age 14, and married Marie, 16-year-old daughter of Alexandre Girouard
dit de Ru,
later Sieur de Ru, and Marie Le Borgne de Bélisle, in January 1711.
The marriage was a fortuitous one. Marie's
maternal grandfather was
Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle,
former French governor of Acadia and seigneur of Port-Royal, and she also
was a descendant of former governor Charles La Tour.
Soon after their marriage, the couple moved to Grand-Pré
and then to Chignecto in the late 1720s, where Jean continued to practice his
profession, that of a surgeon.
As a result, his fellow colonists called him Sr.
Jean. Marie gave him 10 children, including five
sons who created families of their own.271
Pierre, son of Mathurin
Thébeau, Thébaut, or Tibaude and Perrine
Moran of St.-Malo, France, married Marie-Jeanne, daughter of
Pierre Comeau l'aîné and Jeanne Bourg, at Port-Royal in November 1703.
Marie-Jeanne gave Pierre two children, including a son who created a
family of his own.272
Gabriel,
fils, son
of Gabriel Samson and Françoise Durand of la Pointe de
Lévis, Québec, born at Cap-St.-Ignace on the St. Lawrence, married
Jeanne, a daughter of Barnabé Martin and Jeanne Pelletret
and widow of Louis
Chênet dit La Garenne, at Port-Royal in April 1704. Gabriel, fils
was a constructeur, navigator, and carpenter. Jeanne
gave him 11 children, including three sons who created families of
their own.275
Thomas, son of Samuel
Jacau or Jacob de Fiedmont and Judith Fillieu of
St.-Martin d'Harse or Ars, diocese of Saintes, was born in Saintonge
in c1677. While serving as a master cannonier in the fort at
Port-Royal he married Anne, daughter of Pierre Melanson,
fils and Marguerite Mius d'Entremont, in
October 1705. Anne gave the cannonier eight children,
including four sons, none of whom seem to have created families of
their own.273
Pierre
dit Lapierre, son of Pierre Pouget,
Poujet,
or Pochet and Françoise Plantecoste of St.-Hippolyte,
bishopric of Clermont, Auvergne, France, was a soldier in the
Port-Royal garrison when he stood as godfather to a daughter of
André Simon dit Boucher in December 1705.
Lapierre was still a soldier, age 26, when he married Françoise,
daughter of François Moyse dit Latrielle and Madeleine
Vincent of Passamaquoddy, at Port-Royal in March 1707.
Pierre remained in the Acadian capital
after it fell to the British and worked as a chaudronnier, or
coppersmith. Françoise gave him 11 children, including two
sons who created families of their own.279b
Louis
dit Poitiers,
son of René Marchand or Marcheguy and Jacquette
Gaillard of Bussière-Pointevine, Poitiers, France, a corporal in
the Port-Royal garrison and a habitant-gardener, married Marie,
daughter of Laurent Godin dit Châtillon and Anne
Guérin, at Port-Royal
in November 1705. Marie gave the corporal five children,
including two sons who created families of their own.276
Michel
dit La
Rigeur, son of Michel Picot, Pico,
Picotte, or Picou and Saintine Venarde of Chartres, France, married Élisabeth, or Isabelle, daughter of
François Levron dit Nantois and Catherine Savoie, at Port-Royal in November 1705.
Michel dit Le Rigeur died at Annapolis Royal, formerly
Port-Royal, in c1711. Élisabeth gave him two children, including a
posthumously born son who created a family of his own.277
Sr. René Fontaine, came to the colony by November 1705, when he
witnessed a marriage contract between Ambroise Melanson
and Françoise Bourg. Being literate, Sr.
René signed his name. When the new Acadian royal governor,
Daniel d'Auger de Subercase, reached Port-Royal in late October
1706, Sr. René, a clerk in the bureau de la Marine,
was appointed the new governor's secretary. In August 1707,
Isabelle, 26-year-old daughter of Jean Corporon and
Françoise Savoie, gave birth to Sr. René's
"natural" son, Louis dit Beaulieu, who was baptized at the
Port-Royal church in September. Sr. René did not
marry Isabelle. One suspects that when Port-Royal fell to the
British in October 1710, he quit the province with other French
officials, leaving his son to be raised by his mother, who records
show, had produced another "natural" child by an unidentified man.
Isabelle married William, also known as Guillaume, Johnson
dit Jeanson, a former British soldier, at
Annapolis Royal in c1714, when son Louis dit Beaulieu would
have been age 7. Louis survived childhood, came of age at
Annapolis Royal, adopted his father's family name, married, and
created a family of his own.304
Jean-François
Flan
of Paris, France, married Marie, daughter of Michel Dupuis
and Marie Gautrot,
at Port-Royal in January 1706. Jean-François had been
serving as clerk--commis des fortifications--at Port-Royal for
several years before his marriage and for
a time oversaw the rebuilding of the town's defenses. After
the British gained control of Port-Royal and renamed it Annapolis
Royal, the former commis moved on to Minas. Marie gave
Jean-François five children, only one of them a son,
who probably did not marry.274
François
dit Paris,
son of Jean Testard and Jeanne Vignier of Beaumont in
Picardie, not Paris, married Marie, daughter of Jean
Doiron and Marie-Anne Canol of Minas, at Port-Royal in November 1706. Paris worked as a
carpenter and a navigator. Marie gave him seven children,
including three sons, but only the youngest son created a family of
his own.278
Pierre
dit La
Forest, son of Pierre Part and Catherine Piouset
of Mouzens, bishopric of Tulle, France, was a soldier in la
compagnie de Falaise, serving in the garrison at Port-Royal,
when he married Jeanne, daughter of
Claude
Dugas and François Bourgeois, in
February 1707. Pierre dit La Forest worked as a
blacksmith at Port-Royal after his term of service expired.
Jeanne gave him six children, including three sons who created
families of their own.279
François, son of Gilles
Langlois, maître-orfêvre, or master goldsmith and Antoinette Muri
of Paris, born at Paris in c1680,
worked as a navigator in French Acadia. He married Madeleine,
daughter of Pierre Comeau l'aîné and Jeanne Bourg, at Port-Royal in
March 1707. She gave the navigator a dozen children, including
four sons who created families of their own.279c
François, son of Claude
Raymond and Marguerite Borga of Dorai, France, was a
soldier and master carpenter assigned to the Port-Royal garrison.
He married Anne, another daughter of Pierre Comeau l'aîné
and Jeanne Bourg, there in June 1707, and remained after the
British took over the colony. Anne gave her soldier 10 children, including five sons
who created families of their own.279a
Louis, son of François
Blin, also called Abelin and
Hablain, and Jeanne Barbier
of St.-Pierre, Lachine, Montréal, Canada, took up with Marie, daughter of Olivier Daigre
and Marie Gaudet and widow of Pierre Sibilau, in
c1707. Marie gave Louis one child, a "natural" daughter born at
Grand-Pré in December 1708, before Marie remarried to Jacques Gouzil
in c1711. (Marie had borne a "natural" child by Gabriel
Moulaison in c1702. Marie's "natural" daughter by Louis
Blin, Anne, married Michel Picot
III at Grand-Pré in February 1731.) Meanwhile, Louis returned to his native Canada,
perhaps because of his illicit relationship with Marie, and married Marguerite,
daughter of Jean Mineau dit Lumina and Marie
Quévillon, at Rivière-Ouelle,
on the lower St. Lawrence, in April 1709. Marguerite gave
Louis 14 more children, all born on the St. Lawrence.280
Jean
dit La
Giroflée, son of Claude Turpin and Anne Prission
of Sancerre en Berry, France, was a sergeant in the compagnie
de Duvivier at Port-Royal when he married Catherine, daughter
of Jean Bourg and Marguerite Martin, at Port-Royal in January 1708. Catherine
gave the sergeant seven children, including a son whose given name
and his spouse's name have been lost to history.281
Pierre, son of Noël
Surette and Françoise
Colarde of Mauset, diocese of La Rochelle, France, was a
sailor when he married Jeanne, daughter of Étienne Pellerin
and Jeanne Savoie,
at Port-Royal in February 1709. They remained at Port-Royal
and settled in the parish of St.-Laurent on the haute rivière.
Although Pierre became a farmer along upper Rivière-au-Dauphin,
he also continued to work as a sailor. Jeanne gave him nine
children, including three sons who created families of their own.283
François
Bodart, Baudard, or Bodard of
Brussels, a navigator, married Marie, daughter of Charles Babin
and Madeleine Richard,
probably at Minas in c1709. Marie gave François five children,
all of them daughters--the oldest one born at Grand-Pré in September
1710, the others at Port-Toulouse, Île Royale, from c1714 to c1725,
so the family did not remain in peninsula Acadia. Two of their daughters married.
The oldest one, Marie-Josèphe, married Jean Tessé
of Cap Fréhel, Brittany, France, at Port-Toulouse in c1728.
The fourth daughter, Marguerite,
married Joseph, son of Michel Vincent and Anne-Marie
Doiron, in c1745, so the blood of this family, at least,
survived in greater Acadia.284
Jean-Baptiste
dit
Lyonnais, son of Jean-Louis
Duon and Jeanne
Clémenson, born at St.-Nizier de Lyon,
France,
in c1684, emigrated to French Acadia in the early 1700s
and served as a notary, so he must have had some formal
education. At age 30, he married
Agnès, 17-year-old daughter of
Antoine
Hébert
le jeune
and Jeanne
Corporon, at Annapolis Royal in c1713. Between
1714 and 1739, Agnès gave Jean-Baptiste dit
Lyonnais 13 children, 10 sons and three daughters, all born at
Annapolis Royal.284a
Joseph-Nicolas, called Nicolas, son of Nicolas Gauthier
or Gautier of
Aix-en-Provence and Jeanne Moreau, was born at Rochefort in 1689 and
came to French Acadia in c1710, in his early 20s. Nicolas married Marie,
only daughter of blacksmith and sawmill owner-turned-merchant Louis Allain
and Marguerite Bourg, at Annapolis Royal in March 1715. According
to Bona Arsenault, between 1716 and 1741, Marie gave Nicolas seven children,
four sons and three daughters. Nicolas dit Bellaire, as he was
called, became a successful farmer, merchant, and navigator and
eventually the richest man in the colony.284b
Jean-Baptiste
dit Dumont, son of carpenter René Dubois and
Anne-Julienne Dumont of Montréal, married Marie, daughter of
André Simon dit Boucher and Marie Martin, at Port-Royal in
May 1710. Jean-Baptiste died at Grand-Pré in November 1713,
but not before fathering a son and, according to Bona Arsenault, a
daughter, both of whom married, the daughter in Canada, the son in
Acadia.284c
.
Queen Anne's War dragged on into
its sixth and seventh years with more pillaging and murder along the
New England frontier. The hapless village of Haverhill,
Massachusetts, was the hardest hit when French and Indians from
Canada, again under Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, swooped down on its inhabitants in late August 1708.200
Meanwhile, the Acadian
settlements remained unmolested, at least by direct attack.
The war again seemed to be a distant thing, although the settlers at Minas
had only to look at
their dykes to be reminded of how quickly that could change.
New houses appeared there and at Port-Royal and Chignecto to replace
the ones the New Englanders had burned. Families grew, more land was reclaimed from the marshy
wetlands, and Acadian life went on. But Governor Subercase was not
lulled by the interlude of peace that followed the retreat of
Wainwright's force. He strengthened the fort as best he could
and beseeched the Minister of Marine
to send him funds, reinforcements, and provisions without delay so
that he could be ready for the New Englanders when they returned, as
he was certain they would do. In Europe, the war was not going
well for France, so the ministry "could not send any substantial
reinforcements: the new recruits were mere children,
two-thirds of the muskets exploded in one's hands, and the soldiers
and officers no longer received their pay." The only
assistance Subercase received, then, were two small ships loaded with Parisian boys, and
provisions too meager to feed his garrison; he had not received a
substantial provisioning from France since 1706. Subercase
pressed the court for more assistance and received only an angry
reply from the Minister, who reminded him "that the treasury was
empty, and that 'the king would abandon the colony if it continues
to be such a burden.'" As a result, "Settlers and soldiers had
the impression of being forsaken by their king, who no longer even
paid his debts. Discontent and discord once again spread like
a disease. Clergy and officers denounced the governor to the
court, accusing him of imposing his arbitration in the settlements
of lawsuits, misusing his authority, and tolerating libertinage and
over-indulgence in intoxicating liquors. On his side Subercase
complained of his officers: one of the captains was weak in
the head, another was clearly out of his mind; others were dishonest
and negligent, the engineers was an eccentric, and the governor
declared the he would have 'as much need of a madhouse as of
barracks.' An epidemic of purpura decimated Port-Royal and was
the final blow to the morale of the population."200a
Luckily for
Port-Royal, the garrison received
indirect assistance from French privateers, including Louis Denys de La Ronde
and Bernard-Anselme de Saint-Castin, who preyed on English shipping along the Atlantic coast
and used Port-Royal as a base of operations. Louis-Pierre Morpain,
who had helped save Port-Royal in 1707, returned to Acadian waters
aboard the Marquis de Choiseul, a vessel belonging to
François-Joseph de Choiseul de Beaupré, the governor of
St.-Domingue. Like Denys de La Ronde and Saint-Castin, but to the chagrin of Beaupré, Morpain chose Port-Royal as his base of operations and was
even more successful against New English shipping. Subercase welcomed the young corsair
and urged him "to remain
there 'and even to take a wife there.'" Morpain must have
thought it was a capital idea. Leaving some of his men with
Subercase, he returned to St.-Domingue, incurred the wrath of his
powerful patron, who was not happy that his assets had been used to
assist a faraway colony, evidently returned the governor's ship to
him, and returned to Port-Royal. On 13 Aug 1709, at
Port-Royal, the 23-year-old privateer married Marie-Josèphe,
16-year-old daughter of Louis D'Amours de Chaffours, a
seigneur on Rivière St.-Jean, and wedded his interests, both
personal and professional, to Acadia; interestingly, Morpain's new
wife was the older sister of the wife of fellow privateer
Bernard-Anselme de Saint-Castin. Another
French privateer menacing New English shipping was Jean Rodrigue,
who commanded the barque Sainte-Anne;
interestingly, one of Rodrigue's crewmen was 22-year-old François Dugas
of Port-Royal. Unfortunately for the Acadian farmers in the
Fundy settlements, the success of the privateers, though it provided
succor for the colonial capital, ruined what little trade there was
between New English merchants who were ignoring the war and Acadians who were always eager to
trade for English goods. Worse yet, these depredations against
New England's primary industry fueled the angry Bostonians' resolve
to destroy the Port-Royal menace once and for all.201
.
In the spring of 1709,
two colonial shakers and movers, colonels Samuel Vetch and Francis
Nicholson, returned to Boston from London with orders from Queen
Anne herself to end the war in the colonies. It would be done
not by negotiation but by force of arms, and Canada would be the
primary objective, Port-Royal a secondary one. For the first
time since Phips's failed attempt to take Québec 19 years before,
the English would try to capture Montréal and Québec, again with
overwhelming force.202
No two more interesting men could have
been chosen to lead the venture. The 41-year-old Vetch was a
native of Scotland who had settled in Albany 10 years before and
established a successful trade with the Indians. In 1706, he,
too, had been implicated in the illegal trade with Port-Royal and
fined heavily. His conviction, however, had been overturned by
a friendly court ruling, and he remained in the good graces of the
English authorities in London. The plan of campaign was
essentially his. The Queen's government empowered him to raise
the necessary force in the colonies to subdue New France. ...
Nicholson, age 54 at the time, was a former army officer who became one of the most
distinguished colonial administrators of the age. In the
summer of 1687, as a captain in the King's forces, he had gone to
Port-Royal to represent Boston authorities in a dispute over fishing
rights along the Atlantic coast of Acadia. He soon was
promoted to the lieutenant-governorship of the ill-starred Dominion of New
England and fled to England with its governor, Sir Edmond Andros, when a revolt in New York toppled Andros's
regime in 1689. The following year, Nicholson returned to the colonies as lieutenant-governor of Virginia. He governed Maryland from 1694-98 and
returned to Virginia in 1698 as governor-general. Quarrels
there led to his ouster in 1705. He nevertheless remained a
favorite of Queen Anne and her ministers, was made a colonel, and
assumed command of the Canadian operation.203
An historian of the war describes the
objective of the expedition: "In brief, the plan of operations
was this: The campaign was to be opened by a combined attack
upon Québec and Montréal, both by sea and land. The fall of
Canada would, of course, involve that of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland,
and all the rest of the French possessions on the continent, which
would then come definitively under British rule, once and forever."
To this end, Massachusetts would supply 1,000 militiamen, Rhode
Island 200, for the attack against Québec by sea from Boston.
The larger force for the sea borne operation would consist of five
regiments of redcoat regulars, 3,000 men, for a total of 4,200 men
in the attack upon Québec. For the land expedition against
Montréal, to be commanded by Nicholson with Vetch as his second in
command, Connecticut would raise 350 men, New York 800, Pennsylvania
150, and New Jersey 300, a total of 1,600 militiamen to rendezvous
at Albany in May. The combined force of nearly 6,000 regulars
and militiamen and hundreds more sailors and marines was over twice
the size of Phips' expedition of 1690. Surely if all went well
for the English, both Canada and Acadia would be theirs at last, and
they would dominate North America.204
Things went terribly awry for the British. Colonel Nicholson's part of the operation started
badly when New Jersey and Pennsylvania refused to furnish the 450
men allotted to them. Undeterred, Nicholson made this up by
employing 600 Iroquois warriors and their families, keeping his
total force for the attack on Montreal at a respectable 1,500 men.
He moved up the Hudson from Albany on schedule, cutting a road for
his supplies and a possible retreat route, and halted at Wood Creek,
which would take his force into Lake Champlain. Here he waited
for word of the larger movement from Boston, built canoes and waited
for flat boats to be floated up the Hudson and dragged overland to
his position. At Wood Creek he skirmished with a small French
force from Montréal, which quickly slipped away to alert the big
French garrison.205
In Boston, meanwhile, Governor Dudley
and his lieutenants, including Vetch, gathered their transports and
waited for the British squadron filled with redcoats and marines to
arrive from England. Spring slipped quietly into summer, which
gave way to autumn, and still they waited. Nicholson's force
waiting at Wood Creek dwindled with each passing day when dysentery
struck the troops in their filthy camps. Finally, a dispatch
vessel from London arrived at Boston: the English squadron and
the redcoats the Queen had promised them had been sent to Portugal
instead. The stout walls of Québec and Montréal would remain
untouched by English fire.206
Colonel Nicholson would not give up.
"Unwilling to throw away what had cost so much time, trouble, and
expense to get together, the New England governors met Nicholson,
Vetch, and Moody at Rehobeth, October 14th, to see what was to be
done. It was unanimously decided to send the New England
forces against Port Royal, provided the queen's ships then at Boston
and New York would co-operate." The Royal Navy balked,
however, and there was nothing left to do but disband the entire
force and send them home.207
And, again, Colonel Nicholson, Captain
Vetch, and Governor Dudley refused to give up on an attack against
the Acadian menace. An historian of the conflict
describes the preparations for yet another expedition against the
French colony: "Though deeply disappointed, the dogged New
Englanders did not give up all hope of reprisal; once again they
lowered their sights from Quebec to Port Royal. England was
again persuaded to provide ships, and in 1710 Massachusetts again
rounded up its semidrilled throng of farmers, mechanics, plowboys,
clerks and apprentices. The soldiers of 1709 were asked to
enlist again, this time lured by the promise that they might keep
the muskets supplied them. Once again, when volunteers fell
below quotas, the colony calmly drafted the reluctant. Seamen
were impressed by the forefathers of that nation which would fight a
war to protect its seamen from British press gangs, and the parents
of those sturdy provincials who would make mock of the dainties in
the elaborate war train of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne did not
hesitate to vote 20 sheep, 5 pigs, 100 fowl and 1 pipe of wine for
the table of General Nicholson. A dinner was held at the Green
Dragon Tavern in honor of Nicholson, Vetch and Sir Charles Hobby,
the British squadron commander, and on the following morning,
September 18, the expedition numbering about 40 ships, large and
small, sailed for Acadia." Nicholson commanded the expedition
with Vetch as his chief of staff. The New England force
numbered 2,000 men, including a regiment of Royal Marines and four
battalions of provincial militia commanded by colonels Sir Charles
Hobby and William Tailer of Massachusetts, Colonel William Whiting
of Connecticut, and Colonel Shadrach Walton of New Hampshire.
A force of Iroquois also accompanied the expedition.
Nicholson's ships reached the entrance to the basin at Port-Royal on
September 24.208
Daniel d'Auger de Subercase, the
successful defender of Port-Royal in 1707, still governed Acadia in 1710. In the fort this time were only about
260 French troupes de la marine and militiamen, "the greater part of whom he was afraid to
trust outside of the fort for fear of them deserting."
And this time there were no Indians to provide the French an
effective mobile force. Worse
yet, the fort itself was in a ramshackle condition, its ramparts
hardly defendable. Not since the previous siege, three years
before, had France or Canada bothered to re-supply the garrison. When the English ships appeared at the
entrance to Port-Royal basin, Subercase rushed a dispatch to the
authorities in France stating that "if the garrison received no
succor, there was 'every reason to fear something fatal.'"209
How true were his words.
Deserters from the French garrison met the New Englanders in the
basin and revealed the weakness of the fort to the enemy.
Though one of Nicholson's ships ran onto the rocks at the entrance
to the basin and sank with the loss of 26 men, his other vessels
anchored safely in sight of the fort. The next day, September
25, the Yankees landed virtually unopposed on both sides of the
river. They moved immediately against the fort, two battalions
under Vetch attacking from the north, two under Nicholson attacking
from the south. Subercase did not sally out to meet them; "no
one would have come back!" The only resistance to the New
English approach came from some of the Acadians living on the line
of march who fired at the Yankees from their houses before hurrying
into the countryside. Meanwhile, the New English warships
lobbed shells into the fort while Subercase fired what artillery he
had at the approaching New Englanders. The French fire
compelled the New Englanders to dig trenches for cover and to resort
to siege tactics. His trenches already within easy artillery
range of the fort, Nicholson brought up his field guns and
supervised their emplacement. From the river, a New English galliot hurled
shells at the French after each nightfall. Three breaching
batteries stood ready by
October 1, when they opened fire from a range of only a hundred yards.
A New English shell "blew off a corner of the [fort's] powder
magazine," panicking the garrison, 55 of whom, including 50
militiamen, deserted their post that evening. It also
frightened many of the settlers taking refuge in the
fort, who beseeched the governor to surrender. Among the severely wounded
in the bombardment was
local landholder turned ensign Charles Saint-Étienne de La
Tour, fils, age 47, who inherited some of his famous father's finer qualities. The next day, after a desultory
return fire and a council of officers that advised him to surrender,
"Subercase asked for terms" but refused to surrender precipitately.
Both sides exchanged hostages and envoys, terms were discussed, and
a capitulation was accepted and signed on October 13. "Once more the golden Bourbon lilies came fluttering
down Port Royal's flagstaff; the defenders--about 250
men--came marching out with drums rolling, colors flying and arms
reversed; the English troops went marching in, the Union Jack went
up the pole, the Queen's health was drunk--and in the morning the
distressed French ladies of the fort were treated to a breakfast by
the English officers." Another historian describes the
defeated troupes de la marine: "Honour was saved, but the
sight of these starving soldiers in rags and tatters, many of whom
were no more than adolescents, saddened even the victors."210
No one could know it, but the
fleurs-de-lys would never fly over Port-Royal again.
One hundred and five years after Samuel de Champain had christened the
fledgling French settlement that the sieur de Monts had planted on the
shores of the wide basin, the name "Port-Royal" slipped quietly into
history. Here, historian John Grenier reminds us, "was the first French
territory that the British Empire seized and held in the New World.
Prior to 1710, groups of English adventurers had only raided,
sacked, and temporarily occupied French colonial possessions.
All the territory that the English conquered in the Americas thus
far had come at the expense of Indians, the Spanish (Jamaica in
1655), or the Dutch (New Netherlands, or New York, in 1664)."
The village which clustered around the old French fort Nicholson
re-christened Annapolis Royal, often shortened to Annapolis, in
honor of the Queen; likewise, the beaten down French bastions he dubbed Fort Anne;
and the English resurrected "Nova
Scotia" as their name for the entire colony--a crowning touch
in their twenty-year effort to conquer French Acadia.211
Nicholson's generous terms extended to
the disposition of Subercase, Denys de Bonaventure, and the rag-tag
garrison, as well as the French civil officials, including Mathieu
de Goutin, and their families. They were transported to
France on three ships, which reached Nantes on December 1.
Denys de Bonaventure went on the La Rochelle. Subercase, "accused of
negligence by some officers, and reprimanded by [Governor-General]
Vaudreuil and the minister, was summoned before a court martial at
Rochefort, but rapidly acquitted."211a
The fate of Bernard-Anselme de
Saint-Castin was different from his fellow combatants. Now
a privateer, Saint-Castin was not at Port-Royal when it fell
to Nicholson on October 13. A week later, unaware of the
disaster, he sailed through the Gut, perhaps with a load of booty.
His ship was promptly captured, "but he managed to escape and take
to the woods." The English tried to entice him to come out of
hiding and join them, such was his influence over the Abenaki, but
he consented only "to set out for Quebec with the act of
capitulation, letters from Subercase, and an English major,
Livingston, who wanted to see the Marquis Rigaud de Vaudreuil," the
governor-general of New France. At Québec, Vaudreuil appointed him to
command what was left of French forces in greater Acadia. His
mission was clear: "keep the Indians hostile towards New
England," and "maintain the Acadians in their loyalty to the French
crown." In January 1711, he returned to Pentagouët, gathered a
force of Abenaki, and prepared to return to peninsula Acadia.211b
Nicholson, meanwhile, turned on the inhabitants of Nova Scotia. The
terms of surrender provided protection only to those Acadians who
lived within three English miles of the fort: the 481
habitants dwelling in what was called the banlieue. To
secure protection, they were compelled to take an oath of allegiance to
Queen Anne without qualification. All others--those in the upper river above
Port-Royal, at Minas, Pigiguit, Cobeguit, Chignecto, the trois-rivières, Rivière St.-Jean, Pobomcoup,
Mirliguèche, La Hève, and other settlements,
that is, the great majority of Acadians--would be "treated as
prisoners at discretion, or as subject to such penalties as the
conquerors might see fit to impose." Nicholson promptly sent
envoys overland to Québec to inform the governor-general,
still Vaudreuil, that Port-Royal was now in English hands. He
warned the Frenchman that "if the discriminate massacre of innocent
women and children by his hired cut-throats was persisted in, then
the Acadians would be treated in a like manner." He left Vetch
to govern the captured town, with a battalion of 450 Royal
Marines and New Englanders to assist him. The following
spring, Vetch returned to Boston, leaving his second in command, Sir
Charles Hobby, in charge at Annapolis Royal. No committee of
citizens would be left to run the town as Phips had decreed 20 years
earlier. Some families packed up and
headed for Canada, but the majority of the Acadians stayed in their
homes, determined to endure whatever else history threw at them.212
.
As the autumn of 1710 slipped into winter, the
Acadians became more and more agitated over the prospect of
remaining under English rule. One of the provisions of the
hated terms of surrender dictated by Nicholson and Vetch was that
"All French must be deported outside the country, save those who
adopt Protestantism. That it would be most advantageous for
the Crown that this measure be effected with all possible speed and
that they be replaced with Protestant families from England or
Ireland ...." The inhabitants within cannon shot--three
miles--of Annapolis Royal were not affected by this decree, but
every other settlement in Acadia fell under it. The Acadians
were devout Catholics who would never dream of converting to
Protestantism or of giving up their land to foreigners. Nor
were they the sort of people who would sit idly by while the English
destroyed their way of life. In November, "the 'principal
inhabitants' of Port-Royal asked Canadian officials to help them
flee, complaining that Vetch 'looks on us as mere Negroes.'"213
An incident on the haute rivière that
winter further soured relations between the British at Annapolis
and the Acadians in the basin. John Mack Faragher relates: "The first sign of Acadian resistance came
in January 1711. Vetch had sent the garrison's commander, a
Huguenot from Bordeaux named Peter Capon, to negotiate the purchase
of grain from Pierre Leblanc, captain of the Port Royal
militia and chief inhabitant of the haute rivière.... As the
two men sat talking in Leblanc's house one evening, a group
of armed Acadians burst in 'with their firelocks cocked,' seized
Capon, and dragged him out into the night. Leblanc
quickly put an end to the incident by going after them and arranging
for Capon's release, paying a ransom of 20 pistoles; but
Vetch kept the pot boiling by sending an officer and fifty armed men
to Saint-Laurent chapel in the haute rivière the following
Sunday morning to arrest Father Justinien Durand, pastor of the parish of
Saint-Jean-Baptiste [on the lower river], as well as a score of
leading inhabitants--merchants Louis Allain and Germain
Bourgeois along with their eldest sons; wealthy inhabitant Jean
Comeau; François Brossard; and Captain Pierre Leblanc
himself. 'This was done in reprizal of what they had done Mr.
Capon,' Vetch announced. There is no evidence that any of them
had anything to do with planning the incident, and Leblanc
had been the one who rescued Capon. But Bourgeois was
well known as the man who had bravely confronted Major Benjamin
Church and his invaders at Beaubassin in 1696, and Brossard
was acknowledged to be a dissident.
The hostages would not be released, Vetch declared, until the
Acadians delivered the persons responsible for Capon's abduction."
The aftermath likely was never forgotten by area Acadians. The
upper river inhabitants "remained in the dungeon [at Fort Anne] for several weeks, and Bourgeois
died soon after his release, according to his family, as the direct
result of his suffering." Father Durand "was sent to Boston, where," says Faragher, "he languished in jail for nearly a year before being released
in a prisoner exchange with French authorities in Quebec." "[A]lthough numerous
inhabitants surely knew the identity of the men responsible" for the
attack on Capon, "no one informed the British," Faragher
insists.213a
The settlers at Minas and Chignecto
heard, no doubt, about the arrest and imprisonment of their fellow
Acadians at Annapolis Royal. They also heard that the garrison
of royal marines, who had not fared well over the Acadian winter,
had been replaced by semi-drilled New-English militiamen, and that
sickness and desertion had reduced the ranks of the New Englanders
by over half, making them vulnerable to attack. The Acadians
appealed to Bernard-Anselme de Saint-Castin, now the French
commander in Acadia, to help them retake the old fort. In late
June 1711, Saint-Castin and his Abenaki crossed the Bay of Fundy
undetected by the English and joined a group of armed settlers from
Minas and Chignecto for a go at Annapolis Royal. Perhaps as a part
of this operation, Abraham Gaudet of Chignecto "set up an
ambush, which resulted in his taking prisoner an English messenger
from the Annapolis garrison." Saint-Castin and his Indians
approached to within a dozen miles of the fort at Annapolis.
At a place still called Bloody Creek, near present-day Carleton
Corner,
they fell upon a party
of 70 Englishmen searching for building timber. A sharp skirmish left over a dozen of the
Englishmen dead and the rest captured. Saint-Castin
and his Indians, probably with Acadian support, promptly lay siege
to Fort Anne. Though Colonel Hobby had repaired the fort's
walls, his much-reduced garrison and the likely approach of more armed Acadians
improved the chances of the French and Indians
retaking the fort. The Acadians and
Saint-Castin appealed to Governor-General Vaudreuil for reinforcements. They
also alerted the governor of Plaisance in Newfoundland, who promised
to send them what cannon he could spare via French
privateer Pierre Morpain, who had helped save Port-Royal in 1707.
Morpain had been running munitions and supplies to the Acadians
since he had taken up residence at Plaisance earlier in the year.
The young privateer, whose success up to that time had been
phenomenal, set out again in "a brigantine loaded with ammunition"
destined for Saint-Castin, but his luck finally ran out.
An English frigate intercepted
Morpain's vessel. After
a three-hour battle, the privateer was overwhelmed, captured, and
taken to St. John's, Newfoundland, where he was held until 1712.
Meanwhile, June became July as the Acadians
and their allies patiently waited for the men and cannon that never came.214
Unfortunately for the Acadians, their
timing was terrible, and the assault on Annapolis Royal never came
off. Only days before the clash at Bloody Creek, "the most
formidable armament ever dispatched to these shores" began to drop
sail in Boston harbor. Colonel Nicholson, the indefatigable enemy
of the Acadians, had done much to bring this virtual Armada to
America. Flushed with victory, he had returned to Boston after
his easy capture of Port-Royal and soon sailed to England to stir up
the Queen's government for another go at Québec and Montréal.
His timing could not have been better. The Tories had just
ousted the Whigs from power, and the Queen's new Tory ministers were
"eager to discredit the Duke of Marlborough, whose stunning
victories over the French and Spanish had made him the darling of
the Whigs. The Tories reasoned that if France could be evicted
from America, it could be shown that this triumph would be of
greater value to England than all Marlborough's victories, which
were already being belittled as of more benefit to Holland and
Austria than to Britain." The Queen's new government cobbled
together a force of 12,000 men, including seven regiments of
Marlborough's veterans sent to England from Holland for the
expedition, nine ships of war, two bomb ketches, and about 60
transports and supply vessels, 600 marines, and the requisite
artillery, to be supplemented by 1,500 colonial militia to be raised
in New England and commanded by Samuel Vetch. Nicholson was
given the same mission he had tried mightily to complete the year
before: to move a force of 2,300 New York militia and Iroquois from
Albany to Lake Champlain and to fall upon Montréal when the
formidable force from England fell on Québec by way of Boston.
The armada began arriving at Boston on
24 June 1711. After turning Boston inside out for supplies and
recruits and ordering Colonel Hobby at Annapolis Royal to return the
100 British marines assigned there, the commander of the armada, an
"armchair admiral" named Sir Hovenden Walker, set sail for the St.
Lawrence on July 30. In command of the land forces was
a political appointee who had never seen battle, Brigadier John
"Honest Jack" Hill, brother of the Queen's new favorite, Mrs.
Masham. On
the foggy night of August 22, as he approached the mouth of the St.
Lawrence River, Admiral Walker's incompetence allowed part of his fleet to be
dashed against the treacherous north shore of the St.
Lawrence estuary. At least 900 soldiers and sailors perished
in one of the worst maritime disasters of the age. Despite
still having a large enough force to capture Québec easily, and
ignoring the entreaties of Colonel Vetch, Walker and Hill sailed
back to England, and Nicholson fell back to Albany. Back at Court, the
admiral and the brigadier blamed the disaster on
the Bostonians, whose hopes of destroying
the Canadian menace once and for all were dashed again, this time literally, on the rocks of the
Île-aux-Oeufs.
It was this force that gobbled up the
cannon headed from Newfoundland to Saint-Castin in
Acadia. Vetch, on his way back to Boston, reinforced the
hard-pressed Annapolis garrison with a fresh contingent of 200 New English
militiamen. Under orders from Brigadier Hill, Vetch also
replaced Hobby, a militia commander, with Thomas Caulfeild, then a
regular army captain, in command of the garrison. Meanwhile, Saint-Castin's
warriors alerted the force of 200 Canadians descending to Annapolis of
the failure of Morpain's mission and the
strenghtening of the British garrison. Vaudreuil's
men, reluctant to attack a fort without cannon, turned back, and
Saint-Castin and his Indians abandoned their enterprise against
Fort Anne.215
Queen Anne's War sputtered on along the
New England-Maine frontier, but the Tories in London had had enough.
Peace negotiations began in earnest at Utrecht in Holland, where, in
April 1713, Britain and France signed the first in a series of
treaties that ended 11 years of warfare in Europe and America.
Among the complex provisions of the Peace of Utrecht was a clause
that affected the Acadians profoundly. Having won the
recognition of a Bourbon to occupy the throne of Spain, the reason
why the conflict in Europe was called the War of the Spanish
Succession, France agreed, among other things, to cede some of its
colonial territory to Britain--its holdings along the shore of Hudson
Bay; the Caribbean island of St. Kitts; the region of Newfoundland;
and, in the treaty's Article 12, Acadia, "with the ancient
boundaries."216
Unfortunately for the hapless Acadians, the treaty was vague about these "ancient
boundaries." The French would claim for decades that they had
ceded only
peninsula Acadia. The British would insist that the
Peace of Utrecht had "made them owners, not only of the Nova Scotian
peninsula, but of all the country north of it to the St. Lawrence,
or at least to the dividing ridge or height of land."
Regardless of which claim was the correct one, the deed was done.
Acadia was Nova Scotia again. The great majority of Acadians
lived on tidal lands bordering the deep inlets of the Bay
of Fundy, along the shore that France clearly had ceded to Britain,
but a growing number of their kinsmen had crossed the upper bay to
the opposite shore, into what soon would become an imperial no-man's
land.
The long years of warfare with their implacable enemy, as well as
the vaguely worded Peace that ended the conflict, sowed seeds that
would bear terrible fruit for these simple farmers
who wanted nothing more than to be left alone.217
INTRODUCTION
BOOK TWO: British Nova
Scotia
BOOK THREE:
Families, Migration, and the Acadian "Begats"
BOOK FOUR: The French Maritimes
BOOK FIVE: The
Great Upheaval
BOOK SIX:
The Acadian Immigrants of Louisiana
BOOK SEVEN: French Louisiana
BOOK EIGHT: A New Acadia
BOOK NINE: The Bayou State
BOOK TEN: The Louisiana Acadian "Begats"
BOOK ELEVEN: The Non-Acadian "Cajun" Families of South
Louisiana
BOOK TWELVE: Acadians in Gray
SOURCE
NOTES - BOOK ONE
01. Quotations from Hall, G. M., Africans in Colonial LA,
2; Canny & Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World,
37. See also Canny & Morgan, eds., chap. 2, by Joan-Pau
Rubiés; Canny & Morgan, eds., chap. 3, by David Northrup; Canny &
Morgan, eds., chap. 5, by N. A. M. Rodger; Diggins, On Hallowed Ground, 261-62, 266;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 6; Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders,
chaps. 4-6; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 28, 36ff; Istre, Creoles of South LA,
2; Nonone, "Creole
in the Americas," 140-41; Taylor, A., American Colonies,
25-26, 29; Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves, 18.
Much of the information in the
foregoing paragraphs can be found in any good textbook, encyclopedia, or
online Wikipedia article dedicated to the Norse settlements in North
America & the European Age of Exploration. A recent
detailed treatment of the subject is Fernández-Armesto. See also
Canny & Morgan, eds.; Erskine; Hoffman; online Wikipedia, "New World," "Norse Colonization of the
Americas"; note 02g,
below.
A. Taylor offers a
review of Islam's triumph over the European Crusaders & further Muslim
advances in southeastern Europe during the 15th century that created "a
powerful sense of geographic and religious claustrophobia" among
European thinkers, which, ironically, motivated them "to break out and
circumvent the Muslim world." Quotations from 26. Taylor,
29, emphasizes the private, capitalistic nature of the Genoese &
Iberian ventures down the northwest coast of Africa, including the
discovery & exploitation of the Canaries, Madeira, & the Azores.
For Portuguese Catholic & cultural influence in the Kingdom of Kongo
from the early 1500s, see Dewulf, "From Moors to Indians," 26.
On the origins of the West African slave trade, see
Canny & Morgan, eds.; Diggins, which offers a grand
perspective of the institution in Western & African history; G. M. Hall. Trudel offers the date 1444 as the beginning of European enslavement of
West Africans, but David Northrup in Canny & Morgan, eds., 45-46, notes
that the first West Africans transported to America--aboard the
Portuguese ship Santa Maria de Bogona from Sao Tomé, off the
coast of West Africa--did not reach Santo Domingo until 1525. Not
until 1534 did a slave vessel--the Portuguese Conceiçao, from
the Congo River to Santo Domingo & Jamaica--sail directly from the coast
of West Africa to the Caribbean. Northrup notes also that not until after 1650,
when the plantation economy in the Americas began to development rapidly, did slaves make up more than "a relatively modest share of African
exports ..., except from West Central Africa." See Canny &
Morgan, eds., Table 3.1 on 47, 53-54. For the introduction of West African slavery into
French LA via St.-Domingue & Cuba in the early 1700s, see Book Seven.
For an explanation of Columbus's miscalculation of "the
length of the league," see Canny & Morgan, eds., 29n13. Also 31. Nonone, 141, describes Columbus's impact on the Caribbean
world as "linguistic violence."
01a. See note
07, below.
02. Quotations from
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 20. See also Eccles,
The French in North America, 4; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 113, 129; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 173, 175, 210;
Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 26, 28-29; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
21; Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB, 1:275; online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier";
note 05r, below.
Hoffman, 139, Fig. 43, is entitled "Itinerary of
Cartier's second voyage for the French king in 1535 and 1536...." Again, dates are from Trudel, Beginnings of New France.
See Richter, 26, for the origin of the word canada.
Mercator's map of 1569 applied the name St. Lawrence to
the gulf & the river 34 years after Cartier's second voyage. See
Eccles.
02a. Quotations from
Allain, "Not Worth a Straw," 1; Eccles, The French
in North America, 2-3. See also Allain, 2; Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
5; Canny & Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World, 59-60; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 1-2; note 02, above.
Trudel, 1, asserts that
"France was the last of the Atlantic nations to join the race to Asia,"
& adds: "True, since 1504, Breton fishermen had made frequent use
of the route to Newfoundland, but fishing voyages undertaken regardless
of science or politics earned no credit for France as a contributor to
contemporary knowledge of the world, nor any rights to the possession of
land." See also Trudel, 2. Allain also mentions de Gonneville
& the role of Breton, Norman, & Basque fishermen in French Atlantic
commerce.
02b. Quotation from
Eccles, The French in North America, 3. See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
5;
Costain, The White & the Gold, 15;
Deans, The River Where America Began, 120;
Fortier, Louisiana, 1:4;
Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 112; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:4-5, 7; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
3, 7-8; Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 81; notes 02a, above, &
286b, below.
King François I was captured at Mirabello, outside Pavia,
Italy, in Feb 1525. Imprisoned by Emperor Charles V, François was
compelled to sign the "humiliating" Treaty of Madrid, "surrendering
significant territory to his captor. The outcome of the battle
cemented Spanish Hapsburg ascendancy in Italy." The battle of
Pavia also has been described as the first modern battle in which troops
with firearms defeated men-at-arms, that is, Europe's vaunted knights.
The result was the decimation of France's fighting nobility. "Tout
perdu for l'honneur" (all lost but honor), the French king
supposedly said. See online
Wikipedia, "Battle of Pavia."
Deans notes
that the first African slaves taken to America arrived at Hispaniola in 1501, only 9 years
after Columbus's first voyage to the region. By the time of de Ayllón's
venture, then, slaves were well
established in the Spanish colony. Online Wikipedia, "San Miguel
de Gualdape," says not only that de Ayllón's settlement marked the first
use of slave labor in territory now comprising the United States of
America, but also that the slave revolt there was the first in the history of North America. Taking advantage of political disputes among the
settlers probably after de Ayllón died, the slaves ran off into the
wilderness to live with the Natives.
In 1521, Gordillo & de Quejo, at the behest of de
Ayllón, sailed perhaps to the mouth of
today's Pee Dee River, into a region the Indians called Chicora,
where he captured Indian slaves who spoke a Siouan language, & took them back to
Hispaniola. Among the slaves was Francisco de Chicora, who gave de Ayllón much information about his land & people &, in Spain, even agreed
to an interview with the court cartographer, Peter Martyr. After
obtaining a patent from King Carlos I, de Ayllón sent Quejo on a second
voyage in 1523 that took him as far north as today's Delaware Bay.
The slaver captured Indians in every district he touched upon,
ostensibly to teach them Spanish so that they could serve as
interpreters. De Ayllón took the Indian Francisco with him to
Chicora in 1526, but Francisco escaped soon after they reached his
homeland. Online Wikipedia, "San Miguel de Gualdape," says de Ayllón lost his ship "at a river he named the Jordan, probably the
Santee." Online Wikipedia, "Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón," says the
ship was lost at the mouth of Winyah Bay, which is north of the Santee.
The online Wikipedia articles say attempts to locate de Ayllón's settlement farther north,
including the 1609 expedition by Francisco Fernández de Écija looking
for an English settlement established in the Chesapeake Bay area, proved
fruitless, as have recent scholarly efforts to locate Tierra de
Ayllón farther up the coast from GA. See, e.g., Trudel, 8. The online articles also
say that SC state
archaeologists are attempting to locate the remains of de Ayllón's lost vessel
in Winyah Bay. Martin, F.-X.,1:4-5, first published
in 1827, says Ayllón--he calls him Vasquez de Aillon--sailed to SC, essentially on a slaving venture, in
1520, that he landed on the Santee River, which "he gave the name
Jourdain, after a man on board of one of his ships," that the Indians
received him with "hospitality," he invited them aboard his ships, they
danced for him, & then "he hoisted his sails and brought off his unwary
guests." No other source agrees.
Martin, F.-X., 1:5, adds that a Velasquez "made another
voyage to Florida in 1552, with two ships: he was quite
unsuccessful. He lost one of the ships, and the Indians killed a
great part of his people."
02c. Quotations
from Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 32, 112; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:3; Parkman, France & England,
1:149. See also Costain, The White & the Gold, 15; Hoffman, 30-31, 113; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
1-2; Martin, F.-X., 1:4, 27; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians
of Nova Scotia, 6; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
1, 55;
Hoffman, 30, 113, notes that, according to Jesuit Fr.
Pierre Biard, in an account written in 1614 & published in 1616, "This country (New France) was
first discovered by French Bretons, in the year 1504," but Fr. Biard
does not name the discoverers, so one wonders if they were anonymous
fishermen. Trudel, 1, says Breton fishermen had made voyages to
Newfoundland "since 1504." Costain makes much of the
role of St.-Malo in the North Atlantic.
F.X. Martin, Hoffman, & Parkman mention the voyage of
Denys of Honfleur. Martin says Denys "made a
map of, the Gulf of St. Lawrence." Parkman, citing Parmenter &
Estancelin, says Denis, as he calls him, explored the Gulf.
Though Hoffman, citing Fr. Biard, mentions Denys's visit to
Newfoundland in 1506, he says nothing of an exploration of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence, so one wonders how much of the Gulf the Honfleurais
actually "discovered" 28 years before Cartier.
According to Ross & Deveau, Thomas Aubert of Dieppe "explored the coast of
Labrador and supposedly took six Beothuks from Newfoundland back to
France in 1509." Hoffman, 31, 112, provides others
details of the venture. Online Wikipedia, "Jean Ango," says
Ango, not Aubert, owned the Pensée. See also note
05b, below.
MacDonald points out
that the Baron de Lhéry & Gueux was the same Baron de Léry & Saint-Just,
as Hoffman calls him, who, when food & water ran out for his animals
during the crossing from France, let them off at the first land he came
to, which was Sable Island. She also notes that the baron had
married a daughter of François de Salazar, baron de Saint-Just &
seigneur de Sauvages, Clages, Baigneux, & Courson-le-Chatel, a
descendant of Basques from the Spanish Pyrenees, & that 4 of de
Salazar's descendants--Poutrincourt, Biencourt, & Claude & Charles La Tour--would
loom large in early Acadian history. See notes
06b & 10e,
below. Martin, F.-X., 1:27, places Baron de Levy, as he calls him,
on Sable Island in 1508. Parkman's date, taken from Lescarbot, is
followed here.
Louis XII, who succeeded his cousin, the childless
Charles VIII of the house of Valois, ruled France from 1498-1515. François I, Louis's
son-in-law, ruled from 1515-47. François, in fact, died the same
year as Henry VIII of England, his bitter rival. See online Wikipedia, "List of French
Monarchs."
02d. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 4-6; Morley, "Verrazzano," in
DCB, 1:659. See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
5; Costain, The White & the Gold, 14-15; Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 105-14; Horn, A Brave & Cunning Prince,
29; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:5,
41; Morley, 1:658; Parkman, France & England,
1:149ff; Trudel, xi, 7, 9-10, 163, 282n8; Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 79-80; online Wikipedia, "Giovanni de Verrazzano,"
"Norumbega";
notes 08b &
286c, below.
Hoffman, 109, Fig. 33, is entitled "Verrazano's
voyage of 1524, showing the course up the Atlantic coast of North
America."
Trudel, 282n4, notes that Verrazzano's 1524 route across
the North Atlantic "was not followed again until 1562, by Ribaut, and
then in 1602 by Gosnold, who had acquired a copy of Verrazano's
account." The other route across, of course, was the earliest
one--that of Columbus & the other Iberians, south to the Canaries & then straight across to the West
Indies. See note 01, above.
Biggar says while "nearing the mouth of the St.
Lawrence" Verrazzano's "provisions ran short, and he was obliged to
sail for home," so he, too, like Jean Denys of Honfleur in 1506,
may have been an early "discoverer" of the Gulf of St. Lawrence before
Cartier's voyage there in 1534. See notes 02c, above, &
02g, below.
Morley, 1:659, notes that Verrazzano's
description of his voyage, written soon after he returned to France,
"records the earliest geographical and topological description of a
continuous North Atlantic coast of America derived from a known
exploration, and his observation on the Indians is the first
ethnological account of America north of Mexico."
Trudel, 163, insists "Verrazano conceived the name
Nova Gallia in 1524," but Hoffman, 108, a more detailed albeit an earlier study of
the venture, is followed here. Martin, F.-X., 1:41, says King
Henri IV applied the name to "his American dominions" soon after
Champlain established Québec in 1608, but the name in various forms
had existed for decades.
02e. Quotations from
Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 112; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
6. See also Allain, "Not Worth a Straw,"
2; Costain, The White & the Gold, 14-15; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:5; Trudel, 8-10.
According to Allain, François I did not believe that simply seeing territory constituted a
claim to it. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 38, for
the context of this notion. One could argue, then, that all Verrazzano
did for France was seek the elusive passage to Asia, which he failed to
find, & map an impressive swatch of coast in North America. Not
until the early 1540s, with the dispatch of a colonizing venture to
Canada, would France start making "claims" to parts of the continent
where the Spanish & the Portuguese had never settled. See note
20za, below.
Frustrated by his failure to find the passage to Asia,
Verrazzano made another trans-Atlantic voyage, in 1528, this one to the
region south of his earlier venture, to Florida, the Bahamas, & the West
Indies, where he met his end. On Guadeloupe, the future French
colony, he made the mistake of rowing ashore with minimal protection &
was captured, killed, & eaten by the native Caribs. Verrazzano
never married. His heir, brother Gerolamo, or Girolamo, may have witnessed the
navigator's grizzly demise. See Morley, "Verrazzano," in
DCB, 1:660. Trudel, 9, asserts: "... as in the
case of the celebrated Corte-Real brothers, no one knows for
certain what became of him," & goes on to detail several theories about
the explorer's fate but, like Morley, favors the Caribbean tale related
by the navigator's brother to the poet Paul Jove. Online Wikipedia,
"Giovanni de Verrazzano," citing Samuel Eliot Morison, says
Verrazzano went to Brazil in 1527 & harvested brazil wood
there, but Morley, 1:660, says nothing of a voyage to Brazil, only the
ones to North America & the Caribbean in 1524 & 1528. See
also F.-X. Martin.
02f. Quotations
from Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 20; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
134-35. See also Costain, The White & the Gold,
22-23; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 38; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
12-13; Hoffman, 176-77, 179-80, 191-95, 201-04, 209, 214; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 26-27; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 15-16;
Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 21; online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier,"
"Iroquois";
notes 02p, 139c, &
287, below.
Hoffman, 201-02, says that, after Cartier's voyages
to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the regional fur trade moved from the
dry-fishing areas of the Atlantic coast of Labrador, Newfoundland, &
Cape Breton Island into the inhabited regions of the Gulf, which would
have led to more contact with the Mi'kmaq. Weidensaul emphasizes
the familiarity of the Mi'kmaq with European fishermen by the time of
Cartier's appearance in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
02g. Quotations
from Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 132; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 12; Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:165.
See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France, 3;
Costain, The White & the Gold, 15-20, 22; Hoffman, 113,
133, 173, 189; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:3, 7-8; Parkman, France & England,
1:149; Trudel, "Cartier," 1:166;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 13-15, 18, 283-84n13; online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier," "L'anse Aux Meadows"; notes
285 & 287, below; Book Two.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 283n5, reminds
us that the names of Cartier's vessels on his first expedition to Nova
Gallia, as well as the identities of his ships' officers, have been lost
to history. Costain, 16-17, details the ceremony at St.-Malo on
the eve of Cartier's departure presided over by Vice-admiral of France
Charles de Mouey, sieur de la Milleraye. Costain specualates that
the presence of such a high official for what normally would have been a
pro-forma ceremony was due to the independent-mindedness of
Malouine sailors,perhaps including Cartier. Costain relates:
"Everyone knew what was behind this announcement [that all members of
Cartier's crews must take a public oath of obediance to the King before
the expedition could depart]. St. Malo did not favor any further
efforts to open up the new continent. It was very pleasant and
profitable for them as things stood, with the chance to fish in the most
prolific of waters, free of government control and supervision.
They did not want colonies on the shores of America, and regulations to
fetter their movements, and great men like this furred and feathered
admiral to keep them in line. Their attitude of sullen opposition
was so well known that this oath had been deemed necessary to insure
their obedience at sea."
Parkman says Denis of Honfleur explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence
in 1506. Martin, F.-X., 1:3, calling him Denys,
agrees. Biggar says
the Portuguese Fagundes explored it in 1520. See note
286c, below. If so, Cartier only
re-discovered that body of water, though he was the first explorer to
offer compelling descriptions of what he saw there. However,
Costain, 15, claims that during the two decades after Cabot's
explorations when European fishermen made annual voyages to & from the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland, "No one guessed how close they were to a
tremendous secret; that just behind the Island of Baccalaos
[Newfoundland] there was a gulf shaped like a great funnel of the gods
into which a majestic river poured." This implies that it was
Cartier who discovered the gulf. Parkman & Biggar are followed
here. See also Costain, 18; note
02c, above.
Costain, 18, says Cartier named Ste.-Catherine harbor
after his wife, Catherine Des Granche, described by Costain, 16, as
Marie-Catherine, daughter of "Messire Honoré des Granches, chevalier and
constable of St.-Malo." See also Trudel, "Cartier."
Martin, F.-X., 1:7-8, first published in 1827, offers a
delightful story about the origin of the name "Canada": At the
Baie de Chaleurs "Two sailors (the wretched remnant of the crew of a
Spanish ship, which had been wrecked there) were wandering on the beach,
when Cartier's boat approached. The French inquired what country
they were in; one of the Spaniards, who, being pressed by hunger,
imagined he was asked whether there was any thing to eat, replied,
Aca nada; 'there is nothing here.' The French in the boat, on
returning to Cartier, told him the Spaniard said the country was called
Canada." More recent sources accept the Iroquoian version
of the name. See note 02, above.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 14, offers a
full-page map entitled "Cartier's first voyage 1534."
Hoffman, 133, Fig. 42, is entitled "Itinerary of
Cartier's first voyage for the French king in 1534."
02h. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 16-17; Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 135-36. See also Costain, The White & the Gold,
23, 25; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 113,
129; Hoffman, 133, 138, 142, 163, 177, 179, 202-12, 214;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 27; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 28-29, 284n15; Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:166; Marcel Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB,
1:275, &
online; Taylor,
A., Crucible of War, 436;
online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier," Percé, Quebec,"
"St. Lawrence Iroquoians."
For a famous 18th-century view of the Pierced Island,
which Samuel de Champlain named in 1603, see Fischer, 129; A. Taylor;
online Wikipedia, Percé, Quebec"; note 05u,
below. Costain, 25, says Cartier came up with the name Gaspé.
At the time Cartier encountered them at Gaspé, the
territory of the Laurentian Iroquois
included the St. Lawrence valley from above the falls at
present-day Montréal to the shores of Lake Ontario & down to the islands
below Québec. On their annual fishing trips, however, they paddled
down the St. Lawrence as far as the
Strait of Belle-Isle to catch cod & hunt seals & other sea-going
mammals. Gaspé evidently was an important stop on this seasonal
migration. See Hoffman, 208-10; online Wikipedia, "St. Lawrence
Iroquoians." Hoffman, 202, says of their culture: "Linguistically, these people belonged to the
Iroquoian family of languages; culturally they constituted the
northernmost and easternmost outpost of Iroquois culture, which was
characterized by an economy based on maize agriculture, by a sedentary
pattern of settlement, by fortified villages containing matrilineal
extended families living communally in long-houses, by a complex clan
and moiety system which formed the foundations for an extensive
governmental and religious structure, and by a well-developed pattern of
warfare. These traits stand in sharp contrast to those of the
surrounding Algonquian tribes [including the Mi'kmaq], who were largely
non-agricultural. The culture of the St. Lawrence or Canadian
Iroquois was unusual in another respect, however. Situated as they
were along the banks of the St. Lawrence River, at the very northern
limit of maize agriculture, the Canadian Iroquois seem to have been
strongly oriented, especially in the sections of their range, to the
river and to the sea." Trudel, "Cartier," 1:166, calls them "Laurentian
Iroquois." Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 17, says
these Iroquois had "invaded the St. Lawrence Valley around the year
1200, introduced the cultivation of corn, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco,
and finally imposed their domination along the whole length of the
river." See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
28-29.
02i. Quotations from
Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 136; Trudel, "Donnacona," in
DCB, 1:275;
Trudel, "Cartier," in DCB, 1:166; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France,
17-19.
See also Costain, The White & the Gold, 23-26; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 113; Hoffman, 133, 137, 173, 180, 209;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 27-28;
Trudel,
Beginnings of New France,
155;
online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier."
Donnacona's name is variously spelled Donacona &
Donnaconna. Taignoagny's name also is rendered Taignoagni &
Taignoagny, &
Domagaya, Dom Agaya & Domagaia. See, e.g., Richter. Fischer
insists that Cartier "treated the Indians [at Gaspé] brutally, kidnapped
several, and took them captive to France." Other sources disagree.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 155, places the
kidnapping of the Iroquois brothers--for that is what it was--in the
context of the language barrier between French & Indian.
Costain, 26, makes much of a council of masters,
officers, & sailors aboard one of the ships off the western end of
Anticosi in which Cartier asked the company if they preferred to winter
in this strange new land & continue their explorations in the spring or
return to St.-Malo before winter set in. Not surprisingly, the
company preferred to head home.
02j. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 31-33; Trudel, "Cartier," in DCB, 1:168; Trudel, "Donnacona,"
in DCB, 1:276; Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 141-42, 173. See also Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 113; <grandcolombier.com/2013/01/02/an-english-history-of-saint-pierre-and-miquelon>; Hoffman, 183, 187-88; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 31-32; Trudel, Beginnings of
New France, 30, 42; Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves,
20; Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 80-81; online Wikipedia,
"Jacques Cartier"' notes 02g,
& 02i, above, & 02k & 286c, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of
New France, 42, insists that "Cartier had no intention of taking
Donnacona back to Stadacona. He had removed him to make way for a
chief whom he considered more reliable"--Agona. Needless to say,
Cartier also intended for Donnacona's troublesome sons to remain in
France.
Hoffman, 187, citing Richard Hakluyt, details an
English venture to Cape Breton Island in 1536, about the time that
Cartier returned from his second voyage. The Englishmen, 120 in
number, led by Richard Hore, a leather-seller from London & "a man of
goodly stature and of great courage" & including "divers gentlemen" on a
"voyage of discoverie," sailed in 2 ships, the Trinity & the
William of London (also called the Minion). They landed
at Cape Breton before sailing north to Newfoundland, "which they were
unable to leave because of inadequate supplies. After starvation
had reduced them to cannibalism, the explorers succeeded in capturing a
French fishing boat carrying supplies, and returned to England."
In truth, Hoffman, 188, using primary sources discovered by
early 20th-century scholars, the Hore voyage was a fishing expedition to
the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, not a "voyage of discoverie." If
there were "divers gentlemen" aboard, they were essentially "tourists."
Moreover, Hore's vessels, having left in Apr 1536, returned to England
in Sep & Oct. This would place the Hore ships off of Newfoundland
about the time that Cartier, returning from Canada, reached Cape Race,
stopped at Renewse Harbor, & then headed back to St.-Malo.
02k. Quotations from
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 33-34; Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB, 1:276; Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 156.
See
also Hoffman, 142-44, 157-60, 183, 217-27, 237-38; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
32, 42, 151; Trudel, "Cartier," 168; Trudel, "Donnacona," 1:275; online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier."
The 10 Iroquois who Cartier took with him to France
included not only Donnacona & his 2 sons, but also "a little girl of ten or 12 years of age, and two little boys whom
Cartier had received as gifts the preceding autumn, a little girl of
eight or nine years of age whom the chief of Achelacy had given him, and
three other Indians." Quotation from Trudel, "Donnacona," 1:276.
See also Trudel, "Cartier,"
168; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 32. Only 1 of the
little girls survived their time in France. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
42. This source, & Trudel, "Donnacona," 1:275, say Donnacona died probably
in 1539. Hoffman, 156, says the contemporary author, André Thevet, called the chief Donacona Aguanna & reported that "This
man died in France as a good Christian, speaking French, for he had
lived there four years....," which would make his death in c1540, the
year before Cartier returned to Canada. Thevet's statement also
implies that Donnacona was 1 of the 3 unnamed Iroquois men who were
baptized in France. The dates of the other Indians' deaths evidently are
unrecorded, as is the fate of the Iroquois girl who was still alive in
1541. For the Iroquois captives' contributions to Cartier's
Relations, the collective accounts of his voyages printed in France,
see Hoffman, 156-60, 217-27, the latter pages a detailed appendix of
St. Lawrence Iroquois words & phrases gleaned from Cartier's first &
second voyages. For the Relations' many editions, see
Hoffman, 237-38.
Hoffman, 183, using a Spanish source, insists Cartier and his men considered their second voyage to be a failure.
Trudel's quotation on p. 33, cited above, seems to say otherwise.
However, Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
151, says: "The winter of 1535-36 had
been a miserable failure."
02l. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 42-46; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 147; Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:169; Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB, 1:276. See also
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 113-14; Hoffman, 144-46,
183-85, 201; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 32; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 35, 39, 47-49, 156;
Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 81; notes
02, 02g,
& 02i, above.
For location of the Cap-Rouge/Charlesbourg-Royal site
relative to Stadacona & Rivière Ste.-Croix, see the illustration at the
bottom of Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
43, entitled "Oblique view of the region where the first French colony
was established in North America, 1541-1543."
Online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier," says on 7 Sep
1541, a couple of weeks after reaching Stadacona, "Cartier left with the longboats for a reconnaissance in search of
'Saguenay'" & then reached Hochelaga. Cartier knew from his second voyage that
what is today called Rivière Saguenay lay downriver at Tadoussac, so he would
have been searching for the kingdom, not the river, via Hochelaga. The exploration of
Rivière Saguenay was conducted by men under Roberval, not Cartier, in 1542 or
1543. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 48-49; notes 02n
& 02s, below.
The 2 ships sent back to France in early Sep 1541
reached St.-Malo on 3 Oct. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
44, who adds, 44-45: "Francis I's reaction that autumn is
not known. If those letters from Charlesbourg Royal, the first
mail sent from the St Lawrence valley, spoke of silver, gold, and
diamonds, glittering with 'sparkles of fire,' he must have believed
himself at last to be as rich as Charles V!," until the assayers in
France discovered the true nature of Cartier's treasure. The
result led to a saying in France: "Faux comme un diamant du
Canada"--"As fake as a Canadian diamond." See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
48; online Wikipedia, "Cap Diamant," the name of the promontory on which Québec
City stands today.
02m. See Allain, "Not Worth a Straw,"
2-3; Eccles, Canadian Frontier,
12ff; Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 114-15; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 148ff, 151-55,
161-67, 184, 188-96, 217-27; La Rocque de Roquebrune, "La Rocque de
Roberval," in DCB, 1:425; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:18; Micelle, "From Law Court to Local
Government," 422n32; Parkman,
France & England, 1:145ff; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 33; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians of Nova
Scotia, 6; Taylor, A., American Colonies, 92; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
52-53, 151; Trudel,
"Cartier," in DCB, 1:171.
Richter reminds us that after Robeval returned to France
in 1543, "As far as we know, no Europeans traveled up the St. Lawrence
River for another forty years," hence the dubious nature of French
claims to the region.
Parkman, a classic but sometimes
"dated" study, gives a detailed account of the
ventures of Verrazzano, Cartier, & Roberval, as understood in the
late 1860s & 1870s. For recent evaluations of Cartier's voyages &
the lessons learned from them, see Eccles; Hoffman; Ross & Deveau;
A. Taylor; Trudel,
"Cartier," in DCB, 1:171. Hoffman, 161-67, 217-27, analyzes the cartographical
& linguistic legacy of Cartier's ventures.
For an un-translated copy of Roberval's instructions from the French
court, dated 1540, see Micelle.
Allain provides a summation of François I's ideas of legitimate
territorial claim & mentions the Roberval effort. See also
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 52-53; online Wikipedia, "Francis I of France."
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 53, offers this
compelling contrast between Spanish & French exploration in North
America during the early 1540s: "It was a Spaniard, De Soto, who
was responsible for the progress made during this period in the
exploration of the North American continent. Between 1539 and
1542, De Soto explored South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama and crossed
the Mississippi 450 miles from its mouth to reach into Oklahoma; a
spectacular feat that clearly showed up Cartier's and Roberval's
timidity." Trudel, 151, adds: "The winter of 1535-36
had been a miserable failure, the two of 1541-42 and 1542-43 might be
considered so too...." See also note
02za, below.
While reviewing the role of convicts in Roberval's
expedition, La Rocque de Roquebrune offers an interesting conclusion: "This Pierre Ronsard,
born about 1480, was approximately 60 years old when Roberval obtained
his release from prison. The master of mint at Bourges, he had
been condemned for falsification and for 'altering coins.' But he
was a technician, and Roberval needed him, in view of the fact, says the
royal letter of 31 March 1541' that the said Ronsard might render
great service to the said La Roque on the voyage to be made by him to
the territories across the sea.' This indicates that Roberval's
objective in going to Canada was above all to discover precious metals.
It may have been Ronsard who 'asssayed' the stones gathered in the
Saguenay district and who declared them to be gold. And thus,
writes R. Marichal [a Roberval biographer], Ronsard might be the
person really responsible for the tremendous disillusionment which was
to put a halt to colonization in Canada for half a century."
Hoffman, 184, cites a Spanish account which claims Roberval returned to Canada in the late 1540s &, with one of his
brothers, perished there in 1549. In truth, neither Roberval nor
Cartier returned to Canada after 1543. Fischer, 114, says Cartier died of the plague in 1547 & Roberval
was "killed in the wars of religion." For the actual circumstances
of Roberval's death, in 1560, see note
03, below.
Hoffman, 151-55, analyzes the influence of Cartier's
voyages on the Renaissance writer François Rabelais, whose Gargantua
and Pantagruel, published from the early 1530s into the 1550s, is
one of the classics of French literature. Hoffman dismisses the
theory that Rabelais himself wrote part of Cartier's Relations.
Hoffman, 188, offers this perspective on the interlude
following Cartier's voyages: "Once again silence falls upon
European activity in the area [of the northern seas], much as happened
during the interval between Sebastian Cabot's voyage and those by Gomez
and Verrazano. The commercial ventures of fishermen and traders
undoubtedly multiplied and expanded. Nevertheless they have
remained most obscure, either because they were deemed of little account
and not worthy of record, and the records have been destroyed, or
because scholars have lacked interest in this later period." Judge
Martin credits the interlude to the
continued wars with Henry II.
For the cartographic legacy of Cartier's voyages, see
Hoffman, 188-96. For Samuel de Champlain's critique of
Cartier's failure, emphasizing the earlier explorer's treatment of the
natives, see Fischer, 114-15.
02n. Quotations
from La Rocque de Roquebrune, "La Rocque de Roberval," in
DCB, 1:423-24; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 49-51; Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 147. See also La Rocque de Roquebrune, 1:425;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 33; Trudel, 51-53; online Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier," "Jean François Roberval."
Trudel, 49, says Roberval's fort at Cap-Rouge also
was called fort Henri-Charles & France-neufve.
One wonders which of the 2 ships Roberval sent back to
France in Sep 1542 took chief pilot Alfonse de Saintonge on his
exploration of the Arctic region. See note
02t, below.
02o. Quotations
from Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:167; Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB,
1:275; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
140-41; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 24-25, 29, 120. See also
Costain, The White & the Gold, 132; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
113, 295-96; Hoffman, 150, 175, 210; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 30; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
22, 159-60; online Wikipedia,
"St. Lawrence Iroquoians."
Champlain was the later explorer who renamed Lac
St.-Pierre. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 24; note
05, below.
Archaeologists have not settled on the exact
location of Hochelaga, nor of Stadacona. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
22; online Wikipedia, "St.
Lawrence Iroquoians."
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 159-60, offers
details on the place of wampum, also called matachiaz, in
North American native culture.
Fischer, 113, implies that
Cartier & his men, on their 1535 venture, wintered at Hochelaga.
Other sources, cited above, disagree. Fischer, 295, points out
that it was Champlain who, in 1612, first placed Cartier's name for
today's Montréal on a published map. Fischer, 295-96, quoting
Champlain, offers a striking description of the St. Lawrence rapids
below Montréal at present-day Lachine.
Cartier's cross at the mouth of Rivière St.-Maurice is
the site of today's Trois-Rivières. See
05c, below, for the next mention of the place in this narrative.
02p. Quotations
from Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB, 1:275; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
141; Trudel, "Cartier," in DCB, 1:168; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
27-28. See also
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 113; Hoffman, 156-60, 175, 178, 209-10;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 30-31, 37; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 22,
25-26, 29-30, 33, 284n25; Trudel,
"Cartier," 1:167; Trudel, "Donnacona," 1:276; online
Wikipedia, "Jacques Cartier," "St. Lawrence Iroquoians"; notes
02f, above,
298, below.
Richter, 37, speculates that Donnacona's people died of
hunger, not scurvy, that winter.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 26-27,
distinguishes what was then called "land scurvy," which Cartier's men
suffered, & "sea scurvy," & offers the remarkable fact that the former
disappeared "with the introduction of the potato" to European diets.
The South American tuber, along with citrus fruits & wine, proved to be
a cure for sea scurvy as well.
For Cartier's perspective on the geography of the St.
Lawrence basin garnered from his own observations & Indian tales during
his first ascent of the river, see Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
29-30.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 30, offers this
astonishing speculation on Donnacona's description of the "white men" of
Saguenay: "Today one thinks of the region of Lac St.
Jean and the Saguenay River, but a close examination of the account
reveals that it is impossible to place Cartier's Saguenay
geographically. Was it just a fairy-tale kingdom--a product, pure
and simple, of the Indian imagination? Or was it not, rather, a
synthesis of traditional folklore retold by Donnacona for his own
purposes, as happens among primitive peoples? Attempts have been
made to link this Saguenay myth with the Norwegian expedition of 1362; a
treasure-hunt by white men dressed indeed in cloth. But, if
traveling west of Hochelaga, Donnacona and his compatriots really had
seen white men dressed in cloth, and an abundance of precious metals,
then it must be supposed that they had ascended the Ottawa River (the
'straight and good road' to Saguenay), navigated the Great Lakes,
entered the Mississippi river system and reached the Spanish
possessions. Viewed in this way, the Kingdom of Saguenay did
actually exist, but another century and a half would pass before
Frenchmen retraced that route." See Book Four.
02q. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 11; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 131;
Eccles, The French in North America, 3; Marcel Trudel, "Cartier, Jacques," in DCB, 1:165, &
online. See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
5; Clark,
A. H.,
Acadia, 7-8, 74; Costain, The White & the Gold, 16-17; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 6; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 112ff; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadia, 3;
Hoffman, 112-14, 133; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:7; Ross & Deveau,
The Acadians of Nova Scotia, 3-4, 6; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
7, 12; online Wikipedia, "Jacques
Cartier"; note 02b, above.
Hoffman, 113-14, makes a case, first broached by
Jesuit Fr. Pierre Biard in 1614, that Cartier sailed to Newfoundland in
1524, the year of Verrazzano's first expedition. Trudel, "Cartier,"
1:165, citing the historian Lanctot, who used Fr. Biard's account &
other speculations as evidence that Cartier was part of Verrazzano's
expedition, debunks the claim but concedes that Cartier's accounts
reveal a knowledge of Brazil as well as the coast of Newfoundland, which
he could have explored on ventures other than Verrazzano's.
Predictably, the Iberian powers protested the Cartier
voyages as a second violation by France of the half-century-old Treaty
of Tordesillas, which a papal representative had helped negotiate in
Spain in 1494. See Hoffman, 131; note
02a, above.
02r. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 19. See also
Eccles, The French in North America, 4;
Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 137-38, 150-51; Trudel, "Cartier," in
DCB, 1:166-67; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 20; note
02q, above.
Trudel, "Cartier," 1:167; & "Donnacona,"
in DCB, 1:275, says Domagaya & Taignoagny
were not baptized during their 8-month-long stay in France.
The spellings of ships' names are from Trudel, "Cartier," 1:167; & Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 19, not
Hoffman, 138, which calls them Grande Hermyne, Petite
Hermyne, & Hermerillon.
02s. Quotations from
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 46-48; La Rocque de Roquebrune, "La Rocque de Roberval,"
in DCB, 1:424. See
also Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 146-47, 184-86; La Rocque de Roquebrune,
"La Rocque de Roberval," 1:423, 425; R. La Roque de Roquebrune, "La
Roque, Marguerite, de," in DCB, 1:424, &
online;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 26, 32-33; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
49, 286n31; Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:169; note 02z, above.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 47, calls
Roberval's actions against the English "privateering," which implies
permission to do so from a sovereign power. This Roberval did not
possess, hence my use of "piracy" here. See Hoffman, 146-47,
for details. Trudel points out that Roberval's "privateering" in
the autumn of 1541 was akin to Verrazzano's actions in 1523 before his
voyage to the New World. However, France was at war with Spain in 1523,
so the Florentine would have been engaged in privateering, unlike
Roberval. See note 02d, above.
After slipping away from Roberval & producing what
was nothing more than quartz crystals & iron pyrites, Cartier was denied
command of the relief force sent to Roberval in 1543, nor was he
entrusted with command of another voyage to New France. He "retired"
to his estate, Limoilou, near St.-Malo, & died in Sep 1557, age 66.
His wife Catherine, daughter of Jacques Des Granches, chevalier de
roi & constable of St.-Malo, survived him by 18 years.
He had married her in the spring of 1520, years before his voyages to
Canada. They had no children. See La Rocque de Roquebrune,
"La Rocque de Roberval," 1:424; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
48; Trudel, "Cartier," 1:165, 170.
An interesting episode in this third French venture to
Canada was the fate of Marguerite de La Roque, a kinswoman of Roberval,
probably a cousin. As co-seigneuress of Ponpoint in Picardy with
Roberval, she coaxed him into allowing her to accompany his
expedition to Canada. She was young and unmarried when Robeval's
fleet left France in April 1542. During the voyage, however, the
high-spirited Marguerite became the lover of a young nobleman serving
aboard one of her cousin's vessels. Either out of Calvinist
righteousness or, more likely, from a desire to inherit his cousin's
estates, Roberval marooned Marguerite, her maidservant, and her lover on
the Île de Démons inside the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the southern
coast of Labrador; later called the Îles de la Demoiselle, the Isle of
Demons may be
today's Hospital Island, also called Harrington Island, where
"Marguerite's Cave" is a local tourist attraction. Marguerite gave birth
on the desolate island, but the child, its father, and the hapless
maidservant died, leaving Marguerite to fend for herself. She
survived by shooting wild animals with the firearm her cousin allowed
her to keep. A few years later, Basque fishermen found her on the island and returned
her to France. There, her story became a sensation and
was recounted by the Queen of Navarre in a posthumously published
romance.
Marguerite became a school mistress and lived in the
Chateau de la Mothe near Norton in Périgord. There is no record
that she sought legal redress against her powerful cousin, who died at
Paris in 1560, murdered by an anti-Protestant mob. Despite her celebrity, the date and place of
Marguerite's death remains unknown. Evidently she remained
unmarried. See R. La Roque de Roquebrune, "La Roque, Marguerite,
de," 1:424, &
online; online Wikipedia, "Marguerite de la Roque," "Harrington Island."
According to Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
48, Roberval renamed Cartier's Assomption Ascension (today's Anticosti
Island), & called the river of Canada France-Prime or François-Premier.
See also La Rocque de Roquebrune, "La Rocque de Roberval," 1:423.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 49, says
Alfonse de Saintonge "went at least two or three leagues up the river
[Saguenay], far enough to observe that it was wider upstream; Alfonse
concluded that this must be an arm of the sea, through which one could
reach 'the Pacific sea or indeed the sea of Cathay.'" For
Champlain's more thorough exploration of the river 6 decades later, see
note 05d, below.
02t. Quotations
from Gustave Lanctôt, "Fonteneau, Jean," in DCB, 1:309, &
online. See also Hoffman, Cabot
to Cartier, 168-71, 184, 213; Lanctôt, 1:310; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:14;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 33; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 47-53;
online Wikipedia, "Jean Alfonse," "Norumbega"; note
02d, above.
Lanctot, 1:309, does not place Alfonse in Canada with
Roberval, stating only that he piloted "Roberval's expedition, which
left La Rochelle 16 April 1542," & that "It was probably on the return
trip, at the end of the summer, that he ventured on a cruise in search
of the northwest passage to China." Trudel, 49, however, says
Alfonse was "the first ... to note the existence of Montmorency Falls,"
which can be found on Île d'Orléans, near Stadacona, & helped count the
grains left by Cartier at Cap-Rouge, which places him there with
Roberval in the summer of 1542. See also Trudel, 50. One
wonders which of Roberval's 3 ships Alfonse took on his Arctic venture. Hoffman, 184, cites a Spanish account of
Alfonse's voyage which says that, after the pilot failed to find the
passage to Asia, "he returned to the Canada River fort and told Cartier
what he had seen." The problem with this scenario is that Cartier
was nowhere near the St. Lawrence River when Alfonse completed his
voyage.
Hoffman, 213, calls Alfonse "the discoverer (or the
first describer) of that part of the Atlantic between Labrador and
Greenland, and the first to recognize that Greenland and Labrador were
not continuous. Earlier cartographical representations of a
separate Greenland and a separate Newfoundland-Labrador (such as the
Cantino and the Kunstmann No. 3 [maps, dated 1502 & c1504,
respectively], do not seem to have so much the result of actual
exploration as of cartographical coincidence and theorizing. It
is, of course, not known how far Jean Alphonse succeeded in penetrating
towards Davis Strait (lying between Baffin Island and Greenland), but he
did seem to penetrate far enough to determine that this sea, lying
between the mainland and Greenland, was the source of the icebergs and
floe ice running southward past Newfoundland." Cartographically,
then, Alfonse's voyage of 1542-43 was an important one despite its
failure to find the passage to Asia. Strangely, Trudel, 47-53,
a detailed account of Roberval's venture, says nothing of Alfonse de Saintonge's voyage to the Arctic region.
Lanctot, 1:309-10; & online Wikipedia, "Jean Alfonse," say nothing
of Alfonse's exploration of Norumbega/the Penobscot River in 1542, as
does online Wikipedia, "Norumbega," hence the use of "legend" &
qualifying language in discussing this part of the venture.
While serving as a privateer for France, Alfonse was mortally wounded in a battle with
a Spanish & Portuguese force in 1544, the year after he returned from
his Arctic adventure. He died at age 60. Interestingly, the
leader of the Iberian force that killed Alfonse was Pedro Menéndez de
Avilés, who went on to massacre the Huguenot inhabitants of Fort
Caroline in FL in 1565 & establish San Agústín down the coast soon after. See Hoffman, 168; Lanctot,
1:310; online Wikipedia, "Jean Alphonse"; note
04, below.
02u. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 2-3. See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
5; Costain, The White & the Gold, 14; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:5; William F.
M. Morley, "Verrazzano ("Janus Verrazanus"), Giovanni da," in DCB,
1:657-60, &
online; Trudel, 4, 7, 11; online
Wikipedia, "Giovanni de Verrazzano"; notes
286a &
286c, below.
Morley, 1:658, questions the Florentine's
presence on Aubert's 1508 to Labrador & Newfoundland. Trudel,
2, offers no specifics of the navigator's earlier voyages, concluding
that "Unfortunately, we know nothing of Verrazano prior to his arrival
on the scene" in 1523. As this passage reveals, Verrazzano's name also is spelled Verrazano.
Judge Martin, first published in 1827, calls him Veranzany.
02v. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
8; L.-A. Vigneras, "Gomes, Estevao," in DCB, 1:342, &
online. See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
4-5; Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet,
14; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 671-72n29; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 112, 114-17, 122-30; Trudel, 7,
9;
Vigneras, 1:343; Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 80; online Wikipedia, "Estêvao Gomes," "Ferdinand Magellan."
Hoffman, 115, Fig. 34, entitled "Gomez's voyage to
the New World in 1525, as reconstructed by Ganong (1932: 165-6,
178-9)," has Gomes sailing north to south, which follows Biggar.
On this point, Trudel follows Biggar, Ganong, & Hoffman. Vigneras, 1:342,
however, says Gomes crossed the Atlantic to Santiago de Cuba, filled his vessel with
provisions, & sailed up the coast from Florida to Cape Race before
returning to Coruna on 21 Aug 1525. Vigneras continues: "The
theory generally followed by historians (Harrisse, Biggar, Ganong,
Hoffman, etc.) that Gomes made his voyage north-south, is based on an
erroneous statement by Antonio Herrera, and evidence is overwhelmingly
against it.... It is most likely that the stop-over at Santiago de Cuba
took place on the way to America and not on the return trip, and that
Gomes made his voyage south-north, as Verrazzano had done a few months
before." Hoffman, Fig. 34, shows Gomes
making first land fall at Casco Bay, sailing up the ME coast to the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, & then doubling back along
the coast of ME before continuing on to FL & the West Indies. Trudel, 8, has him steering "straight for Newfoundland" in Aug 1524 "and, reversing Verrazano's course, made this his starting
point for a voyage down the coast, taking soundings of all the bays and
river mouths as he went" along the ME coast, adding that "He concluded
this exploration after rounding Cape Cod, sailed on to Cuba and from
there back to Spain, where he arrived in June 1525"--a much longer
voyage than Verrazzano's. The dates of the beginning & end of
Gomes's voyage used here are from Vigneras, as is the direction of the voyage. Biggar,
5, describes Gomes as following "the coast from Gaspé to
Cape May," which places him in the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the beginning
of his expedition, not followed here.
According to Trudel, 9, Norembega referred to
present-day New England & was spelled Arembec by the English, Oranbega by Verrazzano,
& Norembègue by later French explorers.
Gomes's
voyage may have informed the colonizer de Ayllón of the nature of the
North American coast on the eve of de Ayllón's settlement venture. See
note 02b, above. Fischer offers a dark depiction of Gomes's character, as evidenced in his
treatment of the natives of Norembègue. Gomes was born in c1483 at Porto & died on the Paraguay
River in South America in 1538, victim of an Indian ambush. See Vigneras, 1:342; online
Wikipedia, "Estêvao Gomes." Online Wikipedia, "Ferdinand
Magellan," does not list him among the 18 survivors of Magellan's
1519-22 expedition that circumnavigated the globe. He sailed in
the expedition, however, as captain of the San Antonio. See
Vigneras, 1:342; online Wikipedia, "Estêvao Gomes," "Ferdinand
Magellan." Online Wikipedia, "Estêvao Gomes," says La Anunciada
was a 50-ton caravel, but Vigneras, 1:342, says 75 tons.
Charles V was the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor who ruled
much of central Europe & Italy from Jun 1519 to his abdication in Aug
1556. From Mar 1516 to Jan 1556, however, jointly with his mother
Joanna until her death in 1555, he also ruled as King of Castile & Léon, & King of
Aragon & Sicily--the first of that name in those kingdoms,
hence Carlos I. As ruler of both Castile & Aragon jointly, Carlos
I was, in fact, the first King of Spain or the Spains, as the new nation also was called. See online Wikipedia, "Charles V, Holy Roman
Emperor."
02w. See Hoffman, Cabot
to Cartier, 117, 122-30; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
8.
One must remember that, from the perspective of the
mid-1520s, in the 3 decades since 1492
Columbus had stumbled upon a New World, explored the Caribbean basin in
3 more voyages between 1493-1504, & established settlements on Hispaniola & Cuba, the
beginnings of New Spain; Vespucci explored the coast of South
America from 1499-1502 &, by 1507, helped establish the existence of a mundus novus;
Nunez de Balboa
crossed the isthmus of Panama in 1513 & "discovered" the "South Sea"; Ponce de Léon "discovered" FL
in 1513, explored its southern coasts, encountered
the Gulf Stream, & attempted, but failed, to settle near present-day
Charlotte Harbor, FL, in 1521; Cortes conquered Mexico in 1519-21; Magellan's expedition,
from 1519-21, crossed the Pacific Ocean & circumnavigated the globe;
& Verrazzano "completed" the exploration of the North American littoral
from FL to Cape Breton. See online Wikipedia; note
02d, above. Compared to
all of this, the results of Gômez's voyage must have seemed relatively
insignificant to Spanish authorities, though, as Hoffman, 122-30,
shows, Spanish cartographers evidently were delighted by the new
information the Portuguese could furnish them about the North America
coast.
Hoffman, 117, documents a fishing venture out of
Bayonne in 1527, & another out of La Rochelle in 1533, but no
Court-sanctioned voyages of discovery left France from 1528 (Verrazano's
third expedition, to the West Indies) & 1534 (Cartier's first voyage
to "New France").
02x. Quotations
from Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 117; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 8-9. See also Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
4; Costain, The White & the Gold, 13; Hoffman, 118-21, 197; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:17; Trudel, 282-83n21;
Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 80.
Costain says the Sampson was lost at sea & the
Mary encountered the Spanish at Puerto Rico before heading
home.
02y. Quotations
from Trudel, "Cartier," in DCB, 1:166; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 16. See also Costain, The White & the Gold,
22; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
173, 179.
Dates followed here are from Trudel, Beginnings of New
France.
Hoffman, 173, citing French writer André Thevet, says
the Native word meschsamecht, probably Mi'kmaq, refers to
"'the dangers along the coast from an infinite number of reefs and
shoals, besides which dangers of the sea pall....'"
Toudamans also is spelled Tontaniens, Toutaneens.
See Hoffman, 179. Champlain & subsequent French explorers &
settlers in 17th- & 18th-century Acadia/Nova Scotia would call the
Mi'kmaq the Souriquois. The British called them the Micmac, a name
still common today. See note 06e,
below.
02z. Quotations
from Trudel, "Cartier," in
DCB, 1:167; online Wikipedia, "Tadoussac"; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 21; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 140. See also
Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 129-30, 251-53, 683n81; Hoffman, 207, 209; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 29-30; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 20, 48-49, 140-41, 284.
The St. Lawrence turns brackish near Tadoussac & becomes
fresh by the time one reaches Île-aux-Coudres. See Hoffman, 207.
The Montagnais, also called Montagnards, Canadiens, &
Ilnut, call themselves Innu, "the people."
Champlain would encounter them at Tadoussac & near the abandoned site of
Stadacona in 1603, nearly
three-quarters of a century later. See Fischer; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
140-41; note
05d, below.
Trudel, "Cartier," 1:167, points out that Canada was
then considered to be only a small part of the region centered at
Stadacona. The word canada is St. Lawrence Iroquoian
for "village." It was Cartier who applied the word not only to
Stadacona, but also to the St. Lawrence River &, eventually, the region
thru which it flowed. See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
284n20; online Wikipedia, "St. Lawrence
Iroquoians."
Hoffman, 209, Fig. 58, is entitled "The geography of
the country of Canada at the time of Cartier," & includes the names &
locations of Canadian Iroquois villages, regional nations, & geographic
names.
02za. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 34, 37, 40; Trudel, "Cartier," in DCB, 1:168-69; R. La Rocque de Roquebrune, "La Rocque de Roberval, Jean-François de,"
in DCB, 1:423, &
online.
See also Hoffman,
Cabot to Cartier, 142-45, 183; La Rocque de Roquebrune,
1:422, 424; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:13-14; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 32; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
35-36, 38-39, 41-42, 63; Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB,
1:276; online Wikipedia, "Francisco Vásquez de Coronado," "Hernando de
Soto," "Jacques Cartier"; note 02m,
above.
For the pope's reluctance to support Spanish claims in
the New World at the expense of France, as well as Portugal's lukewarm
support of Spanish efforts against François I, see Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
39.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 42, says that
on the eve of Cartier's return to Canada in the spring of 1541, only 1
of the little Iroquois girls was still alive, & she did not return to
her homeland.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 35, says
Roberval's paternal line was from Languedoc, & his maternal line--his
mother was Isabeau de Poitiers--was from Picardy. As the holder of
many great estates, Trudel points out, Roberval "had all the attributes
of a great nobleman." His peculiar nickname was le petit roi de Vimeu,
or little king of Vimeu, a region in Picardy. His commission of 15
Jan 1541 granted him so many powers & privileges that Spanish spies
called him "King of Canada" in their reports to Carlos I. See also
La Rocque de Roquebrune, 1:422, 424; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 36; online
Wikipedia, "Jean François Roberval."
According to Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
35, 40-41, Cartier, as well as Roberval, could not recruit for their
colony
"counterfeiters and those judged guilty of heresy or lese-majesty [lèse-majesté]
against God or man," as well as "'other too-grievous cases and crimes.'"
Roberval sent agents to prisons "under the jurisdiction of the
Parlements of Rouen, Paris, Dijon, Bourdeaux and Toulouse." As
it turned out, the convicts made up the largest portion of the Cartier-Roberval
colony.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 39, says 46,350
livres were "collected" for the venture, "of which 45,000 came
from the King and the rest was borrowed by Roberval." Contrast
this with King Henri IV's parsimony in colonial ventures half a century
later. See note 05c, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 40, discusses
the seigneurial & commercial systems proposed for Roberval's colony,
including the division of profits that would result from the venture.
See note 05a, below, for the
resurrection of commercial monopolies in New France by subsequent French
Kings.
For a discussion of why François I suddenly made
conversion of the Indians an important element in France's colonial
policy, as well as the nature of French claims in North America, see Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
37-39; note 02e, above. Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
38, mentions François's amazing claim, made in conversations with the
Spanish ambassador in 1540, that the French had discovered "'new lands'
thirty years previous to 1492 (a claim made very late in the game and
never substantiated)."
02zb. Quotations
from Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 145; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
40-41. See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 35, 39, 42; Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:169.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 35, 39, says by
1541 the Émérillon, was "'now old and decaying,'" but the King
allowed the "transfer [of] its fittings to the other vessels," but the
ship "was not demolished but repaired." It cost Cartier 1,000
livres to make the repairs on a vessel still owned by the King.
This was the barque he had taken from Ste.-Croix up to Lac
St.-Pierre in early fall of 1535, during his second expedition.
See note 02o, above.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 41, says the
1,500 estimate by a Spanish spy "is not unlikely."
03. Quotation from
Roberts, Europe, 230. See also Eccles, Canadian
Frontier, 17; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 50ff; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
4-5; La Rocque de Roquebrune, "La Rocque de Roberval," in DCB,
1:425; Parkman, France & England,
1:175; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians of Nova Scotia, 6;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 54-55; online Wikipedia, "French Wars of Religion."
One of the earliest Protestant martyrs in France was
Jean-François de la Rocque, sieur de Roberval, who died at Paris in 1560,
a victim of an anti-Protestant mob. Roberval, in fact, was an early French convert to Calvinism, having
converted in 1535, the year after Calvin fled to Switzerland. See
La Rocque de Roquebrune; online
Wikipedia, "Jean François Roberval."
03a. Quotations from
Johnson, American People, 10; online Wikipedia, "France
Antarctique." See also Canny & Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World,
chap. 4, by Neil L. Whitehead; Eccles, Canadian Frontier,
18; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 112-13, 173; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
171-79; Parkman, France & England, 1:33ff; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island,
4; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 54; Wikipedia, "France
Antarctique," "La Rochelle."
Villegagnon's almoner, or chaplain, on the 1555 voyage
was missioner André Thevet, who had spent time in Asia & later became an
important French writer. See Hoffman, 171-79, especially 172.
The Portuguese claim to Brazil went as far back as the
Treaty of Tordisillas of 1494 & Cabral's voyage of 1500. See note
01, above. For a later French
effort in the region in the early 1610s, this one by Capuchin friars in what the French
called La France Equinoxiale, northeastern Brazil, see Kellman,
"Encounter & Environment in La France Equinoxiale." The Capuchins'
efforts also were ended abruptly by the Portuguese.
04. Quotations from Allain,"Not Worth a Straw,"
3; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:23, 25; Johnson, American People,
10. See also Allain, 4; Canny & Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World,
64; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 78n6; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 50-54, 70, 112-13, 115, 166-67, 249; Horn, A
Brave & Cunning Prince, 27-29, 253n7; Martin, F.-X., 1:3, 18-22, 24,
26; Moore, J. P., Revolt in LA, 22; ; Parkman, France & England, 1:124ff; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island,
4; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 42; Taylor, A.,
American Colonies, 76-77, 92; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 54;
Wilson, Jr.,
"Colonial Fortifications and Military
Architecture in the Mississippi Valley,"
379; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 84-86; note
02c, above.
The Spanish claim to FL, & all of North America for that
matter, was based not only on papal donations issued soon after
Columbus's discoveries, but also the efforts of Ponce de Léon beginning in 1513.
See Martin, F.-X., 1:3; online Wikipedia, "Juan Ponce
de Léon"; note 02w, above.
Horn, 27, 253n7, places Charlesfort at Parris Island,
SC, on Port Royal Sound, near Beaufort, SC. Fischer, 249, identifies the officer murdered at
Charlesfort as one La Pierria. Martin, F.-X., 1:19-20, calls him
Albert &, 1:20, calls the chosen leader of the conspirators Nicolas
Barré.
Martin, F.-X., 1:21, first published in 1827, places Fort
Caroline on the southern bank of the St. Marys River, but recent
sources, based on archaeological evidence, place it on the lower St.
Johns, which the French called "the River of May, near present-day
Jacksonville." Quotation from Horn, 27. Wilson, Jr. describes Fort Caroline as "a
triangular timber structure with bastions and a symmetrical arrangement
of buildings within."
Martin, F.-X., 1:24, calls the attack at Fort Caroline
"... the first act of hostility, between European nations in the new
world." A. Taylor offers a concise, more recent interpretation of
Menéndez's actions in FL & their result. Richter says Menéndez de
Avilés established San Agústín before marching his men the 40
miles north to Fort Caroline. A. Taylor, 77, followed here, has
the Spaniard attacking first & then founding his outpost.
Menéndez de Avilés also was responsible for the death of
French explorer Jean Fonteneau dit Alphonse de Saintonge
in 1544. See note 02t, above.
Needless to say, the Spanish protested de Gourgues's actions, which took
place during a time of peace, & even placed a price on his head.
Like Menéndez, the Gascon was not punished for his bloody deed.
One of San Agústín's more trying moments was when Sir
Francis Drake burned it in 1586 during the Anglo-Spanish War. See
note 05j, below.
Allain, 3, offers a broad view of Coligny's efforts in the
context of French colonial policy, quoting another scholar as saying
that Coligny "conceived of colonization as a tool of foreign policy," as
"a factor in geopolitics." She also says, 3-4, that Queen
Catherine de Medicis' "fear of Iberian reprisals" was one of the reasons
for the Massacre of 1572. "Certainly Spaniards and Portuguese
celebrated the demise of the admiral with a grandiose Te Deum."
Fischer, 70, avers that Prince Henri de Béarn and
Navarre, the future King Henri IV (1589-1610), had been interested in
French colonization in South America as early as the 1570s, when he was
in his 20s. Fischer says that in Aug 1588, the year of the
Armada, Henri corresponded with "his 'most affectionate and best
friend'" Sir Francis Drake, a fellow Protestant, "about opportunities in
the new world."
05. Quotations from
Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:188; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
140; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 78-80. See also Fischer, 138-41, 260-61, 575;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:34, 61; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 77,
95, 99, 101-02, 122-23; notes
02l, 02n,
&
02o, above, &
05r & 18b,
below.
Kebec is Algonquin for "where the river
narrows." Its use in 1603 reflects the disappearance of the Laurentian
Iroquois from the St. Lawrence valley & their replacement by Algonquin
speakers. See notes 05t &
12a, below.
Trudel, "Champlain," 1:188, & Trudel, Beginnings
of New France, 78, have Champlain going "up the Richelieu as far as
the Saint-Ours Rapids" (quotation from "Champlain"), but Fischer, 140, has him going only as far
as the mouth of the river, where his Indian companions informed him of
what lay to the south. Fischer, 261, says in early Jul 1609, 6
years after having first gone there, Champlain wrote of
his venture up the River of the Iroquois to attack the Mohawk: "'No Christians but ourselves had ever penetrated
this place,'" implying that this was his first ascent of the river. Fischer adds that when Champlain sailed his
chaloupe thru today's Chambly's Basin, well above, or south of,
St.-Ours, the explorer "was surprised to meet rapids that the shallop
could not pass," something he might have learned for himself if he had
ascended the Richelieu in 1603. Martin, F.-X., 1:61,
says the current name of the river came from Fort Richelieu, built by
Montmagny, Champlain's successor as governor, in the late 1630s & named
in honor of the powerful cardinal.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 95, notes the name Iroquois was "a disparaging term used by their enemies."
In Algonquian, the word meant "snake people." The Iroquois name
for themselves & their 5-nation confederacy was Haudenosaunee or
Hotinonsionni. The Five Nations of this confederacy, called the
Iroquois League by the French, included, from east to west, the Mohawk,
Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, & Seneca, to which was added the Tuscarora,
who immigrated north from the Carolinas, in 1722. See also online Wikipedia, "Iroquois."
Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 78, says Champlain et al. attempted
to pass today's St. Louis Rapids at Montréal & employs the term pays
d'en haut, that is, upper country, a term the French would use to describe the
vast region north, west, & south of the Great Lakes. See also
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 102; Books Two & Six. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 99, points out that the young
interpreter, Étienne Brûlé, who Champlain sent to live among the
Algonquin of the pays d'en haut in 1610, was the first European
to shoot the St.-Louis rapids, so Champlain, in Jun 1611, was the
second.
05a. Quotations
from Ross & Deveau, The
Acadians of Nova Scotia, 7; David B. Quinn, "Bellenger, Étienne
(Stephen Bellinger)," in DCB, 1:87-88, &
online; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 58-59.
See also Allain, "Colbert's Colony Crumbles," 32; Clark, A.
H., Acadia, 7-9, 22-24, 74-75, 78n6, 88; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 5; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 3, 28-30; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 21;
Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 113, 199;
Lanctôt, "La Roche," in DCB, 1:421;
57-58; Quinn, 1:89; Ross & Deveau, 4-6; Taylor, A.,
American Colonies, 94ff; Trudel, 56-57; online Wikipedia, "French Wars of Religion,"
"Norumbega"; notes
02m, above, &
139, below.
For descriptions of the fishing & fur trading operations
in the St. Lawrence region & along the Nova Scotia shore, & their
significance to the history of Acadia, see A. H. Clark; Faragher; Griffiths; Ross & Deveau, 4-6; Trudel,
56-57. Allain says, aptly, that the Canadian
fur trade was "Born of the fishing industry." See also
A. Taylor, A.
Quinn, 1:87, says that, in 1607, Champlain
found on the bay "a very old cross, all covered with moss," likely one
of Bellenger's markers from a quarter century before. Spaniard
Estevan Gomez had discovered the Penobscot, which he called the Deer
River, in 1525; the French came to call it "R. de Gamas." See note
02b, above; Quinn, 1:88.
Nor was Bellenger the first Frenchman to sail into the Bay of Fundy.
Trudel, 57-58 , says a French fisherman named Captain Champagne,
aboard the Gargarine, "was reported to have been in the Bay of
Fundy" in c1568 (quotation from 57), & that, by the time of
Bellenger's exploration, the bay was being called Menim or Menan.
Nevertheless, Bellenger's 4-month voyage to La Cadie enhanced the cartographic image of
that part of New France. Not long after his
exploration, Bellenger personally gave information to English
minister-diplomat-scholar Richard Hakluyt at Bellenger's house "in the
rue des Augustines, next to the sign of the Golden Tile (Huille deor,
i.e., Tuille d'Or)" in Rouen, & the Englishman diligently
recorded all that he learned from the intrepid merchant. Yet,
Bellenger's biographer contends, "He made a valuable contribution to the
knowledge of the coastline between Cape Breton and Maine even though it
was not fully assimilated by his contemporaries." Evidently
Hakluyt was more interested in data that could help the English
establish a settlement in "Virginia," south of New France, which
resulted in the failed colonization of Roanoke Island in 1585. See
Quinn, 1:88-89.
According to Hakluyt, Bellenger was preparing to return
to the Maritimes in another barque out of Honfleur--"solely a trading one
it would appear"--by 1 Mar 1584, but he either did not go, or he
did not return. See Quinn, 1:89. For
perspective on how relatively little was known of the coast south of
Newfoundland in Bellenger's time, see Hoffman, 199; note 287, below.
05b. Quotations
from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France,
62-64; Lanctôt, "La Roche," in DCB, 1:421-22; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 116;
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 78n6. See also Clark, A. H., 77; Fischer, 112,
115, 605, 675; Gustave Lanctôt, "Chefdostel, Thomas," in DCB, 1:210, &
online;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:27, 32; Parkman, France & England,
1:175-78; Ross & Deveau, The
Acadians of Nova Scotia, 7;
Trudel, 61, 65, 73; notes 05h,
06d &
286, below.
Trudel, 62, makes it clear that "La Roche did not
sail with the voyage he organized in 1597." With Chefdostel on this
combined fishing trip/reconnaissance were 33 sailors under Captain Kerdement, Lieutenant Kéroual, & Ensign Mondreville.
Lanctôt, "La Roche," 1:421, says La Roche renamed Sable
Island Île-de-Bourbon in honor of François de Bourbon, duc de
Montpensier, governor of Normandy. Trudel, 63, adds that the
inlet on which the settlement was sited was called Rivière
Boncoeur--Goodheart River. See also Lanctot, "La Roche," 1:421.
Trudel, 62, says Sable Island lies "ninety miles west of Cape Canso,"
& "is the sole point rising above sea level from the sub-oceanic plateau
known to navigators as les Bancs or the Banks; with its area of
16,000 acres, it is twenty-five miles long, shaped like 'a bow whose
string is stretched from east to west'; it is entirely surrounded by a
broad beach, and here and there are hillocks of sand; a part of its area
is taken up by a lagoon or barachois, which once was joined to
the sea by an inlet. The island has excellent pasturage and plenty
of fresh water. There are no trees, only shrubs, wild roses,
cranberries, blueberries and strawberries. Its fauna includes
walruses, seals, sea-lions, a great many foxes, and horses which were
left there at some time by Europeans and have reproduced and become
wild. Its climate is the same as New England's." Trudel, p.
62, adds that the island may have been visited as early as the first
decade of the 1500s by the Portuguese. It appears on early maps as
S. Cruz (1505), Isolla del Arena & Ile de Sable
(mid-500s). Fischer, 675n23, avers that a cousin of Jean de
Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just, the future
lieutenant-governor of Port-Royal, Acadia, "married into a Spanish
Basque family and attempted to found a colony in America. After it
failed he put his animals on Sable Island, where their offspring
remained for centuries," but Fischer does not name the cousin. He
may have been the Baron de Lhéry, "whose story remains very obscure,"
Trudel, 62, informs us. See also Martin, F.-X.; note
02c, above. For Humphrey Gilbert's shipwreck on the
island in 1583, see note 05j, below.
Lanctôt, "La Roche," 1:422, says, "On their return trip
at the beginning of September a violent storm prevented the ships from
calling at the island post, and drove them straight to the French
coast." Trudel, 63-64, followed here, says La Roche remained
with the settlers at Sable Island in their first days there & that "When Chefdostel and Girot had finished their fishing they came to collect La
Roche, and the colonists stayed behind...." (quotation from 63). Perhaps the storm in
early Sep occurred on the return voyage to France.
Trudel, 64, says "no one knows why" a re-supply was
not sent to Sable Island in 1602. Lanctôt, "La Roche," 1:422,
agrees.
Parkman, 1:175-78, says 11 of La Roche's convicts survived on Sable
Island for 5 years before being rescued by the Norman pilot Chefdhôtel
in Sep 1603, on the eve of de Mons's arrival in Acadia. Fischer,
116, offers dates that place the men on the island for only 4 years,
from 1599-1603, influenced, most likely, by accounts in Lanctôt, "La Roche," 1:421-22,
& "Chefdostel," 1:210; & Trudel. Lanctôt, "La
Roche," 1:422, speculates that after killing the officers "this
seditious act had soon been followed by further murders among the
deportees" & that Chefdostel returned with "the 11 principal rebels,
together with the remaining stock of furs," which seems to imply that
there were more than 11 survivors left on the island. Trudel, 64, says "Only eleven colonists remained, which suggests that a large
number of settlers had taken flight." Lanctôt, "Chefdostel," 1:210,
interestingly, agrees with Trudel that only "11 survivors [were] left on
the island."
Lanctôt, "Chefdostel," 1:210, offers this interesting
denouement to the Sable Island venture: After Chefdostel returned
the 11 survivors to France he "claimed the right to keep as compensation
all the skins which they had loaded on to his ship. But the
Parlement of Rouen ordered them to be shared out, one-third going to
Chefdostel and the remainder to the rescued men." Lanctôt, "La
Roche," 1:422, offers even more detail on the odd nature of French royal
justice: "When they [Chefdostel & the 11 survivors] got back to
France these deportees, making great display of their animal skins, were
presented to Henri IV, who had each of them given the sum of 50 écus.
This treatment staggered La Roche, who was indignant that 'instead of
their being hanged for their misdeeds, they have been given money,
although they have themselves admitted to the murders.'" One
wonders what the families of Commandant Querbonyer & Storekeeper Coussez
thought of the King's odd sense of justice.
05c. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 68-69. See
also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 39-40, 116-17, 121,
124-26, 129-31, 135-37, 601, 605;
Morley, "Chauvin de Tonnetuit," in DCB,
1:209-10; Parkman, France & England, 1:179,
182; Trudel, 65, 70, 73.
Trudel,
65, points out that, while serving at the Louvre in Paris as one of
the King's geographers, Samuel de Champlain, the noted cartographer &
explorer, "was overjoyed at the new enterprise" to be undertaken by
Chauvin & his associates. "'This is the beginning of a fine endeavour,' he wrote, 'without cost to the King, if what is in this
commission shall be realized.'" However, according to
Champlain's most recent biographer, after studying Chauvin's
venture following the proprietor's death, Champlain noted that Chauvin insisted on allowing only Calvinist ministers to accompany his
expedition although most of his men were Catholics. This, along
with the choice of a disagreeable settlement site & a dearth of supplies
there, Champlain believed, doomed the venture.
The only success Champlain attributed to
Chauvin's venture was the willing
transportation of 2 young Montagnais to France who miraculously survived
old world illnesses, studied the French language & culture, & returned
to their homeland in 1603 with Gravé & Champlain. See Fischer, 117,
126.
Trudel, 69-70, offers a more positive evaluation of Chauvin's
contribution to Canadian history.
Fischer, 121, says Chauvin's monopoly was "forfeited" in 1602.
Trudel, 68, offers a more nuanced explanation: "Since no
progress was being made, and this enterprise of 'discovery and
inhabitation of the lands and realms of Canada' must needs be
'strengthened and pressed forward,' in the autumn of 1602 Henry IV
authorized the merchants of Rouen to join forces with Chauvin."
05d. Quotations
from Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:188. See
also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 126-38, 496, 575, 605, 609; Historical Atlas of Canada,
1: plate 19; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 199; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
49, 63, 74, 76-77, 97-98; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB, 1:346;
notes 05b, above, &
05n, below.
For a relative lack of knowledge of the North Atlantic
coast south of Newfoundland compared to what was known of Newfoundland &
the Gulf of St. Lawrence region in Champlain's time, see Hoffman, 199; note 287,
below.
Fischer, 127-29, citing Champlain's work, details
the voyage from Honfleur to Tadoussac across
"the great western ocean."
The 2 young Montagnais were "princes" of their nation who
volunteered to accompany Gravé back to France in 1602. See
Fischer, 126, 496.
The gathering at Tadoussac was Champlain's first encounter with the
natives of New France, beyond the 2 young Montagnais who sailed with him
on Gravé's ship from Honfleur. See Fischer, 129-34. It was here, Fischer says, 134,
that the French, represented by Gravé & Champlain, & the Indians of New
France, "began to build a relationship that would be one of the longest
and strongest on record between Europeans and Native Americans."
On the same page, Fischer adds: "It [the Great Tabagie at
Tadoussac in the spring of 1603] marked the beginning of a relationship
that was unique in the long history of European colonization in America.
Something of its spirit has endured in Canada between Europeans and
Indians even to our own time--an extraordinary achievement." See
also
Trudel, "Champlain," 1:188. The Montagnais today call
themselves the Innu. See Fischer, 609.
Champlain certainly must have been aware of Alfonse de Saintonge's
2- to 3-league exploration of the lower Saguenay in 1542, after which
Alfonse concluded that the river was
an arm of the sea, "through which one could reach 'the Pacific sea or
indeed the sea of Cathay.'" See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
49; note 02s, above. Fischer, 138, contradicts Trudel as to the date the English discovered Hudson Bay. Trudel,
"Champlain," 1:188, & Beginnings of New France, 97, say it did not occur until
3 Aug 1610, during Henry Hudson's fourth & final expedition. Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
97, adds that, after entering the larger bay, Hudson and his men "pressed on into James
Bay, and there on its southern shore they spent the winter." Fischer,
on the other hand, insists that in 1603 "The English had already
been there, searching for a route to China," hinting that Champlain's
prediction of the great bay's existence--he called it "some gulf of this
our (Atlantic) sea"--came from prior knowledge. Englishman
George Weymouth, in fact, had sailed into Hudson Strait in 1602 but was
compelled to turn back by a rebellious crew & did not reach the bay. See Historical Atlas of Canada; online Wikipedia, "George Weymouth"; note 18b, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 97-98, notes that in 1611, 3
years after the founding of Québec & a year after Hudson's discovery,
the Montagnais were still refusing to guide Champlain up the Saguenay to
the shores of the far northern bay.
05e. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 81. See also Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 141-42, 148, 575, 605;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:34-35; Trudel, 74.
Fischer, 605, says Gravé's expedition & de
Chaste's monopoly "turned a profit that has been estimated at 40 per
cent of its capital," a successful venture indeed.
Fischer, 141, says Gravé & Champlain returned to
Le Havre after a 15-day crossing via the Grand Bank, but on 575, a
chronology of Champlain's voyage, Fischer says they returned to Honfleur.
Comme çi, comme ça. Honfleur lies across the Seine
estuary from Le Havre, only a dozen or so miles southeast of the great
port.
05f. See Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 23, 57, 144-45; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
76; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:188.
Neither Trudel nor Fischer mention the presence of a
Catholic priest or a Protestant minister on Gravé's 1603 expedition.
Perhaps missionaries were to accompany the next phase of the
enterprise--actual settlement.
05g. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
55. See also Trudel, 150; note 287, below.
05h. Quotations
from Lanctôt, "La Roche," in DCB, 1:421; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
55, 58; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
chap. 1, 604-05; Quinn, "Bellenger," in DCB, 1:88. See also Parkman, France & England,
1:177n1; Ross & Deveau, The
Acadians of Nova Scotia, 7;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
59-60, 66, 71;
Marcel Trudel, "Champlain, Samuel de," in DCB,
1:186, &
online; notes
02c,
above, &
287, below; online
Wikipedia, "Richard Hakluyt."
Quinn, 1:89, says, following his evaluation
of Étienne Bellenger's contribution to New-French cartography:
"... Cardinal Bourbon's and the admiral's plans for the Maritimes were
soon subordinated to a more ambitious expedition which was in
preparation during 1584, sponsored by the Duc de Joyeuse, and which was
to be under the command of Guillaume Le Héricy, with Jacques de Vaulx,"
a Bellenger acquaintance, "as chief pilot, ostensibly to coast the whole
of eastern America from Brazil to Labrador. It left in 1585 and
eventually returned in 1587 but its North American relevance, if any, is
not known."
Brouage in Saintonge, where La Roche's second expedition
wrecked, was the birthplace
of Samuel Champlain, who would have been in his early teens in 1584. See Fischer,
chap. 1; Trudel, "Champlain," 1:186; note
05q, below.
Jacques Noël was half-brother of Étienne Noël, who had
accompanied their uncle on his third voyage to Canada in 1541-42.
Jacques Noël went to Canada in 1585, "perhaps as a
pilot." He, in fact, was able to trace the steps of his famous
uncle, noting the ruins of Ste.-Croix & Charlesbourg-Royal, & climbed
Mont-Réal, which his uncle had named on his second voyage. He even
wrote a book about his Canadian adventures. The 4 ships lost in
the St. Lawrence in 1587 were Jacques Noël's property, but they were
manned by 2 of his sons, Michel & Jean, & their associates. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
59, 71; notes 02o &
02zb, above. Fischer, 604-05, says the King owed the Cartier heirs 1,600 livres, but
Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
59, says 8,630 livres. Trudel goes on to say that the grant
to Noël & La Jannaye gave them "the same powers that Francis I had
accorded Cartier on October 17, 1520. This was therefore a revival
of a commission that was a half century old." Trudel adds that, in
the Jan 1588 commission grand by Henri III, for the first time
"Protestantism was being excluded by a plan of colonization," a
departure from the precedents set by Henri III's father, Henri
II. The reasons for this, Trudel tells us, was sound
enough: "It was essential to rule out the possibility of Spanish
intervention across the Atlantic on the pretence of saving Catholicism;
Philip II could not be allowed the opportunity of repeating the same
politico-religious manoeuvres in the St Lawrence that he had executed in
Florida" in 1565. "The circumstances of 1588," the year of the
Spanish Armada, "demanded that New France should be exclusively
Catholic." See Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
59-60; notes 02za &
04, above.
05i. Quotations
from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 78n6;
Gustave Lanctôt, "La Roche de Megouez, Troilus de, Marquis de La
Roche-Megouez," in DCB, 1:421, &
online; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
55-56; online Wikipedia, "Henry III of France." See also
Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
605; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:26-27;
Parkman, France & England, 1:176-77.
According to Trudel, 56, "the documents of the day
reveal neither their destination nor the strength of their complements."
Interestingly, Trudel says nothing of the English attack on La Roche's
vessels, which is taken from Lanctôt.
F.-X. Martin dates La
Roche's lieutenant-generalship "in Canada, Hochelaga, Newfoundland,
Labrador, the river of the great bay, (St. Lawrence) Norembegue and the
adjacent county" on 12 Jan 1583, which actually was granted 5 years
earlier.
05j. Quotations
from Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France, 4-5; online Wikipedia, "Humphrey Gilbert," "Roanoke
Colony." See also Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:26-29,
32-34; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
83; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 78, 86-87; online Wikipedia, "Richard Chancellor,"
"Martin Frobisher," "John White"; notes
02x, above, and 285, below.
The Anglo-Spanish War lasted from 1585 to 1604, the
defeat of the Armada in 1588 only a highlight in the long, indecisive
struggle between the imperial powers. Nevertheless, in 1586,
before he sailed south & rescued Lane et al. at Roanoke, Drake burned
the Spanish outpost at San Agústín, FL, which made English attempts to
settle "Virginia" that much more precarious. See note
04, above.
Martin, F.-X., 1:29, says Grenville left 50 men at
Roanoke Island in 1586 & they all were massacred by the local Indians.
The second settlement at Roanoke Island, of course, is
the famous Lost Colony. White died sometime after 1593 & never
returned to Virginia. Raleigh did not send an expedition back to
Roanoke Island until 1602, taking the trouble to provide wages out of
his own pocket for the crew of his ship so that they would not resort to
privateering, the war with Spain not yet ended. Samuel Mace & his men concentrated on gathering
aromatic wood and plants from the Outer Banks rather than searching for
lost colonists. Raleigh's arrest for treason during the reign of
Elizabeth's successor, James I, and his subsequent execution, ended his
cares about the fate of his colonists. "To this day," a Wikipedia
writer reminds us, "there has been no conclusive evidence as to what
happened to the colonists." See online Wikipedia, "Roanoke
Colony," "John White."
In 1602, during the final year of Elizabeth's reign,
Bartholomew Gosnold, "a bold navigator," left Falmouth with 32 men "in a
barque, and sailing as nearly west as possible, made the continent on
the eleventh of May of the same year, towards the forty-third degree of
northern latitude. He gave the names, which they still bear, to
Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Elizabeth islands, in the present state
of Massachusetts; but no account has reached us of his leaving any
person behind. Indeed, the small number of men he took out,
precludes any idea of it." See Martin, F.-X., 1:33-34, first published
in 1827; note 08a, below.
05k. Quotation from Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
71. See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
60-61.
05l. See Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:29, 32; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
83; online Wikipedia, "War of the Three Henrys," "Salic law."
05m. Quotation from Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
61. See also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 115; Lanctôt, "La Roche," in DCB,
1:421; Parkman, France & England, 1:176-77; Trudel, 60, 63; online Wikipedia, " Philippe Emmanuel, Duke
of Mercoeur"; notes 05h &
05i, above.
La Roche was imprisoned by the Duc de Mercoeur,
brother-in-law of King Henri III, from 1589-97. During that time,
in 1591, "a man by the name of La Cour Pré-Ravillon is said to have
succeeded to the concession held by Noël & La Jannaye, but no document
has yet been found to substantiate this speculation. Pré-Ravillon
perhaps only laid claim to a concession restricted to the development of
mines. It is known, in any case, that Pré-Ravillon did attempt to
establish a foothold in the Magdalen Islands," which were part of New
France. See Trudel, 61; note 05h,
above.
05n. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 65, 82. See also Arsenault, History,
11; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 71-72; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 5, 7;
Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 6; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
47-60, 68-70, 71-72, 119, 150-52, 233, 605; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
27, 467n3, 473n2; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
2-3, 200n5;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:33; William F. E. Morley, "Chauvin de Tonnetuit, Pierre de," in DCB,
1:209, &
online;
Morley, "Verrazzano," in DCB, 1:659; Parkman,
France & England, 1:184n2;
Trudel, 10, 83-84, 283n27;
online Wikipedia, "Edict of Nantes," "Peace of Vervins";
notes 05b, above, &
06b, below.
Fischer, 47-60, offers a biography of Henri IV
in the context of the wars of religion & the era of peace & relative prosperity that accompanied his 21-year reign. Fischer, 71-72, summarizes
Henri's ideal for French settlement in New France, including the
place of seigneuries & trade monopolies, & explains the
opposition of colonization schemes, especially in North America, by the
duc de Sully & other ministers in Henri's court. See also
Griffiths. Contrast
this with François I's largesse with Cartier & Roberval half a century
before. See note 02za, above. Fischer, 71, 119, 233, repeats the accusation of Sully's taking bribes from
powerful Dutch merchants to limit French presence in North America.
Fischer, 68-70, focuses on Henri IV's imperial
policy viz. the Caribbean basin & North America, focusing on the
so-called "lines of amity"--the Friendship Line--& avers, 69-70: "Henri IV went
further and warned Spanish rulers that he did not accept their hegemony
in the new world.... Immediately after the Peace of Vervins," signed in May 1598, a month after the
issuance of the Edict of Nantes, "Henri IV also made
clear to other rulers that he meant to exercise sovereignty in the
region of North America that was widely recognized as New France on
European globes. The French claimed their title by right of
discovery in the voyages of Jacques Cartier and others."
Chauvin's commission may have been the first to mention
"the coast of Acadia." Many sources cited in this work discuss the origin of the names La Cadie
or Acadie & Acadia.
See, e.g., A. H. Clark, 71-72, especially p. 71n1 (one
of Clark’s sources in this discussion is P. C. Cormier’s
L’Origine et l’histoire du nom Acadie, avec un discours su d’autres noms
de lieu Acadiens, published in 1966); Erskine, 5; Faragher; Fischer, 150, 152; Griffiths, 467n3;
MacDonald, 200n5; Morley, "Verrazzano,"
1:659; Parkman. Arsenault, for instance, insists that Verrazzano “was so
overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the primeval forest reaching
down to the sea that it reminded him of descriptions of Arcadia in
ancient Greece.” Much current scholarship says the true origin of
the future colony's name is the French
corruption of a Mi'kmaq word, acada, akade, or cadie, which means "place," "fertile
place," or "good place to live," not Verrazzano's "Arcadia," which he applied
not to present-day NS but to the
Chesapeake area of VA (Fischer, 150, says NC).
See note 02d, above. Trudel, 10, 283n27, published in 1973, discusses the northeastern shift of
Verrazzano's name on maps & printed accounts of the late 1500s,
specially those of 1566, 1572, & 1575, & acknowledges "the influence of
a purely coincidental resemblance to native place-names"--Shubenacadie,
Tracadie, Passamaquoddy, are his examples--leading to "a period of
several years of hesitation between Arcadie and Acadie,"
but, on 10, he breathlessly concludes: "Considering the maps
which first showed the form Arcadie and then gradually
transferred the name of the area that is historically Acadie, the period
of hesitation between the two forms on the part of the writers, and
particularly the exclusive use of the form Arcadie by Champlain
in 1603, we may safely assert that it was Verrazano's name Arcadia
that ultimately produced Acadie and Acadia. Today,
that name is the sole remaining relic of the illustrious voyage of
1524."
In 1604, early in the reign of James I of England (who
also was King James VI of Scotland & succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1601),
England also signed a peace treaty with Spain. "Secured at home
and powerful at sea, England was manifestly ready to strike root in
North America," which she did, finally, at Jamestown in Virginia in
1607. See Trudel, 83; note
12h, below.
05o. Quotations
from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 80-81.
05p. Quotations
from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 73-74. See also Allain, "Not Worth a Straw,"
8; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 121-27, 575, 605, 620;
Ganong,
Champlain's Island, 20; Lanctôt, "La Roche," in DCB, 1:421; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:34; Morley, "Chauvin de Tonnetuit," in DCB,
1:210; Parkman,
France & England, 1:178; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 69; Trudel, "Champlain," in
DCB, 1:188; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB,
1:346; notes 05b,
05c, above, &
05r, below.
La Roche died in France in 1606, in his mid-60s.
See Lanctôt. According to Parkman, "La Roche died miserably," but, unusual for
Parkman, does not offer
specifics.
For de Chaste, see Fischer, 121; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 73-74. His distinctions included
Knight of Malta, Grand Prior of Auvergne, Commander of Limoges, & Grand
Master of the Order of St. Lazare, as well as Vice-Admiral of France,
ambassador extraordinary to England, & Governor of Dieppe. There
is no bio. of de Chaste in the DCB probably because the admiral
never ventured to New France.
Judge Martin, first published in 1827, calls him Commander de la Chatte.
Allain offers
a review of Henri IV's use of commercial companies. She points out
that the de Chaste venture was the first of 75 commercial companies
established by French monarchs between 1599 & 1789. According to Fischer, 121-22, de Chaste's monopoly
extended from 40 degrees north latitude (Philadelphia) to 46 degrees
north latitude (Cape Breton) but did not include the fisheries.
His investors were so fearful of losing money in the venture that de
Chaste's insurance rate was an astonishing 35 percent. See
Fischer, 126.
Fischer, 124, says the Bonne-Renommée was
"a small storm-beaten navire," a generic French term for
a ship, says on 126 that its burden was 120-150 tons, & on p. 158
reduces it to 120 tons.
Yet, on 620, he places the navire in the category of
large, full-rigged ships of from 350-1,000 tons burden, also called "a
round ship," "powered only by sails." Ganong hints that the Bonne-Renommée was
rated at 150 tons burden, which would have made it a small navire
indeed. See also note 06b, below.
Fischer, 127, adds the interesting detail that the Bonne-Renommée
in 1603 carried a middling-sized vessel that Champlain called a
moyenne barque. They also brought
along "open-hulled shallops of five or seven tons, which would be
useful for exploring and making charts," that "were prefabricated in
sections for assembly in America."
05q. See Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, chap. 3; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
74-75; Trudel, Champlain," in DCB, 1:186-88;
notes 05c, above, & 06b, below.
One of his recent biographers speculates on the
possibility that Champlain could have been an illegitimate son of King
Henri IV, hence the King's unusual interest in him, but then concludes that this was only a rumor. See Fischer.
05r. Quotations
from Lanctôt, "La Roche," in DCB, 1:422; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
66. See also George MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts,
Pierre," in DCB, 1:291, &
online;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:33;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
67, 73, 76, 101;
Marcel Trudel, "Gravé du Pont (also called Dupont-Gravé, Gravé
Le Pont, Pont-Gravé, or simply Le Pont or Gravé), François," in DCB,
1:345, &
online; notes
05h & 05m,
above.+
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 101, says
Samuel de Champlain did not apply the name St. Lawrence to Cartier's
Rivière du Canada, "thus harking back to Mercator, who had given the
name to the Gulf in 1569," until Champlain's multi-volume Voyages
appeared in 1613. See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
76; online Wikipedia, "Saint
Lawrence River"; note 02, above. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 66, says "it was perhaps
thanks to him [Gravé & his exploration of the St. Lawrence
valley while working for La Roche] that the names Trois Rivières and
Quebec made their first appearance on a map (the Lavasseur map of
1601)."
05s.
Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 66-67, 287n24.
See also MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:291;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:33;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
77; Trudel, "Gravé
du Pont, François," in DCB, 1:345.
Judge Martin, published in 1827, places
Chauvin's venture in 1602, but other, more recent, sources say 1600.
05t. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 49, 67, 70; online Wikipedia, "Tadoussac." See
also Dickinson & Young, Quebec, 17-8; Eccles, Canadian
Frontier, 20;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 131, 136-37, 605; Hoffman, Cabot to
Cartier, 202-11, 214;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:33; Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 33, 37-38;
Trudel, 28-29, 69, 71-73; notes 02n,
02s, & 02z,
above.
The derisive
term "country cottage" for Chauvin's house at Tadoussac is Champlain's.
See Trudel, 67.
Fischer offers Champlain's sketch
of Tadoussac harbor, drawn in the spring of 1603, which includes an
illustration of Chauvin's "manor house" on the east side of the harbor,
the ruins of which Champlain observed 3 years after its abandonment.
Trudel, 67, reviews the
evolution of Tadoussac's name in French accounts & on French maps, from Thadoyzeau in c1550, Tadouscu in 1599-1600, to Tadoucaq
in 1601, & notes that "Its first official mention occurred on January
15, 1600, in the royal letters addressed to La Roche and Chauvin." For descriptions of the astonishing depth & the
scenic wonder of the lower Saguenay above Tadoussac, frequented today by
full-sized cruise ships, see Fischer, 136-37.
For discussions on the Laurentian Iroquois during Cartier's
time, see Hoffman; Trudel, 28-29; online Wikipedia,
"Iroquois," "St.
Lawrence Iroquoians." For their likely fate, see Dickinson &
Young; Richter; Trudel, 71-73; "St. Lawrence Iroquoians." Trudel, 71, says in 1603,
during his exploration of the valley, Champlain found small groups of
natives near Île aux Lièrvre; at a little river along the north shore
below Île aux Coudres; on the shore opposite today's Île d'Orléans; &
at the mouth of the Richelieu, but "All were nomadic; there were no
longer any fixed settlements." Richter, 33, says the
Laurentians "were evidently absorbed by components of" their fellow
Iroquoian speakers, the Huron of the lower Great Lakes & the Haudenosaunee of
upper New York, but notes, on 37-38, that the Mi'kmaq & especially the
Mohawk killed a substantial number of Laurentians & that the failure of
Donnacona to return from France helped lead to the demise of Stadacona. The discussion in "St. Lawrence
Iroquoians" leans heavily on their linguistic kin, the Mohawk from the
south, part of the Haudenosaunee confedereation, as the hunting culture that destroyed or drove away the
Laurentians. See also "Iroquois." Trudel, 72-73, leans towards a league of
Algonquin, Etchemin (Maliseet), & Montagnais as possible culprits, as
well as the less dramatic explanation of migration from the region to
escape soil depletion. Dickinson & Young, 18, speculate that the
Laurentian Iroquois "may have been destroyed by native peoples from
farther west seeking direct access to European trade, or they may have
been decimated by European diseases brought by Cartier or Robeval and
their companions. On the basis of Hochelagan pottery found in late
prehistoric Huron sites, other archaeologists speculate that the St.
Lawrence Iroquoians were adopted by the Huron." Trudel, 73, concludes: "Whatever
the reason [for the disappearance of the Laurentian Iroquois], the
St Lawrence valley had regained a certain political unity. With
the league of Montagnais, Etchemins and Algonquins, which had the armed
support of the Micmacs or Souriquois of Acadia and the Hurons of
far-away Georgian Bay, there was a new hegemony that favoured the Frence
of the seventeenth century. Because they were nomadic, the nations
of the St Lawrence would facilitate European colonization, and because
they were counting more heavily on barter with the Europeans, they would
be strongly motivated to defend the valley against attack from the
sedentary Iroquois living to the south of Lake Ontario," the powerful
Haudenosaunee.
According to Fischer, 605: "Champlain believed
that Chauvin's proposal [of transporting 50 colonists to New France each
year] was a fraud, and that he had no interest in colonization."
His leaving only 16 men at Tadoussac was proof enough of that.
Trudel, p. 68, notes: "Though the
French had spent three winters in the St Lawrence valley a half century
earlier, they had not yet learned to survive on their own; without the
natives, the minute colony of Tadoussac would have flickered and died."
Trudel, p. 151, pronounces all of the French winters in Canada thus
far--1535-36, 1541-42, 1542-43, & 1600-01--as "miserable failure[s], ...
leading to the possible conclusion that the St Lawrence was
uninhabitable the year round." This view, of course, would change in
the early 1600s.
05u. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 79-80. See also
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 126, 129, 151, 205; "Sarcel, De (Du) Prévert, Jean," in DCB,
1:601-02, &
online;
Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:188; note 02h, above.
"Sarcel"
says the St.-Malo merchant, who before 1604 was involved in the St.
Lawrence fur trade as far up as Île d'Orléans, "reconnoitered the
Acadian coast as far as the Saint John River, and brought back to
Champlain specimens taken from two mines." Fischer places Sarcel de Prévert & his
unnamed vessel in de Chaste's expedition of 1603 & adds, on 141,
that in Jul, at Gaspé, Sarcel de Prévert communicated directly with Gravé & Champlain
about what he had found in La Cadie. See also Fischer, 205; notes
05d, above, &
09, below.
06. Quotations from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 152; Parkman, France & England, 1:184n2. See also
Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 71-72; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 20; Erskine,
Nova Scotia, 7; Fischer, 38-41, 70, 148-50, 152-54, 157-58, 601-02,
643; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 3-5, 467n3; Lanctôt, "La
Roche," in DCB, 1:422; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB,
1:291-92;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35; Morley, "Chauvin de
Tonnetuit," in DCB, 1:209; Parkman, France & England,
1:184; Rudin, Remembering & Forgetting in
Acadie, 18, 281n3;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 67, 84; notes 05n &
05p, above.
MacBeath, 1:291, says de Mons was "a Calvinist" who
"distinguished himself fighting in the cause of Henri IV during the
religious wars in France," for which the King awarded him "an annual
pension of 1,200 crowns and the governorship of the town of Pons in
Saintonge," & that his title from the King was
"lieutenant-general 'of the coasts, lands and confines of Acadia, Canada
and other places in New France.'" Morley says that, in 1588, de Mons "occupied" the important garrison at
Honfleur. Fischer, 38-41, 148-49, 601-02, offers short
biographies of de Mons, emphasizing his Saintonge origins, his fate at the
hands of historians, & the similarities in his character with fellow
Saintongeois, Champlain. For a discussion of its sundry
forms & the evolution of de Mons's name
in Acadian historiography, see Fischer, 38-39, 643n11; Rudin. Fischer, 39, says: "The title 'de
Mons' came from a hill that rose above the town of Royan. The
crest of the hill, overlooking the River Gironde, was the seat of the
family's château," built by de Mons's grandfather. Most scholars call
him Pierre Dugua de Monts or de Mons or
some other variation of that name, but Rudin prefers the family name Dugua.
Griffiths, p. 4, spells his family name Du Gua but
calls him de Monts, as does Trudel, 67, 84. Parkman spells his family name du Guast.
Judge Martin, first published in 1827, calls him Pierre de Guard, Sieur du
Monts & also Dumontz.
The spelling preferred by current scholars seems to be de Mons, also
preferred by the National Park Service &
Parks Canada, protectors & interpreters of de Mons's settlement on Île
Ste.-Croix/Saint Croix Island, ME. Fischer, 38, distinguishes
between the nom de famille, Dugua, & the various noms de terre:
De Mons, De Monts, De Montz, "or simply Montz (his favorite)," & on 643n11, avers: "It might be noted that Pierre Dugua, sieur de
Mons, signed himself either Pierredugua, or Dugua, or Monts, or Mons,
but not de Mons or de Monts." Trudel, 67, acknowledges de Mons's birth "in Saintonge about 1560" but is the
only source this researcher had consulted who notes that "This gentleman
was of Italian origin."
Eccles says de Mons's
title from the King was "Vice-admiral and Lieutenant General of New France." Trudel,
84, says "On October 31 [1603], the Admiral of France granted him [de
Mons] a commission as Vice-Admiral and, on November 8, Henry IV
granted him, as his Lieutenant-General, authority over all the territory
between the 40th parallel and the 46th (the latitude of Cape Race
[Newfoundland]) and a ten-year monopoly of trade with the Indians on the
Atlantic coast and on both shores of the St Lawrence."
Judge Martin says de Mons had "been granted the exclusive trade, in
furs and peltries from the 40th to the 50th degree of northern latitude,
with the authority of granting land as far as the 46th" & that his title
was "Vice Admiral, and Lieutenant General." Griffiths, 4, calls de Mons
"viceroy and captain-general," & adds, 6-7, 467n5, that de Mons's
commission "as lieutenant general of Acadia" was dated 29 Jan 1605, but
that his "patent" from the king was dated 8 Nov 1603, certified in Feb
1604, & that de Mons created
his trading company on 10 Feb 1604. MacBeath, 1:292, repeats the
10 Feb 1604 date for the creation of de Mons's trading company, says
he was "appointed lieutenant-general 'of the coasts, lands and
confines of Acadia, Canada and other places in New France," & mentions
the requirement to establish at least 60 colonists there, as well as to
convert the the Indians "to the Christian faith." Fischer, 152,
154, details the negotiations in early Nov
between de Mons & King Henri over a new title--de Mons preferred to be
"viceroy" of Acadia, but the King refused to grant such a vaunted title
to someone who was not "prince of the blood"--& over the lines of
communication between de Mons & the King. De Mons wanted to report
directly to the King's Council, on which some of his supporters sat, but
the King insisted de Mons report all legal questions to "the
financial center of Rouen," where some of de Mons's detractors held
sway. The Parlement of Rouen, in fact, "refused even to
register the Royal grant." See also Fischer, 601-02. For the
predictable consequences of the King's decision, see note 11a,
below. For a facsimile
copy of de Mons's grant, dated 18 Dec 1603, see Fischer, 153. Fischer, 152-53, gives the dates of de Mons's
commissions, used here.
Parkman, following the French notion of the
extent of
La Cadie in 1603, describes it as running "from Philadelphia to
beyond Montreal." the same area granted to de Chaste in 1603. See
note 05d, above. In note 2, he
adds: "This name"--La Cadie or Acadie, the French roots of the
name Acadia--"is not found in any earlier public document. It was
afterwards restricted to the peninsula of Nova Scotia, but the dispute
concerning the limits of Acadia was a proximate cause of the war of
1755." And: "The word is said to be derived from the Indian
Aquoddiauke, or Aquoddie, supposed to mean the fish
called pollock. The Bay of Passamaquoddy, 'Great Pollock Water,'
if we may accept the same authority, derives its name from the same
origin. Potter in Historical Magazine, I, 84. This
derivation is doubtful. The Micmac word, Quoddy, Kady,
or Cadie, means simply a place or region, and is properlty used
in conjunction with some other noun; as, for example, Katakady,
the Place of Eels, Sunakady (Sunacadie), the Place of
Cranberries, Pestumoquoddy (Passmaquoddy), the Place of
Pollocks. Dawson and Rand, in Canadian Antiquarian and
Numismatic Journal." Parker says nothing here of the
Verrazzano hypothesis in naming Acadia after Arcadia, the classical
Greek paradise. Griffith, 467n3, agrees that "there seems to be a
growing consensus that the word has an Amerindian origin."
Interestingly, at the time of de Mons's appointment as
lieutenant-general of New France, the marquis de La Roche still
considered himself the viceroy of that region. In 1604, La Roche
wrote that "Du Gua de Monts was not 'in full view of everyone as I am on
the Île de Bourbon,'" his name for Sable Island. "That same year, in a
mémoire to the king," La Roche "requested payment of the grants
and dues to which he was entitled, and at the same time offered to
fortify all the harbours from Labrador to Port-Royal." Typically,
"Henri IV remained deaf to this appeal." La Roche died in 1606,
freeing Henri of what must have been an embarrassing circumstance.
See Lanctôt.
06a. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 84. See also Clark, A.
H.,
Acadia, 8-9, 77-78; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 117, 150, 152-54,
601-04, 606; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 4-5,
8, 31; Parkman, France & England, 1:1071,
2:928-29; Ganong, Champlain's Island, 20; MacBeath, "Du Gua de
Monts," in DCB, 1:291-92;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35; Taylor, A., American Colonies,
92ff;
Trudel, "Champlain,"
in DCB, 1:188; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, xi, 82,
142, 151; notes
05r
& 05t, above.
Martin says de Mons "was allowed the free exercise of his
religion (the Calvinist) in America, for himself and his people.
He covenanted to settle the country, and establish the Roman Catholic
religion among the Indians."
For Spain's, as well as Portugal's, domestic &
international status in 1603, see Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
82. James VI came to the English throne as James I upon the death
of his cousin, Elizabeth, in 1603, and the war with Spain ended the
following year with the Treaty of London, thus freeing up England for
its own exploitation of North America, which had failed so miserably in
the late 1580s. See note
05j, above.
A. Taylor gives
a recent analysis of the historical debate over the nature of the
Canadian fur trade & its place in the French settlement of North
America. It includes the role of Tadoussac in the trade.
Griffiths, 5, says de Mons had "crossed the Atlantic once or twice
before" & had been part of Chauvin de Tonnetuit's expedition
to Tadoussac in 1600. MacBeath, 1:291, says only that "De Monts
seems to have made several voyages to Canada during the closing years of
the 16th century, one as a member of Pierre Chauvin de Tonnetuit's
expedition to Tadoussac in 1600," but does not claim that de Mons
wintered on the St. Lawrence. Fischer, 117, while detailing Champlain's critique of Chauvin's
expedition, does not place de Mons among the 16 settlers Chauvin left at
Tadoussac over the winter of 1600-01, only 5 of whom survived. See note
05c, above.
Fischer, 150, who places Champlain in the middle of de Mons's lobbying at court for the de Chastes concession, says the geographer preferred to center de Mons's concession on the St.
Lawrence above Québec, which he himself had surveyed the year before &
with which he was much impressed, not farther south in La Cadie.
Was Champlain doing so in spite of being so impressed with what Sarcel de
Prévert & the Mi'kmaq had told him the year before? See notes
05 &
05o, above.
MacBeath, 1:292, says de Mons's company was formed "with capital of 90,000
livres." See also Fischer, 154, for this figure.
Clark, A. H., 9, 77, mentions a religious aspect to
France's exploitation of the fur trade in what became New France.
See also Griffiths, 8.
For Acadia's strategic value to New France, see Clark,
A. H., 77.
See Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 142, for a
map entitled "Native peoples known to the French, 1604-1627."
Fischer, 602-04, points out that, of all the
so-called viceroys of New France granted that title from 1604-35--de
Mons, Soissons, Condé, Thémines, Montmorency, Ventadour, &
Richelieu--only de Mons actually went there. If one adds Roberval
& La Roche to the list of viceroys, de Mons would have been the third, &
last one, to go there.
06b. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 157-58; MacBeath, "Du
Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:292; Ganong, Champlain's Island, 79, citing Champlain's narrative of
1613; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 7; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 84. See also
Arsenault,
History, 10; Brasseaux,
Founding of New Acadia, 151; Lucien Campeau, "Aubry, Nicolas," in DCB, 1:72, &
online;
Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 78; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 2; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
39, 45, 62, 112-19, 154-56, 159, 209-10, 217, 262, 286-87, 374, 569-74,
665, 684-86; Fischer, "Saint Croix,
Island of Discovery," ix-x, in Forward to Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island; Ganong, 20-21;
Griffiths, 5, 8, 14-15, 468; Historical Atlas
of Canada, 1:48; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 203; MacBeath, "Du
Gua de Monts," 1:291; George MacBeath, "Ralluau (Ralleau), Jean,"
in DCB, 1:564, &
online;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 2;
Milling, Exile Without End, 3;
Parkman, France & England, 1:180ff; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island,
Appendix A3, 269-75; Rudin, Remembering & Forgetting in
Acadie, 18; Huia Ryder, "Biencourt de Poutrincourt, et de
Saint-Just, Jean," in DCB, 1:96-97, &
online;
"Sarcel, De (Du) Prévert," in DCB, 1:601-02; Marcel Trudel, "Angibault dit Champdoré, Pierre," in DCB,
1:64, &
online; Trudel, "Champlain,"
in DCB, 1:186-99; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in
DCB, 1:346;
note 05, above.
Griffiths, 468n21, says the most cited
contemporary accounts of the expedition are those of Champlain &
Lescarbot. She says, 5, that the
years 1603-07 "were almost the only years in which Acadia was the most
important focus of French colonization efforts in North America."
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 154, says that when the merchants of
Brittany & Normandy demanded "full 'liberté de trafic du Canada,'" that is, the freedom to trade in Canada, the King responded
"to the men of Rouen that the project for New France was vital to the
'advancement of Our Power and Authority,' and a monopoly of the fur
trade was its necessary instrument." Henri then informed "the
merchants who claimed liberty of trade that they had full liberty to
join the company of monsieur de Mons." Many did so, including
investors from Rouen, St.-Malo, La Rochelle, & St.-Jean-de-Luz.
Griffiths, 7, offers a list of cities from which the bankrolling
merchants came. She also lists several of the
merchant-investors in de Mons's trading
company, including Samuel
Georges & Jean Macain of La Rochelle, & Corneille de Bellois of
Rouen, the latter de Mons's keeper of accounts. Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 154,
says that, upon learning of the duc de Sully's opposition to the use of
royal funds for the venture, de Mons "requested permission to take
artisans to New France and also to recruit vagabonds and convicts," as
Roberval & La Roche had done.
One wonders what Champlain thought of this. The King also approved
de Mons's request to build "fortresses" on his concession;
this was, in fact, along with converting the "savages," de regeur
for all French colonizing efforts. Having
no doubt read
Sarcel de Prévert's
report of his 1603 explorations in La Cadie, the King requested
that de Mons search carefully for "mines and minerals,"
another de regeur requirement, to which de Mons
of course agreed. "Sarcel" says
Sarcel de Prévert "seems to have played a part in the decision
taken by Du Gua to establish settlements towards the south," & that he
likely informed King Henri IV of his discoveries in La Cadie, which
included mines. See note 05o,
above.
The
unnamed DCB biographer of the explorer adds, 1:602: "Prévert joined the first company of de Monts 19 Feb
1604 and withdrew from it in 1607," but does not say if the St.-Malo
merchant went to La Cadie with de Mons et al. in Mar 1604.
Probably not. Pendery, ed., Appendix A3, does not include him in de Mons's company. Trudel, "Champlain," 1:189, says that,
after de Mons et al. explored the Port-Royal basin, they "went to the
end of the Baie Française [the Bay of Fundy] to look for Prévert's
mines...." MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:292, says that, after
leaving the Port-Royal basin, "The explorers continued up the bay,
seeking both a site for their settlement and a valuable metal deposit
Jean Sarcel de Prévert had reported the previous year to be in the area.
If Sarcel de Prévert had been with them, certainly he would have led
them straight to the place where he found the minerals. Was it at
the entrance to
the Bassin de Mines? Again, the unnamed DCB author does not
say.
Arsenault says more than 120 men crossed with de Mons.
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 156, citing Champlain's account, says
"'about 120 workers.'" Ganong, 21, says "somewhat over 120." A.
H. Clark; Parkman, 1:189; & Historical Atlas
of Canada, say 79. Faragher says 75. Evidently the original expedition contained 120 men & was reduced to 79 after Poutrincourt
took the Don-de-Dieu back to France in Sep (Gravé's Bonne-Renommée
& its contingent never went to Île Ste.-Croix in 1604 but only to Canso;
see note 07b, below). Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 156-57, lists the professions of de Mons's
120 workers, including 2 master miners from Slavonia,
& says most of the sailors, not part of the count, returned to France with Gravé in late summer of 1604 but
that 12 of them
remained with the expedition to man the smaller vessels. Campeau conflates Aubry & the other priest who had
come along, known only to
Champlain as le curé. See Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 157. Names in de Mons's expedition found in Ganong
include not only the principals such as de Mons, Champlain, & Gravé, but
also Sieur d'Orville; Sieur Pierre Angibault dit Champdoré; Sieur
Eustache Boulay, Boulé, or Boullé, Champlain's future
brother-in-law & perhaps commander of the Swiss mercenaries; Sieur Genestou;
Sieur Sourin; Sieur de Beaumont; Sieur la Motte Bourioli; &
Sieur Fougery. Griffiths, 7-8, includes Jean Ralluau, de Mons's secretary; Sieur d'Orville; Sieur de Beaumont;
Fougeray de Vitré; La Motte Bourgjoli; Nicholas Aubry, the young priest; Daniel Boyer, a tile maker; François Rocques, a roofer; & Robert
Lescuyer, a mason. Trudel, "Champlain," 1:189; &
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 156, give Champdoré's full name.
See also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 155-57; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:292. Pendery, ed., Appendix A3, 269-75, offers details of the lives of a number of these
characters & includes new names & their professions not found in
Ganong & Griffiths: François Adenain or Addenin, a skillful
hunter & de Mons's body guard, perhaps assigned
to that duty by the King himself; Henri Beaufort, an apothecary; Louis Conian,
ship's pilot; Henri Couillard, also spelled Couillart, ship's master,
who had been to Canada at least twice before, in 1600 & 1602 (see notes
05c & 05s,
above); Artus Daniel, another of
de Mons's domestics; Guillaume Du Glas (Duglas), ship's pilot; Timothée Le
Barbier, ships's captain; Nicolas Morel, ship's master; Sieur de Sourin,
an artisan; Pasque Symonneau, a Norman man-at-arms with de Mons; Maitre
Simon, a master miner; & unnamed Swiss mercenaries housed in Building D on Île Ste.-Croix.
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 156-57, 665n32, adds Anthoine Lemaire, a 19-year-old house
plasterer; & the indispensable da Costa. For more on François
Addenin, who became a member of Champlain's Order of Good Cheer & would
go to Canada with the geographer in 1608, see Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 155, 209-10,
217, 262, 685-86n28. For more on Eustache Boullé, see Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 286-87. None of these men established families in the
colony. That would not happen for another 30 years, at least not
with European wives.
Griffiths, 8, says "There were no women,
but this does not reflect any attempt (such as the English were making
in Newfoundland at much the same time) to exclude them. The
majority of those who sailed with de Monts considered the expedition
just a stage in their lives, a view made explicit in the contracts they
signed, which guaranteed them return passage to France."
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 374, passes on the delightful
observation that "In Acadia, Lescarbot [who came to the colony in 1606]
wrote that the male settlers had told the Indians that the ladies of
France wore beards and mustaches." One can imagine, then, the
Indians' shock when they first laid eyes on Europeans women, especially
on the younger ones, but this would not occur for years.
Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island of Discovery," ix-x, after recounting the
success of King Henri IV in bringing peace to a war-torn France after
decades of religious conflict, offers this compelling portrait of
Champlain & de Mons: "These French leaders around Henri IV were
humanists of a new breed, different from the classical humanism of the
Italian Renaissance. The sieur de Mons and Champlain were consumed
with curiosity about the world and its inhabitants, and driven by a
passion for discovery. More than that, their struggle against
intolerance in France persuaded them that all people shared a common
humanity, and could learn to live in peace with one another. They
spoke not only about humanity itself, but also about treating others
humanely, humainement, a French adverb that began to spread in
their time...."
Champlain probably was born at Brouage, & de Mons at
either Le Gua or Royan, only a few miles south of Brouage.
Evidently de Mons was 10 or 12 years older than Champlain, de Mons born
between 1558-60, Champlain in the late 1560s. See
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, chaps. 1-3, 569-73; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:291.
Griffiths, p. 7, reminds us that Champlain also had sailed the Caribbean before going to
La Cadie.
For details on this brief but significant episode of Champlain's career,
in 1599-1600, see Fischer, Champlain's Dream, chap. 5, 574; Trudel, "Champlain," 1:187. Rudin points out that Champlain was not a nobleman & claims
that he
added the "de" to his name later to give the impression that he was of
the nobility. Trudel, "Champlain," 1:186-99, which
addresses the question of Champlain's "de" on 1:187, is a relatively
detailed treatment of the explorer's life by a noted Canadian historian,
but perhaps the most thorough biography in print today is
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, who addresses the "de" question on 45, 62, 571. Fischer says the honorific was granted to
Champlain in c1595, when he was in his 20s, as recognition of his
good services in King Henri IV's army logistics corps. Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 155, points out that, as a King's pensioner, Champlain had to ask the
King permission to accompany de Mons in 1604. The King granted permission
on the condition that his geographer "'should always make him a faithful
report of everything I saw and discovered.'"
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 39, says de Mons "was raised a Huguenot
but married to a Catholic." Brasseaux calls Poutrincourt a Protestant,
perhaps a typo.
Griffiths, 7, calls both Poutrincourt & Champlain
devout Catholics. Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:96-97, gives no doubt that Poutrincourt
was "a good Catholic." For details of Poutrincourt's family, see
Griffiths, 14-15; MacDonald, who points out they were "from Saint-Just in Champagne, a little barony at the
junction of the Seine and Aube, southeast of Paris and forty kilometers
from Troyes"; Ryder. Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 155, provides a vignette of Poutrincourt but does not
mention his religious affiliation until p. 193, when he describes him as
"a Catholic of deep piety." Ryder says Poutrincourt at first opposed Henri IV in the
wars of
religion but joined the King's cause after Henri converted to
Catholicism. Henri, who called Poutrincourt "one of the finest and
most valorous men in his kingdom," appointed Poutrincourt to a series of
positions, including "Gentleman of the Chamber," "chevalier of the
king's order," & governor of Méry or Marcilly-sur-Seine. Unfortunately,
Poutrincourt lost much of his wealth during the religious wars.
Ryder adds that Poutrincourt was a friend of de Mons (evidently
religious differences did not sour their relationship), & when
Poutrincourt learned of de Mons's plans to go to Acadia "The challenge
of such an expedition appealed to Poutrincourt's great love of adventure
for he dreamed of founding a great agricultural colony in the New World.
He was granted permission by Henri IV to accompany de Mons who was
delighted to have Poutrincourt's support which greatly eased the problem
of obtaining volunteers for the expedition. It was Poutrincourt
who obtained the necessary arms and soldiers for the defence of the
settlement de Monts planned to establish in America." See
also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 207.
Rudin details the slow, even reluctant, recognition by Acadians
themselves that 1604 was the "birthday" of their history.
06c. Quotations
from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 9-10; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
164-65; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 84. See also Arsenault, Généalogie;
Bunnell, French & Native North American Marriages; Campeau,
"Aubry," in DCB, 1:72; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 7;
Fischer, 5, 157, 162-63, 170, 176, 575, 667; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in DCB, 1:564;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island,
Appendix A3, 275; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB,
1:346; White,
DGFA-1;
note 06b, above.
Lake Rossignol, the largest in NS, also is named for the
Le Havre fur trader. Mi'kmaq tradition says 2 of Rossignol's
sailors, one named Peter, the other Charles, escaped from de Mons's men,
& made their way inland to the Mi'kmaq settlement of Kedgie, located on
islands in the big lake. The story goes that the Frenchmen took
Mi'kmaq wives & created families of their own at places on the lakeshore
called Peter's Point & Charles Point. See Fischer, 162-63,
667n50. However, one looks in vain for these métis families in
Acadian genealogical sources. See Arsenault;
Bunnell; White; note 20, below.
Rossignol, not a man to mess with, sued de Mons et al.
when he returned to France, & the litigation between them lingered for 4 long
years. See Fischer, 667n48.
Fischer, 163, in the caption beneath a facsimile of
Champlain's chart of Port-au-Mouton, says the locals pronounce the
name Port Matoon.
For Maître Simon, see note 06b, above.
For
Champlain's coasting technique, Fischer, 5, says the
geographer, a superb mariner, had "developed a method of close-in
coastal exploration that he called 'ferreting,' and he used it to study
thousands of miles of the American coast from Panama to Labrador."
See 176 for details of the method.
Griffiths, 10, following Lescarbot again, says Gravé, in the Bonne-Renommée,
appeared at Port-au-Mouton with 4 captured Basque vessels, the captains of
which, like Rossignol, had been illegally trading for furs in de
Mons's concession, before de Mons & Champlain left Port-au-Mouton.
Fischer, 170, following Champlain, places de Mons's confrontation
with the errant Basques in late Jun,
after de Mons & Champlain had arrived at Île Ste.-Croix, & says the
Basques were delivered to the island not by Gravé in Bonne-Renommée
but in a barque du port, a much smaller vessel, commanded, most
likely, by 1 of Gravé's officers. Trudel, "Gravé du Pont," hints that, in 1604, Gravé did not
leave Canso except to return to France with a cargo of trade goods.
See also 07b, below.
Fischer, 157, citing Champlain, says Fr. Aubry
was from "a 'good family' in Paris," that the young priest's parents
were so anxious about his going to New France that they followed him to
Honfleur & begged him not to go. Curiously, when his narrative
comes to the place where Fr. Aubry became lost on Île Longue, Fischer
says nothing of it. See p. 165. Neither does Griffiths, 10. For the details of the episode, see Campeau; Pendery, ed.,
who cites Campeau.
06d. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 155, 158. See also
Arsenault, History, 10; Clark, A. H., Acadia; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme; Fischer,
124-26, 159, 350, 575, 666, 698; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
7, 9; MacBeath, "Du
Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:292;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35;
Morley, "Chauvin de Tonnetuit," in DCB, 1:209; Parkman, France & England;
Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island, Appendix A3, 275; Ryder,
"Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
65, 80, 84, 287; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB, 1:345.
Griffiths names the larger ship & says de
Mons sailed on the smaller
one. She calls the larger vessel Bon Renommé, but, on p. 468n20, admits: "Oddly enough, the names of the
ships are difficult to discover." Morley says de Mons's former associate, Chauvin de Tonnetuit,
owned Don-de-Dieu,
but Chauvin had died the year before. See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 65. Did de Mons buy the vessel
from Chauvin's estate, which was in ruin by the time of his death?
See Morley, 1:210. However, Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 287n24, says Chauvin's Don-de-Dieu was rated at 400 tons, much
larger than de Mons's Don-de-Dieu, so it may not have been the
same ship. Fischer, 158, says the Bonne-Renommée
was 120 tons & the Don-de-Dieu 150 tons, so de Mons,
appropriately, sailed on the larger ship, which was 100 feet long,
compared to Bonne Renommée's 90 feet. See also Fischer, 126. Fischer, 158; & Pendery, ed., provide the details of who served as masters &
commanders of which vessel in Apr 1604. Pendery, ed., citing a
secondary source, calls Henri Couillard of Honfleur the master of
Don-de-Dieu, but Fischer, citing primary sources, says Captain
Timothée Le Barbier was that ship's master. See also Fischer, 350, 698n20. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 65, 287n24, shows Henri Couillart undertaking "a codfishing voyage" for Chauvin in the
Don-de-Dieu in early 1599 & "in charge of the ship's sailors" in
1603. See also note
05c, above.
Fischer, 158, details the supplies in the ships'
holds, including "prefabricated parts for several shallops and skiffs,"
which proved to be lifesavers.
MacBeath & Ryder say the departure dates for de Mons's 2
ships were Mar 7 & 10, & MacBeath has Gravé leaving first.
Trudel, 84, says de Mons's "fleet of three ships set sail early in
March, 1604," but does not give the port. Griffiths, 9, seems to agree
with these departure dates but does not specify which ship left first.
Evidently these writers follow Lescarbot's account, which pronounced Champlain's dates
incorrect, though Lescarbot was not on the voyage. Fischer, 158-59, 575, following Champlain, says the 2 ships departed on Apr 7 & 10,
de Mons first & then Gravé, &
that the crossing for Don-de-Dieu was swift but "lively." Fischer, 666n39,
cites contemporary court records that show merchants still signing up
passengers for the 2 ships on Mar 17 & Don-de-Dieu at Honfleur until Mar 24, when it sailed to Le Havre to join
Bonne-Renommée.
Judge Martin, first published in 1827, says de
Mons's expedition left Havre-de-Grâce on 7 May 1604.
Griffiths says the ships became separated
during the crossing, implying that they had intended to sail together.
Fischer, 159, says they "sailed independently with orders to meet at
the fishing harbor of Canso...."
Arsenault calls de Mons's second in command
Dupont-Gravé. A. H. Clark calls him Gravé du Pont. Faragher uses Pontgrave. Fischer prefers Pont-Gravé, which, he says on 124, was what his
shipmates called him. Griffiths prefers Gravé Du Pont.
Parkman calls him Pontgrave. Ganong's translation of
Champlain's 1613 narrative favors Pont. Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
66, says he was called Dupont-Gravé, Dupont, Le Pont, & Pont-Gravé, but
favors Gravé. Trudel, "Gravé du
Pont," is followed here. Fischer, 124-25, offers a glowing portrait of the man called "the Falstaff of New
France" & adds, on 155, that, in the expedition of 1604, Gravé
was "The commander afloat, and first lieutenant of the sieur de Mons
ashore...."
In 1604, the French called Cape Breton Island Île
St.-Laurent, perhaps because of its association with the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. See Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 80.
06e. Quotations
from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 9; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 162. See also Fischer, 155, 159-61; Ganong, Champlain's Island,
21; Griffiths, 10; MacBeath, "Du
Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:292; Ryder, "Biencourt
de Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
84, 151; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:189; note 05b, above.
Ryder says: "The voyage was long and filled with
peril. Many times the captains of the two ships advised a return
to France but both de Monts and Poutrincourt were determined to complete
the journey." Fischer, 159, describes the Don-de-Dieu's
crossing as "lively" & details a near-fatal mishap when a carpenter was
swept overboard but managed to hand on to a dangling ship's line.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 151, says of early 17th-century
crossings in general: "The voyages would sometimes take up to
three months, though most often it could be done in two. In 1615
and again in 1618, it was even completed in a single month."
Griffiths, 9, says de Mons & Champlain sighted
Cap-Sable on May 1, but Fischer, 160-61, following Champlain's account, says the
Don-de-Dieu reached Sable Island, not Cap-Sable, on May 1 & La
Hève, the actual landfall, a week later. Ganong & MacBeath agree that they landed at Cap de La Hève
on May 8. Fischer, 160-61, which includes a facsimile of
Champlain's chart of the harbor at La Hève, says the geographer
named the cape "after a French landmark near Le Havre with the same name
and similar appearance." Fischer also notes that this "marked the
start of Champlain's long career as an inventor of names for the land of
North America." La Hève today is La Have, NS, south of Lunenburg.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 84, citing Champlain &
Lescarbot, seems to be implying that de Mons first landed at
Port-au-Mouton.
The encounter with friendly Mi'kmaq at La Hève would have been a first for the expedition & a harbinger of good
relations between the French & Indians. There was, of course,
a reason why de Mons et al. got along well with the local Indians. See
Fischer, 161-62; Griffiths, 10;
note 08, below.
07. Quotations from
Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 165-66; Whitehead & McGee, The Mi'kmaq, 31. See also
Arsenault, History, 11; Clark, A. H., Acadia, x-xi, 24,
28, 80;
Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 20, 22; Fischer, chaps. 1 & 2, 150-52,
168, 170, 174, 575, 623-26, 668n68; Ganong, Champlain's Island,
21, 73; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 10-11, 469; Historical Atlas of Canada,
1: plate 29; MacBeath, "Du
Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:292; MacDonald, Fortune & La
Tour, 3;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35; Milner, "Chignecto";
<new-brunswick.net/new-brunswick/rivers/sjriver1.html>;
Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island, 15; Quinn, "Bellenger," in DCB,
1:87;
Ryder, "Poutrincourt,"
in DCB, 1:96; "Sarcel, De (Du) Prévert," in DCB,
1:601-02; W. Austin Squires, "Secoudon (Secondon,
Chkoudun), in DCB, 1:604, &
online;
Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 84-86; Trudel,
"Champlain," in DCB, 1:189;
map.
For the nuances of de Mons's grant to Poutrincourt, see note
10c, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 84-85, says de
Mons et al. left "this bay [Ste.-Marie] on June 16 through Long
Island Strait" & "set out in a pinnace to examine the great bay to which
he gave the name Baie Française, today the Bay of Fundy." This
implies that it was de Mons who named the great bay. Fischer, 152, says Champlain named the Fundy "Baie
Françoise." Historical Atlas of Canada calls it "Baie Française" (the Historical Atlas of Canada
is the standard for Acadian & Canadian place-name
spellings used in this study). See also Arsenault; Clark, A. H.,
80;
Eccles. Griffiths, 469n51, says: "Throughout the time period covered by this volume
[1604-1755], the French always used the term "Baie française" for these
waters." See Clark, A. H., x-xi, for his struggle with Acadian names, both
geographical & personal.
De Mons only "re-discovered" the Bay of Fundy.
It was visited first by the Portuguese fisherman/explorer Jaoa Alvares
Fegundes in c1521 & soon after by Verrazzano. Milner says Diego Homen, "a
Portuguese settled at Venice," ventured into the Bay of Fundy in 1558 &
"made a map showing Chignecto Bay." Milner goes on to say:
"It is probable that Portuguese and French fishermen cast their nets
into these waters even before that date." Milner implies that not
until de Mons's appearance in 1604 did a sanctioned European expedition sail along
the Chignecto shore. What of Bellenger's exploration in 1583,
which was the first recorded exploration of the bay's interior, or
Sarcel de Prévert, who explored the Acadian coast a year before de Mons's voyage to Acadia? Both Bellenger & Sarcel de Prévert
also explored the lower reaches of Rivière St.-Jean, so their
explorations of the bay likely had been extensive. See
Quinn; "Sarcel"; notes
02b, 05, & 05a
above,
286, below. An excellent map of de Mons's Jun 1604
exploration is Pendery, ed., 15, Fig. 2.1,
"Routes of the 1604, 1605, and 1606 expeditions."
Ganong; & Trudel,
"Champlain," say de Mons explored the Bay of Fundy in a
barque. MacBeath says a ship's longboat.
Fischer, 165, says a shallop. Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 85, says a pinnace. Griffiths, 10,
implies that de Mons took all of his ships into the bay. Fischer, 170, Ganong, 73, & Griffiths, 10, mention barques captured from Basque fur
traders, one a vessel of 8 tons. What the French called a shallop or chaloupe
was little more than an open longboat with sails, specially designed for
exploration of more sheltered rock-strewn coasts, shallow bays, &
rivers, where larger vessels dared not go. For exploration of safer coasts, they used the slightly
larger patache,
similar to what the English called a pinnace, which, unlike the
chaloupe, was fully decked. See Fischer, 168, 174, 623-26; notes 06c &
08, above. Bellenger made
good use of such craft in his exploration of the Acadian coasts in 1583.
See note 05a, above.
Trudel, "Champlain," &
Beginnings of New France, 85, say it was Champlain
who named Port-Royal. See also note
08a, below.
The narrow gut by which the French reached the
Port-Royal basin from Baie Française is today's Digby Gut. Online
Wikipedia, "Digby Gut," says: "The Digby Gut is a narrow channel
connecting the Bay of Fundy with the Annapolis Basin. The town of
Digby, Nova Scotia[,] is located on the inner portion of the western
side of the Gut. The eastern entrance is marked by the Point Prim
Lighthouse. Strong tidal currents, numerous rocky ledges, frequent
fogs and unpredictable winds make it a dangerous passage requiring a
pilot of local knowledge. Tide flows create 5 knot tidal currents
and create numerous whirlpools and eddies. The gut is about a half
nautical mile in width and bordered by high rocky cliffs. It marks
a break in the North Mountain ridge along the Annapolis Valley and is
the eastern end of Digby Neck. Digby Gut had its origins as the
terminus of the ancient Bear River, part of which is now a drowned river
valley." The Bear River, only 25 miles long, flows northward into
the lower Annapolis Basin & is styled by locals "the Switzerland of Nova
Scotia." Champlain called it Rivière St.-Antoine & Lescarbot
Rivière-Hébert, probably after Louis Hébert, the latter name
persisting thruout the French period; sometime in the late 1700s, the
British renamed it Bear River; the Mi'kmaq, who still live on its banks,
call it L'sitkuk. See online Wikipedia, "Bear River (Nova
Scotia)."
It is interesting to note that during the several weeks
in which de Mons & Champlain explored the coast of present-day
southwestern
NS & southern NB, they laid eyes on the future sites of most of the major
Acadian settlements of the 17th & 18th centuries--Cap-Sable; St. Mary's Bay, which would become a
refuge for post-dispersal Acadians after the 1760s; Port-Royal; Minas;
Cobeguit; Chignecto. They may even have observed the mouth of the river in
the Minas Basin up which Pigiguit would be established, as well as the mouths of
rivières Chepoudy
& Petitcoudiac, & perhaps the Memramcook as well.
The highest tides in the Bay of Fundy come in the
spring, the time of year in which de Mons & Champlain first observed them.
Clark, A. H., 24, writes: "...it is within the bay that
spectacular ranges of thirty to forty feet at normal tides, and fifty
feet or more at spring tides, occur." See also Clark, A. H., 28
(Fig. 2.4). They also happen to be the highest tides recorded on the
planet. See note 22c, below.
Being Saintongeois, de Mons & Champlain were familiar with high tides &
their effect on coastal marshes on the upper Bay of
Biscay. See Fischer, chaps. 1 & 2; note
06b, above.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 85, citing
Champlain, is the source for de Mons's cross at the mouth of Rivière
St.-Jean.
The map in Pendery, ed., 15, Fig. 2.1,
entitled "Routes of the 1604, 1605, and 1606 expeditions," does
not include the sweep down to Grand Manan Island in the Jun 1604
exploration but has de Mons et al.
going from Rivière St.-Jean straight to Passamaquoddy Bay. See
Fischer, 166, for the detour to Grand Manan. Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 85, says nothing of it.
07a. Quotation from MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts,"
in DCB, 1:292. See
also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 169-71, 668-69n75; Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island of Discovery," ix, in
Forward to Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island; Ganong,
Champlain's Island, 74-77, 122-39; Pendery, ed., 6, Fig. 1.6, entitled "Plan of the Saint Croix
Island habitation from Champlain's Les Voyages (1613)
(Library of Congress)," 7, 8, Fig.
1.8, also entitled "Plan of the Saint Croix habitation from
Champlain's Les Voyages (1613) (Library of Congress)";
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 86;
map.
The proposed fields 3 leagues above the island on the
western side of the river, "near some rapids," would have been the site
of present-day Calais, ME, across from St. Stephen, NB--an important
international crossing between the U.S. & Canada.
07b. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 167-68, 170. See also
Fischer, 166, 169; Ganong,
Champlain's Island, 21, 22-23, 29, 45; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
11-12; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island; Perrin, W. A., Acadian Redemption,
2; Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 85-86; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:189;
Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB, 1:346; note
06c, above.
Île
Ste.-Croix--also called Dochet (pronounced DOE-shay) Island,
Met-a-neg-wis, Isle Saincte Croix, Ste.-Croixe, St. Croix, Dosias, Doceas, Docias,
Dochez, Doshays, Doucett, Douchette, Douchet, or Ducie Island, Big
Island, Great Island, Neutral Island, Bone Island, De Monts Island, &
Hunt's Island--is on the ME/U.S. side of the international border. A good map of its location relative to the surrounding area is
Ganong, 29, Fig. 4. In a revised &
expanded edition of a work published originally in 1902 that includes
translations of many passages from Champlain's 1613 narrative, Ganong
also provides a comprehensive history of the island & its brief time as
the "capital" of Acadia. An even deeper treatment of the
island's history is Pendery, ed., which
offers great detail on the island's archaeology as well as its geology &
history.
W. A. Perrin says "Dugua named the island St. Croix
because it was near the confluence of rivers resembling the arms of a
cross." Ganong, 22-23, 45, says the story of the
cross-shaped river originated with Marc Lescarbot, who came to Acadia
after the Île Ste.-Croix settlement was abandoned but visited the island at least
once during his time at Port-Royal in 1606-07. See note
09, below. Ganong also points out that
the eventual name of the river, St. Croix, came from the island, not
vice versa.
If de Mons's larger ships lingered at Baie Ste.-Marie until the last week of
Jun, when Champdoré retrieved them, why was Fr. Aubry unable to find them
there? He must have been
thoroughly, hopelessly lost in a wilderness he could not comprehend.
Griffiths, 12, says: "At this point [the end of
Aug], the two large ships departed for France, under Poutrincourt's
command, with orders to report on the expedition's progress." This
implies that Gravé & the Bonne-Renommée also went to Île
Ste.-Croix. Trudel, "Gravé du Pont," says, "On his 1604 voyage, he
[Gravé] concerned himself exclusively with trading," something best done
from an established base like Canso. Poutrincourt likely was
placed in command of Don-de-Dieu for the voyage home, with La
Lavrette as the other "large" vessel in the flotilla. Gravé was de Mons's second in command on the ground & commanded the expedition's
vessels while they were sailing together, so it is unlikely that
Poutrincourt, who held no formal office in the 1604 venture, would have
been placed over Gravé at that time. See notes
06d, above, &
08c, below.
08. Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
12; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:292; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 87. See also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 78;
Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 23;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 7; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 148, 171-73,
210, 545-46, 575,
668-69; Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island of Discovery," ix-x, in Forward to Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island;
Ganong, Champlain's Island, 24, 62-69 (including maps from
Champlain's narrative of 1613), 80, 82-86; Hoffman, Cabot to
Cartier, 179; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts,"
1:293; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in DCB, 1:564; MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour, 3;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35-36; Pendery, ed., 3, 5;
Rudin,
Remembering & Forgetting in
Acadie, 20;
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 85-86, 95, 151-52, 160; Trudel,
"Champlain," in DCB, 189; notes
02n, 02p,
05e & 05n,
above.
The French called the Indians in the area of Île
Ste.-Croix the Etchemins. Champlain, in fact, called Rivière Ste.-Croix the River of the
Etchemins. Only later did the river take
the name of the island. See S. A. Davis; Ganong, 63;
Pendery, ed., 5; note 07b, above. The actual Indians in the area were the
Algonquin-speaking Passamaquoddy, after
whom the bay into which the Ste.-Croix flows was named. See Rudin. Nearby, on Rivière St.-Jean, were the
Passamaquoddy's close kin, the Maliseet, who the French also called Etchemins. See
also note 140, below;
map.
The death toll during the winter on Île Ste.-Croix was
34, 35, or 36, depending on the source one consults, all of whom agree that, after Poutrincourt left
with the Don-de-Dieu, 79 men, including de Mons & Champlain,
remained. Ganong, 24, says 59 fell sick & 34
died. Champlain's 1613 narrative says 35. Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 171, says 35 died "and twenty more were 'very
near it.'" Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 87
agrees. Fischer,
"Saint Croix, Island of Discovery," ix, says 35 or 36 died, mostly of scurvy, & that only 11 of the survivors
remained in tolerable health when spring came. (See Fischer, 173, for the possible identity of these 11 men--the professional hunters
who Jesuit Fr. Biard later reported "preferred the chase to the foul air
of the firesides, running actively to lying passively in bed, setting
traps in the snow for wild game to sitting around the fire, talking of
Paris and its great chefs.") Griffiths, 12, says 36 "died
before spring."
Judge Martin, first published in 1827, offers an interesting take on the
cause of the scurvy: "During the winter, the French suffered
much for want of water. The difficulty they found in procuring a
supply from the continent, induced them to use melted snow. This
brought on the scurvy, which made great havock among them." For a
more modern take on the cause of the disease, see online Wikipedia,
"Scurvy."
Erskine, published in
1975, says "(Recently, the site of that first fort [on Île Ste.-Croix]
was excavated and twenty-eight skeletons were found, their teeth showing
the results of scurvy.)" See also Ganong, 83. De
Mons's dead were buried necessarily in shallow graves, which led the
Indians to call Île Ste.-Croix "Bone Island." See Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 171. Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 668-69n75, provides a summary of the archaeological
excavations on the island, by both amateurs & professionals, from
1796-2005. See also Pendery, ed. Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 171-72, based on recent excavations on the island, supports
Champlain's account of surgeons at Ste.-Croix performing autopsies on
some of the dead to determine what had killed them. Authorities
insist that these were "the New World's First Adult Autopsy." See
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 669n78.
No one disputes that most, if not all, of these men died of scurvy.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 95, shows that Champlain,
during his over-wintering at Québec in 1608-09, was still unaware of the
efficacy of annedda in the treatment of scurvy. See also
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 152; note
12a, below.
Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island of Discovery," ix,
adds: "The French founders were unfortunate in their choice of a
site, and unlucky in their timing. The winter of 1604-05 was one
of the worst in a long era that climate historians call the Little Ice
Age." See also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 669n76; Pendery, ed., 3.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 85, is especially tough on de
Mons's choice of the island. After pointing out the few good
things about the place, Trudel continues: "However, being still
little acquainted with America, the Europeans had overlooked a number of
serious shortcomings. It would be necessary, wrote Lescarbot, 'at
every hour of the day, morning, noon and night, to cross with great
effort a large expanse of water in order to bring such things as might
be needed from the mainland'; an island, he added, 'is not appropriate
to commencing the establishment of a colony,' and besides, there was
neither fresh water nor firewood there. The mistake was being
made, then, that had been made by Villegaignon in the bay of the Rio de
Janeiro; the same mistake that had been made by La Roche with his
isolated colony on Sable Island. The Europeans still had a lot to
learn."
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 546, offers an
interesting interpretation of the failure of the settlement at Île
Ste.-Croix as expressed by the Canadian historian Benjamin Sulte
(1841-1923), who wrote a multi-volume history of Canada in the early
1880s. "Sulte believed," Fisher tells us, "that the settlers of
Sainte Croix had failed because 'most of them knew only city life; they
were unable to fend for themselves; they were totally lacking in the
initiative prevalent among rural people.'" See also Fischer, 545. According to Professor Marcel Trudel--see Fischer, 546--Sulte
& American historian John Bach McMaster, who also published in the 1880s,
were pioneers of a form of history that focused on le petit peuple,
"the little people"--still a popular trend in historiography, as I hope
the present work demonstrates.
Again, no women accompanied the re-supply. See
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 210.
08a. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 182-84, 186, 189; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
157. See also
Fischer, 185, 187-88, 576; Thomas Grassmann, "Panounias (Panoniac)," in DCB, 1:529-30,
&
online;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 12; MacBeath, "Du Gua de
Monts," in DCB, 1:293; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:33-34, 36; Parkman,
France & England, 1:191ff;
Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island,
15, Fig. 2.1, "Routes of the 1604, 1605, and 1606 expeditions";
Squires, "Secoudon," in DCB, 1:604; Trudel, "Angibault,"
in DCB, 1:64; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 87, 156; Trudel, "Champlain,"
in DCB, 1:189; online Wikipedia, "Bartholomew Gosnold";
note 05j, above.
Parkman,
taken largely from Champlain's
1613 narrative, is a detailed account of the 1605 exploration down the
coast to Cape Cod.
Griffiths, as well as Trudel, "Champlain," & Beginnings of New France, 87, like Fischer & Parkman, place de Mons on the expedition. MacBeath says "Champlain was sent on an exploratory trip down the
New England coast," implying that he went without de Mons, but
there is no question that de Mons was in command of the 1605 exploration.
Only the first of Champlain's 3 explorations of the coast of
Norembega--in Sep 1604--was under his sole command.
08b. Quotations
from
Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:189; Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 176-79, 181-82; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 86. See also Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 7, 113, 157-58, 174-75, 180, 575, 624-25, 670n12 & 13,
670, 671n20, 672n31, 678n61; Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island of Discovery,"
in Forward to Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island, x; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island, 15, Fig. 2.1;
Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
9-10, 115; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 8, 19, 102, 391n8; online Wikipedia, "Mount Desert Island," "Norumbega"; notes
02d,
02v,
05a, & 05d, above.
Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island of Discovery,"
emphasizes Champlain's good relations with
the coastal Indians, the result of his treating them humanely:
"Champlain approached the Indians without fear or force or guile,
usually with an interpreter, and he was welcomed. They found ways
to talk." See also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 7.
The expedition had carried with it prefab parts for
"several shallops and skiffs." A dozen sailors, probably
from Don-de-Dieu, remained with the expedition in late Aug to man
the smaller vessels thru the winter. See Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 157-58; note
06b, above. For a detailed
description of a French patache, which the English called a pinnace,
see Fischer, 174, 176, 624-25, 670nn3 & 5; Fischer, "Saint Croix, Island
of Discovery." For details on Champlain's method of "ferreting" a coast,
see Fischer, 176.
Trudel, Beginning of New France, 86, says:
"Champlain, having searched in vain for mines around Chignecto Bay, set
out on September 2 for the Norembègue country." Is Trudel saying
that Champlain returned to the Chignecto area to look for minerals
before heading south to Norembègue, or is this a reference to the
exploration of the upper Bay of Fundy the previous Jun by de Mons et
al., including Champlain? See note
07, above. Trudel, "Champlain," says of Champlain's
down-coast exploration in Sep & Oct 1604: "Although not the first
European to visit this region, he has given us the first precise
description of it. He returned somewhat disappointed with what he
had seen," hence his determination to return there. Jean
Alfonse's exploration of the Penobscot in 1542 may very well be the
stuff of legend. See note 02t,
above. Not so Champlain's exploration of that river in 1604, which
was thoroughly documented.
The middle word in Mount Desert Island is pronounced
today by locals de-ZERT, as the French would have it. Cadillac Mountain
stands over 1,500 feet above sea level, the highest point on the East
Coast of the United States. See online Wikipedia, "Mount Desert
Island."
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 115, in
describing the intended site of a Jesuit mission to be established in
Norembègue in 1613, calls the site of Champlain's tabagie
Kadesquit, which follows the Jesuit narrative of Fr. Pierre Biard.
See note 13, below. The
present-day spelling is Kenduskeag.
Weidensaul says Champlain's guides were Mi'kmaq & calls
the Penobscot sagamore Bashabes. On p. 5, he says the
Europeans' Norembèque was called Wobanakik, or "land of the dawn," by
the Wabanaki of present-day ME. For the fate of Bashabes & his
fellow Abenaki, see p. 102.
08c. Quotations from
Arsenault, History, 12; Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 193. See also Campeau, "Aubry," in DCB,
1:72; Fischer, 171, 176; MacBeath, "Ralluau,"
in DCB, 1:564;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:35;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 86, 151; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont,
François," in DCB, 1:346.
Campeau says Aubry "returned to France either in 1604 or 1605," that he
"was still living in 1611, and maintained a keen interest in Canadian
affairs." If he returned to France in 1605, he would have been
compelled to endure the hard winter on Île Ste.-Croix, which is
unlikely considering his condition after he was rescued. So he
probably returned to France with Poutrincourt in Sep 1604.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 151, informs
us, in the context of a discussion of early 17th-century Atlantic
crossings: "The duration of the return to France, as far as we can
tell, was usually shorter, ordinarily less than two months, and we may
note that in 1613 [on one of Champlain's voyages from Canada] it was
only two weeks."
08d. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 189-92. See also Fischer,
185, 192, 267, 530, 576, 616-19, 673, 687;
Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 12, 33; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:36-37;
MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:293; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
87; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:189; Weidensaul,
The First Frontier, chap. 1.
Trudel, "Champlain," lists the sites visited by
de Mons & Champlain on their 1605 expedition & includes the original
French name as well as the current name for these places:
Kennebec, Baie des Sept-Îles (Casco Bay), Baie de Chouacouët (Saco Bay), Cap-aux-Îles (Cape
Ann), Baie des Îles (Boston Bay), Port St.-Louis (Plymouth Bay), Cap-Blanc (Cape Cod),
& Mallebarre (Nauset Harbour). Trudel says the voyage was "a journey of about 400 miles," & adds:
"[Bartholomew] Gosnold [in 1602] and [George] Weymouth [in 1605]
had preceded him at some points on this coast, but the geographer
Champlain has left us a set of such precise maps that he deserves the
title of first cartographer of New England." See also Griffiths.
Fischer, 185, offers a detailed map of de Mons's travels up & out of
the Kennebec from Jul 1-8. On 192, he mentions the presence of
Weymouth in the Kennebec area in Jul 1605 & the earlier voyage of Martin
Pring in 1603, in which the English turned mastiffs loose on the Indians
when they tired of their company.
Griffiths, 12, says de Mons & Champlain sailed as far south as Nausett[sic]
Bay, which lies on the Atlantic side of the Cape Cod peninsula south of
the cape, & that the Frenchmen saw no "signs" of English claims in the
area.
For Champlain's favorite weapon, an arquebus à rouet,
or wheel-lock musket, see Fischer, 267, 616-19, 687n49. This
may have been the type of weapon he was using in 1605.
See Fischer, 530, for a critique of de Mons's
leadership on this voyage.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 87, in a brief
review of de Mons's 1605 expedition down the coast, concludes:
"Along this coast, where a flourishing New England was to take root
twenty years later, de Monts had not found his ideal spot for
colonization; where the country was attractive and climate pleasant, he
judged the coast to be of difficult access, or else it was the soil
itself which was unpromising, or again the Indians did not appear
sufficiently reliable." Yet here & in "Champlain," Trudel
fails to mention the clash with the Nauset at Mallebarre. See also
Griffiths, 12. Just as surprisingly, MacBeath says only that, in 1605, after de Mons had decided to move his
venture from Île Ste.-Croix to Port-Royal, "Champlain was sent on an
exploratory trip down the New England coast with Panouias and his wife
as interpreters and guides, but his report on settlement possibilities
there was unfavourable." MacBeath evidently is conflating
Champlain and de Mons's 1605 expedition with de Mons & the geographer's return to
the coast of ME with Poutrincourt in the fall of 1606, but MacBeath also fails to
mention the clash with the Nauset at Malbarre during the 1605
expedition. See note 10b, below.
One would be tempted to question Fischer's details of the incident had
he not cited Champlain's own account of the 1605 voyage so extensively!
See Fischer, 673nn60-66.
George Weymouth, who Weidensaul calls Waymouth & his
ship Archangell, was an old hand in the exploration of the
northern regions. In 1602, he sailed several hundres miles into Hudson Strait
until his mutinied, & he was compellted to turn back This was 9 years
before Hudson himself had gone that way & discovered the bay that lay
beyond the strait! Ferdinando Gorges, known today as the Father of
English Colonization in North America, became intrigued with North
American settlement when Weymouth presented him with 3 captured Natives.
Gorges--&, according to Martin, F.-X., 1:36, also the earls of
Southampton & Arundel--were sponsors of Weymouth's expedition to North
America for the purpose of finding mines & trading for "furs and
peltries." Weymouth
left Downs, England, aboard the Archangel on 5 Mar 1605, & made
land fall at Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, on May 17, a month
before de Mons & Champlain set out on their venture down the coast. From Monhegan,
Weymouth turned west to the Kennebec estuary, which de Mons did not
reach until the first week of Jul. Weymouth then turned north,
found the estuarary of the Penobscot, & explored 60 miles
up the great river before he returned to England with 5 Native captives.
Martin, F.-X., 1:37, says Weymouth returned to England with "a Sagamore
and five other chiefs." He presented these captives to Gorges &
Sir John Popham, who taught them English so that they could serve as
guides on future expeditions. Weymouth founded no colony during
his 1605 expedition; if he had, local Indians would have alerted de Mons
of its existence. See F.-X. Martin; Weidensaul; online
Wikipedia, "Ferdinando Gorges," "George Weymouth"; notes
12h & 18b, below.
Weidensaul, a recent work, details Weymouth's weeks-long encounter with
the coastal Indians from both Native & English points of view. He
points out that the 5 Indians Weymouth kidnapped at the mouth of the
Penobscot in early Jun 1605 were Eastern Abenaki, including a local
sagamore. Weidensaul, 26, 394n26, offers phonetical
renditions of the names of the captured Abenaki--the leader, Krehaneto;
his brother Amoret; Skicowaros; Maneddo; & Sassacomit, perhaps adopted
by the Abenaki.
09. Quotations from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 202-03, 205; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:293; Trudel, "Champlain,"
in DCB, 1:189; Eileen C. Cushing, "Messamouet," in
DCB, 1:507, &
online. See
also Allain, "Not Worth a Straw,"
8; Campeau, "Membertou," in DCB, 1:500-01; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 79; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 1-9;
Fischer, 6, 576; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 12-13;
MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:293-94; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in DCB, 1:564;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 4-5;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:36;
Squires, "Secoudon,"
in DCB, 1:604; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont,
François," in DCB, 1:346.
MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:293, tells us:
"When he [de Mons] arrived [in France] after a crossing of 31 days, he
learned that many of the fur-trading merchants who were not members of
the company were making a serious effort to have his trading privileges
revoked. He quickly came to the decision to remain in France to
better protect his company's interests." De Mons, in fact, never
returned to Port-Royal; he did not even return to North America but
continued to send lieutenants & associates there instead.
But one must keep in mind that, in the early 1600s, de Mons was one of
the few French
lieutenant-general/viceroy/concessionaire of New France who actually went
there. See Fischer, 6; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:293-94.
Fischer, 202, says: "In the summer of 1605,
Henri IV was thinking seriously about planting a French colony between
Portuguese Brazil and New Spain. He appointed a soldier named
Daniel de la Revardière to be lieutenant-general for the territory from
the Amazon to Trinidad." How would such a venture affect de Mons's
concession far up north in New France? One would expect that
Henri, with Sully whispering in his ear, would have contributed nothing
from the royal treasury for the tropical colony but would have awarded a
monopoly on production & trade to an individual or a thrown-together
trading company like de Mons's to finance & populate the venture.
This could have drawn away potential investors from de Mons's
concession, but certainly not royal funding. See Allain.
Cushing places Champlain's
exploration with the Mi'kmaq chief in 1604, but Fischer, 576, hints
that it was a year later, in the fall of 1605, which makes more sense in
light of French & Mi'kmaq contact at this early stage in the colony's
development.
09a. Quotation from Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 206. See also Arsenault, Généalogie; Biggar, Early Trading
Companies, 62; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 9-10; Fischer, 6,
158, 205, 575-76; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadia, 13-14;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 4;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:37; Milling, Exile Without End,
3-4; Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64;
Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 88, 151; Trudel, "Champlain, in DCB, 1:189;
White,
DGFA-1 ; note 33,
below.
Griffiths, 13, says 12 of the settlers at
Port-Royal, including the priest & the Huguenot minister, died of scurvy
that winter. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88, says
between 6 & 12. An indication of religious toleration in France at
the time was the presence at Port-Royal of not only a priest,
but also a Huguenot minister. According to a disgusted Champlain,
who was Catholic but likely had been baptized a Protestant, the 2
clergymen often came to blows over theological differences.
As the story goes, when the contentious clergymen died of scurvy in the winter of
1605-06, their fellow
colonists buried them in the same grave in hopes that they could live in
peace at least in the afterlife. See Fischer, 158; Griffiths, 13;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88. Milling, 3, which includes Champlain's description of these characters, claims
Acadia harbored a number of Huguenot adventurers & settlers well
into the 17th century. Milling, 3-4, points out, however, that
"no Protestant congregation survived," at least during French
control of Acadia, due to the influence of the
priests & intermarriage with the Catholic majority. Acadian
genealogy, as revealed in Arsenault & White, agrees, & documents a number of mixed marriages during the
French period which invariably led to the groom's conversion to
Catholicism. See, e.g., notes 44c,
76, & 79,
below; Book Three.
For archaeological & botanical analyses of the
Port-Royal habitation, near today's Lower Granville, NS, see Erskine, published in 1975.
Fischer, 575, dates the Gravé-Champlain-Champdoré
exploration from 15 Mar-10 Apr 1605. However, Trudel, "Angibault," says:
"After an accident in April 1606, François Gravé du Pont had Champdoré
put in manacles until he could have been tried in France. However,
as another boat had to be built, Champdoré was released for a time; as
soon as the job was finished, he was put in manacles again.
Another accident occurred; Champdoré saved the situation, and at his
comrades' entreaties Gravé pardoned him." But Trudel does not
specify the nature of the "accident." Nonetheless, Trudel's date
is followed here for the simple reason that Gravé did not return to
Acadia from France until mid-Jun 1605. Only in the spring of 1606
could he have made a coastal survey with Champlain & Champdoré, which
Fischer seems to be acknowledging on p. 576.
Gravé's heart attack can be found in Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 88, which places the incident during
Champdoré's mishap.
Griffiths, 14, says that, once they agreed to abandon
the settlement, Gravé & Champlain left 2 men
at Port-Royal, La Taille & Miquelet, & took 2 small craft towards Canso but got no farther than Cap-Sable when they met a
chaloupe
sent by Poutrincourt to inform them that he had reached the fishing
rendezvous & would meet them at Port-Royal.
09b. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 203. See also Campeau, "Membertou," in DCB,
1:500-01; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 79-80; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 47-48; Drake, Border Wars,
55n; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 1-14; Fischer, 201,
204, 132, 218-21, 576; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 10, 12-14;
Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 21-22; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
4;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:36; Parkman, France & England,
1:187-88;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 85, 87; Trudel, "Champlain," in
DCB, 1:189; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB,
1:346; notes
07, above, &
10c, below.
Fischer, 201, says de Mons made his decision to
move the settlement from Île Ste.-Croix to Port-Royal "In the spring of
1605 ...," which was before his Jun-Aug venture down the
coast with Champlain. Was the coastal survey conducted in order to
make certain that there were no better settlement sites in Norembègue &
Massachusetts than the one he had chosen at Port-Royal?
Griffiths, 13, points out the fine features of the
Port-Royal habitation in contrast to the settlement on Île Ste.-Croix.
See also Erskine, Nova Scotia, 7. Trudel, "Gravé du Pont,"
& Beginnings of New France, 87, say Gravé & Champlain
chose Port-Royal for the site of new settlement, but de Mons was still
in the colony & still in charge of the venture, so the decision
to move there would have been his.
MacDonald, 4, in the context of Poutrincourt's return
to Port-Royal in Jul 1606, says the habitation there "resembled
the defensive farm communities of his [Poutrincourt's] own gently
rolling (and often fought over) Champagne countryside--an open
courtyard, surrounded by living and working quarters for family
labourers and animals, the whole securely walled in." This is all
fine & good except for the fact that the layout & construction of the
Port-Royal habitation was overseen not by Poutrincourt, who was
in France, but by de Mons, who was from Saintonge, not Champagne.
Evidently de Mons's habitation reminded Poutrincourt of
what he had seen in Champagne. MacDonald then provides the long
view regarding the habitation at Port Royal: "It was a
successful model, well suited to conditions in North America, which
would be used at Quebec, at La Tour's St. John fort, [Nicolas]
Denys's posts, and later at the fur forts of the north and far
west."
Griffiths, cited above, says de Mons's choice of Port-Royal for his new headquarters,
instead of a place farther down the coast, could have been motivated by
"encounters" with the "Abenaki," who, though they were
linguistic kin to the Passamaquoddy & Mi'kmaq, were more numerous & more
settled agriculturally than their fellow Algonquin & had no Frenchmen among them
at the time, hence their hostility to foreigners. Fischer makes no
mention of "encounters" between Champlain, de Mons, & the Abenaki in
1604-05. See notes 08a &
08b, above. If there
were tensions between the Abenaki & the French at the time, they were
not permanent. See note
140, below. Griffiths also points out the importance of the Acadian fisheries
as another possible reason for de Mons's choosing a site on the Bay of
Fundy & not farther away from the traditional fishing banks. The
Bay of Fundy also was closer to the lower St.
Lawrence, still important to French interests in the region.
A. H. Clark, 80, Fig. 4.2, is entitled "Port Royal Basin and Valley in the
Seventeenth Century."
Trudel, "Champlain," says Champlain chose the name
Port-Royal because he was impressed with its spacious anchorage. Other
historians emphasize the basin's
beauty & say that Poutrincourt named the
place in honor of the King. See Drake;
Griffiths, 10; Parkman.
See note 07,
above, for the basin's "discovery."
The French name for the tribe at Port-Royal, the Micmac or M'ikmaq (pronounced
MICK-maw), was Souriquois. See
map. Hodson, 22, says Membertou's name meant "the game cock who
commands many." See also Hodson, 21. Griffiths, 13-14, citing Jesuit
Fr. Pierre Biard,
mentions Membertou's beard, quite rare among native Americans, as well
as the sagamore's handsomeness, & details the interaction between
Membertou's Mi'kmaq & the French at Port-Royal. Davis, S. A., 48,
also attributes Membertou's physical description to Fr. Biard:
"'This was the greatest, most renowned and most formidable savage within
the memory of man; of splendid physique, taller and larger-limbed than
is usual among them; bearded like a Frenchman, although scarcely any of
the others have hair upon the chin; grave and reserved; feeling a proper
sense of dignity for this position as commander.'" See also
Campeau, 1:500; Fischer, 218. Davis, S. A., 47, says:
"According to the French explorer Lescarbot, Membertou was more than one
hundred years old when the French arrived [in 1605]. In part, this
estimate is derived from Membertou's assertion that he had been a mature
adult when he met Jacques Cartier, presumably in 1535. His
exploits and status among the fifteenth[sic]-century Mi'kmaq were probably
exaggerated both by himself and the French." Campeau, 1:500-01, also questions Membertou's age,
especially in light of his military exploits in support of the French in
1607. "In the same way," Campeau cautions, "the pompous titles
conferred on Membertou by the French should not be taken literally.
He commanded a small following of Micmacs who hunted and fished in the
basin of the river and harbour of Port-Royal, and on the shores of St.
Mary's Bay in Nova Scotia. It would be unwise to give this band a
precise figure; that of 100 souls seems a generous estimate."
See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88. Campeau says
sagamo was the title given to the leader of a
Mi'kmaq band who "assumed responsibility for directing and protecting a
group of individuals and families moving about in a given area."
Membertou also was the band's autmoin or shaman, a
medicine-man, which enhanced his status among his own people.
Before 1605, the remoteness of Membertou's band from the Atlantic
fisheries gave him little prestige among his fellow Mi'kmaq leaders.
With the appearance of de Mons at Port-Royal, however, "To be the host
of the Europeans, within immediate range of their merchandise, was an
advantage which all the sagamos envied highly. The jealousy of his
fellow-sagamos earned for the old chief the 'reputation of being the
most evil and treacherous among all those of his nation,'"
Campeau continues. See also Fischer, 218-21.
Sagamo also is rendered sagamore by other scholars.
See, e.g., Fischer, 132.
Faragher, 9-14, attempts to place the Port-Royal venture in the context of Mi'kmaq
history & culture, seeming to conclude that de Mons & later Poutrincourt
occupied the place only because of Mi'kmaq acquiescence, which likely would
have surprised many a Frenchman of that day.
10. Quotations from
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 79; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 5. See also
Dickinson & Young, Québec, 14, 16; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 110-11, 353; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
14, 28, 31, 64; <www.ns1763.ca/guysbco/savalette-plaque.html>; Parkman, France & England,
1:145-47, 205; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 42; note 287,
below.
The old fisherman Lescarbot & Champlain met at Canso in 1607 was a
French Basque ship captain named Savalet, also called Savalette, of
St.-Jean-de-Luz. Savalette's days in the waters off New France had begun in 1565, before
either Lescarbot or Champlain had been born (both in c1570). Both
Lescarbot in his writing, & Champlain on one of his maps, named a cove
near Canso after the old fisherman. See Fischer, 111; Parkman, 1:205;
<www.ns1763.ca/guysbco/savalette-plaque.html>.
Repeating & supplementing Erskine's list, Griffiths, 31,
says the important fishing
stations in the Acadian region during the time of de Mons's &
Poutrincourt's efforts were at Canso & English Harbour on Cape Breton, &
on the Baie des Chaleurs. Lescarbot noted
that the fur trade flourished not only at Port-Royal, but also at Port-Mouton on the Atlantic side of the peninsula. Griffiths,
64, says that "By 1650, Canso had become one of the most well-known
and best-organized fishing areas, with gravel beaches for drying the
cod."
For the relative importance of the fur & fishing
industries in Acadia as late as 1632, see note
15a, below.
10a. Quotations
from MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB, 1:293;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 209, 211; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
79. See also Clark, A. H., 80, 85-87; Faragher,
A Great & Noble Scheme, 14-15; Fischer, 202, 210, 212; Griffiths, Migrant to Acadian,
14-17; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in
DCB, 1:564;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 4-6, 201n7; Parkman, France &
England, 1:196-99; Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96-97; Squires, "Secoudon,"
in DCB, 1:604; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 87; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:189.
Faragher, 15, says the Jonas returned to France
in Nov after Poutrincourt returned with a load of furs from his voyage
down the coast, but Griffiths, 15, places the ship's return on Aug
25, "barely a month after her arrival...." It makes more sense
that the vessel left in late summer, not in late autumn, to cross the
treacherous, ice-choked North Atlantic.
For the site of Poutrincourt's grist mill, see Fischer,
202, a facsimile of Champlain's map of the Port-Royal basin; Historical Atlas of Canada. The stream, which flows into the basin from high
ground to the south, was first called Rivière-du-Moulin or Mill River,
later Petit Rivière & Rivière Allain, & is today's Lequille River. See
also note
13a, below. Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 87, in the context of de Mons's
construction of a habitation at Port-Royal in 1605, seems to be
saying that the large river flowing into the basin at Port-Royal
originally was named Rivière de l'Equille: "Gravé and Champlain
chose a spot of some elevation on the north shore of the basin,
'opposite the island [Goat Island] which is at the entrance' of Rivière
de l'Equille, later the Rivière du Dauphin." For the geographical
relationships of Goat Island, the Lequille River, & Rivière du Dauphin,
today's Annapolis River, see Clark, A. H., 80, Fig. 4.2, entitled "Port Royal Basin and Valley in the
Seventeenth Century."
10b. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 193, 195. See also Lucien
Campeau, "Membertou, Henri," in DCB,
1:500-01, &
online;
Cushing, "Messamouet," in DCB,
1:507; Faragher,
A Great & Noble Scheme, 14; Fischer, 194, 198, 212, 222, 576;
Grassmann, "Panounias," in DCB, 1:529-30; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
15-16; Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96; Squires, "Secoudon,"
in DCB, 1:604; Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 89-90.
Faragher says Champlain called the coast of
ME "'the coast of Florida,'" but Fischer, also following Champlain's
narrative, favors the name Norembega--Norembègue to the French--for the coast of ME.
Fischer, 576, calls Port-Fortuné Misfortune Harbor,
perhaps in jest. See also Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
89, a map entitled "Acadia 1606-1607, Place names taken in part from the
reports of Champlain and Lescarbot," which uses Champlain's name.
For Champdoré's skill as a shipwright but his faults as
a mariner, see Trudel, "Angibault"; notes
09a, above, &
10d, below. Both Gravé &
Champlain, exceedingly competent mariners, thought little of the
shipwright's
sailing abilities.
The murder of Mi'kmaq chief Panounias by the
Almouchiquois, his wife's kinsmen, in 1607, only months after the
meeting at Saco, would lead to war that summer between the Indians of
Acadia, led by Membertou, & the Almouchiquois of Norembègue. The
hard feelings that precipitated Panourias's death evidently were brewing
between the 2 nations when Poutrincourt attempted to reconcile their
differences at Saco in Sep 1606. Membertou & his allies, the
Etchemin (Passamaquoddy & Maliseet), emerged victorious against the
Almouchiquois about the time that de Mons & Poutrincourt were compelled
to abandon Port-Royal. See Campeau;
Fischer, 222;
Grassmann; Trudel, "Angibault"; note 11a, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 90, castes a more positive
light on the meeting at Saco, insisting that "a temporary alliance of
the Almouchiquois, Etchemins and Souriquois had been achieved."
Fischer, 193-94, details the meeting from Champlain's perspective, which
offers no room for optimism. Neither does Cushing.
Ryder says "Poutrincourt and
Champlain explored the coast to Cape Cod and established friendly
relations with Messamouet and Secoudon [the first a Mi'kmaq, the second
a Maliseet], but the idea of a second settlement was abandoned after a
battle with some unfriendly Indians during this trip." However,
Ryder does not name the hostile tribe. In truth, Poutrincourt &
Champlain had established good relations with Messamouet & Secoudon soon
after the Acadian colony was established. Secoudon's Maliseet village, in
fact, lay at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean, which, Ryder says, on 1:97,
was "the richest source of [fur] trading in Acadia." See also
Cushing; Squires.
10c. Quotations from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 208. See also René Baudry,
"Lescarbot, Marc," in
DCB, 1:469, &
online; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
1, 10; Fischer, 112; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 10-11, 24; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," in DCB,
1:293; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in
DCB, 1:564; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:36-37; Parkman, France & England,
1:196-98; Ryder,
"Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
85, 289n8; note
13, below.
Trudel, 85, 289n8,
citing Lescarbot & a petition by Poutrincourt's son Biencourt, recorded
in a decree of the Royal Council, dated 8 Feb 1624, says de Mons
"conceded to him [Poutrincourt] in seigneury, which was done on
August 31 of that years [1604]." Ryder says: "This
grant [of Port-Royal], which included fur-trading privileges and fishing
rights, was confirmed by the king on 25 Feb. 1606." So de Mons may
have promised Poutrincourt the place in Aug 1604, but the grant of
seigneurie was not formalized until a year & a half later. Two of de Mons's merchant-partners in La Rochelle were
Messrs. Maquin, Macquin, or Macain, & Georges. See Fischer,
112; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts."
Faragher says: "The French colonization of
l'Acadie began in earnest on 13 May 1606, when the Jonas, a
vessel of 150 tons, loaded with provisions and carrying forty men,
weighed anchor at the port of La Rochelle and sailed for the infant
outpost of Port Royal on the far side of the Atlantic."
See also Baudry, 1:469. Parkman details Poutrincourt's return to Acadia & the
condition of the settlement in 1606. Griffiths, 24, says the Jonas had been captured from the English. Faragher, 10, says Poutrincourt called the fort
at Port-Royal his "manor house" because he owned it. As
the area's seigneur, this was true. Griffiths, 10,
says Henri IV confirmed the grant of Port-Royal to Poutrincourt on
23 Feb 1606. See also Ryder.
Fischer, 208, says Henri IV issued the grant on 25 Feb 1606.
After Poutrincourt promised "to establish a settlement there," Griffiths
10, says de Mons gave him "fishing and fur monopolies in the
area as well." This was de Mons's first grant in Acadia.
For details on the nature of land grants in the
colony, see Griffiths, 10-11.
She reminds us that "This grant also made clear that there would be
no recognition of any prior rights of the Mi'kmaq or other native
peoples."
10d. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 206-07. See also Baudry, "Lescarbot," in
DCB, 1:469; Fischer,
210, 576;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 4; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:37; Ryder,
"Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:96-97; Trudel, Beginnings
of New France, 88.
MacDonald implies that Poutrincourt reached Port-Royal
on Jul 27, found the 2 caretakers there, & sent out messengers to
retrieve the others. Fischer's chain of events is followed here.
See also note 09a, above.
10e. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 208-10; Trudel, Beginnings of
New France, 90. See also Baudry, "Lescarbot," in
DCB, 1:469; Ethel M. G. Bennett, "Hébert, Louis," in DCB, 1:367-68,
&
online;
Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 24, 34; Fischer, 211-12, 216-18,
350-52, 356-57, 364, 372-73, 375, 385, 417, 419, 676n30; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 15; George MacBeath, "Gravé du
Pont (also called Pont-Gravé and Du Pont-Gravé), Robert," in DCB,
1:346-47, &
online; George
MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne de La Tour, Charles," 1:592, &
online;
George MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, De
La Tour, Claude de," 1:596, &
online;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 3-4, 19-21, 280-81;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:37; Parkman, France &
England, 1:305, 319, 1072; Huia Ryder, "Biencourt de
Saint-Just, Charles de," in DCB, 1:99-100, &
online; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 88, 155; Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves,
15-18, 20, 237;
Marcel Trudel, "Duval, Jean," in
DCB, 1:299-300, &
online; White, DGFA-1,
1431-32, 1442.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88, says Louis "was a first
cousin of Poutrincourt's." Louis, on the urging of Champlain,
later settled at Québec, where he arrived in
1617 with his wife & 3 children. He was in fact the first
permanent settler of what was then only another fur trading post.
They were, then, the First Family of Canada, &, for years, the only
European family to have settled there. See
Bennett; Eccles;
Fischer, 350-52, 356-57, 364, 372-73, 375, 385, 417, 419; Griffiths, 15; Parkman, 1:305,
319. According to Fischer, 350, in 1617, on the eve of
their departure for Canada, "The Hébert family lived near the
Louvre and were part of the American circle there." When an
English expedition seized Québec in Jul 1629, the Héberts & 1
of their
in-laws, Guillaume Couillard, chose to remain, while the outpost's other
settlers, including several families, returned to France. See Fischer, 424, 427, 450,
465, 714n2. Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves, 15-18,
offers an interesting sidelight on the Héberts & Coulliards at
the time of Québec's retrocession to France. The Kirkes had
brought to Québec in 1629 a young black boy from either Madagascar or
Guinea, the first recorded African slave in Canadian history.
During the British occupation, 1 of the Kirkes sold the boy to French
turncoat Le Baillif for 50 écus, & Le Baillif "gave" the boy to
Guillaume Couillard, husband of Guillemette Hébert, when the
French resumed control of the outpost. Couillard entrusted the boy
to Jesuit Fr. Pierre Le Jeune, whose school at Québec, the first in
Canada, consisted of a young Indian & the young African. The boy
was baptized in 1633 & was given the Christian name Olivier, "in honour
of the general clerk Olivier Tardif." Later, Olivier chose the
surname Le Jeune, that of his Jesuit teacher. Olivier Le Jeune was
buried at Québec on 10 May 1654, perhaps in his 30s, still the servant
of Guillaume Couillard & perhaps still a slave. The first family
of Canada, then, also may have been the first Canadian family to hold a
slave.
Louis Hébert, whose surname
one day would be added to the prominent families of Acadia, was not the progenitor of the Acadian Héberts.
See
note 63, below;
Book Three;
Hébert
family page. Throughout this study, family names in bold
are the ones who lived in greater Acadia & created families there--see
Arsenault, Généalogie; White, DGFA-1--as well as
families who married Acadian exiles & their descendants in every part of
the Acadian diaspora. Of course, many Acadian families, like the La Tours,
"went" to the lower Mississippi valley & other parts of the disaspora only via their "blood,"
& some disappeared without a trace before 1755. See also Books
Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten.
MacBreath, the La Tours' biographer in DCB,
says Claude & Charles
came to Acadia in 1610. Fischer, 208, 216-18;
& Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 88, 90, say the
La Tours, "cousins" of Poutrincourt, came to Port-Royal in the summer of 1606. Charles,
born in c1593, would
have been in his early teens at the time. Parkman, 1:1072, says he
was 14. MacDonald, 4,
280-81n6, citing a letter from Charles to King Louis XIII & Cardinal
Richelieu, dated 25 Jul 1627, makes it clear that Charles & his father reached
the colony in 1606. Since Marie de Salazar was Charles La Tour's mother, he,
too, was related to Poutrincourt. See also MacDonald, 19-21;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 155; White; note
12g, below.
Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves, 18, notes that
Lescarbot was the first to record the holding of captive slaves by the
Mi'kmaq & suggested the French should purchase some of the
captives for humanitarian purposes or hold them to ransom. Trudel, 20, 273n7,
adds that Lescarbot was only speculating when he wrote this
passage, that the French at Port-Royal did not actually enslave captive
natives, as some historians have claimed.
One can assume that the carpenter Guillaume Richard
of Poitou who came to Port-Royal with Poutrincourt in 1606 was not kin
to Michel Richard dit Sansoucy, a soldier from Saintonge,
who came to French Acadia in the early 1650s & was the progenitor of the
largest branch of the Richard family there. See note
73, below.
For the notorious exploits of locksmith Jean Duval, see
note 10f, below.
Griffiths, 15, makes the interesting observation that
the cows brought by the Jonas "had died on the voyage because, it
was felt, there had not been a woman on board to care for them, and no
man could be expected to have such knowledge." See also
Fischer, 210-11. Compare this to the
cattle-raising skills of the Acadian settlers half a century later.
See note 39, below. Fischer, 210, says: "There were no European women in Acadia from 1604
through 1607." Is he implying that Poutrincourt's wife was the
first European woman in the colony? See note
12g, below.
10f. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 196-97; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 90. See also
Fischer, 200, 247-48, 576; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
16; Parkman, France &
England, 1:199; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 89, 94;
Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:189; Trudel, "Duval," in DCB,
1:300; Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, Robert," in DCB, 1:347.
Griffiths, citing Lescarbot, says the fight at
Port-Fortuné was with the Nauset. Fischer does not name the nation at Port-Fortuné but, on 247, says the expedition of 1606 had gone on a "southern cruise to Nauset," which
implies, correctly, that the same tribe at Port-Fortuné was the same one
living at Mallebarre.
Jean Duval returned to Port-Royal--"'It would have been
better if he had died there,'" wrote Marc Lescarbot--left for France
with the others in 1607, went to Québec with Champlain in 1608, & led a
failed conspiracy to murder the commander & to transfer the outpost to
Basque interlopers or the Spanish. After a formal trial at Québec, Duval was hanged
& beheaded, his severed head placed on a
pike for all to see. See Fischer, 247-48, 576; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 94; Trudel, "Duval."
One wonders why Champlain would have tolerated such a character being
part of another colonial venture in 1608 after the mess at Port-Fortuné
2 years earlier. Duval's skill at repairing the locks on the
colonists' firearms likely explains it.
Griffiths says that in their 1606 trip down the
coast Poutrincourt & Champlain
reached Stage Harbour, MA, south of Cape Cod. Parkman says they reached Hyannis, MA. Trudel, "Champlain,"
says "the scene of a massacre of Frenchmen"
was at Port Fortuné, & that the exploration got no farther than Martha's
Vineyard. No matter, they managed to round the elbow of Cape Cod
peninsula & sail into Nantucket Sound, the farthest French exploration
of that area from Acadia. However, as Fischer's detailed account
attests, Poutrincourt's voyage was a dismal failure. On 200,
Fischer
concludes: "These failures [de Mons's epedition of 1605 as
well as Poutrincourt's effort in 1606] put an end to French colonization south
of the Penobscot River and marked the beginning of English hegemony in
this region." See Fischer, p. 530, for a critique of de Mons's & Poutrincourt's leadership on these voyages.
10g. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 212-14. See also Baudry, "Lescarbot," in
DCB, 1:470; Faragher,
A Great & Noble Scheme, 14-15; Fischer, 576; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 16;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 5; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 90-91.
Trudel, 91, says: "With this play, theatre in
North America was born." However, Fischer, 213-14, says Lescarbot's
masque was not the first theatre production in the New World--there were
earlier ones staged by the Spanish in FL in 1567, Cuba in 1590, & New
Mexico in 1598. But it was the first such production in New France.
10h. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 212; Trudel, Beginnings of
New France, 90. See also Fischer, 576; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
15.
Griffiths also
offers a poignant summation of Poutrincourt's decision not explore south
of Cape Cod: "An American historian, Samuel Eliot Morrison, agrees
with a Canadian, Morris Bishop, that this was a crucial decision, since
it effectively prevented the French from exploring what would be, but
was not at that time, the focus of English and Dutch colonization:
Rhode Island and New Amsterdam."
Trudel, 90, says the expedition returned to
Port-Royal on Nov 14. Fischer, 576; & Griffiths, agree; but
Fisher, 212, says they returned on Nov
16.
11. Quotations from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 214; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 79; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 160.
See also Arsenault, History, 13; Clark, A. H., 104; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq,
23-24; Faragher, A Great &
Noble Scheme, 15-16; Fischer, 215-17, 221, 534;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 15-16; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 5;
Parkman,
France & England, 1:200ff; Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB,
1:97; Trudel, 91, 151.
Lescarbot was many things but not a priest.
However, at Poutrincourt's request, no priests being around, the lawyer led the settlers in
religious instruction, though he likely refrained from trying to convert
the Indians except by good example. See Ryder. After Lescarbot returned to France
in 1607, he wrote a
history of the Acadian colony which was published in 1609, 4 years
before Champlain's history of the venture appeared in print. For a copy of Lescarbot's imaginative map of Port-Royal, included in his 1609
publication, see Clark, A. H., 104. See also S. A. Davis; Griffiths,
15. Parkman, using Lescarbot as his major source,
describes the settlement at Port-Royal in fine detail, including
Champlain's L'Ordre de Bon-Temps. Faragher; Fischer, 215, 217; & Griffiths, 16,
following Champlain & Lescarbot, include Membertou & his Mi'kmaq in the Order.
Fischer, 215, says the typical English translation of
Champlain's L'Ordre de Bon-Temps--The Order of Good Cheer--is the
creation of anglophone Canadian historians, including W. F. Ganong.
Fischer, 216-17, includes the names of members of
L'Order de Bon-Temps--Poutrincourt, Biencourt, Captain Boullay,
surgeon Estienne, apothecary Hébert, Fourgeray de Vitré, Robert
Gravé du Pont, Daniel Hay, Marc Lescarbot, François Addenin, Claude &
Charles La Tour, & Champlain. The traditional day for the creation of L'Order is
14 Nov 1606 & is still celebrated in Acadian communities. See,
e.g., the Nov 2013 newsletter for the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, LA, <acadianmemorial.org/newsletter/december-2013-newsletter.pdf>.
Trudel, 151, relates that after the winter of
1606-07, "for many years, there is no mention of scurvy in the Acadian
peninsula," so the Order of Good Times was a stroke of genius. One
wonders, then, why Champlain himself failed to apply the lesson in the
first winter at Québec in Canada during the winter of 1608-09. See
note 12a, below.
11a. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 221-22, 233; Arsenault, History, 13;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 91; MacBeath, "Du Gua du Monts,"
in DCB, 1:293.
See also Allain, "Colbert's Colony Crumbles," 34; Eccles, Canadian Frontier,
22; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 8; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 17-18; Fischer, 230-32, 234,
349-50, 353, 364-65, 394, 606; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
4-6, 17, 20, 30; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22;
MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts," 1:293; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in DCB, 1:564;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 6;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:37; Parkman, France & England,
1:205-06;
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:97; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 91-92, 290n36; Trudel, "Champlain,"
in DCB, 1:189-190; notes 06 &
06a, above.
Possible fraud in de Mons's Company is from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 91, 290n36.
MacBeath, "Ralluau," says the news of de Mons's
cancelled privileges first reached La Cadie via one Chevalier. Trudel, "Champlain," 1:189, hints that the Jonas
returned to Port-Royal in May. Ryder says it happened in
the autumn. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 92, says that
on May 31, "while Poutrincourt and Champlain were spending their last
moments at Port Royal ... the rest of the company [were] waiting at
Canso to take ship for France...." The
details & chronology of withdrawal from Port-Royal followed here are
from Fischer, 221-22.
Erskine emphasizes the
jealousies of the other fur-trading interests in the revocation of de
Mons's monopoly. Eccles insists: "The
amount of furs obtained from the Indians was insufficient to offset the
costs of maintaining the settlement at Port Royal." Faragher, 18, agrees & adds that Poutrincourt beseeched
some of his men to stay at Port-Royal but that all of them chose to
return to France with him. Griffiths, 17, says Poutrincourt & his men were ordered to return to France.
Marc Lescarbot confirmed that, in
contradiction to the King's expectations, "after three years of enjoying
the said privileges, he [de Mons] made no [Indian] converts as yet."
See Allain for a discussion of the role of
conversion in French colonization, including the statement:
"Evangelization of the natives was an obligation every charter imposed
on companies or individuals granted a colonial monopoly." See
also Griffiths, 20; Ryder. Parkman concludes about France's early efforts in Acadia & the role of religion:
"First of Europeans, they had essayed to found an agricultural colony in
the New World. The leaders of the enterprise had acted less as
merchants than as citizens; and the fur-trading monopoly, odious in
itself, had been used as the instrument of a large and generous design.
There was a radical defect, however, in their scheme of settlement.
Excepting a few of the leaders, those engaged in it had not chosen a
home in the wilderness of New France, but were mere hirelings, without
wives or families, and careless of the welfare of the colony. The
life which should have pervaded all the members was confined to the
heads alone. In one respect, however, the enterprise of De Monts
was truer in principle than the Roman Catholic colonization of Canada,
on the one hand, or the Puritan colonization of Massachusetts, on the
other, for it did not attempt to enforce religious exclusion."
Griffiths, 4, says de Mons's monopoly was an attempt "to bring
some order into the process" of French exploitation of the region
loosely called La Cadie. On 5-6, she points out,
however, that rival merchants "in ports from Dieppe to
Saint-Jean-de-Luz" challenged de Mons's crown-sanctioned monopoly
from the beginning, & that merchants at Rouen were especially vehement
in their opposition. She concludes on 6: "This tension
between endeavours backed by royal authority and the customs of the
people of Atlantic ports was to prove an ongoing handicap for French
colonial development in North America. Throughout the seventeenth
century, the independence of the people of the Atlantic coast from the
central government meant constant challenges to those armed with the
authority of the king, be it Henry IV or Louis XIV, to establish
settlement in North America." MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts,"
says that, in the Acadian venture, "De Monts's loss alone was
said to be 10,000 livres," & this after exercising a 10-year
monopoly for only 3 years. For more on Daniel Boyer, who
Champlain described as a "malicious enemy and grand chicaneur"
& who would plague the New French venture for years, see Fischer, 349-50,
353, 364-65, 394 (quotation from 349).
12. Quotations from
Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:189; Ryder, "Poutrincourt,"
in DCB, 1:97; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 222; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 91-92. See also Baudry,
"Lescarbot," in DCB, 1:470; Campeau,
"Membertou," in DCB, 1:500; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 48; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
9-14, 18-19; Fischer, 223,
227, 576; Parkman, France & England, 1:198; Ryder,
"Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:97; Trudel, "Angibault," in
DCB, 1:64; Book Two.
Trudel, "Angibault," says Champdoré, whose talents as a shipwright were now
legendary, also went along on Champlain's final voyage to Baie
Français. Trudel, "Champlain," 1:189-90, says that, before he left
Canso in the summer of 1607, Champlain "took the opportunity to
reconnoitre the coast in detail and to make a map of it. And it
was thus that in 1607, thanks to him, all the Atlantic coastline, from
Cape Breton to the south of Cap Blanc [Cape Cod], was chartered and
decked out with French place names." See also Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 91-92.
Trudel, "Angibault," says
Poutrincourt left Port-Royal in the Jonas on Jul 30, but Fischer,
222, makes it clear that the ship went no farther than Canso after it
reached Cape Breton Island following its crossing from France.
Parkman emphasizes the good relations of de Mons's
settlers with the local Mi'kmaq, who were sad to see the Frenchmen go.
Faragher, 9-14, details the good
relations between the "Normans," as the Mi'kmaq called them, & the
Indians at Port-Royal, with emphasis on the role of Membertou. Campeau says that Membertou was especially close to Poutrincourt, who
would return to Port-Royal during the sagamore's final days (Membertou died
in Sep 1611). See also S. A. Davis; Ryder,
who contrasts Poutrincourt's kind treatment of the
Indians with "the Spanish in the Indies."
It was on the return voyage to France via the fishing
rendezvous at Canso that Champlain & Lescarbot met Captain Savalette.
See note 10, above. Fischer, 227, details the unpleasant return trip to France on the Jonas,
which was forced to land at Roscoff in Britanny because of heavy seas.
With Champlain et al. was a young Indian convert, whose name the
geographer evidently did not record. Roscoff is on the northwest
coast of Brittany, near Morlaix. Fischer, 576, says the crossing
lasted from Sep 3-30 & that they were sailing for St.-Malo, a major port
east of Roscoff.
12a. Quotations from
Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 18; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 236; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
6; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 94; online Wikipedia, "Quebec." See also
Brebner, Canada, chaps. 1-4;
Campeau, "Membertou,"
in DCB, 1:500; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 23ff, chaps.
1-6; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 8;
Fischer, 39-40, 139, 234-35, 237, 239-43, 251, 295, 313, 365, 570, 576ff, 606,
chaps. 11-25; Griffiths, 5,
17, 37-38; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 33; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
202-03; Olga Jurgens, "Brûlé, Étienne," in DCB,
1:130-33, &
online; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts,"
in DCB, 1:291, 293-94; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:37-39,
41; Moogk, La Nouvelle France; Parkman,
France & England, 1:241-324; Taylor, A., American Colonies,
99-100; Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 66, 95, 118, 141, 151,
chaps. 7, 9-14, 16-18; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:190-91;
Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," in DCB, 1:346; André Vachon, "Marsolet de Saint-Aignan, Nicolas," in DCB,
1:493-95, &
online; online Wikipedia, "St. Lawrence Iroquoians"; notes
02p, 05,
05c, 05d, &
10b, above; Book Seven.
Griffiths, 17-18, details Poutrincourt's efforts in
France to secure a monopoly in Acadia similar to de Mons's. On 17, she states that during his time at court Poutrincourt "began to
appreciate de Monts's situation and thus his own. The central
government clearly wished to establish a formal and continuing French
presence in North America, but it did not have the means to ensure that
monopolies, granted to those commissioned to achieve this end, would be
respected. Nor was the government willing to invest directly in
the enterprise. Finally, it quickly became apparent that even
those who were committed to the establishment of a permanent French
settlement in North America were split as to whether it should be
planted in Acadia or in Canada, the name that was now being given
exclusively to the St. Lawrence valley. Champlain opted without
hesitation for the latter and de Monts supported him."
Fischer, 234, says de Mons considered sending François Gravé du Pont back to the St. Lawrence as his lieutenant to build a new
trading post there, but the old mariner "was not in good health and his
behavior was increasingly erratic," so he gave the job to
Champlain instead. Trudel, "Gravé du Pont, François," offering more detail, says that, after leaving Port-Royal in Aug
1606, Gravé did not return to New France until 1608, when he assisted
Champlain in the St. Lawrence valley. Gravé, then in his mid-50s,
returned to France that autumn, troubled, no doubt, by his wound.
For details of the encounter with
the Basque interlopers at Tadoussac that Jun, see Fischer, 240-41;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 94. From his residence in France, Gravé returned to the St. Lawrence every year
from 1609-18 & briefly replaced Champlain in command at Québec from 1619-20.
In 1621, Gravé returned to the St. Lawrence as a trader, but his ship
was confiscated by the new fur-trading concessionaire for the region,
Guillaume de Caën. Gravé worked for de Caën until 1629, wintering
at Québec in 1622-23 & 1625-26. Despite ill health (Trudel says
that he had suffered heart trouble in Acadia & was plagued with gout),
Gravé returned to Québec in 1627; he was now in his early 70s! He
had become the indispensable man in de Caën's Canadian operations & was
especially helpful to the Récollets in their work among the Natives.
Gravé was at Québec in Jul 1629 when Louis Kirke captured the post.
Gravé returned to France & died there sometime in 1629, in his mid-70s.
Martin, F.-X., 1:41, first published in 1827, when comparing Champlain &
Gravé, unkindly says of the old warrior: "The views of these men
were quite different. Champlain had most at heart the success of
the colony; Pontgrave thought of nothing but the acquisition of wealth,
by traffic with the Indians." Evidently Gravé played no
part in Poutrincourt's resurrection of the Port-Royal colony in 1608 &
did not return to Acadia, though the jovial old sailor's son, Robert
Gravé du Pont, secured a concession on Rivière St.-Jean, across the bay
from Poutrincourt's seigneurie, in c1610. François outlived his
son Robert by 8 years. See also Fischer, 365; note 12e,
below.
Fischer, 240-41, 576, says Champlain wanted to leave Honfleur for the St. Lawrence in Mar but did not get away until Apr 13,
reached the Grand Bank on May 15, & arrived at Tadoussac Roads after an
uneventful crossing on Jun 3.
Parkman calls the site of Québec Stadacone. Historical Atlas of Canada,
& most other sources, call it Stadacona. See note
02z, above. Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 66, says "it was perhaps thanks to him
[Gravé de Pont & his 1599 exploration of the St. Lawrence valley] that
the names Trois Rivières and Quebec made their first appearance on a map
(the Lavasseur map of 1601)." See note
05c, above. According to
Hoffman, 202-03, during his exploration of the upper St. Lawrence in
1603, Champlain had found the area uninhabited & adds that the St.
Lawrence Iroquoians had disappeared from Canada before 1600.
Online Wikipedia, "St. Lawrence Iroquoians," says they "appear to have
disappeared from the St. Lawrence valley some time prior to 1580."
Champlain seems to have thought that they had been driven away by their
fellow Iroquoians, the Mohawk of today's upper New York. The site
of the Montagnais village near Stadacona in 1603 was at present-day
Sillery. Today, the Montagnais are called the Innu. See
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 141; Weidensaul, The First Frontier.
Parkman, 1:266, relates the efforts of de Mons to
re-establish his monopoly on the fur trade in New France & its ultimate
failure, made even more difficult by the assassination of King Henri IV
in 1610. MacBeath, 1:293, says de Mons's
difficulties in establishing a profitable settlement in La Cadie was a
factor leading to the final withdrawal of his Acadian monopoly in
1607--a sort of Catch-22 for the proprietor. MacBeath, 1:294, says that even after he sold his interests in New France to the
marquise de Guercheville in 1611, de Mons "continued to participate actively in the
Canadian trade and to encourage the exploration and settlement of the
country until 1617. After that he withdrew to his château
at Ardennes [the one south of Pons in Saintonge, near today's
St.-Grégoire-d'Ardennes, not the huge forest in northern France &
Belgium], although he continued to be a shareholder in succeeding
trading companies as late as 1622...." De Mons died at his
château on 22 Feb 1628, age about 70. His wife, Judith Chesnel, gave him no children. See Fischer, 39-40; MacBeath, 1:291;
note 13, below.
A. Taylor touts the
superiority of Canada in the trade for furs but its inferiority in
matters of agriculture &, following Champlain's argument, contrasts the "open access" of peninsula Acadia
with the superior defensive geography of the St. Lawrence valley.
See also Fischer, 236. Griffiths, 18, also touts the reasons
why Canada came to overshadow Acadia in the eyes of French officials &
merchants. Martin, F.-X., 1:39, says Québec lay 360 miles "from
the sea."
Perhaps remembering the fiasco between the Protestant
minister & the Catholic priest at Île Ste.-Croix & Port-Royal in 1604-05, Champlain did not bring any clergy to Québec in 1608.
See Fischer, 239-40, for the failed negotiations with the Jesuits on
the eve of establishing the Canadian venture. For the arrival of
the first priests in Canada since the days of Cartier, see Fischer, 313; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 118;
Weidensaul, 105; note
15b, below.
Griffiths, 38, mentions the
commission as lieutenant Champlain received from Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, Louis
XIII's viceroy of New France, in 1612. Trudel,
"Champlain," 1:191, expounds on this promotion, explaining
that Champlain had been "only the lieutenant to a
lieutenant-general who possessed relatively little influence, the Sieur
de Monts; in October 1612, he became the lieutenant of an important
personage, the Comte de Soissons, who at that period, it is true, seems
to have borne only the title of lieutenant general; but the following
November Champlain became lieutenant to a viceroy, the Prince de Condé.
Moreover, he obtained the real powers of a governor, without however
having either the title or the commission." For details of
Champlain's life after he left La Cadie, never to return, see the
recently published Fischer (2008), starting at chap. 11.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 95, reminds us
that Champlain's stay at Québec in the winter of 1608-09 was "the fifth
winter spent by Europeans in the valley of the St. Lawrence." The
first winter there was Cartier's at Ste.-Croix in 1535-36, followed by
Cartier's at Cap-Rouge/Charlesbourg-Royal in 1541-42, Roberval's at
Cap-Rouge/France-Roy in 1542-43, & Chauvin's unfortunates at Tadoussac
in 1600-01. See above.
For a brief summary of the first half century of
Canadian history after 1608, see note
15b, below; Book Seven. For
detailed histories of the colony during that period, see
Brebner; Eccles, chaps. 1-6; Fischer, chaps. 11-25; Moogk;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, chaps. 7, 9-14, 16-18.
12b. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 108-10. See also Lucien Campeau, "Biard, Pierre," in DCB, 1:94,
&
online; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
8; Faragher, A Great & Noble
Scheme, 22; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 288-290, 691, chap.
13; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 20; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:43; Parkman, France & England,
1:210-14; Ryder, "Biencourt," in DCB, 1:99-100; Ryder, "Poutrincourt,"
in DCB, 1:98; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 98, 111.
For a detailed account of the assassination of Henri IV
by a Catholic fanatic on 14 May 1610,
see Parkman. Online Wikipedia, "François Ravillac,"
is a brief account of the life & gruesome death of the king's murderer. Griffiths says the
assassination worsened relations between Catholics & Protestants in
France & complicated efforts to raise money for colonial ventures.
She adds: "The interdenominational character of de Monts's
first voyage was a thing of the past. French overseas expansion
was, even before the end of Henry IV's reign, becoming predominantly
Catholic. Those of Reform (Protestant) beliefs who would be
involved would be so without either official approval or recognition."
Can one assume that the fishermen who had informed Biencourt at the
Grand Bank also informed Poutrincourt at Port-Royal of the death of his benefactor?
The most detailed analysis of the controversy over
sending Jesuits to Poutrincourt's seigneurie can be found in
Trudel, 108-11. Erskine reminds us that "no Huguenot would support a
project in which Jesuits were involved." Can one assume,
then, that the
Huguenots had no quarrel with secular priests like Jesse Fléché?
Most scholars tend to emphasize the cleverness of the Jesuits & their
supporters in their dealings with Biencourt in 1610, but Trudel, 111,
offers a larger perspective on the financial arrangement that serves as a testament to the young nobleman's maturity:
"It was clearly Biencourt who had the better of his partners in this
contract [signed at Dieppe on 20 Jan 1611]. From an enterprise to
which he contributed only a quarter of the capital, he was to receive
half the profits; he charged his partners a transport fee of 1,000
livres, he borrowed from them without obligation to pay interest,
and his contract did not in any way restrict the use of the money at his
disposal. That same day, the shipowners Dujardin and Duquesne
advanced an interest-bearing loan of 1,200 livres on stiff
capital, expecting only half the profits, and lent further sums, without
demanding either guarantee or interest, to a partner who would not have
been able to budge from France without them. The Jesuits were
unquestionably the losers on the deal, to such an extent that one
wonders whether to call it naïveté or great generosity."
For a compelling description of the chaos & treachery
reigning in Marie de Medici's court, see Fischer, chap. 13. For a
short biography of the lovely marquise, who King Henri IV had once
pursued,,
see Fischer, 288-90, 691n25; <www.nieuletalentoursenlimousin.fr/le-musee/ses-hommes-et-ses-femmes/xveme-xviieme-siecle-68/antoinette-de-pons.html>. A copy of her portrait,
by François Quesnel, graces
Fischer, 289, as well as the French website cited above. She was born in
c1560, so she was in her early 50s at the time of her appearance on the
stage of Acadian history. Parkman, 1:211-14, offers a classic version of the famous story in which the King failed
to conquer the lovely Antoinette.
12c. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 113-14; Lucien Campeau, "Du Thet, Gilbert," in DCB, 1:299, &
online;
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:98. See
also Campeau, "Biard," in DCB, 1:94-95; Campeau, "Du
Thet," in DCB, 1:299; Campeau, "Massé,"
in DCB, 1:498; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq,
24; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 22; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
8; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 22-29; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 290; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 15, 19-21, 23; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
8-9; Parkman, England & France,
1:207ff, 1071; Ryder, "Biencourt," in DCB, 1:100;
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:97-98; Trudel, 112, 115, 158.
Trudel, 113-14, offers the best detail of the
brouhaha between Fr. Biard & Biencourt in Mar-Jun 1612.
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:97, says Fr. Pierre Coton,
confessor of both kings Henri IV & Louis XIII & France's most prominent Jesuit, along with the marquise
de Guercheville, chose which members of the Society of Jesus would go to
Acadia. Eccles reminds us that the Jesuit presence at Port-Royal
in 1611 was the first mission of the order in what became New France.
Parkman, 1:216, concurs & devotes 2 chapters to the efforts of the
Jesuits to intrude themselves into the Acadian venture. See also Griffiths,
19-21; online Wikipedia, "Pierre Coton." S. A. Davis credits Jesuit Fr. Biard as "The
author who wrote the most explicitly about the activities of the
Mi'kmaq...." Campeau, "Biard," 1:94-95, adds that in 1611 Fr.
Biard "made three journeys along the coasts of New Brunswick and Maine,
going as far as the Kennebec River, in an attempt to appease the
quarrels among the French [he likely is referring to the Poutrincourt-Gravé
conflict] and to inculcate in the Indians the rudiments of
Christianity. He incurred Biencourt's rancour when he decided to
baptize the Indians only after he had been able to give them some
instruction, since he saw that those who were already Christians
[the ones Fr. Fléché had baptized the year before] had
retained their pagan customs. As it happened, Biencourt was
counting on the number of baptisms conferred by Abbé Fléché for
propaganda purposes in Europe and for raising funds." Campeau,
"Biard," 1:95, adds that Fr. Biard also sought the assistance of Robert
Gravé du Pont, which of
course angered the touchy Biencourt.
Erskine, echoing Campeau, says that Fr. Biard did excommunicate
"the peppery Biencourt," as he calls him, but, as
Campeau, "Du Thet," points out, Biencourt & Fr. Biard reconciled
by late Jun 1612, before Du Thet returned to France.
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:98, adds that, in order to
protect the interests of his family, "On his release [from debtor's
prison], ill and discouraged, he [Poutrincourt] arranged a legal
separation from his wife to make it possible for her to keep any money
and property she still owned." MacDonald, 9, says
Poutrincourt "sold a seigneury in Picardy to repay" his
debts & secure his release.
12d. Quotation from
W. Austin Squires, "Argall (Argoll), Sir Samuel," in DCB, 1:67, &
online.
See also Ryder, "Biencourt," in DCB, 1:100;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 111.
According to Trudel, Biencourt's original departure date
was sometime in mid-Nov 1610. Interestingly, Ryder & Trudel do not
mention the sojourn on the Isle of Wight. See Squires for mention
of it.
Marc Lescarbot's history of the Acadian venture had been
published in France in 1609, & English officials may have secured a copy. Lescarbot had returned to France in
1607, so his work would have offered actionable intelligence on the French in La
Cadie only until that time.
12e. Quotation from
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 111. See also Campeau, "Biard,"
in DCB, 1:94-95; Lucien Campeau, "Massé, Énemond," in DCB,
1:497-98, &
online; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
89; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 15, 19; MacBeath, "Gravé du Pont, Robert," in
DCB, 1:347; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 7-8, 38-39;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:43; Parkman,
England and France,1:216ff; Ryder,
"Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:98; Trudel, 108, 155.
Champlain in Canada had resisted the importation of
Jesuits into that colony, so the 2 Jesuits who sailed
with Biencourt in 1611 were the first of their order to go to New
France. See note 12c, above.
Judge Martin, first published in 1827, goes even farther in touting the
arrival of the 2 black robes at Port-Royal: "This is the first
spiritual succour, sent to this part of the continent, from France."
Of course it was not. See notes 06b,
above, & 12g, below.
Trudel, 155, says the young Gravé "was accused by the
Indians of having abused and raped one of their women."
MacDonald, 38, places a Captain Merville with Robert Gravé at Île
Emenenic in c1611.
A. H. Clark asserts: "Poutrincourt brought his
wife briefly [to Acadia] ...," but does not give the date. It
was not in 1610. See note 12g,
below. Ryder says it was on Biencourt's return to Port-Royal in early 1611 that his mother, Claude[sic] Pajot, may have gone to Acadia--perhaps the first European
woman in the colony.
The young Gravé du Pont built his fort on an island in
the Rivière St.-Jean 6 leagues above the river's mouth near present-day
Browns Flat, NB. Gravé had
come to Port-Royal with Poutrincourt in Jul 1606, lost a hand in the fight
with the Nauset at Cape Cod 3 months later, learned to speak Mi'kmaq, &,
after returning to France in 1607, sailed back to La Cadie by 1610 out of St.-Malo,
a port notorious for smuggling. MacBeath
claims Robert
was the "founder of the first European settlement in what is now New
Brunswick and possibly the first white man to become completely familiar
with the language and customs of the Etchemin (Malecite) Indians." See
also Griffiths; MacDonald, 38-39; Parkman; notes 10e
&
11, above, notes 15a
& 19b, below. Trudel, 108, has the Indians on the lower St.-Jean
complaining to Poutrincourt about the young Gravé in the spring of 1610,
when Poutrincourt visited the river on his way to Port-Royal from
France. See note 12g, below.
12f. Quotations
from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 112. See also Ryder,
"Biencourt," in DCB, 1:100;
Ryder,
"Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:98; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island,
5, 7; Trudel, 111, 116-17; Vachon, "Fléché," in DCB,
1:307.
Vachon says the secular priest, "nicknamed the
'Patriarch' by the [Acadian] Indians," died in France the year he returned
from Port-Royal, his age unknown. One wonders if he was elderly at
the time of his death.
For the Honfleur captain's full name, see Trudel, 116. Pendery, ed., 7, calls him Captain Platrier.
12g. Quotations
from Trudel, "Angibault," in DCB, 1:64; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
107-08. See also Clark, A.
H., Acadia, 79-81; Dodson, Acadian
Diaspora, 22; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
19-21; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 210, 238, 275; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
15, 19-20;
MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:596; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 6-7;
Parkman, England & France, 1:210; Ryder, "Biencourt," in DCB,1:99-100; Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:97-98; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
96-97, 111; Trudel, "Gravé de Pont,
François," in DCB, 1:346; André Vachon, "Fléché, Jessé," in
DCB, 1:307, &
online; White, DGFA-1
English, 299; notes 08c,
10e, &
12a, above, note 12i, below.
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:97, says that, according to Lescarbot, Poutrincourt's "'fruits of the earth'" brought back from
Port-Royal in 1607 influenced the King's decision to grant de Mons's extension. Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
107, says Poutrincourt "acquired the Habitation from de Monts as of
February 2, 1608." This included the set of buildings de Mons had constructed in 1605 & Poutrincourt
had refurbished in 1606.
See notes 09b &
10e, above.
Griffiths, 19-20, says Poutrincourt wanted to
return to Port-Royal in 1608, soon after he was named de Mons's
second in command, but financial difficulties delayed his
departure. This earned Poutrincourt a stinging reproach from King
Henri IV in late 1609, but, typically, the King offered no financial assistance
to expedite the proprietor's return.
Part of the problem was that, in securing financial backing for a new
Port-Royal venture, Poutrincourt had to compete with de Mons's
operations in the St. Lawrence valley. MacDonald, 6, following Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 107, notes that Poutrincourt "put his expedition together at
Saint-Just, where the Seine and Aube rivers meet." This was the
site of Poutrincourt's barony in France. MacDonald, 7, paints a romantic picture of Poutrincourt's "barge"
making its way down the Seine through Paris and around to Dieppe, where
it met his ship, but she does not name the larger vessel.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 107, spells Fr. Jessé's family name Flesché. Vachon gives other
spellings--Jossé Flesche, from Briard; Josué Fleche, from Champlain;
Fleucy; & Fleuche. The title abbé is from Vachon.
It was a common designation "for low-ranking Catholic clergymen in
France ... with or without consecration." See online Wikipedia, "Abbé."
MacDonald, 7, insists that in 1610 Claude La Tour
"remained in France to deal with business matters." MacBeath says Claude "sailed from Dieppe with Poutrincourt on 25
Feb. 1610 and after a passage of several months the party arrived at
Port-Royal. Here Claude assisted in superintending the
construction of buildings and the tilling of the soil, and he learned
the various phases of the fur trade." For the La Tours'
earlier stay in the colony, see note
10e, above.
For Biencourt's age when he returned to Acadia
in 1610, see
Griffiths, 15; Parkman; Ryder,
"Biencourt," 1:99; note 10a,
above. Fischer, 210, says "There were no European women in
Acadia from 1604 through 1607." Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 107, says Poutrincourt took no women to La Cadie in 1610.
Champlain, having been recalled to France in 1609 to
consult with de Mons, sailed from Honfleur to Québec in Mar 1610, a few
weeks after Poutrincourt left Dieppe for Port-Royal. Champlain's
crossing was much less eventful--he reached Tadoussac without incident on May 19. See Fischer,
275, Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 96-97.
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," 1:97, says "The two-month voyage
to Acadia was broken by a mutiny of the crew," but the detailed account
of the crossing in Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 107-08, says
nothing of a mutiny.
12h. See Deans,
The River Where America Began; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
235, 680n21; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 17, 27; Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:38-39, 45; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 92; online Wikipedia, "Popham Colony"; notes
08d,
11a,
& 12, above, & 13a, below.
French claims in North America, remember, ran from 40
degrees north latitude, roughly the latitude of today's Philadelphia,
northward, though by 1607 they had explored only as far south as the
bottom of the Cape
Cod peninsula. Martin, F.-X., 1:38, says the 2 English
companies were granted rights in 1606 from the 34th to the 41st parallel
for the southern, or London-based, company, & from the 38th to the 45th
parallel for the northern, or Plymouth-based company, with the
stipulation that "neither was to settle within one hundred miles from
any establishment made by the other." Martin, F.-X., 1:38-39,
says, at the time of their establishment, the northern colony
(he calls it Sagadehoc) had 200 colonists, & the southern colony (Jamestown) 150.
Griffiths, 27, reminds us: "France had no tradition of joint-stock
companies, something that greatly facilitated money-raising for similar
ventures at this time in England, where it was not only an accepted and
familiar mechanism but also one that spread the risks among a much
greater number of backers." During the reign of James I
(1603-25), English colonizers experienced the same restrictions;
Jamestown, like Roanoke Island before it, was founded not by a
royally-funded expedition but by an English trading venture, in this
case the Virginia Company of London, chartered by the King in 1606 but
receiving no royal money. The Popham colony, as the Kennebec
venture was called, lasted only a year; a rough winter & resulting
disease killed the colony's leader & "some of the principal colonists,"
so the survivors abandoned the venture. The colony at
Jamestown, howeover, despite the amazing number of deaths in its first few years,
managed to survivie. See Deans; Martin, F.-X., 1:38-39; online Wikipedia, "Popham Colony"; note
13a, below. Martin, F.-X.,
1:38, says the short-lived ME colony's palisade was named Fort George.
After his adventures at Jamestown, which ended in 1610,
Captain John Smith returned to North America, this time turning his
attention northward. In 1614, he explored the coast of New England
from Cape Cod to the Penobscot & made "an accurate map" of what he had
found there. See Martin, F.-X., 1:45.
12i. Quotations
from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 238; MacBeath, "Ralluau," in DCB,
1:564. See also Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 18-19;
Fischer, 240, 242; Griffith, From Migrant to Acadian, 17-18; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts,"
in DCB, 1:293; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 93,
96-97, 108.
Fischer, 240, calling the shipwright-turned-mariner
Champlain's friend, emphasizes, more than any other scholar, Champdoré's mission "to sail to
Port-Royal, resettle Acadia, explore the coast, and renew alliances with
Indian nations." MacBeath, "Ralluau," mentions the
trip to Saco but not to Mount Desert Island & says that Champdoré &
Ralluau went up Rivière St.-Jean "for a distance of some 50 leagues" in
search of Etchemin chief Secoudon, whose village was at the mouth of the
river. Fifty French land leagues was approximately 150 English
miles (see Fischer, p. 629), which would have taken them as far upriver as today's Grand Falls, NB.
Strangely, Fischer, 242, in recounting Champdoré's voyage, mentions
the Saco & Mount Desert Island meetings but not the exploration of Rivière St.-Jean.
Trudel, 108, places Champdoré's visit to Port-Royal in 1609, but
other sources--Fischer, 240; Griffiths, 18; MacBeath, "Du Gua de
Monts"; MacBeath, "Raullau"--say it happened the year before.
De Mons did not send anyone to reoccupy the habitation
at Port-Royal likely because it still belonged to Poutrincourt, who also was
working diligently at court to secure a concession for his seigneurie.
Also, de Mons's year-long monopoly of 1608-09 was not renewed, so he
would not have had the wherewithal to re-establish the colony on his own
even if he so desired. See Griffiths, 17-18; Trudel, 96-97; notes 12a,
12g, above, &
13, below.
12j. Quotations from
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:97; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
102; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 108. See also Allain,
"Colbert's Colony Crumbles," 34; Campeau, "Membertou,"
in DCB, 1:500-01; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 79-81; Davis, S.
A., Mi'kmaq, 47-48; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 8; Faragher,
A Great & Noble Scheme, 22-29; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
220; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 17-23, 30-31; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 7;
Trudel, 112; Vachon, "Fléché," in DCB, 307.
Vachon
says
when Henri IV approved of Poutrincourt returning to La Cadie, he
could do so "on condition that he take some Jesuits there to preach the
gospel to the Indians. Not desiring the presence of Jesuits,"
Poutrincourt "took with him only one priest," Fr. Fléché, who
was not a Jesuit or associated with any other order. The King
had imposed such a condition on Poutrincourt probably under the
influence of his son's confessor, Jesuit Fr. Pierre Coton, & of his queen, Marie de Medici, who,
along with many of the ladies at court, favored the Jesuits. See
also Ryder, "Poutrincourt." Griffiths, 20, says during
Fr. Fléché's year in
Acadia he "baptized some hundred Mi'kmaq," which would have been the
beginning of that tribe's long association with Roman Catholicism.
Trudel, 112, says "Flesché had baptized about eighty natives in the
space of a year in both public and private ceremonies; Lescarbot, whose
aim was to extol the secular priest at the expense of the Jesuits, even
mentions 140 baptisms." Campeau, "Membertou,"
1:500, says "Messire Fléché, who baptized all
the Indians passing through Port-Royal, scarcely reached the number of
140 in a year," most of them from Membertou's band. Trudel,
108, gives the larger perspective on this important occasion in New
French history: "This mass baptism was performed with some
alacrity, so that news of it might be carried to France by the next ship
to leave, and Poutrincourt was soon to draw criticism for his unseemly
haste for apostolic glorification. There is no doubt that the
publicity value of the ceremony had been uppermost in Poutrincourt's
mind; such a spectacular and quickly-realized religious coup would, he
hoped, impress the leading lights of the Church and the Court, and thus
win their support. Perhaps, too, the performance of this mass
baptism by a secular priest was designed to demonstrate that the Jesuits
were not indispensable to New France." Erskine says not only Membertou's family,
but also "those of the chief of the Saint John estuary [the
Maliseet under Secoudon] were baptized" by
the priest brought to Port-Royal by Poutrincourt, but Erskine does not
name the priest. Until 1611, when the Jesuits arrived, it could only have been
Fr. Fléché. S. A. Davis & Campeau say the first to be baptized on 24 Jun 1610 was Membertou
himself & that the sagamore took the baptismal name of Henri, in honor
of the King. Membertou's wife was given the name Marie, after the
queen, & their son was baptized Louis, after the dauphin, Louis
XIII. See also Fischer. Campeau,
"Membertou," 1:500, adds: "The fact that this Micmac
sagamo was the first Indian
to receive solemn baptism in New France remains his principal claim to
distinction. Others before him had been baptized in France, only
to return to their pagan customs as soon as they got back."
Evidently the baptisms changed nothing in the behavior of Membertou &
his band, "who," Campeau, 1:501, says, "preserved their pagan beliefs, to the
scandal of the Jesuits," who soon arrived in the colony.
See also Vachon. Probably at their urging, Campeau informs us, Membertou gave up his role as
shaman & tried to practice Catholicism, including monogamy, unusual
among the Algonquin, as much as he could understand the foreign faith. Membertou urged the Jesuits to learn the Mi'kmaq language so that he
could receive more religious instruction from them. During the
late summer of 1611, Membertou contracted dysentery & was nursed by Jesuits Massé & Biard. In his final days, Membertou requested to
be buried with his pagan ancestors. Biencourt agreed, but Fr.
Biard disapproved. The priest nevertheless administered the last
rites to the convert. Membertou, wishing to please the Jesuit,
changed his mind about his burial arrangements. The old sagamore died on Sunday, 18 Sep 1611, was
given a solemn funeral, &, as he had agreed, was buried among the
French. Membertou's death came only 15 months after his baptism.
For a wide perspective on illness among North American
Natives, see Weidensaul, 94-104.
It must be emphasized that, even if Pourtrincourt had
parceled out land to settlers at Port-Royal in 1610, the allotments went
to individual men, not families. The first European family to
remain in French America was that of Louis Hébert at Québec in
1617. Not until 1636 would European families--those of Pierre
Martin, Guillaume Trahan, Isaac Pesseley, & perhaps
Jean Gaudet & François Gautrot--come to French Acadia &
remain there. See note 27a,
below, & Book Four.
12k. Quotations
from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 79; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 92.
12l. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 92.
See also Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 42.
Richter, listing European activities in North America in
the early 1600, mentions Jamestown in 1607, Québec in 1608, & Henry
Hudson's exploration of the Hudson in 1609, but not Île Ste.-Croix &
Port-Royal in 1604-05--a sad commentary on a book published in 2001.
13. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
114; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:43; Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet,
14; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 290. See also Campeau, "Biard,"
in DCB, 1:95; Campeau, "Du Thet," in DCB, 1:299; Lucien Campeau, "Le Coq de La Saussaye, René," in DCB,
1:441, &
online; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 8;
Faulkner & Faulkner, 30; Fischer, 285, 300-02, 310-11, 364, 578-79,
601-02, 606, 693; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 23, 46; MacBeath, "Du Gua de Monts, in DCB,
1:294; Martin, F.-X., 1:37-38, 44, 50; Parkman, France & England,
1:221, 224ff, 1071; Léon Pouliot, "Lalemant, Charles," in DCB, 1:411, &
online;
Léon Pouliot, "Quentin, Jacques," in
DCB, 1:560, &
online; Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in
DCB, 1:98; Squires, "Argall," in DCB, 1:67-68;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 100-02, 105-06, 112, 115-16,
124-25, 161, 292n23; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB, 1:191;
Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 102; White,
DGFA-1; White,
DGFA-1 English; online Wikipedia, "Mount Desert Island."
Fischer, 285, 300, 578, 602, says the Queen-Regent
banished the sieur de Mons from court in 1610, soon after the death of
Henri IV, which essentially ended de Mons's direct access to power (he
was a Protestant, & Marie de Medici was determined to remove him & other
Huguenots from power). By then, de Mons's year-long monopoly,
awarded by King Henri IV in early 1608, had expired, & a period of free
trade followed in New France until Oct 1612. At that time, thanks
in part to Champlain's maneuvering at Court, and with the
approbation of de Mons, who no longer was welcome at court, Che comte de Soissons received the concession in New France.
Even after his monopoly expired & he was superseded as
lieutenant-general by Soissons & then Condé, de Mons maintained a financial
interest in the fur & fish trade of the region, & this evidently is what
the marquise acquired from him in 1612. See also Fischer,
301-02, 311, 364, 606; note 12a, above. MacBeath,
1:294, says, "By now, any rights he had in Acadia
had been given to the Marquise de Guercheville," but those rights were
likely purchased. See Griffiths, 23. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 100, explains: "As for de
Monts, who had been Lieutenant-General since 1603, [on 8 Oct 1612] he
yielded his office to a prince [Soissons] whose rank and influence might
bring better results than hitherto in the establishment of the
Laurentian colony." De Mons died around age 70 at his estate, Ardennes, in
his native Saintonge, in 1628, but his activities in Canada, begun with
the founding of Québec in 1608, had pretty much ended by 1617. See Fischer, 601-02, 606; MacBeath, 1:291, 294; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
124-25.
Parkman says the marquise de Guercheville's
seigneurie included all of North America from the St.
Lawrence down to FL, excepting Poutrincourt's concession at
Port-Royal. Griffiths, 23, echoing Campeau, "Biard," says that,
after buying out de Mons's "residual rights in the colony," the
marquise arranged for the title of viceroy of Canada to be given to Henri de Bourbon, the Prince de
Condé et duc d'Enghien, succeeding the comte de Soissons, a prince of
the blood, who had been awarded the New French concession on 8 Oct 1612 but died
a few weeks later. Condé, also a prince of the blood, was Soissons's
nephew. Condé was named viceroy on 22 Nov 1612. Champlain
organized a company in his name a year later, on 20 Nov 1613; it was
granted an 11-year monopoly, but it,
too, failed; the venture also was known as Compagnie de Canada,
Compagnie de Condé, & Compagnie de Rouen et de
Saint-Malo, as well as Compagnie de Champlain. See
Fischer, 301-02, 310-11, 578-79; 602, 606, 693n38; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 100-01, 105-06. Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 101, says Condé's viceroyalty included Acadia as well as
Canada. Campeau, "Biard,"
says de Mons granted to the marquise "all the
American Atlantic coast, excepting only Port-Royal." MacBeath, 1:294, implies that the
marquise's massive
grant included Acadia but not de Mons's monopoly at Québec in Canada, & that de Mons & Champlain "succeeded in having the
title of viceroy given to the Comte de Soissons and then to the Prince
de Condé." Fischer, 301-02, agrees, but says Soissons held the titles of admiral,
lieutenant general, & governor, also held by de Mons, & that Condé
was the first to demand the title viceroy of New France. See also
Fischer, 302, 578-79, 602, 606; Trudel, "Champlain." Unlike Campeau & Griffiths, Fischer & Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 100-01, give no credit
to the marquise de Guercheville for the appointment of the Prince de
Condé as viceroy of New France; it was, they say, the work of de Mons &
especially Champlain. A close reading of Fischer shows that Poutrincourt's
efforts in La Cadie from 1610-14 & Jesuit ventures there in
1612-13 under the aegis of the marquise de Guercheville were only
indirectly related to activities in Canada at the time.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 114, says the
General of the Jesuits, who he does not name, "had been opposed to the
foundation of another colony with the help of his priests; he would have
preferred to bring Fathers Biard and Massé home. By the time this
was learned, however, the new project was already well advanced, under
the patronage of the Queen Mother and backed by the authority of the
King," who then was only 12 years old. F.-X. Martin, 1:50,
says Fr. Lallemand, as he calls him, among the first Jesuits to go to
Canada in 1625, had been with La Saussaye in Acadia in 1613.
Pouliot, "Lalemant," disagrees; he places Fr. Lallemant in France in 1612-13 teaching "lower
classes" at the Jesuit college at Nevers. See also note
15b, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 116, says the
patache--he calls it a pinnace--was "built at St. Sauveur," but
one wonders if La Saussaye & his men could have built such a vessel in
their short time at St.-Sauveur. Squires, 1:67, says La Saussaye took the "Jonas of 100 tons and a pinnace
of 12 tons" from France to Port-Royal, which is a more likely scenario.
The detail about Kenduskeag is from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 115, which, following Fr. Biard's account,
calls it Kadesquit; & Faulkner & Faulkner, 14. Trudel explains: "This secluded spot had the
advantage of being near the sea and also of offering the possibility of
communication with Quebec. It seemed most suitable, both for the
establishment of a colony and for the fur trade." For Champlain's visit there, following his first visit to Mount Desert Island in
late summer of 1604, see note 08b,
above.
For details of the Jesuit venture at St.-Sauveur, see
Parkman, 1:224ff, which places the mission on Mount
Desert Island. Griffiths, 23, places St.-Sauveur "at
the mouth of the Pentagöuet (Castine, Maine)," which lies on the
Penobscot estuary just west of Mount Desert Island, yet Map 3 on
Griffiths, 46,
entitled "Acadian and New England in the seventeenth century ... based
on Reid, Maine and New Scotland," places Pentagouët & St.-Sauveur
in the Penobscot estuary 50 miles apart. (Griffiths spells it Pentagöuet, but White favors Pentagouët.)
Pentagouët was an earlier name for the Penobscot. See Faulkner & Faulkner,
30n14; note 08b, above.
Fischer, 290, says: "The colony was called Saint-Sauveur, and
it was planted on Mount Desert Island, perhaps at a beautiful and
sheltered placed on the western side of Somes Sound which is still
called Jesuit Point." Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
115, describes the site as "A spot on the mainland ... behind Mount
Desert Island, where the land seemed fertile and where there was a
harbour that appeared to be safe and commanded the whole coast."
Campeau, "Le Coq de La Saussaye," places it on Frenchmans Bay,
which is on the eastern side of Mount Desert Island. Online Wikipedia, "Mount Desert Island," places the mission "on what is now
Fernald Point, near the entrance to Somes Sound," on the big
island's southwestern end, & adds: "St. Sauveur
Mountain overlooking the point still bears the name of the mission."
One wonders if Fischer is referring to Jesuit Spring, which lies
along the north shore of Fernald Cove, less than a mile west of Fernald
Point. Fischer, 290, calls the first Jesuits efforts in New
France "an 'Acadian Paraguay' in the Gulf of Maine, comparable to the
South American country that was run by the Jesuits for many
generations."
Campeau, "Du Thet," calls the marquise's Jonas
a "new" ship, so the Jonas of 1613 likely was not the same ship of
that name which Poutrincourt had hired for his return trip to Port-Royal in 1606.
See note 10c, above.
13a. Quotations from
Squires, "Argall," in DCB, 1:67; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
9; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 116. See also Arsenault, History,
15-16; Campeau, "Biard,"
in DCB, 1:95; Campeau, "Du Thet," in DCB, 1:299; Campeau,
"Le Coq de La Saussaye," in DCB, 1:441-42; Campeau, "Massé,"
in DCB, 1:498; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 81;
Deans, The River Where America Began, 102; Erskine,
Nova Scotia, 8-9, 11, 29; Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet,
14; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
19, 29-33; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 290-91, 691n31;
Allan M. Fraser, "Calvert, Sir George," in DCB, 1:162-63, &
online; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 23-24, 31, 37, 43; Historical Atlas of Canada,
1:29, 48, plates 22 & 23; Horn, A Brave & Cunning Prince,
44-52; MacDonald, 8; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:44; J. Monet, "Noyrot, Philibert," in DCB, 1:521, &
online; <http://ns1763.ca/annapco/lequille.html>; Parkman, England & France,
1:228ff, 1072; Pendery, ed., Saint Croix Island, 5; Pouliot,
"Quentin," in DCB, 1:560; Squires, "Argall," in DCB,
1:68-69; Trudel, 115, 117-18; online Wikipedia,
"Mount Desert Island"; notes 12
& 12f, above,
& 18b, below.
Arsenault, 16, calls Argall a Welshman; Faragher,
29, calls him a Welsh privateer. According to Squires, 1:67, however, the admiral was a native of East Sutton, Kent,
England. Griffiths, 23, ever the careful historian, calls
Argall simply "a Virginian." A. H. Clark, 81, calls Argall "a trader-freebooter out of Jamestown." Deans, 102, calls him "a
settler-soldier." Parkman, 1:228, not commenting on Argall's
nativity, calls him "captain of an illicit trading-vessel."
However, Argall's
appointment as admiral & his commission from the Virginia Company to
destroy French settlements hardly made him a "freebooter" or
even a
privateer.
Argall & Dale not only felt justified, but also had been
ordered, to destroy
French settlements in territory claimed by the London Company
charters of 1606 & 1609. Trudel, 115, however, insists that
"When he left Virginia on this first occasion, Argall's objective
does not appear to have been one of destruction. The Virginians
were as yet unaware that La Saussaye had come to establish a colony
behind Mount Desert Island...." Trudel cites Fr. Biard as source
for the belief that Argall simply stumbled upon the Jesuit mission. Parkman, ever the defender of things English,
nevertheless, on 1:1072, makes a strong case against "the lawless
inroads" of Dale & Argall, whom he says had no authority to molest the
French settlements. On 1:228, he reminds us that Argall had
captured Pocahontas during the spring of 1613--the same year in which he
fell on the Acadian settlements. Parkman insists that, after the
abduction of Pocahontas on the Potomac, Argall, "With a ship of one
hundred and thirty tons, carrying fourteen guns, and sixty men," but not
naming the vessel, sailed up to ME in May to fish for cod.
Parkman says Argall had been given "the errand" by Dale, "Governor[sic]
of Virginia, ... to expel the French from any settlement they might have
made within the limits of King James's patents." English claims
ran as far north as the Grand Banks & Newfoundland, so this would have
included ME & the rest of French Acadia. Parkman, 1:228-29,
relates that Argall was plagued by thick fog on the ME coast, but
when the weather cleared, he found himself not far from the Bay of
Penobscot. Local Indians came out in canoes to greet him, & their
sign language revealed the presence of "Normans," the name by which the
Algonquians knew the French. Argall's questioning revealed the
location & size of the French settlement, & Parkman goes on to detail
the attack on St.-Sauveur, which he does not name, in his usual detail;
he even names a number of the French defenders--Bailleul the pilot, La
Saussaye the commander, La Motte (also called La Mothe) the lieutenant, Captain Fleury, Du Thet, & Biard, who left an account of the action,
but does not mention Jesuit Fr. Quentin.
Erskine, 8, tells a somewhat different story, with no detail; he says "Samuel Argall, returning to Virginia by
the northern route, happened by chance upon the new settlement [St.-Sauveur]
in territory recently abandoned by Raleigh and Gilbert. Without
hesitation he attacked the settlement and carried off the French ships,
Father Biard and another Jesuit, since by law Jesuits were forbidden on
English land. In Virginia he was ordered to return and to destroy
any French encroachments upon English territory," hence the raid against
Ste.-Croix & Port-Royal as well. Faragher, 29-30, citing
primary sources, including printed accounts by Argall & Biard, echoes
Parkman's version of the story, including details, & calls the coastal
Indians Abenaki. Judge Martin, first published in 1827, insists Argal,
as he calls him, attacked with only 11 men; one doubts that a 130-ton
vessel with 14 guns carried such a small crew; F.-X. Martin solves this by
saying the English ship carried only 4 guns & that the French were
"unprovided with artillery," also unlikely. Griffiths, 31, places Argall's raid in the context of
Acadia beyond the settlement at Port-Royal. Faragher, 29, calls
him "a Welsh privateer with a commission from Governor[sic]
Thomas Dale of Jamestown." (Dale, however, was never governor of
Jamestown. In 1613, he served as the colony's "marshall," or chief
law enforcer, though he had served briefly as acting-, deputy, or
lieutenant-governor in 1611 & would serve in that capacity again from
1614-16; all that time, however, from 1611-16, he was the colony's
marshal. The governor of Virginia in 1613 was Thomas West,
third baron De La Warr, known to history as Lord Delaware, who had been appointed governor
by the Company's new charter of May 1609, had come to VA in 1610, left
for England soon afterwards, & was still in England when Argall attacked
St.-Sauveur & Port-Royal.
In 1613, Delaware's acting- or deputy-governor was Sir Thomas Gates.
See online Wikipedia, "Thomas Dale," which is well researched but also
calls Dale "governor"; the article mentions Argall & his ship
Treasurer only in the context of Dale's return to England, with the
Rolfes in tow, during the spring of 1616.) Squires, 1:68, says, "When Argall returned to England in 1614 there was an
inquiry into his attacks on the French and it was agreed that the whole
action was legal and proper to protect the rights granted to the
Virginia Company by the Crown. The vessel Jonas was
returned to Mme. Guercheville but her claim for 100,000 livres
damages was disallowed." Interestingly, Squires, 1:69, in
a discussion of Argall's detractors in England & VA, says Fr. Biard, "who had the greatest reason to be bitter against [Argall,] spoke
very highly of him and obviously admired him." Among other things,
Biard likely recalled Argall's refusal to hand him over when Biencourt
threatened to hang him on the beach at Port-Royal. The prisoners
Argall took to Jamestown (F.-X. Martin says they "voluntarily followed
Argal to Virginia") returned to France by a circuitous route.
He took them perhaps aboard the Jonas to England in 1614 & sent
them on to France aboard that vessel after the English agreed to return
it to Madame de Guercheville. She held on to her Acadian seigneurie
until 1627, but she made no efforts to resettle the Jesuits
there. See J. Monet; Trudel, 116-17.
The English claims in that part of North America,
although established slightly later than those of the French,
nevertheless led to a more rapid growth in settlement during the early 1600s,
not all of them successful. See Historical Atlas of Canada,
1:48, for a list of failed English agricultural settlements in Newfoundland during the three decades after
the founding of Jamestown: at Conception Bay in 1610; Renews in 1617; Harbour
Grace in 1617; Renews again in 1623; St. John's in 1624; Ferryland in
1632, this one led by Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who founded MD
as a Catholic refuge 2 years later; & Ferryland again in
1638. It took a while for the stubborn English to realize that
sustainable agriculture was not possible in this frozen, forbidding
land, only fishing and fur trading, so they concentrated their
agriculture efforts
farther south, along the Chesapeake & Cape Cod bays. The Newfoundland sites can be located in Historical Atlas
of Canada,
1, plates 22 & 23. See
Fraser. Griffiths, 37, says the English settlement at Ferryland
was well established by 1625 & mentions another English settlement in
Newfoundland at Cupids Cove, which had been established even earlier.
She says Cupids Cove contained 54 men, 6 women, & 3 children
in 1612 & that Lord Baltimore's Ferryland had 100 settlers in 1625. See also Griffiths, 24.
For post-Cabot English explorations in North America & the resulting
territorial claims, & English settlement attempts on the Atlantic seaboard, see
notes 05j,
08a, &
08d. For English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard after
the founding of Port-Royal & conflicting territorial claims, see Trudel,
118; notes 12h
& 12k, above. For English colonial
efforts on the Atlantic seaboard after Argall's exploits, see note
18, below.
Some sources say Argall was guided to Port-Royal either
by Fr. Biard (so claimed Biencourt & Poutrincourt, his enemies) or a
captured Mi'kmaq sagamore (so said Fr. Biard himself), but Squires,
1:68, notes: "No one suggests the obvious that there
must have been enough charts and written directions in Le Coq's [La
Saussaye's] baggage and on the Jonas to guide Argall to both
Sainte-Croix and Port-Royal." Poutrincourt's & Biencourt's
accusation was their way of blaming the Jesuits for their troubles, &
Fr. Biard's blaming an Indian likely was an attempt to wash his own hands of
the matter.
Jesuits--Spanish, not French--had been martyred in North
America as far back as Feb 1571 in, of all places, present-day Virginia,
after they had established a mission near what the Spanish called the
Bahia de Santa Maria, today's Chesapeake Bay. They were murdered
by local Algonquians led by one Don Luís, a Hispanicized Indian whose
actual name was Paquiquineo, called later by the English Opehancanough.
See Horn.
Erskine, 9, 11, published in 1975, says the mill "where
some of the colonists passed the winter of 1613-14," near present-day
Lequille, NS, "has been commemorated by the building of the pattern of a
French mill surrounding the hydroelectric station. The real mill
must have been very small, since it had been shipped from France, and it
must have stood a furlong to the south where the river is divided into
three channels. Ever since that time until a few years ago, there
have been mills on the southern branch. A millstone found near
there has been accepted as having belonged to Poutrincourt's mill, but
our knowledge of millstone types is sadly limited." Lequille is
located on what was variously called Petit Rivière, Rivière Allain, &
the Lequille River, a meandering tidal stream that flows northward into
the basin below present-day Annapolis Royal. Erskine, 29, says that Poutrincourt's mill was the first one built in
North America. A number of mills were built on the Lequille River over the centuries, including
one owned by prominent settler Louis Allain, a blacksmith and
merchant, in the late 1680s. Today, an impressive monument stands
on the site. It reads, on the English-language side: "Poutrincourt's
Mill 1607: To relieve the toil of the hand-mill in making flour
for the settlers at Port Royal, Sieur Poutrincourt had a water-mill
erected on the Lequille River near here early in 1607. An
electricity generating plant was built in 1967 on the river. A
metal plague on a wall of the 1967 building reads, in part: "Poutrincourt's
Mill: On or near this site, in the spring of 1607, Poutrincourt,
baron and soldier, erected the first grist mill in America. ...
The exterior of this 'mill' is a reproduction of a water mill in France
at the time Port Royal was founded. It is not a replica of
Poutrincourt's mill because no record of the design of that mill can be
found. Since the gallant French adventurers first settled here,
the Lequille River has turned the wheels of 18 mills for grist,
lumber, carding and electric energy...." See also Griffiths,
43; Historical
Atlas of Canada, 1:29; <http://ns1763.ca/annapco/lequille.html>;
notes 10a, above, & 19 &
234, below.
Fischer, 290-91, details Champlain's reaction to the
creation & destruction of St.-Sauveur, including a proposal to Jesuit
Fr. Pierre Coton, former confessor of King Henri IV, "to join a common
effort for a colony centered on the St. Lawrence River rather than in
southern Acadia," but the influential priest & the governor differed
over control, as well as finances, & could not come to an agreement.
Champlain's failure to come to terms with Fr. Coton meant that he
also had no influence over the marquise de Guercheville, whose agents
now seemed to be
running the show in French North America.
13b. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 115.
See also Campeau, "Biard,"
in DCB, 1:95; Campeau, "Le Coq de La Saussaye," in DCB,
1:441; Campeau, "Du Thet," in DCB, 1:299.
Campeau, "Le Coq de La Saussaye," says "On 29 June 1613
they [La Saussaye et al.] received warning that an English
vessel, in fighting order, was fishing off the mouth of Penobscot, but
La Saussaye was not disturbed by the news." This was Argall of
course, probably interrogating local Indians. Only Campeau, "Du Thet,"
mentions a fort "which had just been started" at the time of Argall's
attack.
14. Quotation from Eccles, Canadian Frontier,
23. See also MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
115-16; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 118.
15. Quotations from
Ryder, "Poutrincourt," in DCB, 1:98; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22. See also
Bennett, "Hébert,"
in DCB, 1:367; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 82; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 9; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 33;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 346; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 24-25, 31, 34;
MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:592; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
10-11; Parkman, France & England, 1:239, 1072; Ryder, 1:96,
99; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 117.
Trudel says Poutrincourt agreed to give Macain
& Georges "all the beaver skins produced by the Acadian trade."
Ryder, as quoted, says they received a share of the furs.
Ryder, 1:98, says "one mill and
some barns had escaped destruction as had most of the planted fields but
these were insufficient for the continuance of the colony at that time."
Ryder, 1:98-99, describes the death of
this important player in early Acadian history: "It is ironic that
Poutrincourt who loved peace and wished to devote his life to
agricultural development should die a violent death, having been
summoned at the moment of fresh troubles to France and ordered by his
queen to recapture Méry-sur-Seine in Champagne. Pierced by many
bullets, he died in December 1615 at the age of 58. Various
historians have given different versions of his death but the most
accepted is that Poutrincourt died in an effort to forestall his
commander-in-chief from receiving the surrender of Méry-sur-Seine, of
which Poutrincourt was governor. Poutrincourt felt that he alone
should capture it. He met his death at the hands of his own party.
With him was his son Jacques who was taken prisoner.... Poutrincourt was
buried at Champagne, where a large monument was erected in his memory."
See also Fischer; Griffiths, 25; Ryder, 1:96.
Parkman says Biencourt rebuilt Port-Royal & built a fort at Cap-Sable called Fort
Loméron, but MacBeath,
followed here, says: "With little in the way of supplies and
reinforcements arriving from France, Biencourt and La Tour were
able to rebuild the Port-Royal buildings only in part. They
largely abandoned settlement and farming in favour of the lucrative but
risky fur trade, a commerce which each year attracted several vessels to
the Acadian coasts." MacBeath says Charles La Tour
built Fort Loméron, evidently named after David Loméron, at Cap-Sable only after Biencourt's
death. Trudel concludes his chapter on Poutrincourt's
efforts in La Cadie: "The Poutrincourts, father and son, were
henceforth no more than suppliers of furs, to the greater profit of the
merchants of La Rochelle. Not for many years to come would there
be anything more than a few trading posts in Acadia."
15a. Quotations from
Parkman, France & England, 1:1072; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
12, 15; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 125. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1643-46; René Baudry, "Menou D'Aulnay,
Charles de," in DCB,
1:503, &
online;
Clark, A.
H.,
Acadia, 57, 82, 87-88; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 9, 11-12;
Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet, 14, 30; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
218, 581, 603, 606-08; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 31-37,
54;
D. C. Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB,
1:51, &
online;
MacBeath, "Gravé du Pont, Robert," in
DCB, 1:347; MacBeath,
"La Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:592, 594;
MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude,"
in DCB, 1:596-98; MacDonald, 11, 13-16, 19-22; <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles>; Ryder, "Biencourt,"
in DCB, 1:102;
Trudel, 152-53, 155, 164, chap. 12; White, DGFA-1, 1431-32, 1442;
White, DGFA-1
English, 299-300, 303; Williamson, "Castine"; note 12b, above,
& 19b &
19d, below.
Fischer, 218, details the
"education" of Biencourt, Charles La Tour, & Robert Gravé du Pont
in Indian languages & behavior from their first days in the colony.
Fischer says Poutrincourt encouraged this practice as part of his
program to establish good relations with the natives. See also
note 10a, above. Trudel, chap.
12, entitled "The Meeting of Cultures," is especially good in detailing
the influence of native folkways on French explorers & settlers, &
mentions Charles La Tour on 155. For characteristics of
the universal Indian food, sagamité, see 152-53.
Claude La Tour's full name after his marriage was Nicolas dit
Claude Turgis dit de Saint-Étienne, sieur de La Tour.
See White, DGFA-1, 1431. For more on the La Tour
family, who, like Poutrincourt & his family, were from Champagne, see
Arsenault; MacBeath,
"La Tour, Charles," 1:592; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude,"
who, on 1:598, concludes that
the La Tours family name was Turgis & that they were of the lesser nobility; MacDonald,
19-20; White,
DGFA-1, 1431-32. Son Charles was born probably in Champagne
in c1593, so he would have been only 13 or 14 in 1606, the year he came to
Acadia with his father & Poutrincourt. Charles's mother was
Claude's first wife, a widow when they married; Marie, daughter of
Hector de Salazar, married Claude in c1592. One historian
avers that Marie de Salazar "is believed to have been a
descendant of Saint Louis IX, King of France, in the eleventh
generation." See White, DGFA-1, 1442; White, DGFA-1
English, 303, citing René Jetté, Traité de généalogie, 601-05. Charles,
born when his father was age 23, was the first child & Claude's only
son. Charles's sister Louise, birth date & place unrecorded,
married Charles Simony, a soldier of the Paris garrison, in c1625.
Like youngest sister Angélique, who may not have married, none of
Charles's sisters had children of their own. Trudel, p. 155, says
Charles's first wife was a Souriquois, the French name for the Mi'kmaq,
& their first daughter (her name was Jeanne) "is the first métis
child mentioned in the history of French America." White, DGFA-1
English, 300, citing historian Fr. Clarence d'Entremont, says Charles & his first wife may also have had sons; if so, their names have
been lost to history. Claude's second wife
was another widowed Frenchwoman, Marie, daughter of Claude Guesdon and
"the young widow of an attorney of the Châtelet," who he
married at Paris in Sep 1615.
They had no children, at least none whose names have been recorded, but
she had 2 sons by her first husband who "would serve their older
stepbrother [Charles] in Acadia."
See MacDonald, 21-22 (quotes from 21); White, DGFA-1, 1431-32.
Gravé du Pont lived on Rivière St.-Jean during the
1610s, doing well in the fur trade. Unlike Biencourt & the La
Tours, who seemed to have remained in Acadia even during the winter,
Gravé made regular trips to France, returning to his post on Rivière
St.-Jean when it suited him. In 1619, in command of the ship
Espérance, Gravé, who was a naval officer like his father, joined a
French expedition to the East Indies. "His ship was burned there
by the Dutch in 1621 and he died at sea soon afterwards," only in his
mid-30s. See MacBeath, "Gravé du Pont, Robert."
In Champlain's day, the French word sauvages, rendered as
"savages" in English, meant, simply, "native forest dwellers" & had no
negative connotation, unless one had a personal animus against natives
who lived in forests. See Fischer, 608.
Erskine, 9, asserts that Biencourt
built Fort Loméron at Cap-Sable. Other sources say Charles
La Tour built the post. Perhaps Erskine is implying that La Tour
built the fort as part of a seigneurial grant given to him by Biencourt,
hence the fort was constructed with the seigneurs's approbation.
On 11, Erskine says: "At the death of Biencourt, he [Charles
La Tour] took over Fort Lomeron and enlarged it to 'Fort St.
Louis.'" Erskine, published in 1975, details recent attempts to
identify the locations of La Tour's old fort, as well as another
fort near the cape, that of Sir Thomas Temple from the 1650s, &
concludes, on 11, "Neither site has been excavated to determine its
date." On 12, however, he hints that it lay inland from the
beach at present-day Villagedale, NS, west of Port La Tour. See
also online Wikipedia, "Fort St. Louis, Shelburne County, Nova Scotia,"
"Villagedale, Nova Scotia." Fr. Clarence-J. D'Entremont,
in an article for the Yarmouth Vanguard, followed here, says
Fort Loméron was likely located at today's Chebogue Point, also called
Theboc, northwest of the cape, not at the cape itself. See <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles/4.htm>.
Since Fort St.-Louis was located at the cape,
on can conclude that forts Loméron & St.-Louis were different structures
sited at different locations. See <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles/43.htm>;
notes 19m &
19n, below.
Erskine, 9, also makes the remarkable statement: "We know only
that during the next years they [Biencourt & the La Tours] had an
adequate band of coureurs de bois for their fur trade, and the
fact that sixteen years later there were five surplus marriageable girls
available for the Scottish colony suggests that most or all of the
peasant families had remained." Is Erskine saying that French
families lived in Biencourt's Acadia from 1614 to 1630, & that they
produced children, at least daughters, who survived childhood? If
so, this flies in the face
of the scholarship which insist that the first French families to remain
in Acadia did not arrive until v1636. Griffiths, 54, calls the 1636 arrivals "the first recorded migrant families." White, DGFA-1, the most reliable source on
early Acadian
genealogy, begins the history of Acadian families in v1636. See also notes
20, 21a,
&
27a, below. If he had not used
the words "peasant families" one would think that Erskine was writing
about the children of métissage. The term coureurs de bois--literally
"runner of the woods," also rendered coureur des bois--was used
in Canada, often disparagingly, to denote the independent, that is to
say, unlicensed, fur traders who spent more time in the wilderness,
among the Indians, than in the colony's French settlements. In the
context of 1614-32 Acadia, the term may be anachronistic as well as
geographically misplaced.
At Pentagouët, the local Algonquian-speakers would have
been the Penobscot, & on Rivière St.-Jean they would have been
the Maliseet, all part of what became the Wabanaki Confederacy--essential partners for any fur-trading
venture in the region. See Clark, A. H., 57, 82. MacBeath,
"Saint-Étienne, Claude," 1:596, says La Tour built Fort
Pentagouët, "a combined fortified trading post and fishing station," on
the Penobscot & that Pentagouët has been
"termed the first permanent settlement in New England"--the Jesuits,
remember, had settled in the area only briefly during the spring
& summer of 1613. See note 13a,
above. MacBeath's failure to give a date for the erection of the
post at Pentagouët complicates any claim of priority of settlement. Baudry; & MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," 1:594, say
Claude La Tour founded the Pentagouët post in c1625,
which would have been 5 years after the English founded Plymouth
in MA, which was a permanent settlement, but before the founding of Boston in 1630. White, DGFA-1
English, 299, says of Claude La Tour that "ca 1613: After the destruction of
Port-Royal, he devoted himself to the fur trade in the area
around Pentagouët, where he later had a fort built" (italics
added), but gives no
building date. If the La Tours constructed the post in the
1610s, the claim to priority of settlement would be valid. Faulkner & Faulkner,
14, after thoroughly reviewing the European presence on the lower
Penobscot in the early 1600s, offer no definitive building date either,
but they add, 30n14: "The Saint-Sauveur settlement
on Mount Desert was occasionally referred to as 'Pentagoa,' and hence
has been confused with the later French Fort Pentagoet in Castine,
Maine. For the French, Pentagoet was the name of the river and its
drainage; thus any settlement near the mouth of the river [the
Penobscot] was commonly referred to as Pentagoet." Pentagouët, the
spelling favored here, also is rendered as Pentagöuet & Pentagoüet.
As Faulkner & Faulkner reveal in great detail, the site of Claude's old
fort in Castine, one of the loveliest towns in all New England, has been
located, excavated, & commemorated on a grass-covered shelf of land
behind the town's Roman Catholic church.
Clark, A. H., 88, places the relative importance of
agriculture, fur trading, & the fisheries in Acadia before 1632 in stark
perspective: "In numbers of men involved, the value produced, the areal distribution of activity, and the interest in Europe, it is clear
that the agricultural experiments and even the fur trade remained of
very minor importance in comparison with the cod fishery. The
events on which the majority of the historians of the area have focused
most of their attention were economically and demographically rather
incidental. The overwhelming significance of the apparently
inexhaustible codfish near the shores and on the offshore banks, and of
the hundreds of miles of deeply broken Atlantic coastline offering
innumerable coves for shelter, refreshment, and the erection of drying
flakes, cannot be overlooked in any geographical assessment of the area.
Indeed, the fur-trading and settlement activities, such as they were,
were heavily dependent on the ease with which small vessels could move
along the coast, from Havre à l'Anglois (Louisburg[sic]), to Cape
Fourchu (Yarmouth), or even around the shores of the Bay of Fundy,
'hopping' from one of the closely spaced harbors to another."
Griffiths, 32, estimates that, during the late 1610s
& early 1620s, "at any given point there were probably no more than
twenty Frenchmen who wintered over in Acadia." On 34,
she details the growing criticism in France, both
contemporary & historical, of Biencourt et al.'s supposedly dissolute
lives in Acadia, especially the specter of sexual activity with the
region's native women. On 35-36, she points out the importance
of marriage not only among the natives but also in the lives of these
young Frenchmen of the wild, using Charles La Tour's first
marriage as an example. See note 19a,
below.
In 1617, at age 16, Louis XIII led a coup against his
mother, the Queen-Regent, & asserted himself as monarch, with mixed
results. See online Wikipedia, "Louis XIII of France."
During Biencourt's "control" of the Acadian concession &
the chaos that followed his death, several New French monopolies
attempted to dominate trade in the St. Lawrence valley--that held by
Henri, second duc de Montmorency et de Dampville, from 1620-25 & by
Henri de Lévis, duc de Ventadour, from 1626-27, both holding the office
of viceroy of New France but neither going there & both employing Samuel
de Champlain as their lieutenant & governor at Québec. In 1627
came Richelieu's Company, which lasted until 1632. See Fischer,
603, 606-07.
15b. Quotations from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 313, 734n136; Trudel, Beginnings
of New France, 118, 123, 127, 136, 157, 167; Frédéric Gingras, "Le Caron, Joseph," in DCB, 1:437, &
online. See also
Arsenault,
History,
20; Campeau,
"Massé," in DCB, 1:496; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 83n21; G.-M. Dumas, "Duplessis, Pacifique," in DCB,
1:296, &
online;
G.-M. Dumas, "Huet, Paul," in DCB, 1:379, &
online;
G.-M. Dumas, "Viel, Nicolas," in DCB, 1:661, &
online; Fischer, 317-24, 349-50, 352, 354-56, 358-59,
362, 367, 369-70, 372, 377, 379, 393, 395-97, 400, 402, 404, 412, 417,
419, 423, 452, 476-77, 535-36, 542-43, 579-80, 583, 594; Frédéric Gingras, "Dolbeau,
Jean," in DCB, 1:265, &
online;
Frédéric Gingras, "Jamet (Jamay), Denis," in DCB, 1:385-86, &
online;
Gingras, "Le Caron," 1:436; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 34, 475n39; René Latourelle, "Brébeuf, Jean de,"
in DCB, 1:121-26, &
online; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
13, 37; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:45-51; J. Monet, "Nouë, Anne de," in DCB, 1:521, &
online;
Monet, "Noyrot," in DCB, 1:521; Pouliot, "Lalemant," in DCB, 1:411;
Jean De La Croix Riox, "Sagard, Gabriel," in DCB, 1:590-92, &
online; Trudel,
131-32,135, 164, 169,
181-82, 295, chaps. 9-13; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
105-06; notes
note 12e & 15a, above, &
21a, below; Book Four.
Although Champlain favored the Récollets enough to
invite them to "his" colony in 1615, he eventually turned away from
them. After Fr. Georges le Baillif's mission to Paris, Champlain "'no longer bore towards them [the
Franciscans] the same friendly feelings as formerly, as a consequence of
the conduct of Récollet father Georges in 1621 when Champlain thought
that he had sent forged letters to the King.'" The result was
that they were not invited back to Canada when it was returned to the
French in 1632; only the Jesuits returned there. Though they were
allowed to return to Acadia in 1630/31, the Récollets did not return to
Canada until 1670. See Fischer, 369, 377, 594 (quotation from 594), enclosing a quote from Biggar, Early
Trading Companies of New France, 279; Trudel, 131-32, 181-82.
Arsenault says one of the Récollets baptized
Jeanne, the eldest daughter of Charles La Tour by his first wife,
a Mi'kmaq, in 1626, but this would have been 2 years after the 3
surviving friars in La Cadie had returned to Québec. MacDonald, 37, says the blessing & baptisms did not occur until 1630, when the
Récollets returned to Acadia, specifically to Cap-Sable. See note
19n, below.
Dumas, "Viel," says of the death of Récollet Fr.
Viel at the Montréal rapids: "He set off [from Huronia] with the
Indians who were going down for the fur trade. While he was at the
last rapids in the Rivière des Prairies, in a canoe occupied by three
Indians, he was slaughtered by them and thrown into the water; a young
man named Ahuntsic, who was following in another canoe, witnessed the
crime, and suffered the same fate." Martin, F.-X.,
1:51, says "As they [the natives with Fr. Viel] carried away the
father's baggage, and did not appear well disposed before, they were
strongly suspected of premeditated murder." Trudel, 136,
295n27 & 28, insists "The death of Father Viel ... seems indeed to
have been no more than an accident...." What motive would
Indians have had to murder the good priest? Trudel calls Ahuntsic, the young
man who also died in the accident at the rapids, Auhaitsique & says he
was a Frenchman, not an Indian, known to history only by his Huron
nickname.
The Jesuits, remember, had abandoned their efforts in
French America after Argall destroyed their mission at St.-Sauveur in Jul 1613. From Jan 1625, however, when the first
of them arrived, the Jesuit
presence in Canada increased gradually. When the English
held Québec from 1629-32, a single Jesuit remained at the post to look
after the order's interests there. The other Jesuits & all the remaining Récollets returned to France in
the fall of 1629.
With the restoration of Canada in 1632, Richelieu ousted the Récollets & sent only Jesuits
back to the colony, Frs. Paul Le Jeune & Anne de Nouë, according to
Trudel, 181, &, according to Campeau, Fr. Massé, now in
his late 50s. Fr. Massé remained in Canada & died at Sillery, near
Québec, in May 1646, age 70; a monument to him was erected over his
grave in 1870. See Campeau, "Massé." One of the first Jesuits in the colony, Fr. Jean de Brébeuf,
martyred in Huronia by the Iroquois in Mar
1649, has been, since Oct 1940, the patron saint of Canada. See Latourelle, 1:121, 124. According to Fischer, 452, King Louis XIII would
have preferred sending "gray-gowned Capuchins" to Canada in 1632 instead
of the black-robed Jesuits, but the Jesuit lobby at court was more
successful. See also Fischer, 393, 395-97, 402, 404, 423, 452, 476-77; Parkman, France & England,
1:309-10, 328, 403ff.
For details of the Jesuits' practice of the so-called
"Chinese rite," as described by Weidensaul, 105, see Book Seven, which
places it in the context of the French exploitation of the upper
Mississippi valley in the late 1600s & early 1700s.
Fischer's biography is replete with examples of
Champlain's tolerance towards Protestants.
16. Quotations from
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 164; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 67-69; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 56. See also Clark, A. H., 58, 82, 87;
Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 23; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 5-6;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 477-78; Griffiths 30-32, 34-37;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 13-14; <Micmac
History>; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians of Nova Scotia,
3-4, 22n1; Trudel, 150; notes 02f,
05a, 10,
12j, & 15b, above,
139 &
287, below.
For a history of the Mi'kmaq, see <Micmac
History>; S. A. Davis. For recent discussions of the Frenchmen in Acadia
at the time of Biencourt's leadership & their relations with the
Indians, especially with Indian wives & children, see Griffiths, 34-37;
MacDonald. For Mi'kmaq numbers & the approximate
range of their territory during the first decade of the 1600s, see
Clark, A. H., 58. Erskine relates
that M'kmaq sagamore Membertou, quite elderly at the time, told colonist
Marc Lescarbot "that in his youth the Indians had been numerous as the
hairs on his head [Membertou wore a beard, remember], and now they were
reduced to a handful. Allowing for exaggeration, this may have
been correct. Hunting Indians could not support inveterate
diseases and so had no resistance to them." Such a dramatic
diminution of the tribe's collective strength, due largely to European
diseases, could only have benefited the Frenchmen who were determined
to overawe them. Fischer, 477, says a
missionary, probably a Récollet from Québec, wrote in 1616 "that the
Mi'kmaqs[sic] were ravaged by disease after the French arrived
and traded with them," so the problem persisted & even became worse.
See also Fischer, 478
17. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 721-25; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 97; White, DGFA-1, 1295-1302;
White, DGFA-1 English, 275-77; Books Two, Three, & Four.
18. Quotation from MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour, 16. See also Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 33; MacBeath,
"Saint-Étienne, Claude," 1:596; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:48, 56-58; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country,
299n23; White, DGFA-1
English, 299; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 163; notes
08a & 12, above.
The history of early VA & the
founding of Plymouth Colony in present-day MA, like the discussion of
Columbus & other early explorers of the New World, are too well known
to document here. Consult any good
encyclopedia for details of these important historical events, but be
wary of romanticizing, such as the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth & the
"Pilgrims's" supposed good relations with the local Indians. One must keep in mind that in the early 1600s the Indians of VA were part of a
powerful confederacy that had largely escaped the white man's diseases
until the English came, but the Indian tribes of the Massachusetts Bay
area had been devastated by European diseases by the time the
Separatists/Pilgrims appeared on the scene. It was easier for the Pilgrims
& the Puritans to overawe the coastal tribes of MA because there were so few of
them left. For a recent study of the VA & New England
colonial ventures that does justice to Native & African contributions,
see Taylor, A., American Colonies, chaps. 6-9. For
Jamestown, Deans, The River Where America Began, is especially
readable.
Richter is especially good for the Indians' "discovery of Europe," as he
aptly puts it. In the footnote cited above, he mentions the
depredations along the MA coast of Edward Harlow in 1611 and Thomas Hunt
in 1614, the latter being the one who captured the famous Squanto,
future "savior" of the Pilgrims.
See
Parkman, France & England, 1:312, 314-15, for a classic, &
entirely biased, expression of the contrast between authority-ridden New
France & liberty-loving New England.
18a. Quotations from Harvey,
"Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:51-52; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 41. See also Arsenault, History,
19; Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 429; Griffiths, 33-34,
42; Harvey, 1:50; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 16-17, 34-35, 205n3;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:48, 50; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 164, 175, 178; note
19k, below.
Griffiths, 33, says after Alexander's grant, which included the
Gaspé region & the present-day Maritime provinces, Acadia was referred
to as Acadie ou la Nouvelle Ecosse, that is, "Acadia or Nova Scotia."
Harvey, 1:52,
notes that, after returning to Scotland, Sir William published a
pamphlet entitled An encouragement to colonies in which he
"sprinkled a number of Scottish names. Thus the Sainte-Crox
becomes the Tweed; the Saint John, the Clyde; and the whole is divided
into two provinces Alexandria and Caldedonia," none of which caught on.
Martin, F.-X., 1:48, calls the New Brunswick portion of the viscount's
grant Nova Alexandria & says Sir William was authorized to create "fifty
baronets" from among his associates. Harvey's number--150--is
followed here.
18b. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
145; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:52. See also Canny &
Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World, 65; Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 270-71, 305; Martin, F.-X., 1:40, 43, 65; Squires, "Argall,"
in DCB, 1:68; Trudel, 103, 105, 163; online Wikipedia, "Henry
Hudson," "New Amsterdam," "New Netherland,"
"New Sweden"; note
05d, above.
For the domestic & international status of the Netherlands on the eve of
Hudson's explorations for them, see Trudel, 83.
Hudson called his river the Mauritius River, & the Dutch later called it
the North River. At Ticonderoga, on the southern
end of Lake Champlain, near the river's source, French explorer Samuel de Champlain, wielding a
wheel-lock arquebus, helped his Indian allies defeat a party of Mohawk
on Jul 29, only a few weeks before Hudson came up his river. See
Fischer, 270-71. On 270, Fischer says
Hudson "reached the present sites of Albany and Troy on September 19,
1609." Troy is only 70 miles south of Ticonderoga, but neither
explorer likely knew of the other's presence so close in time &
distance. See Trudel, 103, map
entitled "Explorations of Champlain, 1609-1616," which includes Hudson's
1609 exploration to Albany. Canny & Morgan say the Dutch abandoned
the site of Fort Nassau only 3 years after its establishment, which
would be c1617.
For Argall's depredations against the French in 1613, see note
13a, above. Needless to say, Dutch
authorities did not recognize the validity of the Argall's
strong-arm tactics at Manhattan.
Martin, F.-X., 1:43, first published in 1827, says the Dutch called their
Manhattan post "Nova Belgica, and its principal town (now the city of
New York) New Amsterdam."
19. Quotation from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 426. See also
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 83; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
12;
Fischer, 410-16, 420-25, 427-30, 432, 436-37, 584-85, 607, chap. 19;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 37, 40; Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling,"
in DCB, 1:53; Leckie, Wars of America, 14; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 33-34;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:54-56; Moir,
"Kirke, David," in DCB, 1:405; Moir, "Kirke, Sir Lewis," in
DCB, 1:407; Moir, "Kirke, Thomas," in DCB, 1:407; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
174-79; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:195-96; online Wikipedia,
"Treaty of Suza"; notes 13a
& 15a above; Book Two.
Leckie places the
1629 English expedition against Québec into the context of Europe's
Thirty Years War of 1618-48. According to Leckie, Champlain had
"only 16 starving men inside his rickety fort when Lewis Kirke
sailed up the St. Lawrence and summoned him to surrender." Griffiths, 37, offers a glimpse of Québec at the time of its capture
in 1629 & says it contained about 72 settlers, including 3 families, compared
to about 30 men in Acadia with no European families. Fischer,
chap. 19, offers more details. Martin, F.-X., 1:55, says Broullé's
vessel was captured by the Kirkes & that Champlain "viewed the English
[that is, the Kirkes] less as enemies then as liberators, who came to
put an end to the horrors of famine."
Moir,
"Kirke, David," contends de Caën was nabbed before Lewis &
Thomas Kirke confronted Champlain at Québec, but Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
175-76, followed here, insists de Caën's re-supply vessel was captured
in the lower St. Lawrence after
Champlain surrendered Québec on Jul 20.
The Treaty of Suza, as it is generally called,
also spelled Suze, was signed on 24 Apr 1629 (New Style), ratified by Charles I on Jun 11 &
by Louis XIII on Jul 4, 16 days before the surrender of Québec.
See online Wikipedia, "Treaty of Suza." Fischer, 427-28, 584-85,
says Champlain, as well as the Kirkes, did not learn the details of the
peace treaty until they
reached Dover, England, in late Oct. Champlain refused to be repatriated to
France & hurried to London, instead, to demand the return of Canada,
which the English refused to do. See also Trudel, Beginnings of
New France, 177.
Harvey details the English/Scottish argument for keeping
Port-Royal, including references to Argall's conquest of 1613 & Mi'kmaq
sagamore Segipt's "homage" to King Charles I in 1629,
neither of which prevailed in the negotiations at either Susa or
Germain-en-Lay. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 177-78,
notes that, during negotiations between the French ambassador in England
& Charles I, urged on by Champlain in 1630, "the King of England was
favourably disposed to the return of Quebec and all that had been taken
with it ...," but the King's reply "made no mention whatsoever of
Acadia; while it was recognized that the French had been improperly
dispossessed of the place they had occupied, it was maintained that Port
Royal and Cape Breton had not at the time been occupied by the French,
and that the English were therefore under no obligation to give them
back. The King of England was reluctant to return them for two
other reasons: Acadia (or Nova Scotia since 1621), had been
formally granted to William Alexander, who had worked toward its
development; and then there was the dowry that Franch had not yet paid
out for the marriage of Princess Henrietta, sister of Louis XIII, to
Charles I." See also note 18a,
above. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 178-79, details
the large profits, as well as the strategic advantages, that accrued to
the Anglo-Scottish Company, as he calls it, in the 3 years the English
held Québec.
19a. See
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 406-07; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadia, 41; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 171-72.
War between France & England resulted from the
failed Anglo-French alliance of 1624, broken by France when Richelieu
secretly negotiated a truce with Spain; the failed marriage of Louis XIII's youngest sister Henrietta Maria to English King Charles I in
1625; & the royal attack against, & the resulting siege
of, the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle from Sep 1627-Oct
1628, which followed the English attempt to succor the city in Jun 1627.
See Fischer; Griffiths; online Wikipedia, "Siege of La Rochelle."
19b. Quotations from Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 48-49; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:593; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
46-47; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 485. See also Fischer, 438-39, 484,
607, 711n42; Griffiths, 44; George MacBeath, "Marot, Bernard," in DCB,
1:490, &
online;
MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," 1:593; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:597; MacDonald, 37-41, 45, 55, 61-62,
78-83, 207; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 164; White, DGFA-1,
1432; online Wikipedia, "Machias, Maine"; notes
15b, above,
21a, 22,
& 24, below.
MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," says after the
fight with Claude, the Company of New France made Charles an associate
of the Company, not governor, & not until 8 Feb 1631 did Louis XIII
sign a royal commission naming Charles "governor and lieutenant-general
of the king." MacBeath says this commission was brought to Charles aboard the
vessel that provided the materials for the construction of the fort at
Rivière St.-Jean & was delivered either by Laurent Ferchaud or Charles's
associate, Krainguille. MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude,"
implies that Charles was made governor earlier, in 1630, soon after the
fight with his father. Griffiths, 44, reflecting MacBeath's
biography of Charles, adds that Company associate Bernard
Marot's report was largely responsible for Charles's promotion.
MacDonald, 39-40, citing original documents in archives at La
Rochelle & Boston, says during the summer of 1631 Company official
Laurent Ferchaud brought to Cap-Sable both the notice of Charles's being
named by the King an associate of the Company & a commission as the
King's lieutenant-general in Acadia, dated 8 Feb 1631, & that Charles
signed the commission on 16 Jul 1631, with François de Magny as witness. Fischer, 438,
calls Jean Tuffet "a merchant-adventurer
of Bordeaux and a director" of Richelieu's Company. See also
MacDonald, 37. Marot was well acquainted with the La Tours: he had come to Acadia with
Poutrincourt, Biencourt, & the La Tours in 1610. In
early 1632, however, he ran afoul of Charles La Tour when the
latter caught him trading illegally with the Indians. In the
encounter, La Tour wounded Marot, arrested him, &, after trial in
La Rochelle, Marot was sent to prison. La Tour then
arranged for his release, but Marot did not forget the slight:
back in Acadia, he became an associate of Charles's enemy, the Sieur d'Aulnay.
See MacDonald, 45; George MacBeath, "Marot"; note
30, below. Fischer, 607, says The Company of Bordeaux, a
subsidiary of Richelieu's Company, was formed in 1630 "by a consortium
of six of the Hundred Associates. It supported the trading forts
of the La Tours at Cape Sable and at the mouth of the Saint John
River."
MacDonald, 37, implies the Company sent to Charles the men &
supplies necessary to build a new fort with Marot's expedition in 1630,
but MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," says the wherewithal for
a new fort, as well as Charles's royal commission as "governor and
lieutenant-general," arrived with either Laurent Ferchaud or Charles's
associate, Krainguille, in 1631.
Trudel, 164, says the surrender by the marquise de Guercheville of
her Acadian rights to Richelieu's Company "no doubt is why the La
Tours were able to obtain a concession of five leagues by ten on the
St. John River." See also note 19a, above. Command of the new Rivière St.-Jean fort, originally named Fort
Ste.-Marie, went to Jean-Daniel Chaline, another of Charles's trusted
lieutenants. See Griffiths, 49; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles"; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude". MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," calls Fort Ste.-Marie "this first permanent establishment on the
Saint John." Robert Gravé du Pont's fortified post stood on
the St.-Jean
at Île Emenenic, today's Catons Island, during the
1610s but was not "permanent"; he abandoned the post in 1619.
See MacDonald, 38-39; note
12e, above. For a discussion of
the name & location of La Tour's St.-Jean fort, see note 22,
below. MacDonald, 39, offers this brief description of the St.-Jean
post, which was sited at present-day Portland Point within the city of
St. John, NB: "... two, perhaps three wooden buildings, comprising
living quarters and store-houses with cellars, all enclosed within a
stockade from which V-shaped bastions projected at the waterfront
corners." MacDonald, 78, offers a "Map of the St. John
Rivermouth" that includes the location of "Fort La Tour."
MacDonald, 79-83, offers a detailed description of the St.-Jean
fort, c1640, based on archaeological excavations in the mid-1950s &
early 1960s.
MacDonald, 41, points out that in the same month Charles La Tour
received his commission as governor--July 1631--authorities in London,
anticipating another peace agreement, ordered Sir William Alexander "to
remove his settlers from Charlesfort-Port Royal, to demolish the
buildings, and leave the area 'altogidder waiste and unpeopled' as it had
been when they first arrived." But the Scots, under the irascible
Forrester, "took no action, hoping that the terms of a peace treaty now
under discussion would permit them to stay."
MacDonald, 45-47, details the Scottish attack on Fort Ste.-Marie on
18 Sep 1632 & the cruel treatment of Chaline & his Frenchmen.
While in France in 1632-33, Charles left his stepbrother Jacques Goudart, sieur de
Rainville, in command at Cap-Sable, so it would have been Goudart who
succored Chaline & the other Frenchmen driven from the mouth of the
St.-Jean. See MacDonald, 47, 55, 207n8, who calls the
stepbrother Jacques Godard. White shows that
Jacques was a son of François de Goudart de Saint-Étienne & Claude La
Tour's second wife Marie Guesdon, widow of de Goudart.
19c. Quotations from MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:597; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
67. See also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 84; Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in
DCB, 1:53; MacDonald, 38, 40, 47, 55, 70-71; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:58; Moir, "Kirke, David," in
DCB, 1:405;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 179.
Trudel says Louis XIII's threat
in early 1632 to send a fleet under Isaac de Razilly to the St. Lawrence
hurried along the English in agreeing to the new treaty.
During Claude's last days at Cap-Sable, he would have enjoyed the
company of not 1 but 3 sons--Charles of course, when he was there, &
stepsons Jacques & François de Goudart from Claude's second wife Marie
Guesdon's first husband. The de Goudart brothers were among the most trusted
lieutenants of Charles La Tour during the time they spent in the colony. See MacDonald, 47, 55; note 19b,
above.
19d. Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 18. See also
Arsenault, History, 19; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 429;
Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet, 14, 30n11; Griffiths, From Migrant
to Acadian, 37-38; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:592-93; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:596; MacDonald, 17, 19, 22-23, 202n14; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 133, 164, 169; Trudel, "Caën,
Guillaume de," in DCB, 1:160; White, DGFA-1
English, 299-300.
MacDonald, 18-19, asserts that "from 1607 to 1620 there is no
evidence placing Claude La Tour in Acadia, but a good deal
establishing his presence in Paris and Champagne." See also
p. 21, where she further asserts: "Given his interest in the
colony, Claude may well have visited Acadia during the years his son
wandered in search of furs, but so far there is no proof." MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude," 1:596,
disagrees: "With the destruction of Port-Royal by Samuel Argall in
1613, he [Claude] appears to have turned his attention to fur-trading
activities in the Penobscot area and there in the course of time built
Fort Pentagouet, a combined fortified trading post and fishing station.
This post, termed the first permanent settlement in New England, proved
to be a highly profitable outlet for the fur trade. About 1626,
Claude de La Tour was driven from Fort Pentagouet by the Plymouth
colony. He then returned to France to sell some of his lands in
Champagne on behalf of his son Charles...." This places Claude in
greater Acadia at various times during the 1610s & 1620s. For
other sources placing Claude in La Cadie during the period, see Faulkner
& Faulkner, citing Nicolas
Denys; White, 299; note 15a, above.
White, 299, details
Claude La Tour's activities from 25 Feb 1610, when he left Dieppe for
Port-Royal, to May 1630, when he confronted son Charles at Cap-Sable. White, 300, also details Charles's activities from 25 Feb 1610 to his being
named as governor in Feb 1631.
For Biencourt's seizure of the vessel Ange-Saint-Michel
out of Rouen in 1616 presumably in Acadian waters, see Griffiths, 38.
Neither Fischer nor Trudel mention the incident.
19e. Quotations from
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 437;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 176-77;
MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:592. See also
Baudry, "Daniel," in DCB, 1:247-48; Chiasson, Island of Seven Cities,
15, 100-06, 136;
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 83-85, 96, 267;
Feguson, "Ferrar" in DCB, 1:305; Ferguson, "Stewart,"
in DCB, 1:613; Fischer, 138, 431, 438, 440, 585, 608; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
42, 44; Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB,
1:53; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
41; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:54, 56;
Monet, "Noyrot," in DCB, 1:521; Trudel, 151-52, 171, 178; note
21d, below.
Monet says Jesuit Father Philibert
Noyrot, who had escaped the capture of Roquemont's fleet the summer
before & returned to France, chartered another Jesuit vessel, which was
part of Daniel's flotilla. "But a violent gale near Cape Breton
Island sent to the bottom the ship that he himself had chartered, and
Father Noyrot was drowned, along with 14 members of the crew."
Another fatality of the shipwreck was Jesuit Brother Louis Malot.
A Basque vessel, probably fishermen, rescued the survivors. See
also note 19j, below. Judge Martin,
first published in 1827, conflates the fate of the Jesuit vessel with
Roquemont in 1628 & the one with Daniel in 1629.
Chiasson, 101, says Daniel built Fort
Ste.-Anne "across from the
sandbar on the shore [of Baie Ste.-Anne] where Englishtown currently
stands." On 136, he adds that the sandbar was used by cod
fishermen to dry their catches. The sandbar location was slightly
inland, not directly on the coast. See the map on Chiasson, 15.
Chiasson says also that Daniel used the material from Ochiltree's fort
to build Ste.-Anne. One would suspect that he used Scots labor as
well. See also Book Two.
Baudry says after Daniel destroyed Ochilltree's settlement and took the Lord & 17
prisoners to France via England, he returned to Fort Ste.-Anne & used it as his base
for trading operations, ranging from Miscou to Tadoussac, for the next 4
years. In the 1630s, Daniel was an associate of Charles La Tour
in the Acadian fur trade. Clark, A. H., 96n51, in a discussion
of Acadian geography, says "it is not known whether [today's Baleine, Cape Breton Island, NS] was the same site [as Ochilltree's
settlement] in the early seventeenth century." Griffiths, 44,
says Daniel's settlement suffered from scurvy & implies that it was
short-lived. Trudel, 151-52,
says, "... in 1629-30, another dozen died in Cape Breton" from scurvy.
See also Trudel, 178. Fischer, 431, points out that Charles Daniel was
brother of Richelieu Company associate André Daniel, a prominent
physician in Paris, & also kin to Jesuit Fr. Antoine
Daniel, who was martyred in New France. For the subsidiaries of
Richelieu's Company, formed in 1631 & 1632, in which Daniel was a
principal, see Fischer, 438, 608. Fischer, 438, says Champlain helped Daniel strengthen his fort at Ste.-Anne in 1632 before
returning to Québec. According to Fischer, Champlain saw the new
fort on Cape Breton as a fall-back position in case the English refused
to surrender Québec, but the English occupiers had returned Québec to the French
on 13 Jul
1632. See Fischer, 440.
Trudel, 177, notes that forts Ste.-Anne & Loméron were the last
remaining French posts in North America by the end of 1629 & describes
them as "insignificant ones at that." Martin, F.-X.,
1:56, says, from the perspective of 1827:
"Thus, one hundred and twenty years after the French first visited the
northern continent of America, notwithstanding a great waste of men and
money, they were without one foot of territory on it." Not quite,
but close. Contrast this with England's presence in North America
in 1630. See note
19p,
below.
19f. Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 168,
170-72; Monet, "Noyrot," in DCB,
1:521; Masseaut et al., eds., Creolization in the French
Americas, 69. See also
Allain, "Not Worth a Straw," 9-10; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 404-05,
409, 436-37, 480, 583, 604, 607-08, 718; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 37-40; Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of
Stirling," in DCB, 1:52-53; George MacBeath, "Razilly (Rasilly), Isaac de,"
in DCB, 1:567, &
online; Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:52-53; Masseaut et al., eds., Creolization in the French
Americas, 23; Melanson, Cormier Genealogy, 10-11;
Parkman, France & England,
1:313, 1072-73; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 117, 137-38, 169,
171, chap. 13; Trudel, ""Caën, Guillaume de," in DCB,
1:160; online Wikipedia, "Cardinal Richelieu;" notes
15b, above,
21d & 39a, below.
The
marquise de Guercheville died in 1632, age about 62, not long after Richelieu's
Company subsumed her long-idle seigneurie in Acadia. See
note 12b, above.
Richelieu's Company was chartered on 29 Apr
1627 but had many subsidiaries formed from 1630-35, including the 1 for
La Tour. See Fischer, 436-37, 607-08.
Harvey says one of the purposes of Richelieu's Company was "to challenge Sir
William's claims to Nova Scotia." Griffiths, 39-40; & Parkman, 1:313, offer
added details of the founding of Richelieu's Company of New France,
which Professor Griffiths prefers to call the Compagnie des Cent-Associés. Allain offers an even more detailed history of Richelieu's Company & its
subsidiaries; she says Richelieu created the Company of Morbihan, or Compagnie des Cent-Associés,
in 1626, but that opposition from ports outside of Morbihan doomed the effort. Richelieu then created the Nacelle de
Saint-Pierre Fleurdlisée Company in 1627. The Compagnie de La
Nouvelle-France, "specifically to colonize," under Isaac de Razilly, followed in
1628. Allain notes that Razilly was chosen to lead the Company not because of his
kinship with the cardinal but because he "had ample experience
already with Champlain." Allain, 9-10, then provides deep
background to French use of commercial monopolies in their colonies.
Griffiths, 39, says that the Company of the Hundred Associates & the
Company of New France were one & the same, that, although its official
name was the Company of New France, it was more commonly known as the
Company of the Hundred Associates. Griffiths, 39, adds that the Company
was granted a monopoly for all of North America, "from the St. Lawrence
to Florida," regardless of English & Dutch claims & "the residual rights
stemming from de Monts's efforts in Acadia." Fischer, 404-05,
409, 480, 718n8, says Richelieu's Company was supposed to begin with a capital outlay of
300,000 livres, each of the 100 associates to contribute
3,000 livres, but that this capitalization was stymied by war, that the Company's monopoly stretched from Florida
to the Arctic Circle, that Richelieu was Associate #1, Razilly was
Associate #43, Champlain was
Associate #52, & other associates included Charles Daniel & Charles La Tour,
but, of these, only Richelieu was on the board of 12 who directed the
Company. Griffiths, 39-40, points out the importance of Louis XIII granting a special
privilege to French nobles interested in Richelieu's Company. Traditionally, French noblemen were prohibited by custom & law from
engaging in commerce, but those who participated in the Company's
activities would be exempted from this prohibition. Griffiths, 40, also explains the King's concessions to guild members who served in
New France & to Frenchmen born there.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 171, adds that the Hundred
Associates were pledged "to settle four thousand colonists in New
France, all French and Catholic, over the first fifteen years (ending
December 1643), to ensure their subsistence during the first three years
and, when the time came to be freed of that charge, to grant them
cleared land and the wheat they would need for the first sowing.
During the same fifteen year period, the Company would house and
maintain three ecclesiastics at each Habitation (that is to day, each
centre of settlement), or else provide them with cleared land; in
addition to the settlement and administration of the country, then, the
Company would assume the cost of fifteen years' spiritual ministry."
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 171, lists
the following associates among the 107 in a list dated 17 May 1629:
Richelieu himself; Isaac de Razilly; Champlain; Louis Houël de Petit-Pré,
"who had come to the assistance of the Récollets in the colony"; Charles
Daniel, "an associate of the de Caëns"; & merchants Simon Le Maistre &
Jean Rozée.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, chap. 13, entitled
"Tribulations of the Hundred Associates," is especially good at
detailing
Richelieu's grand design for New France.
For more on "françisation," see Book Seven.
19g. Quotation from Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 583. See also Fischer, 389-92; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:53; Melanson, Cormier Genealogy, 10-11; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 129.
For a revealing sketch of Richelieu's early
life, his rise to power--born in Paris in Sep 1585, he became the Bishop
of Luçon at age 21, a cardinal in 1622, a member of the Royal Council in
Apr 1624, & chief minister later that year--as well as his Machiavellian
political philosophy, see Fischer, 389-92. Trudel notes that Richelieu had been
reappointed to the King's Council in April 1624, & this became the
seat of his growing power. In 1626, Louis XIII appointed him
"Grand Master and Superintendent General of Navigation and Commerce of
France," which gave him "absolute control over all voyages afar."
One of his reforms was to abolish "the post of Admiral of France," which
had become little more than a political sinecure. See online
Wikipedia, "Admiral of France."
19h. See Erskine, Nova Scotia,
10-11; Harvey, "Alexander,
William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:53; Harvey, "Alexander, Sir
William, the younger," in DCB, 1:54; D. C. Harvey, "Segipt (sometimes called Sakumow Sagma)," in DCB, 1:605,
&
online;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 22-23, 33-35; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:596-97; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
36; Parkman, France & England,
1:1072; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 173; note
19j, above.
The name of Claude La Tour's third wife, the
English-lady-in-waiting, has been lost to history. As previously
stated, Queen
Henriette-Marie of England and Scotland was a sister of Louis XIII of
France, so the lady-in-waiting also may have been French. There is
no record that this third wife gave Claude any more children. See Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 41; White, DGFA-1,
1432. MacBeath, 1:597, says, "One historian recounts that this lady [Claude's third wife] was a
relative of Sir William Alexander the elder, who had been granted Acadia
by King James. Whether this fact had any influence on Claude's
choice of a wife is not known, but it did prove very helpful." One
suspects that Claude, if he was not already a Huguenot, would have had
to convert to Anglicanism to marry his lady-in-waiting.
MacDonald says Claude made formal
agreement with the Alexanders on 30 Apr 1630 for 2 baronies "jointly
extending from Cloven Cape to Mirlequesche (Yarmouth to Lunenburg) and
several leagues inland...." See also Harvey's bios. of the
Alexanders in DCB.
19i.
Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 172; John S. Moir, "Kirke (in French sources called Kertk, Quer[que], or Guer),
Sir David," in DCB, 1:405, &
online.
See also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 84n24; Eccles, Canadian Frontier,
33-34; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 409-10, 420-21, 424;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 40-41; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
33; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:53-55; Moir, "Kirke, David," 1:404; John S. Moir,
"Kirke, Sir Louis," in DCB, 1:407, &
online;
John S. Moir, "Kirke, Thomas," in DCB, 1:407-08, &
online; Parkman, France &
England, 1:316-17.
Eccles details the activities of the Kirkes in
Canada, says their names were David and Jarvis, & that they were
brothers. Judge Martin, first published in 1827, calls the family Kertz. Parkman says Gervase, not Jarvis, Kirke led the family group that included his
sons
David, Lewis, & Thomas. A. H. Clark agrees with
Parkman, who offers the most detailed narrative of the plight of Québec
at the hands of the Kirkes. See 1:316ff. Moir, "Kirke, David,"
1:404-05, says there were 5 Kirke brothers, David, Lewis, Thomas,
John, & James (sometimes called Jarvis), that they were from Dieppe,
sons of English trader Gervase (Jarvis) Kirke of Derbyshire & Elizabeth
Gowding or Goudon "who may have been the daughter of an English merchant
settled in Dieppe," & that the brothers
operated under letters of marque issued by King Charles I.
Griffiths, 40-41; & Trudel,
follow Moir, but Trudel mentions only patriarch Gervase & sons David,
Lewis (he spells the name Louis), & Thomas. Fischer, 409,
says Gervase or Jarvis Kirke, the family patriarch, "a merchant who was born
in Derbyshire, traded in London, and lived in Dieppe," married Elizabeth Gowding or Goudon, daughter of a merchant of Dieppe, that
their 5 sons were named David, Louis, Thomas, John, & James, also
called Jarvis, "all born and raised in Dieppe," that David was known
to Champlain as
"the General" but was more a businessman than a mariner, that brother Thomas was
called the "Vice-admiral" & brother Louis the "Captain."
See also Fischer, 421, 424. MacDonald mentions only 3 Kirkes, David, Lewis, & Thomas.
19j.
Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 172-73; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 409. See also Fischer, 410-16;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 40;
Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:53;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:53-54; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," 1:597; Moir,
"Kirke, David," in DCB, 1:405; Moir, "Kirke, Lewis," in
DCB, 1:407; Moir, "Kirke, Thomas," in DCB, 1:407;
Honorius Provost, "Giffard de Moncel, Robert," in DCB, 1:330, &
online; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
174; Marcel Trudel, "Roquemont
de Brison, Claude," in DCB, 1:579, &
online; note
19h, above.
Fischer, 409-10, says Roquemont's fleet
numbered 6 vessels, an unnamed vessel that went ahead to re-supply
Québec (Desdames), & 4 large merchants vessels named the Estourneau,
Magdaleine, & Suzanne, "and another of unknown name,"
as well as an
unnamed barque chartered by the Jesuits & Récollets that sailed
with Roquemont, & that the fleet carried 400 settlers, including
families. Trudel, "Roquemont de Brison," also names 3 of the
ships--Estourneau,
Magdéleine, & Suzanne--& says the unnamed fourth
ship, destined for Acadia, was commanded by Claude La Tour.
MacBeath does not place
Claude in command of a supply ship going to Acadia but names Jesuit Fr. Philibert Noyrot as the apparent
commander, which makes little sense in light of the fact the Jesuit's
barque was destined for Québec, where the Jesuits worked, not
Acadia, where they did not, & that their vessel escaped capture. If Claude was captured by the Kirkes along with the
admiral & most of the other Frenchmen, he must have been aboard one of
Roquemont's larger vessels. Trudel, "Roquemont de Brison," says the fleet left Dieppe on 28
Apr 1628 with "a large number of settlers." See also
Griffiths; Moir, "Kirke, David."
Fischer, 410, says Roquemont's fleet
carried "the largest group of French settlers that had been sent to
America." Not so. In May 1555, Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral
of France, sent 600 settlers under French Vice-admiral Nicolas Durand de
Villagnon to South America. See note
03a, above. Roquemont's 400, then,
was the largest group of French settlers sent to North America.
19k.
Quotations from Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in
DCB, 1:53; Clark, Acadia, 83n24; D. C. Harvey, "Alexander,
Sir William, the younger," in DCB, 1:54, &
online; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 43. See
also Arsenault,
History, 19; Clark, A. H., 84, 91, 100; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
9-11; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 407, 413, 583-85;
Grenier, J., Far
Reaches of Empire, 224;
Griffiths, 44; Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:52;
Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22;
MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude," 1:597;
MacDonald, Fortune &
La Tour, 35; <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles>; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 174-75; notes
18a, above, & 21b, below.
For the capture of Fort Loméron in 1628, see
Fr. D'Entremont's article in <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles/4.htm>.
Arsenault says "Sir Alexander" waited for the Kirke brothers
to take Québec in 1629 before sending Scottish settlers to Acadia.
This marked the first time this area was called Nova Scotia."
First, "Sir Alexander" attempted to settle Nova Scotia in 1628 & again
in 1629, before the fall of Québec on 20 Jul 1729; second,
Alexander called the area Nova Scotia as early as 1621, when King James
I granted him French Acadia. See note
18a, above.
A. H. Clark, 83-84n24, offers a detailed
discussion of the year the Scots first settled in Nova Scotia, cites
Harvey, "Sir William Alexander," 1-2, noting that Harvey "settles on
1628 for an Alexander settlement at Gaspé with '70 men and tua weemen,'
(p. 20) and 1629 for the establishment of Port Royal, after moving the
1628 group." Harvey, "Alexander, Sir William, the younger,"
of course agrees. Griffiths, 44, says the
expedition of 1628 "never reached Nova Scotia, probably wintering in
Newfoundland, and its members suffered greatly from scurvy."
The younger Alexander sailed from Scotland in March 1628, about the time
the Kirkes sailed from England. Roquemont's fleet sailed from
Dieppe in Apr & reached the Baie de Gaspé via Anticosti Island probably
in Jun. The fight between Roquemont & the Kirkes occurred below
Tadoussac during the third week of Jul. It makes little sense that
young Alexander would have sited his settlement at Gaspé that summer
with a French flotilla on top of him! Aware of Roquemont's
presence in the region, his settlers would have been safer at St. John's
on the Atlantic of Newfoundland than at Gaspé on the lower St. Lawrence, so Griffiths is
followed here. See also notes 19i & 19j, above. In the spring of 1629, when food was
running out at Québec, Champlain gave serious thought to sending some of
the colonists to Gaspé, "where, with furs, they might buy their passage
to France on fishing vessels." See Trudel, 174.
Champlain would not have entertained such a drastic measure if dozens of
Scots were settled at Gaspé. Moreover, when Eustache Boullé sailed
from Québec to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the spring of 1629 to
rendezvous with the expected re-supply, he met the French vessel at
Gaspé & reported no Scottish settlement there. See note
19, above.
Most sources--e.g., Clark, A. H., 91--say the Scots fort at
Port-Royal was built adjacent to the old French fort. Erskine, 10, entitled "Mitchell's Map of Annapolis River, 1733," sites the "Small
remains of the Scots fort" north of Goat Island, where de Monts's/Poutrincourt's habitation had been. Erskine, 11,
adds that "The
Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada have preferred a place on
the slope to the north [above the old French habitation] for their
monument." In 1975, then, the year Erskine was published, "official"
Canadian history placed the Scot's fort of 1629-32 on the north side of
the basin near the old French habitation. But Erskine adds: "There seems to have been some
building on the spot, though scarcely enough to house seventy men and
two women. Beside it is a remnant of Acadian hedge of native
hawthorn. We should need additional evidence before feeling
certain that this was the true site." Arsenault, first
published in 1966, says the Scots settled at "a place which is now
called Grandville [Granville Ferry?]," that "Charlesfort" lay "five miles from Annapolis."
Trudel, 175, published in 1973, places Fort Charles "very close to
the site of the earlier French settlement of 1605-13." MacDonald,
35,
published in 1983, places "Charlesfort" "about one hundred yards inland from, and overlooking, the
ruins of the original Port Royal habitation...." Griffiths,
43,
published in 2005 &
followed here, places the Scots fort in an entirely different location.
She says William Alexander the Younger, who chose
the site, built a fort "close to what would be the site of the
later Fort Anne, on the banks of what would be named the Allaine
(or Lequille) River," that is, at present-day Annapolis Royal, across
the basin & upriver from the old French habitation. Griffiths,
44, calls the Scots fort Ste.-Anne. Arsenault says the fort was "also known as Scotch Fort...." Grenier, J.,
224n6, calls the Scots settlement Charles Fort & says
it was built in 1629 "around nine miles upstream from the entrance of
the Annapolis River (rivière Dauphin to the French) at the Bay of
Fundy." This sounds like the site of the old French habitation.
Clark, A. H., 84n24, hints there may
have been women, that is, families, in the Scots settlement at
Port-Royal. On p.
89, he says 3 women "may have accompanied the Alexander settlers of
1628 or 1629." Clark, A. H., 100, speculates that "Perhaps as many as
seventy [settlers] wintered in one year, but the numbers are believed to
have fluctuated widely and, generally, to have dwindled progressively
during the four years [1628-32]." Arsenault says the
Scots at Port-Royal numbered "About 100...," but that "Disease had
reduced their number to roughly 70 by 1632...." Erskine, 11, says there
were 70 men & 2 women in the settlement. MacDonald, 35, says
the Scots settlement "numbered about seventy, including men, women and
children, among them the family of a nobleman who had fled Scotland to
escape imprisonment by his creditors," but she does not name the
nobleman. Hodson
says Alexander the Younger brought 70 fellow Scotsmen to Port-Royal
& that the Mi'kmaq
gave the Scots "a good reception." Erskine, 9, 11,
says some of the Scotsmen took French wives, implying that they
were daughters of French "peasant families" who had remained in the area
when Poutrincourt abandoned Port-Royal in 1614. See note
15a, above. For the true number
of settlers left at Charles Fort in 1632, when Razilly shut it down, see
note 21a, below.
MacBeath suggests Claude La Tour, after his renunciation of France, likely accompanied Sir William Alexander the
Younger to Acadia in the spring of 1629 & showed the Scotsmen the
country before gathering together a cargo of furs in the Bay of Fundy
area & returning to England. Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl
of Stirling," says he did. La Tour
received the title of Baronet of Nova Scotia the following Nov, "in
recognition of his valuable assistance in exploring the country," so
he likely had gone there earlier in the year. MacDonald, 35,
agrees.
Griffiths, 43, says "The source of this news"--that
is, the Scots' hard winter at Port-Royal in
1629-30, as recorded by Champlain--"was Claude de La Tour...."
She then reviews Claude's life from 1627-30, but at no time during that
period would he have had the opportunity to communicate with
Champlain directly about the fate of the Scots that winter. For Champlain's whereabouts
after the capture of Québec, see Fischer, 583-85.
Champlain was in England briefly from late Oct-late Nov 1629 &
could have spoken to Claude then, but this was before the Scots
had spent their first winter in Acadia. Claude had been in England
from late summer of 1628 until the spring of 1629, when he went to
Port-Royal, returned to England by Nov, when he could have encountered
Champlain in London, & returned to Port-Royal in May 1630, after his
fight with son Charles at Cap-Sable. Only then could Claude have
learned details about the Scots' first winter at Port-Royal. There
is no evidence, however, that Claude returned to England after the late
spring of 1630, when he renounced his allegiance to England, or even
returned to France, where he could have spoken with the geographer.
Champlain published his Le Voyages de la Nouvelle France Occidentale
in the spring of 1632, so he must have received his information about
the Scots at Port-Royal from Claude indirectly. See note
19h, above.
That the Scots did not attack Charles La
Tour's fort at Cap-Sable soon after they set up at Port-Royal in the
summer of 1629 or during the rest of their time there gives an
idea of the tentative nature of their settlement. For the Scottish
attack on Charles La Tour's new fort at the mouth of Rivière
St.-Jean in Sep 1632, see note 19b,
below.
Grenier, J., 224n2, in the context of Scots
occupation of Port-Royal in the 1620s, makes the interesting observation
that "The Acadians had abandoned Port Royal and congregated on
Cape Sable under the leadership of Charles de Saint Etienne de la
Tour." Italics added. The more precise term would be
that the French had abandoned Port Royal and congregated at Cap-Sable
under La Tour.
There were no "Acadian" families in the colony at the time, nor
would there be until the late 1630s, & so there was no "Acadian" culture distinct from the
French in the 1620s. A distinct Acadian culture would not evolve
until the 1650s at the earliest, & perhaps not until the 1680s, when the
first
families entered their third generation. See notes
39a & 46,
below.
19l. See René Baudry, "Daniel, Charles," in DCB,
1:247-48, &
online;
Chiasson, Island of Seven
Cities, 99; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 83-84; C. Bruce Ferguson, "Ferrar (Farrar),
Constance, in DCB, 1:305, &
online;
C. Bruce Ferguson, "Stewart ('Stuart' in French documents), James, of
Killeith, fourth Lord Ochiltree (or Ochiltrie," in DCB, 1:613,
&
online;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 407-08; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
42; Harvey, "Alexander,
William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:53; Harvey, "Alexander, Sir
William, the younger," in DCB, 1:54;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
175; note
18a, above.
Clark, A. H., 83n22, says Cape Breton Island & today's Prince
Edward Island were taken from Alexander's fiefdom & given to another
Scotsman, Robert Gordon of Lochinvar. Chiasson says Alexander awarded the grant to Sir John Gordon of Lochinvar in the early
1620s, that Lochinbar proposed a settlement on Cape Breton Island, which
he renamed New Galloway, in 1625, but that Lochinvar died afterwards, &
his settlement scheme died with him. See also Book Two.
Clark, A. H., 83-84; & Griffiths;
as well as Ferguson, attribute the La Baleine settlement to James Stewart, Lord Ochiltree.
Baudry, "Daniel," 1:248; Griffiths; & Ferguson, "Ferrar"
& "Stewart," call Ochiltree's settlement Fort Rosemar.
Ferguson, "Ferrar," is clear that
Captain Ferrar brought his wife & family with him to Cape Breton.
Interestingly, Ferguson, "Ferrar" & "Stewart," says nothing of
Ochiltree's attack on the Basques at La Baleine nor of his shaking down
the local fishermen. See Fischer 407-08, for those incidents; also
Trudel, 175.
19m.
Quotations from MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:593; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:597. See also
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 12; Harvey, "Alexander,
William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:53; Harvey, "Alexander, Sir William, the younger," in DCB, 1:54;
MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," 1:595; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
13, 35-37; <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles>; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 174; White, DGFA-1,
1433.
MacDonald, 35-36, downplays the battle
between father & son.
Charles, at age 33, "married" an Indian, probably a
Mi'kmaq, in c1626, 2 years before his
father's capture & 4 years before Claude accepted a baronetcy in his
son's name. Charles's wife's given name has not survived.
She gave him 3 daughters, all of whom survived childhood; the first,
Jeanne, married a fellow French aristocrat, Martin d'Aprendestiguy de
Martignon, at Pentagouët in c1655, but the younger ones became nuns.
See White, which does not provide a
given name for Charles's youngest daughter. MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," 1:595, says Charles's marriage to his first wife was
"blessed" in 1626. MacDonald, 37, says "One of
the Récollets earliest acts [upon their arrival in summer of 1630] was
to bless the union of La Tour and his Indian wife, and to baptise
their young children." Griffiths, p. 35, says Charles
was "In his late twenties or early thirties" when he married his Mi'kmaq
wife, that his married daughter's husband, d'Aprendestiguy, was a Basque fur trader, &
that one of his younger daughters, perhaps Antoinette, "is reputed to
have had such a magnificent voice that she was brought to sing before
members of Louis XIII's court." See also MacDonald, 13;
note 15a, above.
Erskine, writing in 1975, notes of the fight between father &
son: "As local historians point out, this scanty item of history
does not fit the present Port La Tour. That small site lies at the
edge of the water, and a ship would have bombarded the fort without
landing. The Villagedale fort was far back from the shore, out of
reach of the ship's guns, its sandy beach excellent for landing Indian
canoes and small boats. It could be attacked only by land."
So was Charles La Tour's Cap-Sable fort at Villagedale or Port
Latour, which lie on the opposite sides of the Cap-Sable peninsula?
Fr. D'Entremont, in his article at <museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles/4.htm>,
says the Kirkes captured Fort Loméron in 1628 & that the English held it
until 1632. In
<museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles/43.htm>,
Fr. D'Entremont says, "It so happened that Port La Tour was not visited
because the Kirks, in their conquest of Acadia, did not know of
La Tour's hideout." This implies that Charles built 2
forts in the Cap-Sable area by 1628, one up the coast at Chebogue, the
other near the cape at Port La Tour. See note 15a,
above.
19n.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 37; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 178. See also
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 438-39, 477; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne,
Claude," in DCB, 1:597; MacDonald, 38, 96;
<museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles>; Trudel, 181-82.
One wonders if Jean Tuffet was a kinsman of
Louis Tuffet, who commanded Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island in the
early 1640s. See note 24b, below;
Book Two.
Fr. D'Entremont, in
<museeacadien.ca/english/archives/articles/43.htm>,
says of the new fort: "Charles
de La Tour chose for its erection the south-western slope of
the Sand Hills. His choice could not have been better. Not
only is it the highest point of all the coast from Barrington all along
to Cape Negro, including Port La Tour, but also, from this vantage
stage, one has a most splendid view of the two entrances of the
Barrington Bay, on each side of Sable Island. It dominates the
entire Bay, being thus a most strategic location for a fort. An
author, Couillard-Despres, gives high praises to La Tour's
judgment for choosing this site. Started in early summer of 1630,
the construction was all done by December. It was to be the
largest structure ever erected at Cape Sable during the course of its
Acadian history. Nicolas Denys, who visited the fort in
the Summer of 1635, calls it 'a good fort' which stood La Tour
'in good stead.'" From this one can conclude that La Tour's
forts Loméron & St.-Louis were different structures at different sites.
See notes 15a & 19m, above.
MacDonald, 37, says 3 Récollets came with
Marot in mid-summer 1630, but Trudel, 178, places their arrival in Oct
1631, though, on 182, he says they returned to Acadia in 1630. MacDonald says soon after the friars reached Cap-Sable, a Récollet father blessed the marriage of
Charles La Tour & his Mi'kmaq wife & baptized his Métis
daughters. See note 15a, above.
Though the Récollets were welcomed back to Acadia, Richelieu, probably
on Champlain's recommendation, did not let them return to Canada, where
they had gone in 1615, the first priestly order there since the time or
Cartier. As a result, the Jesuits & another Franciscan order, the
Capuchins, ministered to Canada after 1632, the Récollets not returning
there until 1670. See Fischer, 477; Trudel, 181-82; note 15b, above.
19o.
Quotation from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 173-74.
19p. See
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:56-68; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 177; note
21b, below.
20. Quotations from Arsenault,
History, 20, the first quotation based on statements made by Charles de Menou, sieur d’Aulnay de Charnisay. See
also Arsenault, 18;
Clark, A. H., Acadia,
82-83, 87, 89; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 379, 394, 396,
479, 509-10, 606-07; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
37; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles,"
in DCB, 1:592; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude,"
in DCB, 1:596; MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour, 17; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:49;
Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 103; Ryder, "Biencourt de
Saint-Just," in DCB, 1:99-102; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 129-39, 155, 164, 297; Marcel Trudel,
"Caën, Émery de," in DCB, 1:159,
&
online;
Marcel Trudel, "Caën,
Guillaume de," in DCB, 1:159-61, &
online; White, DGFA-1 English,
300.
Arsenault, 18,
says Biencourt died in 1624 & was buried at La Prée Ronde (Round
Hill), upriver from Port-Royal.
Hodson agrees with that date.
Clark, A. H., 82-83; Griffiths; MacDonald; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 164; & White,
DGFA-1, 300, say Biencourt died in 1623. Griffith adds that Biencourt had appointed
La Tour as his successor. Ryder, 1:99-102, says Biencourt died in 1623 or 1624 but gives no place,
& notes, on 1:102: "A
letter from Charles de Saint-Étienne de La Tour to King Louis
XIII, dated 23 July 1627, says of Biencourt 'he has been dead four
years,' but a passage in Champlain's Voyages has led some
historians to give the year of his death as 1624. However, Charles
La Tour was with him at the time of his death."
Clark, A. H., 83, adds that after Biencourt's death
the headquarters of the Acadian venture were moved from Port-Royal to Cap-Sable, where Charles La Tour held sway
at Fort Loméron, whom he named after David Loméron, his agent in France. See
also Clark,
A. H., 87; Hodson; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," & "Saint-Étienne, Claude"; note 15, above.
White says that after Biencourt's death
Charles "became administrator of the colony" & adds that "Shortly
thereafter, he settled at Cape Sable."
Ryder, 1:102, says French historian Émile Lauvrière, published in 1922, "among others, repeats the
charge that Biencourt was poisoned by [Charles] La Tour, but a
descendant, the Marquis de Biencourt, in a letter written in 1847
declares, 'no document exists which corroborates this version.'
Couillard Després [a La Tour biographer] says Biencourt 'left his
goods to one of his most faithful friends, to his relative Chares de
La Tour." Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 297n1, says: "With the help of
a legal document of 1628, this refutes the pamphlet of 1644 that accused
La Tour of having appropriated some property of Biencourt's." These
were unfounded charges perpetrated against La Tour by the
partisans, both contemporary & historical, of the sieur d'Aulnay, La Tour's great rival in the fight for control
of French Acadia. See note 28,
below.
The de Caëns were father, son, & nephew who hailed from a family of
Rouen with both
Catholic & Huguenot members. See Judge Martin; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 130; Trudel, "Caën, Émery de," & "Caën, Guillaume de."
Pritchard says "The term, métis, was never employed in Acadia." He
goes on to say: "The degree to which peaceful relations between
Acadian settlers and Mi'kmaq people were consolidated by marriage and
similar unions is unclear." See also Clark, A. H., 89;
Fischer, 479, 509-10; note
139a, below.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 155, says: "About 1626,
the young La Tour fathered his first daughter (for he was to have
two others) by a Souriquois [Mik'maq] woman; this is the first métis
child mentioned in the history of French America. But there were
also Frenchmen who were just as captivated but more serious of mind, and
who from the earliest days sought wives among the Indians." The
"young La Tour" was age 33 in 1626, hardly a youngster. He
had come to La Cadie at age 14, left it soon afterward, returned when he
was age 18, and remained in the colony after it again was abandoned in
1614, when he was age 21. One suspects, then, that Charles's age
at the time of his first daughter's birth, his fathering 2 more
daughters by the same woman, & his claiming all 3 of them as his own,
would have made him a Frenchman of "more serious mind" who chose to take
an Indian as his wife. See also notes
15a & 19b, above.
21. Quotations from Arsenault,
History, 21; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 59; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
405. See also Clark,
A. H., Acadia, 90, 91n36; Fischer, 404, 427-28, 440-50, 465-67,
479-80, 482, 520-22, 529, 585, 603-04, 608, chap. 25; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 39-40, 48-49,
476n68; MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB, 1:567-68; MacDonald, 42; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:60;
Parkman, France & England, 1:320, 326ff; Provost, "Giffard de
Moncel," in DCB, 1:330; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 177, 179-81, 184; Trudel, "Caën,
Émery de," in DCB, 1:159; Trudel, "Caën, Guillaume de," in DCB,
1:161; Trudel, "Champlain,"
in DCB, 1:197; André Vachon, "Juchereau De Maur, Jean," in DCB, 1:401, &
online;
André Vachon, "Juchereau Des Chatelets, Noël," in DCB, 1:402, &
online; notes
06b,
10e, 19e, above; Book Four.
MacBeath, 1:567, says Razilly, since
age 18, was a knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, while
MacDonald, p. 59, calls him a commander of the Order of Malta.
They are essentially the same organization. The Order of St. John
of Jerusalem, or Knights Hospitaller, are older names for the Order of
Malta. See online Wikipedia, "Knights Hospitaller," "Sovereign
Military Order of Malta."
Griffiths, 40, says the King insisted only Catholics would be allowed to settle in New France,
hence Guillaume de Caën's inability to go there. See also note 19f,
above. This was in sharp contrast to the policy of Louis's father, Henri
IV, who had encouraged Protestants to settle in New France. Professor
Griffiths notes that the war between royalist/Catholic forces & the
Huguenots of La Rochelle, which lasted from 1625-28 & resulted in
Catholic victory, as well as Richelieu's efforts to centralize authority
in the monarchy at the expense of the nobles & Huguenots, contributed to
this change in policy, which Champlain, still a champion of Henri IV's
policies, roundly opposed. See Fischer, 404, 603, for
Champlain's accommodation to this troubling question of religious
toleration in New France. One suspects that Razilly, a fellow
humanist, may have shared this open-mindedness towards non-Catholics.
Clark, A. H., 91, points out that the Scots'
activities in Acadia & Canada during the late 1620s delayed the
Company's efforts in Acadia. On 90-91, he insists that none
of the 17th-century proprietary companies authorized by either
French or English monarchs met the settlement quotas written into their
charters. On 91, he is especially tough on Richelieu's efforts
to colonize Acadia: "Between 1632 and 1635 some 3,700,000 arpents
of land in Acadia were granted to the Company, but for all of their
interest in land as such it might as well have been 3,700 arpents, or
very little more."
MacBeath, 1:568, offers a detailed nuance of Razilly's activities on the eve of his going to
Acadia: "Early in 1632 Cardinal Richelieu invited Razilly to
accept the post of lieutenant-general of New France, but he declined,
requesting instead to serve as a ship's captain under Champlain 'because
he is more competent in colonial affairs.'" See also Fischer,
441. The cardinal, however, would
not be dissuaded. "On 27 March," MacBeath continues, "Razilly and
Richelieu signed an agreement by which Razilly was to take possession of
Port-Royal ... for the company and France under terms of the Treaty of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye and to make Acadia a French colony.
Necessary authority to undertake this action was given Razilly in a
royal commission dated 10 May. While the company also wished
Razilly to begin settling the country, the losses it had suffered in the
recent war with England had left it short of funds. The solution
arrived at was to accord a part of its trading privilege to companies on
condition that such groups participate financially. So it was that
Razilly and some of his friends formed a private trading association
that came to be known as the Razilly-Condonnier company. While the
Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France provided an equipped vessel and the sum
of 10,000 livres for the 1632 expedition to Acadia, it was
Razilly's private trading group which advanced the greater part of the
money required. On 19 May, the Company of New France named Razilly
lieutenant-general for the king in New France and granted him a tract of
land at Sainte-Croix measuring 12 leagues by 20 leagues."
For the French evacuation of Québec from
Jul-Sep 1629, see Fischer, 427-28; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 177. The Kirkes landed them at Dover, England, on Oct
27. Champlain, Boullé, & Émery de Caën remained for a time in
England to protest to authorities there the activities of the Kirkes
during "peacetime," while the others, including the elder Gravé & the
Jesuits & Récollets, moved on to France. For the priests, see note
15b, above.
English occupiers did not retrocede Québec to the
French until 13 Jul 1632, 2 weeks after a small expedition led by Émery
de Caën demanded that they give it up. See Fischer, 440; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 179-81.
Meanwhile, the directors of Richelieu's Company, ignoring the cardinal's wishes, sent Champlain back to Canada in the spring of 1633 as the Company's lieutenant-general
there, but not with the title of governor; he arrived at Québec, perhaps via Fort Ste.-Anne on Cape Breton Island,
on 22 May 1633 with 3 ships & 150 colonists. See Fischer, 445-49, 520-21,
585. Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 184, says "two
hundred" were sent in 1633 but that a year later the Jesuit Fr. Paul Le
Jeune referred to only 1 family at Québec. Louis Hébert
had been dead for over a decade (since 1627) when Champlain returned to
Québec, but Hébert's family,
including their in-laws, the Couillards, had
remained at Québec during the English occupation. By 1632,
however, their suffering at the hands of the English, as well as the French
renegades who infested the colony, compelled them to seek an opportunity
to return to France. The Héberts remained at Québec after
1632 only because of the return of French authority that year. See
Fischer, 465-66; Parkman; Trudel, "Champlain";
note
10e, above; Book Four. Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
184, adds: "Settlement did not begin in earnest until 1634, when
the arrival of [Robert] Giffard, the Juchereau brothers [Jean de Maur &
Noël des Chatlets], and other recruits who were destined to make their
marks on the future of New France." See also Provost; Vachon, "Juchereau De Maur";
Vachon, "Juchereau Des Chatelets." Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 181, describes the
pathetic state of Québec, & Canada, due to English neglect, when the
French got it back. Champlain died at Québec on Christmas Day,
1635, in his late 60s, from the effects of a severe stroke he had
suffered in mid-Oct. See Fischer, chap. 25; Trudel, "Champlain"; Book Four.
21a.
Quotations from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 482-84; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
47. See
also
Arsenault, History, 37; Baudry,
"Menou," in DCB, 1:503; Clark, A.
H., Acadia, 84, 91, 94-95; Erskine,
Nova Scotia, 9, 11-12; Fischer, 479, 485; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
48-51, 62;
Harvey, "Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling," in DCB, 1:53-54;
Harvey, "Alexander, Sir William, the younger," in DCB, 1:54;
Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22; MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB,
1:568; MacDonald, 41, 46, 60; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:60;
Parkman, France &
England,
1:1074; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 180, 182; White,
DGFA-1, 1145, 1171; White, DGFA-1 English, 247, 251.
White,
DGFA-1, 1171, & White, DGFA-1 English, 251, say Razilly
"came to Acadia" on 4 Jul 1632. Parkman says he & his expedition reached
Port-Royal in Aug. MacBeath says Razilly's expedition left Auray on Jul
23, "were joined by a ship from
La Rochelle," & reached Acadia on Sep 8. Clark, A.
H., 91,
says Razilly left France on Jul 5 in his own ship, "shepherding two transports," & arrived at La Hève on Sep
8.
Griffiths, 49, & Fischer, 483, agree with Clarks's dates, used
here. Griffiths also hints that Razilly may have made landfall at
Cap-Sable before sailing on to La Hève. See also Erskine, 12.
Why did Razilly's expedition sail from Auray,
which is in southern Brittany, west of Nantes, nowhere near La Rochelle
& quite a distance from Bordeaux? Was this the
headquarters of his personal company, interest in which Isaac shared
with other investors, including brother Claude de Launay-Rasilly? See Griffiths, 48.
Griffiths, 62, gives the full name of
Razilly's company. Fischer, 479, citing Marcel Trudel's
multi-volume history of New France, calls it simply Compagnie de
Razilly, & adds, on 482, that Razilly's Company "raised a capital
of 150,000 livres for Acadia," & that Richelieu contributed
10,000 livres. Baudry says the Razilly-Condonnier Company was not
organized until 1634.
Clark, A. H., 91 calls Razilly's ship L'Esperance à Dieu. Fischer,
482, calls the vessel L'Espérance-en-Dieu, says it was given
to Razilly by Richelieu, & was captained by Razilly's
lieutenant, Charles de Menou, sieur d'Aulnay. Fischer, citing
Trudel's history of New France, says that 1 of the other vessels was captained
by Razilly's brother, Claude de Launay-Rasilly.
No source has revealed the names of the French
families that came to La Hève in 1632, not even White, DGFA-1,
the most comprehensive, solidly researched genealogy of the Acadian
people, which begins in 1636, not 1632. Fischer, 483, says
only: "The settlers of Quebec," who went there with Champlain in
1633, "came from French provinces north of the Loire, especially from
Normandy. They sailed in three ships from the Norman port of
Dieppe, with others following from Honfleur and Le Havre.
Razilly's colonists for Acadia came from provinces south of the Loire in
the west-center of France. They sailed from the ports of Auray and
La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay."
Griffiths, 49-50, discusses Razilly's
choice of La Hève as his headquarters in Acadia. Razilly named the settlement & its
fortifications at La Hève Fort Ste.-Marie-de-Grace, not to be confused
with La Tour's Fort Ste.-Marie at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean. Griffiths,
50, says "a few traces of the buildings [at Fort
Ste.-Marie-de-Grace] can still be seen today." La Hève is now La Have, near present-day Lunenburg, NS. MacBeath adds: "On the site of the present
village of Riverport [a few miles southwest of La Have, in the opposite
direction from Lunenburg & also in Lunenburg County], Razilly built a
habitation consisting of his own residence, a store, and Fort
Sainte-Marie-de-Grace. A chapel for the Capuchins and other
buildings for the families and the unmarried workmen were erected
nearby. It was here at La Hève, too, that the Capuchins opened the
first boarding-school in New France, one that was for the use of the
colonists and especially the Indians." See also Erskine, 12. Fischer, 482, says Champlain had recommended La Hève, as well as Port-Royal, to Razilly as the 2 best settlement sites in peninsula Acadia.
Griffiths,
48, 50-51, discusses the question of women going to Acadia with Razilly.
On 48, she quotes the Gazette de Remaudot as saying Razilly left Auray with 3 ships "'loaded with all kinds of necessities
and three hundred gentlemen.'" She concedes that it still cannot be determined by the historical record if
there were women & children in the 1632 expedition & concludes,
on 51:
"It seems most unlikely that women were part of this particular
expedition. ... No women are reported as passengers on any of these
ships." Clark, A. H., 91, says Razilly's 1632 expedition
consisted of "mostly men." He notes, on 88-89, that the lack of
women, if allowed to continue, would likely have doomed the agricultural
component of the colony: "But it may be that one notable lack in
the 'equipment' of the settlements was primarily responsible for their
failure. In the history of the transference of people, plants, and
animals overseas from northwestern Europe to the mid-latitude lands
overseas colonized by them, it has been abundantly demonstrated that an
agricultural colony needs its own women and the stability of family
life. Poutrincourt brought his wife briefly, and two women may
have accompanied the Alexander settlers of 1628 or 1629, but if there
were any more we have no record of them." Yet, on 94-95, Clark
estimates that there may have been "a dozen or fifteen women in the
original group," & assumes that they had children at La Hève! MacBeath, echoed by Fischer, 483, says, "12 to 15 families of colonists
were recruited" for the 1632 venture, which would have included women,
perhaps the source for Clark's "a dozen or fifteen women." MacBeath adds: "In all '300
hommes d'élite,' including six
Capuchins and a number of noblemen made up the expedition."
Fischer, 484, says:
"After the French colony at La Hève was well on its way, Razilly turned
to another task," removing the "few Scottish Freebooters" from
Port-Royal. He calls the Scots leader Andrew Forrester & describes
him as "a violent, cruel, and angry man who had defied orders from his
king to abandon the colony." MacBeath says the takeover, which occurred in mid-Dec, was peaceful. MacBeath
adds that the Scottish settlement's commander was Capt. Andrew, also
called Amos,
Forrester, who had attacked Charles La Tour's fort on Rivière
St.-Jean the previous Sep. See note
19b, above. MacBeath asserts: "While a few of the Port-Royal
[Charles Fort] settlers probably joined Razilly's colonists, most accepted his offer of
passage home to England where they arrived in February 1632/33."
Griffiths, 49, mentions Forrester & says there were only
"forty-two erstwhile Scottish settlers" at Charles Fort when Razilly
appeared. Clark, A. H., 84, says "... at least forty-six of
them are said to have been disembarked in England in early 1633
suggesting that there had been a substantial number in the settlement
until the end." Erskine, 11, says "the surviving
Scots were shipped back to England, except for the few who had married
French wives." See Erskine, 9, & note
15a, above, for Erskine's claim that
French "peasant families" remained in peninsula Acadia after
Poutrincourt abandoned Port-Royal in 1614 & that these families produced
children; Erskine evidently believes that the "French wives" of the
Scots settlers came from those putative French families. Clark, A. H., 91, says "the Scottish settlement at
Port Royal was taken over, and all but the possible one or two families
who elected to remain departed...." See also Fischer, 485,
who elaborates: "A few of the Scots chose to remain with the
French and were made welcome. They began to mix with French
families in Port-Royal to form a hybrid culture that still exists in
Nova Scotia, even as its proportions have changed." One wonders which "one or two
families" this may have been. White,
DGFA-1, the most reliable source on early Acadian genealogy,
reveals no Scottish family that remained at Port Royal. White
insists that there were no "permanent" families in Acadia before
v1636.
Arsenault agrees. Perhaps A. H. Clark, Fischer, &
their sources are referring
to the Melansons, who once were thought to be of Scottish
ancestry (Melancthon or some such). In fact, the progenitor of that
family, Pierre Laverdure, was a French Huguenot married
to an English Protestant who did not come to Acadia
until the spring of 1657--not a Scotsman who had settled there in
1629-32. It was Pierre's older sons, Pierre, fils &
Charles, married to Acadians, who adopted the family name
Mellanson, later Melanson & Melançon. See
Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 21ff; White, DGFA-1, 1145; White,
DGFA-1 English, 247; Book Three;
Melançon family page.
Hodson
says it was a skirmish with the French that "sealed the fate of 'New
Scotland.'" Was he referring to Forrester's attack on Charles La Tour's
fort in Sep?
See note 19b, above. Hodson adds
that the French ship Saint-Jean
"hauled forty-two defeated Scots to England" in 1632. Griffiths, 49, also mentions the Saint-Jean as the ship that
returned the Scots to England. Clark, A. H., 84, not mentioning
the ships, says 46 Scotsmen were "disembarked in England in early 1633."
MacDonald, 47, calls the ship
the St.-Jehan. See also Harvey, "Alexander, Sir
William, the younger."
Was this the St.-Jehan that brought the first French families to Acadia
in 1636?
See note 27a, below.
La Saussaye
was acquainted with the colony, having come to Acadia as the Marquise de Guercheville's
agent in 1613 & commanded the short-lived Jesuit mission at St.-Sauveur.
It was he whom the Englishman Samuel Argall captured in the summer of
1613 and allowed, with other settlers, to return to New France
in a ship's boat. See notes
12c & 13a,
above.
21b. Quotations from Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 163-64, 169; Din, "Empires Too
Far," 263;
Fischer, Champlain's
Dream, 463-64. See also Din, "Empires Too Far,"
264n4; Fischer, 405, 424, 465, 479; Fraser,
"Calvert," in DCB, 1:162-63; MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour, 58, 101-02; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:60; Masseaut, "The First African Populations in Lower French LA," 23; Moir,
"Kirke, David," in DCB, 1:405;
Nonone, "Creole in the Americas," 142-48; Taylor, A., American Colonies, 368;
Trudel, 165, 175;
Weidensaul, The First Frontier, chap. 4; notes
13a, 15a,
15b, & 19,
above.
Trudel, 165, says "no more than seventy-two people" lived at Québec in 1627,
that "Above Quebec there was a total absence of French occupation," &
"In all of New France there were only 107 people" that year, so the
number of men in La Cadie could not have been more than 35.
Fischer, 479, offers a concise picture of
the ups & downs of Acadian history before 1632: "We have followed
the troubled history of that region from the moment when the sieur de
Mons and Champlain planted the first settlement on Sainte-Croix Island
in 1604. It was abandoned in 1605, refounded at Port-Royal,
abandoned again in 1607, revived by Poutrincourt in 1610, burned by
English raiders in 1613, rebuilt by Poutrincourt in 1614, abandoned for
another site [Cap-Sable?] in 1618, occupied once more by the French in
1623, and seized by Scottish adventurers in 1629." Here was an amazing
record of colonial instability that Razilly hoped to end.
For the motivation of poor Frenchmen to
emigrate during Richelieu's time, see MacDonald, 101-02.
Masseaut notes that in 1635, while
Razilly was resurrecting the Acadian venture, Richelieu authorized the
creation of "the Company of the American Islands" for "the development
of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Tortuga, which included the introduction
of deported African slaves. This company succeeded another one
found ten years earlier by two Norman pirates, again supported by
Cardinal Richelieu, considered the founder of the modern French state.
Louis XIV created the Company of Guinea in 1684 to stimulate the
production of sugar and its byproducts; the ever more massive
deportation of African labor reduced to slavery on the islands."
In 1638, Richelieu encouraged the creation of the Company of Senegal to
import West Africans into the French Antilles. See Nonone, 145.
As Nonone, 142, 148, points out, workers on Martinique in its first
years under French control were European alloues, or indentured
servants, also called "thirty-six-months" men, not African slaves, who
did not arrive on the island until 1640, & not from West Africa but from
Portuguese possessions. Almost from the beginning, French
officials encouraged the production of sugar cane--native to Asia but
introduced into the Madeiras by the Portuguese in the 1300s, into the
Canary Islands by the Spanish in the 1400s, into the West Indies by
Columbus in 1493, & into Brazil by the Portuguese in 1533--on Martinique
& the other islands of the French Antilles. Not until 1654,
however, did Jewish-Dutch exiles from Brazil introduce the "secrets" of
sugar production to Guadaloupe, which spread to Martinique &
St.-Domingue. See Nonone, 143-44; note
01, above. For the influence of
these Caribbean developments on French LA, founded over half a century
after the settlement of the French Antilles, see Book Seven.
For the impact of African slavery on the Acadians of LA, see Books Eight
& Nine.
21c.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 45. See
also MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 41-42; notes
19, 19a, & 19e,
above.
21d.
Quotations from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 529; MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB,
1:567. See also Baudry, "Daniel,"
in DCB, 1:247; Fischer, 480, 484; Griffiths, From Migrant
to Acadian, 48-49; MacBeath, 1:568-69; Massignon, "Trahans of
Acadiana," 119; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:60; Parkman, France & England,
1:1074; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 129, 171, 176,
178; White, DGFA-1, 1369; White,
DGFA-1 English, 289; notes 19e & 19f
& above.
Parkman calls Razilly Claude, not Isaac.
Claude, whose full name was Claude de Launay-Rasilly, was Isaac's
brother. Fischer, 484; Griffiths; & Massignon, call the brother Claude de Launay-Razilly,
but White,
DGFA-1 English, 289, followed here, spells Claude's surname de
Launay-Rasilly. MacBeath, 1:567, calls brother Claude "a
ship's captain and commodore," so he, too, was a career naval
officer. White, DGFA-1, 1369, says Isaac and
Claude's parents were François de Razilly & Catherine de Valliers,
that Isaac was born at the chateau d'Oiseaumelle in Touraine on 5 Jul 1587,
calls him the colonizer & governor of Acadia, says he was capitaine
dans les troupes de la marine. White, DGFA-1, gives him no wife, so he evidently did not marry. For more
details on his life, see MacBeath, 1:568-69.
MacBeath, 1:567, says of
Razilly's Nov 1626 report to Richelieu: "This report from a
man of renown and high reputation was received favourably by Richelieu
who set about putting the various proposals into force." So Razilly had much to do with the creation of the Company of New
France. See also Fischer, 480; Griffiths, 49; Trudel, 129.
Baudry; MacBeath, 1:568; & Trudel, 176, say Richelieu's Company
sent Razilly to Morocco to protect French shipping from Moorish pirates
in the Mediterranean. They give no dates of this deployment, but it
probably was in 1630. See also Trudel, 178.
22. Quotations from Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 439; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
51; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," 1:593.
See also Arsenault,
History, 21-22; Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:503; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 85, 91-92, 95;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 12; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
44, 47-48, 51-52, 479; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 23;
MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB, 1:569; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles,"
1:594; MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne, Claude," 1:597;
MacDonald, 42-45, 50, 52-56, 58-62, 67, 71-72, 182-83, 207; Parkman, France & England,
1:1074-76, 1078, 1094; White, DGFA-1, 1369, 1433; White, DGFA-1 English, 300;
19c, above.
When Charles La Tour, only a teenager, arrived at Port-Royal with his father in
the summer of 1606, Champlain, then in his late 30s, was still there,
having arrived with de Mons 2 years earlier. They left Acadia
together in the summer of 1607, after de Mons lost his concession, so
Charles & Champlain knew one another in Acadia for at least a year.
When Charles returned to Acadia in the spring of 1610, Champlain had
been at Québec for 2 years & never returned to Acadia. See notes
10e, 12, &
12g, above.
MacDonald, 43, speculates that Charles's Mi'kmaq wife had died before
his voyage to France in late 1632 & offers a detailed description of the
La Rochelle of that day. On 44, she says the youngest of the
daughters, who "cannot have been more than four or five" & whose name
has been lost to history, died in a convent at Tours "within a few
years" of being placed there. White, DGFA-1, 1433, other
than calling this daughter a "religieuse," is silent on the date
of her death as well as her birth. MacDonald, p. 44, offers
details on the fate of Charles's second daughter, Antoinette, who also
remained in France & lived long enough to take her vows at the abbey of
Beaumont-les-Tours, where she was looked after by relatives of Isaac de
Razilly. MacDonald, 44, 55, 207n5, names 2 of the Mi'kmaq in his
entourage, Quichetech & Menougy, "at least one of whom as a chief."
MacDonald, 58, says Charles left La Rochelle on 17 Apr 1633 for his
second return to Acadia in less than a year & brought with him Captain
Étienne de Mourron of Bayonne, Gascony; Guillaume Desjardins, sieur de
Val (probably de Saint-Val), of La Rochelle, a naval captain & later his
trusted agent; & stepbrother
François de Goudart, whom she calls François Godard. See also
MacDonald, 71-72, 185.
MacBeath, "Razilly," says "Razilly had a good working
relationship with Charles de La Tour who shared with him, under
terms of the commissions issued by the Compagnie de La Nouvelle-France,
control of the land and the coasts of Acadia." MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," agrees, adding that "under their direction trade
flourished and settlers were attracted to the land."
Clark, A. H., 92n38, gives the date 1633 for La Tour's
"extensive privileges which were to last for six years." Clark
adds: "There appears to be no definitive documentation but it is
argued by the La Tour apologists that before his death, Razilly
had set up three lieutenants: the coast of present Maine west of
the St. Croix River for d'Aulnay; from St. Croix to Canso for La Tour;
and Canso to Gaspé for Denys." Clark points out that "Denys became
something of an apologist for La Tour," which makes sense in
light of how d'Aulnay treated Denys after Razilly's death.
See, e.g., note 36a, below.
Parkman, 1:1074-76, 1078, says La Tour preferred the name Fort La Tour for his Rivière St.-Jean
holding, but it was more commonly called Fort St.-Jean. Griffiths,
44, 479n14, says it was called Fort
Ste.-Marie & that Fort La Tour was the name of La Tour's
establishment at Cap-Sable. Clark, A. H., 85n26, says
the fort on the Atlantic, at Cap-Sable, was first called Fort Loméron, then Fort St.-Louis, & finally Port La Tour. See also
Clark, A. H.,
92n32. Arsenault, Clark, and others assume that La
Tour's fort on the St.-Jean was at Jemseg, about 70 miles upriver,
where a fortified trading post did appear in the late 1600s.
Parkman, 1:1094n1, insists La Tour's fort was located at the mouth
of the river, specifically Portland Point, "on the east side of the St.
John, at its mouth," and offers compelling evidence, followed here.
Other secondary sources consulted here, including MacDonald & Griffiths,
agree with Parkman's location, & MacDonald, 182-83, offers
archaeological evidence of its location at Portland Point. Griffiths, 44, says La Tour
built his fort at St.-Jean around 1630. One of the fort's purposes was to give
La Tour a place from which to keep a close eye on the Scots
at Port-Royal across the bay, with whom he clashed at least once.
See note
19b, above.
Griffiths, 44, 47-48, 52, points out
that Charles La Tour's commission as lieutenant general of Acadia
dated from Feb 1631, which was more than a year before Razilly reached
Acadia, that, despite the claims of later historians, La Tour's commission was
not revoked after Razilly
came to Acadia, probably the basis of their compromise, & that a
document dated 19 Jan 1633, 8 months after Razilly's appointment as
lieutenant-general, still referred to Charles La Tour by the
title of lieutenant-general in Acadia. In
discussing Razilly's powers granted to him by Richelieu's Company, Hodson, citing Griffiths, 48, says, "For
reasons that remain unclear, they [the Compagnie des Cents-Associés] granted similar powers to Charles de Saint-Étienne de la
Tour...." One suspects that Razilly, cognizant of La Tour's
history in the colony, was very aware of why the Company's directors
acted as they
did.
Clark, A. H., 92, says La Tour moved
his headquarters from Cap-Sable to Rivière St.-Jean in 1635, soon after
Isaac de Razilly died, but White, DGFA-1, 1369, followed here, says Razilly
died in Jul 1636. See also White, DGFA-1 English, 300,
which agrees with the move from the cape to the river in 1635; note 25,
below.
Clark, A. H., 95, says he found "suggestions in
the mid-1640's of a hundred or more residents at the mouth of the Saint
John River, near the fort or forts at Cape Sable, and at Pentagouët and
other posts on the Maine coast. Some of these would have been from
the group of colons which La Tour brought with him in
1633, almost certainly as hands for his fishing or trading enterprises."
So La Tour also had the sense to establish an agricultural base
for his trading ventures. How else could he have reduced his
dependence on French merchants in providing sustenance for his men?
(Clark notes that "The distinction between colons and engagés
was, simply, that the latter were indentured and the former were not.")
Baudry calls the La Tour
outpost at Pentagouët the Vieux-Logis, or Old Lodge.
22a.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 105; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
47-48. See also
Allain, "Colbert & the Colonies," 15ff; Arsenault, History,
22; Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:502; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
95, 106; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 482; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
48, 53; George MacBeath, "Denys, Nicolas," in
DCB, 1:256, &
online;
MacDonald, 30-32, 42, 49, 60-61; Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:62; Parkman,
France & England,
1:1075n1; White,
DGFA-1, 482-89, 1170; White, DGFA-1 English, 251.
Arsenault gives the ages of d'Aulnay & Nicolas Denys in 1632 as 36 & 34, respectively. Baudry
says d'Aulnay was born in c1604, so he
would have been 28 in 1632. MacDonald, 42, says d'Aulnay was
only age 27 when he came to Acadia. MacBeath gives a birth year of 1598
for Denys, which Arsenault evidently
followed. White,
DGFA-1, 487, followed here, gives a precise birth date for
Nicolas Denys--2 Jun 1603, recorded at St.-Saturnin, Tours. White's
birth year for d'Aulnay, in DGFA-1, 1170, is c1604, so the 2 men were about the
same age.
Parkman explains the variations in the spelling of
d'Aulnay's name,
using a descendant of d'Aulnay as authority for his version of the name,
d'Aunay, which differs from Arsenault, Clark, Griffiths, White, & most
other sources, which prefer d'Aulnay, like the French town in the Aunis
region. Chaunisay also is spelled Chaunizay; see White,
DGFA-1,1170; White
DGFA-1 English, 251. Judge
Martin, first published in 1827, calls him Monsieur
d'Antouy.
D'Aulnay's biography in DCB does not use
Chaunisay or any of its
variants in his name, though the biographer says that d'Aulnay was born
at the Château de Charnisay, which was near Loches on the Indre. Baudry says
d'Aulnay's parents were René de Menou, councilor of state under
Louis XIII, & Nicole de Jousserand. Baudry adds: "D'Aulnay
belonged to a very ancient noble family that originated in Perche.
His second name came from the seigneury of Aulnay, near Loudun,
bequeathed to him by his mother." Loudun, in northern Poitou, is
on the southern edge of the Loire River valley, often described as the
garden of France. Baudry says d'Aulnay not only was a cousin of Isaac de Razilly but that in the navy
he served as Razilly's lieutenant, so their relationship was based on
experience as well as blood. Baudry, 1:503, says d'Aulnay
recruited settlers for Razilly, perhaps from the Loudun area. See
also White, DGFA-1, 1170, for d'Aulnay's parents.
D'Aulnay's blood relation to Razilly also meant he was related to
Cardinal Richelieu. See
Griffiths, 53; MacDonald, 32,
42. MacDonald, 30-32, 204n8, offers a sketch of d'Aulnay's
home region, his family connections, his father's royal service, his
education, & his character. Charles, in fact, was the only 1 of
his parents' 3 sons to survive to adulthood.
MacBeath says Nicolas,
son of Jacques Denys de La Thibaudière & Marie Cosnier, claimed that he
"belonged to a 'family of engineers.'" MacBeath goes on:
"While little is known of his early years, we can say he received little
formal education but became proficient in navigation, the fishing
business, lumbering, and administration," all of which would become
manifest in his Acadian ventures. In 1632, MacBeath tell us, Denys
was "a merchant at La Rochelle and charged as agent and representative
of the Company de la Nouvelle-France with the responsibility of
recruiting volunteers and fitting out the expedition being sent to
Acadia under the command of Isaac de Razilly...." So Denys became
an associate of Razilly not because of nepotism, as in the case of
d'Aulnay, but for his skills as an
administrator. See also Griffiths, 48.
MacDonald, 48-49, details a confrontation
between d'Aulnay & La Rochelle official Jean Gaigneur in late 1632 that reveals the
young aristocrat's irascible nature.
Allain provides a discussion
of the seigneurial system of Canada & LA which also could be applied to
French Acadia. See also A. H. Clark, 95, 106, who
says on the latter page: "Something has been made of the 'feudal'
nature of the seigneurial grant to Razilly, and its inheritance by
d'Aulnay, as the transference of an Old World system to Port Royal.
But it has been argued that this is a misinterpretation even for New
France: 'A society in which everyone enjoys equal protection from
the state, and in which everyone is on the same footing with regard to
public duties is not feudal.'" For a more extensive discussion
of the seigneurial system in Acadia, see note
100, below.
22b.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 70, 77; MacBeath, "Razilly,"
in DCB, 1:568. See also Clark, A. H., 95, 98; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 12;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 483; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
49-50, 67; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
59-60; Trudel, Beginnings of New
France, 167; notes 21a, above, & 24,
below.
MacBeath adds: "Working towards the goal of
establishing the colony on a solid basis, Razilly set some of the men to
farming. Land for this purpose was cleared at Petite-Rivière
(Green Bay) [southwest of present-day La Have] and in the course of time
some 40 people were settled there." See also Clark, A. H., 95, 98; Griffiths7.
Fischer is especially effusive in
describing the beauty & richness of La Hève.
For the dearth of French educational
institutions in New France before 1632, see Trudel.
22c.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 24; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 483. See also Clark, A. H., 28, 95, 154-55; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 50-51; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 24; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 59-60,
208-09.
Clark,
A. H., 28,
Fig. 2.4, shows the highest tides at the far end of the bay, in
the Minas Basin & Chignecto Bay. Still, the tides at Port-Royal
coming thru today's Digby Gut would have been substantial, especially higher up in
the Port-Royal Basin, where lay extensive salt marshes as far as the
tides could reach. See Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate
29. For the claim that the Bay of Fundy has the
world's highest tides, see online Wikipedia, "Bay of
Fundy" & "Burntcoat Head, Nova
Scotia." Burntcoat Head lies on the south shore of Cobeguid Bay between
present-day Tennycape & Noel, NS, southwest of Truro, near the Acadian
settlement of Cobeguit. In 1869, a tide resulting from the so-called Saxby Gale
was measured at Burntcoat Head at 70.9 feet! Moreover, the average tide at
Burntcoast Head is an astonishing 55.8 feet. In 1957, National
Geographic Magazine declared Burntcoast Head as the location of the
world's highest tides, a claim buttressed by the Guinness Book of
World Records in 1975. Hodson relates
Poutrincourt's frustration in 1607 "when his canoe was prevented from
reaching Port Royal by 'the tide (which runs swiftly here)' and then
wrenched 'toward the coast, with its high rocks and cliffs.'"
See also note 07, above; Book Two.
Clark, A. H., 154-55, describes the agricultural potential at La
Hève, c1686-88, when only a hand full of families, mostly Indians &
Métis, lived there. See Clark, A. H., 95, for the quality of the
drumlin-based soil at La Hève. Griffiths, 50, quotes a letter from Razilly
to Marc Lescarbot, dated 16 Aug 1634, praising the soil & climate
at La Hève & all that the colonists produced there. See also
MacDonald, 60, 208-09n2.
Griffiths, 51, reminds us that, for the
hundreds of Frenchmen, both colonists and transient fishermen, living &
working at La Hève during its earliest days, the Mi'kmaq provided the
only female contact until 1632.
22d. See
Arsenault, History, 33; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 485; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 48, 50; Jean Lunn, "Denys (Denis) de
La Trinité, Simon," in DCB, 1:261, &
online;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 60-61; MacBeath, "Denys,
Nicolas,"
in DCB, 1:256; White, DGFA-1, 482, 484, 489-90.
Following the birth years in White, 482, but not MacBeath, "Denys,
Nicolas," &
other sources, Simon Denys de La Trinité (Arsenault calls him de Vitré) was Nicolas's older
brother. For more on the Denys of a later generation, see White, 484, 489-90; note
195, below.
The war in which the Denys brothers got caught
up was the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-59, part of the European-wide
struggle known as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). After his
release, Simon returned to his home at Tours, moved to Paris in 1648, &
did not return to Acadia until 1650, again with his younger brother,
taking his wife & children with him. See Lunn.
22e.
Quotations from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 483-84; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 51.
See also Fischer, 486, 509-11; Griffiths, 50; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
61; notes 22a, above, & 26a, below.
Griffiths, 50, uses the number 200 at La
Hève during the first year, so the other 100 Razilly brought to Acadia
in 1632 either returned to France or were parceled out to other
outposts, such as Denys's lumber operation at Port Rossignol or the fort
at Port-Royal, during the first year of settlement. Fischer, 484, says, without citation, that "They suffered a hard winter, but
Razilly took precautions against scurvy that he may have learned from
Champlain's experience of Indian remedies. All the colonists
survived. Some returned to France, but it was a healthy
settlement."
See Fischer, 484, for d'Aulnay's
recruiting venture to France in 1633.
23. See Arsenault, History,
34-35; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 62; MacBeath, "Denys,"
in DCB, 1:257-58; note 24b,
below.
Nicolas's older brother Simon did not
return with him to Acadia ... just yet. See Lunn, "Denys (Denis) de
La Trinité," in DCB, 1:262.
According to Arsenault, 35, the Récollets replaced the Jesuits at
Miscou in 1673 & established a mission at Percé, also a part of Denys's
vast holdings.
24. Quotations from Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian,
57-58; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
63. See also Arsenault, History, 22; Baudry,
"Menou," in DCB, 1:503; Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet,
16; Griffiths, pp.
44, 52-53, 61-62, 67; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:594; MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB,
1:569; MacDonald, 57-58, 61-62, 64, 70; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:56, 60;
Parkman, France & England, 1:1078-79; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
194; online Wikipedia, "Machias,
Maine," notes 15a, 19b, &
19d, above.
Parkman, 1:1078-79, says Englishmen from
Plymouth had established the trading post at Machias in the early 1630s.
There had been 5 or 6 Englishmen there, but La Tour had killed 2 of
them when he visited the place & they fired on him & his party. Online Wikipedia, "Machias, Maine," says
Richard Vine for the Plymouth Company found the trading post at Machias
in 1633, the year Allerton went there, & that La Tour killed 2 of
the 6 defenders & carried "the others away with their merchandise." The
author of the article adds: "No persistent attempt was then made
to hold this point by the English or French for 120 years." See
notes 22,
30d,
45, 105,
& 106, below, for evidence to the
contrary. MacDonald, 61, calls Vines "a Saco trader."
Following Winthrop's Journal, MacDonald, 62, implies that
La Tour gave Vines tacit approval to set up at Machias, that the New
English post was nothing more than "a temporary shack or 'wigwam," that
Vines's men were drunk when they fired on La Tour & his men, that
father Claude was with Charles during the encounter, that La Tour
confiscated the New English wares, including some of his own goods taken
by the Scots from his Rivière St.-Jean fort the year before, & that
La Tour sent the 3 New English survivors to France. For the
assertion that La Tour's attack on Machias was in
retaliation for an attack on his St.-Jean post by Scots from
Port-Royal in Sep 1632, see note
19b, above. MacDonald, 62, contends that "La Tour's
sole intention at the time [of the incident at Machias] was to establish
French claims to a disputed area." The French called Machias Mégais. See note
45, below. Nearby Machiasport was
the site of the first naval battle of the American Revolution, Jun 1775.
Parkman, 1:1079, says Englishmen from
Plymouth also built a trading post at Castine, which was Pentagouët,
also spelled Pentagöuet & Pentagoët.
Griffiths, 52-53, says Razilly sent d'Aulnay to seize
Pentagouët "Later that year," that is, 1635. MacBeath, "Razilly,"
says d'Aulnay captured the post in Aug. Baudry says Charles La Tour had agreed to assist
Razilly in retaking Pentagouët but refused to do so in league with
d'Aulnay, which should have been an early warning of the rivalry
building up between them. Trudel, 194, says d'Aulnay seized Pentagouët from the English, but the Company
"conceded" it to La Tour. MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," reflecting Trudel, says it was d'Aulnay who recaptured the fort at
Pentagouët in 1635; however, the Company granted it to La Tour in
1636, adding: "The company's action seems to
have roused d'Aulnay's hatred for both La Tour and the company."
Griffiths, 67, says Pentagouët went to d'Aulnay in 1635, that he
built there "a fort, with gardens, an orchard, a farm, and a grist
mill," & also a shipyard, where his men constructed at least 1 70-ton vessel.
MacDonald, 70, says, in their attempt to divide the colony between
d'Aulnay & La Tour, the King & his ministers granted Pentagouët
to d'Aulnay in 1638.
Martin, F.-X., 1:60, says the New Englishman who attempted to recapture
Pentagouët was a Captain Girling. Girling was "the
bull-headed master" of the Great Hope, a ship from Plymouth
carrying 20 New English militiamen under Miles Standish, who served as
Girling's pilot aboard an unnamed barque. See Faulkner &
Faulkner; MacDonald,
64 (source of quotation).
MacDonald, 58, provides these startling figures: by 1640, MA
Bay colony held 9,000 people, all of New England 13,000, & the English
colonies of North America--New England & the Chesapeake colonies of VA & MD--27,000!
French Acadia, on the other hand, held no more than 300 colonists.
24a.
Quotation from George MacBeath, "Thomas, Jean," in DCB, 1:642.
See also René Baudry, "Le Creux du Breuil, Nicolas," in DCB,
1:442, &
online; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 485-86; MacBeath, "Marot," in DCB, 1:490; MacBeath, "Razilly,"
in DCB, 1:568-69; White, DGFA-1 English, 219.
MacBeath, "Thomas," calls the Canso
incident "the first Indian revolt against the French in Acadia."
Despite his name, Le Creux du Breuil was a
native of Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the southern coast of Brittany.
(Breuil is on the Somme, north of Parish.) Le Creux returned to
Acadia with his wife & relatives in May 1636 aboard the St.-Jehan.
See Baudry; note
27a, below.
24b. See
Baudry, "Daniel," in DCB, 1:248; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 264n2;
Desjardins et al., "Acadians & Economics," 205; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
439-40, 520-21, 608; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 52, 64;
Jean Hamelin, "Hualt de Montmagny, Charles," in DCB,
1:372-74, &
online;
Melanson, Cormier Genealogy, 11-12; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 138, 164, 181, 203; Trudel, "Champlain,"
in
DCB, 1:197; White, DGFA-1, 400; White,
DGFA-1 English, 89; Books Two & Four.
Champlain died at Québec on Christmas Day 1635,
in his late 60s, from the effects of a stroke suffered the previous Oct.
His successor as lieutenant-general/governor of New France was
Charles-Jacques Huault de Montmagny ("Onontio" to the Iroquois),
a Knight of Malta, a director of the Company of New France, & a favorite
of Richelieu; Montmagny held the post for a dozen years, until 1648. See Fischer,
520-21; Hamelin; Trudel, "Champlain."
For the evolution of proprietary control on
Cape Breton Island from the late 1620s to the late 1640s, see Baudry; Fischer, 608; Trudel,
Beginnings of New France, 203. Historical & genealogical
evidence reveals that Louis Tuffet, son of Jean Tuffet of the Company of New
France, was commandant of the Company post at Fort St.-Pierre, on Cape
Breton Island, in Jan 1644. See White; note 70, below;
Book Two.
Robert Cormier is the
author's paternal ancestor; his older son Thomas is the progenitor of
the Cormier family in Acadia. See
Cormier
family page.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 130, says the
Compagnie de Caën, which held a monopoly in Canada from 1621-35,
"was to have exclusive right to trade in the St Lawrence Valley inside a
line of passing through Gaspé and extending from the 48th parallel to
the 52nd...." Miscou lay on the 48th parallel, & Gaspésie above
it.
Griffiths, 64, says by 1650 "... the
whole of the continental coast, from present-day Guysborough (Chedabouctou
[west of Canso]) to Miscou at the entrance of the Baie des Chaleurs,
provided harbours nearly as good" as the one at Canso. "Perhaps a
hundred and fifty ships a year might be involved in fishing off these
shores" of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, hence the region's importance to
Acadia.
25.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 53.
See also Arsenault, History, 22-23, 25; Baudry, "Menou," in DCB,
1:503; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
92-94; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 12; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
482, 484, 486, 489; Griffiths, 51, 54; Hodson,
Acadian Diaspora, 23; MacDonald, Forutne & La Tour, 59,
65-67; MacBeath, "Denys,"
in DCB, 1:256-58; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:593-94; MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB,
1:569; Parkman, France & England, 1:1075;
White, DGFA-1, 487, 1170, 1369, 1433; White, DGFA-1 English,
137, 251, 289; note 24, above.
Griffiths, 53, relates an incident at La Rochelle in late 1632 that
posed d'Aulnay's interests against that of Charles La Tour,
evidently the
beginning of their personal enmity.
Arsenault, 22-23; Clark, A. H., 92; Hodson; MacDonald, 59; MacBeath,
"Denys," 1:256; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles,"
1:593--all say Razilly died in 1635. Fischer, 486, & MacDonald,
65, say, specifically, Nov 1635. Griffiths, 53; & MacBeath,
"Razilly," say Dec 1635.
White, in
DGFA-1, 1369, & DGFA-1 English, 289, citing an Aug
1640 decision of the Paris parlement in a law suit brought by the Order
of Malta against Claude de Rasilly, & G. de Rasilly, a descendant, says
Isaac died on 2
Jul 1636 at La Hève. Isaac, then, was age
45 when he came to Acadia & died 3 days shy of his 49th birthday.
Champlain had died at Québec on Christmas Day 1635. See note
21, above; Book Six. Arsenault, 23,
citing no source, says Isaac de Razilly was buried at La Hève but
his remains were removed to Louisbourg, Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), in 1749.
Griffiths, 53-54, points out the dubious
nature of d'Aulnay's claim to Razilly's title & interests in Acadia.
Clark, A. H., 92n38, states: "Razilly's intention with regard to
division of authority between himself (and d'Aulnay), La Tour,
and Nicolas Denys has been argued but not resolved." White,
DGFA-1 English, 251, using the date 1636, says brother Claude
inherited Isaac's estates but named d'Aulnay as his "lieutenant" in
Acadia, which in turn led to the King's "appointing d'Aulnay
lieutenant-general in Acadia with authority over Port-Royal and La Hève"
on 10 Feb 1638. This implies that, although d'Aulnay received the
vaunted title, his authority was limited at that time only to those 2
settlements. MacBeath, "Razilly," cites 2 documents
that "may indicate that Claude de Launay-Rasilly was in Acadia,"
implying that Claude, unlike his brother, did not spend much time there,
& that there were questions about his spending anytime there at all.
Other scholars, however, place Claude in France. See, e.g.,
Fischer, 482, who says Claude commanded one of the large vessels
that brother Isaac took to Acadia in 1632. MacBeath, "Razilly," says Claude was an associate of the Razilly-Condonnier
Company as well as the Company of New France & 2 other ventures that
were active in the St. Lawrence valley, which would have made him a very
busy fellow indeed. Fischer, 484, has Claude, along with Jean
Ordonnier, "a bourgeois of Paris," creating a group called "Society for
the Peopling of Acadia" in 1634, when he was back in France, &, on 489, recruiting salt makers at La Rochelle in Mar 1636, on the eve of
his brother's death. See also note
27a, below. MacBeath,
"Razilly," adds: "When, in 1634, the
Compagnie de
la Nouvelle-France was unable to repay the Razillys the money they had
loaned, the company conceded them in the name of Claude de Rasilly the
forts at La Hève and Port-Royal as well as half of the profits to be
derived from the fur trade over the next ten years," so Claude was fixed
up in Acadia even before his brother died. After Isaac's death,
evidently business interests required Claude to remain in France, hence
the designation of d'Aulnay as his agent in Acadia. MacBeath
notes: "However, he [Claude] remained actively interested in the
affairs of the colony and in all probability it is he who was largely
responsible for continuing his brother's successful experiment of
establishing farmers in Acadia." MacBeath says "it seems
reasonable to suggest that some 120 permanent inhabitants were brought
to Acadia by the Razilly brothers." This would include the
passengers of the St.-Jehan. See note
27a, below. In early 1642,
Claude "sold his interests in the Razilly-Condonnier company to
d'Aulnay
and, with this act, participation of the Razillys in affairs here
[Acadia] ceased." Baudry says that even before Isaac's
death, Claude had been granted Port-Royal, La Hève, & Île de Sable "in
his own name, and inherited his brother's shares in the Compagnie de Razilly-Condonnier. His family responsibilities and his post in
the navy prevented him from coming personally to Acadia," hence his
naming cousin d'Aulnay as "his lieutenant in Acadia, while he himself
looked after the company's affairs in France." MacDonald, 66-67, says Isaac had designated the Sieur de Poincy "as his
provisory successor" in Acadia, but brother Claude chose d'Aulnay
instead. White,
DGFA-1 English, 137, refers to Claude de Launay-Razilly[sic] as an
"officer of the Marine," hence Baudry's referral to Claude's "post in
the navy." See also note 28c,
below.
25a.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 57; White, DGFA-1 English,
66. See also Griffiths, 87; Lunn, "Denys (Denis) de
La Trinité," in DCB, 1:262; MacBeath, "Denys," in DCB,
1:256, 258; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 61, 67; White, DGFA-1,
300, 487-88, 1295-96; White, DGFA-1 English, 66.
MacBeath, 1:256, points out that
about the time of Razilly's death & d'Aulnay's refusal to allow Denys to
export his white pines from La Hève, the Portuguese had seized "without
compensation" a shipment of cod Denys had sent to them--"the first
misfortunes in this dauntless man's life." Indeed," MacBeath
continues, "misfortune was to plague him continuously and limit sharply
any lasting effect he was to have in the development of Acadia."
The Portuguese mishap occurred under the charge of Nicolas's older
brother, Simon de La Trinité, who had come to Acadia with him in 1632.
See Lunn; note 22d, above. One suspects that Nicolas, an honorable man, got along well with
other honorable men, such as Isaac de Razilly, but was easily
outmaneuvered by the likes of Charles d'Aulnay. Denys seems to have maintained a generally friendly
relationship with the other Acadian shaker & mover, Charles La Tour.
See MacDonald, 61; note 36a, below.
White, DGFA-1 English, 66, says that, in the
description of Île Royale by Jacques L'Hermite made in 1716, L'Hermite wrote:
"A man named Petitipas (is the) grandson of one named Bernard
du
Gueret (sic), dit St.-Martin, a native of Bordeaux, who was
settled at Mirliguèche, between La Hève and Chibouctou ... by (order of)
the gentlemen of the Company about eighty years ago [c1636]; this
harbour was given him by the King, and the papers were recorded in the
registry of Canada.'" This implies that Bugaret was granted a
seigneurie at Mirliguèche. White, DGFA-1, 300,
reveals that Bugarest's only child, Catherine, married Claude
Petitpas de La Fleur in c1658 & remarried to Charles
Chevalier dit La Tourassé in c1692.
Petitpas created a substantial family in the colony. See
White, DGFA-1, 1295-96; note 17,
above; Books Two & Three. Chevalier, who as a
sergeant of troups de la marine, would head the collaboratist
council left at Port-Royal by Sir William Phips in 1690 during King
Williams's War, fathered no children by Catherine Bugaret.
See White, DGFA-1, 345; note 157,
below.
Denys, at age 39, married Marguerite, daughter of Bordeaux
merchant Pierre de Lafitte, at La Rochelle in Oct 1642. See White, DGFA-1, 487.
Griffiths, 87, says "Denys owed at least part of his success to
his wife, Margeurite[sic] Lafitte. We know almost nothing
about her except that she was the daughter of a Bordeaux merchant and
they were married in La Rochelle in 1642. They seem to have had
three children, one son, Richard, and two daughters." See White,
DGFA-1, 487-88, for their six children--daughters Marie & Marguerite,
& sons Nicolas, fils, Jacques, Richard de Fronsac, Charles, & a
second Jacques. Of these children, only Marie & Richard married, Marie to Michel
Le Neuf de La Vallière in c1666. For more on the family, especially Richard,
see note
38, below.
26.
See Arsenault, Généalogie,
484ff, 505ff; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 486-87; Arsenault, Généalogie,
505ff; White, DGFA-1, 369-93, 481-98, 526-51, 1170-71; White,
DGFA-1 English, 83-88, 112-16.
Fischer, 486-87, citing Geneviève Massignon's
1962 study, exaggerates the number of families brought from La Hève to
Port-Royal in 1636 who created families in the colony, even if one
counts the emigrants who arrived aboard St.-Jehan in 1636 as
colonists who lived at La Hève. See note
27a, below. Fischer, 486,
says: "A study of Acadian parishes in the early eighteenth century
[that of Rameau de Saint-Père, published in 1889] found that migrants to
La Hève accounted for two-thirds of the entire Acadian population."
A comprehensive
genealogical study of the same population does not support this
assertion. See notes
43 & 44,
below, for evidence, both genealogical & historical, placing the arrival
of the progenitors of Acadia's established families in proper temporal
perspective. See also the Acadian "begats" in Book Three of this
study. D'Aulnay himself would establish a family
in the colony, but no lasting line would come of it, there or in France.
See White, DGFA-1, 1170-71. Nicolas Denys's
small line of his family did not remain in peninsula Acadia but settled
on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore before moving on to Canada.
Brother Simon Denys's large family settled in greater
Acadia on Cape Breton Island before moving on to Canada. See
White, DGFA-1, 481-98; Book Three.
For Germain
Doucet and his family, see Arsenault, 505ff; White, DGFA-1,
526-51; White,
DGFA-1 English, 112-16; Book Two. White calls him sieur de La Verdure,
which denotes membership in the lesser nobility. Arsenault says
simply
dit Laverdure. According to White, Doucet was
married in France in c1620; his son Pierre was born in c1621, his
daughter Marguerite (Arsenault calls her Marguerite-Louise) in c1625
(Arsenault says in c1634), so they would have been 11 & 7 if they had
accompanied their parents to Acadia in 1632. White does not say if
Doucet
took his family with him to Acadia in 1632; he probably did not. A second Doucet daughter, unnamed, was born about
this time (she married at Port-Royal in c1650, so if she was 18 at the
time of her marriage, she would have been born in c1632).
Doucet's second son, Germain, fils, was born in c1641
probably at Port-Royal (Arsenault says the second Germain was the son of
Pierre & thus the grandson of the first Germain, but, according to
White, Pierre did not marry until c1660). According to White, all
4 of these children were from Germain père's first wife, whose
name has been lost to history, as has the name of his second wife, whom
Germain, père married in c1654 & who, according to White, gave him no children
who survived in Acadia. White, DGFA-1 English, 112-13,
shows evidence, however, that Germain's second wife may have been the
sister of surgeon & prominent settler Jacques Bourgeois, who
served as Doucet's "lieutenant" in 1654 when the English seized
Port-Royal; Bourgeois married Jeanne Trahan in c1643. See
Appendix
for more on these Acadian pioneers. Recent yDNA findings among nearly a dozen male descendants of
Germain Doucet,
fils, however, call into question the relationship between the 2
Germains. The yDNA evidence tends to point to the conclusion that
Germain, fils was a full-blooded Mi'kmaq whom Sr. Germain
adopted, implying that Sr. Germain's second wife may have been a
Mi'kmaq who had children by a previous Indian husband & that she was not
a fellow French colonist's daughter. See
Doucet family page.
For Pierre Comeau & his family,
see Arsenault, 484ff; White,
DGFA-1, 369-93; White
DGFA-1 English, 83-88; Book Two.
Although Pierre Comeau did not marry until he was 51 years old, age did not slow him down a bit; he fathered 9 children, the
last born when he was age 67!
26a. Quotation from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 103. See also Arsenault,
History, 25, 37; Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:503;
Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 188-89; Clark, A. H.,
85-86, 92, 94-100, 102 (map,
Fig. 4.3), 128-29, chap. 2; Erskine,
Nova Scotia, 12-13; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 486; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
51, 54-56, 64, 67, 85, 478; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 22; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 67-68, 85; notes 09b
& 19, above.
Griffiths, 478n2, cites a study by
Chouquette which says that 64.6% of the early Acadian migrants (1632-54)
"came from towns," which implies that they mainly were workers & craftsmen, not
farmers.
Fischer, 486, says d'Aulnay "encouraged
many settlers to move from La Hève to Port-Royal," implying that the
move was voluntary. Baudry suggests that d'Aulnay
made the move from La Hève not only because he believed the soil at
Port-Royal was more fertile, but also because "it was hoped to establish
salt-pans there, in order to be able to gather near at hand the salt
needed for the fisheries." See note 33,
below, for speculation on how salt-gathering at Port-Royal may have
contributed to the Acadians' adoption of dyking technology in the basin.
Griffiths, 55, notes that, aboard the St.-Jehan,
which reached La Hève from La Rochelle in early May 1636, "A small number of salt makers were
grouped together on the [passenger] list; Jehan Sandry was named as the
master salt maker and he brought his wife."
On soil & weather conditions at Port-Royal
compared to La Hève, Clark, A. H., 98, says: "This decision to move
from La Have was to be of critical importance for the changing geography
of the Acadians for more than a century afterward.... [But] the
motive of finding a more satisfactory spot for agriculture may have to
be discounted. As far as we know there had been no use of the Bay
of Fundy's tidal salt marshes for agriculture before 1635 and the upland
soils previously used in the Port Royal area were not significantly
better (and may have been worse) than those around La Have estuary.
It is true that the shelter of North Mountain [above the Port-Royal
Basin] from the prevailing northwest winds of winter has been advanced
as an attraction, yet Annapolis [Port-Royal], in fact, has lower
temperatures in January and February than has the Lunenburg coast [where
La Have is found]." See also 95, 102-03. For a general discussion of the geology
of Nova Scotia, including the nature of the soil on the peninsula & Cape
Breton Island, see Clark, A. H., chap. 2.
Continuing his discussion of d'Aulnay's move,
Clark, A. H., 99, compares the harbors at La Hève & Port-Royal &
considers the latter to be superior in defensibility only if the French
had employed elaborate defenses at the Gut & "a series of message
relay-stations for warnings to the fort." He concludes:
"Indeed there are few harbors outside of the Mediterranean Sea that have
had as sorry a history of vulnerability to sea attack as did Port
Royal." Hodson calls the "outpost for fishermen and fur traders at
La Hève on the Atlantic coast" a "failed attempt."
A. H. Clark reminds us that d'Aulnay "was primarily
interested in quick profits from the fur trade," so he moved his
headquarters from La Hève to Port-Royal to be "nearer to the chief
source of furs which was on the continent, not on the peninsula," an
advantage that La Tour, on Rivière St.-Jean, already enjoyed.
See 98-99, quotation from 98. Griffiths, 55, 64, 85, agrees. Clark, A. H., 92, hints that another
reason for the move from La Hève to Port-Royal was that La Hève lay in "La
Tour country." Griffiths, 55, adds that the move to
Port-Royal also "heralded a difference in his [d'Aulnay's] policies from
those of his predecessor." On 56, she discusses the enhancement
of relations between the French & the Mi'kmaq resulting from the move.
Clark, A. H., 100, suggests the move from La
Hève to Port-Royal "perhaps was underway before 1635 and largely
concluded by 1640." Clark, remember, believed that Razilly had
died in 1635, not in Jul 1636. Griffiths, 54, says, "d'Aulnay had,
by the end of 1636, moved the greater part of the settlement at La Hève
to Port-Royal, where the economy would be as much a matter of
agriculture and the fur trade as of the fishery" &, on 55, adds, "by the fall of 1636
d'Aulnay had established the
immigrants at Port Royal." See note
38d, below, for the economic
relationship between d'Aulnay & the Port-Royal settlers.
Clark, A. H., 85, says: "In none of [the
posts that existed in Acadia when Razilly arrived in 1632] was
agriculture of any importance. Yet agriculture had been practiced
in the period, first most tentatively at St. Croix [in 1604], and then
more extensively and intensely at Port Royal [1605-07, 1610-23, & 1629-32], with
enough success to suggest that permanent colonies could be assured of
self-support in food." He goes on to detail the agricultural
efforts at Île Ste.-Croix & Port-Royal in the earliest days of the
colony, especially the efforts of Marc Lescarbot at Port-Royal.
Clark, A. H., 85-86, also details the animals kept by the early Port-Royal colonists,
& says, on 96, 98: "Perhaps there were
members of the Poutrincourt-La Tour group at Port Royal each year
from 1613 to 1628, and of the Razilly-d'Aulnay group from 1632 to 1635, but continuous agricultural
settlement in this seedbed of the Acadian people dates from the firm
establishment there of d'Aulnay's 'habitans' from La Have in the late
1630's."
Clark, A. H., 94-95, says Denys counted only
40 habitants at La Hève in 1635 but goes on to say: "Apparently
there were but a dozen or fifteen women in the original group.
Assuming that most of these survived, and that they had a reasonable
number of children, we may estimate roughly a hundred people in all
living at La Have in 1635." White, DGFA-1, finds no
"permanent" families in Acadia before 1636, implying that
there were precious few European women in the colony before that date, at least
none who remained & helped create recorded families. Arsenault, 37, & Griffiths, 51, agree.
For the Métis community at La Hève, see
Clark, A. H., 95, 128-29, the source for calling that settlement such a
community. Clark, A. H., 128-29, writing in 1968, notes: "It
has been observed before that the absorption of Micmac by the Acadian
community has not been well studied. There was a rather
conspicuous métis settlement in the La Have-Mirliguèche region which,
Rameau [in 1889] estimated, numbered seventy-five or more at the turn of
the [17th] century. This settlement had a continuous history from
the arrival of Razilly's settlers in 1632. It has been assumed
that those who did not move to Port Royal later in the decade included
many who had made alliances with Indian women; further recruitment may
have involved daughters of the Port Royal settlement (especially those
with Indian blood) or Indian girls from the interior. It is likely
that, in any event, this group became highly inbred, but that was a
situation characteristic of the small Acadian groups everywhere."
See also Erskine, 13. Brasseaux, writing in 1987,
makes the remarkable assertion that "offspring of mixed blood were
generally exiled to the isolated Atlantic coast community of La
Hève." Italics added. "Exiled" seems to be too-harsh a term
for a community whose history predates the "white" community at
Port-Royal by several years.
For a description of the remains of the
settlement at La Hève, c1975, including a survey of native & exotic
plants there, see Erskine, 13.
27.
Quotation from Arsenault, History, 44.
See also Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 468-69, 716n19; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 70, 193; White, DGFA-1, 1125; White, DGFA-1 English,
244.
Griffiths, 193, calls Mathieu Martin "one [of] the
first children born in Acadia, both of whose parents were European ...."
See also Griffiths, 70; White, DGFA-1 English, 244, which, in
citing Mathieu's grant at Cobeguit, calls him "Sr Mathieu Martin,
'of one of the oldest families in Acadia, being the first one born there.'" For Pierre Martin's family, see White, DGFA-1, 1125.
For the founding of Cobeguit settlement, in
which Mathieu Martin took a prominent part, see note 95,
below.
Amazingly, the first recorded French child
born in Canada also was a Martin--Eustache, son of Abraham
Martin dit l'Écossais & Marguerite Langlois, born &
baptized at Québec on 24 Oct 1621. As Abraham Martin's
dit attests, he was a Scotsman, not a Frenchman, who married a
French girl in Dieppe before taking her to Canada in c1620, only 3 years
after Louis Hébert's family became the first to settle at the
outpost. The Martins were among the several Canadian
families who returned to Dieppe in 1629, after the English captured
Québec, but returned in 1632, when French authority was restored.
The Plains of Abraham, where the famous battle would be fought in 1759 &
now a park in downtown Québec City, likely took the Scotsman's given
name. See Fischer; notes
10e & 21b, above.
27a.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 54-55;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 68. See
also Arsenault,
Généalogie, 673-74, 816; Arsenault,
History, 26, 37-38; Baudry, "Le Creux de Breuil," in DCB,
1:442; Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:503; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
88-89; D'Entremont, "Barbe Bajolet & Her Three
Marriages"; Faragher,
A Great & Noble Scheme, 51; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
484; Griffiths, 57; Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A:203,
547, 767, 788; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 23-24; George MacBeath, "Motin (Mottin),
Jeanne," in DCB, 1:514, &
online;
MacBeath, "Razilly," in DCB, 1:569; MacDonald, 69; Massignon, "Trahans
of Acadiana," 116-27; White, DGFA-1, 221, 666, 983, 1125,
1170-72, 1288-89, 1318, 1508, 1535-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 73,
219-20, 243-44, 262, 274, 323-34; note
33, below.
Griffiths, 54, says that, of the many ships that sailed from La Rochelle & other French
ports to Acadia between 1632-36, "this is the only one for which a
detailed passenger list has survived." Griffiths calls some of the
passengers aboard St.-Jehan "the first recorded migrant families"
in Acadia. Fischer, without
citation, makes this interesting assertion about Razilly's settlement at
La Hève in its first years: "Its population began to grow by
natural increase, slowly at first, but with growing momentum." One
suspects he is projecting this "natural increase" into the period
following Razilly's death & d'Aulnay's move to Port-Royal.
Was the St.-Jehan the same ship as the
St.-Jean that returned the Scots to Britain in 1632-33? Jehan
& Jean are the same name. See Baudry; note 21a, above.
For the importance of women & families to an
agricultural settlement, see A. H. Clark.
Hodson offers
a detailed analysis of conditions in Poitou, south and southeast of
Anjou, in the 1620s & 1630s that
may have motivated peasants there to leave the region. Citing a
Massignon article from 1963, Hodson, 24, asserts: "On d'Aulnay's
estates, which encompassed La Chaussée, Martaizé, and several other
villages south of Loudun, the result seems to have been a glut of
dispossessed men and women looking for a fresh start. On his
visits home during the late 1630s and early 1640s, d'Aulnay began
telling them about Acadia. Along with a few peasants culled from
Razilly's estates in Anjou, about twenty families from La Chaussée and
Martaizé--with names such as Bourg, Gaudet, Leblanc,
and Thibodeau--determined to make new homes in Port Royal."
A perusal of these names in White, DGFA-1, a solid source on
Acadian families that, unlike Arsenault's Généalogie, refuses to speculate on family
origins, attributes none of these families' progenitors to La
Chaussée, Martaizé, or any other village in the region. See White, DGFA-1, 221, 666, 983, 1508.
(Whenever there is conflict of information between Acadian genealogists
Arsenault & White, a common occurrence, this author follows White, the
more recent and more accurate of the two genealogical sources, unless
otherwise noted.) Massignon, Hodson's source, does attribute these
families (thought not the Thibodeaus) to the area of
d'Aulnay's estates south of Loudun. See note
44, below.
Isaac de Razilly's brother, Claude de
Launay-Rasilly, also recruited settlers for the colony. See
Fischer; MacBeath, "Razilly"; note
25, above.
White, DGFA-1 English, 73, details the contract, dated 1 Mar
1636, between Claude & the salt-makers & salt-pan builders who came to
Acadia aboard the St.-Jehan: "Cendre and Gaborit were to
receive 300 livres tournois per 'livre' of marshland equalling[sic]
twenty basins (of crystalization)." White also gives the
salt-maker & his wife's full names.
Griffiths, 54, calls Isaac Pesseley
a Pesselin. White, DGFA-1, 1288, & White, DGFA-1
English, 274, calls him
Pesseley & also Pesselet & Paissely, but not
Pesselin. Isaac served as major
of Port-Royal and died in Apr 1645 during the civil war between d'Aulnay
& La Tour. Pesseley's youngest daughter Marie, born at
Port-Royal about the time of his death, is the matriarch of all the
Pitres of Acadia. See White, DGFA-1, 1288-89, 1318.
Pesseley's wife's family name also is spelled Barjolet,
Bajol, Bayols. She, too, was from Piney. D'Entremont details the family's history in France
& Acadia. According to Fr. d'Entremont, Isaac likely brought his
wife & daughter Marguerite to Acadia aboard St.-Jehan & says
their other 5 children, 4 daughters & a son, were born in Acadia.
However, White, DGFA-1, 1288-89, gives the couple 8 children in all,
including a son Étienne, born at Piney in Oct 1630, Marguerite at Piney
in 1633, and daughter Perrette at Piney in 1634. It is possible
that Étienne and Perrette died in France before 1636 & only Marguerite
was alive when St.-Jehan sailed. White gives no death dates
for Étienne & Perrette, implying, perhaps, that they did not survive
childhood. Of Pesseley's 8 children, in fact, White shows
marriages only for Marguerite, to Antoine Hervieu de Herviste at
St.-Jean de La Rochelle, France, in May 1652; & Marie, to Jean Pitre
in c1665, & to François Robin in c1690. For Issac's
death, see note
30a, below.
Guillaume, son of Nicolas Trahan and
Renée Desloges of St.-Pierre de Montreuil-Bellay, Anjou, was age 35 when he left France for Acadia. Guillaume's second
daughter, whose name has been lost, may have married Germain Doucet, sieur de La
Verdure, in c1654. See White, DGFA-1, 1535-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 323. Arsenault, Généalogie, 816, says
Guillaume was born in 1611; White, DGFA-1, 1535-36, says
c1601. For a detailed analysis of the origins of the Martins
& Trahans of Acadia, see Massignon, which
also mentions, on 117, the birth of Mathieu Martin & his
distinction as "first-born" in Acadia. See also White,
DGFA-1 English, 244. Massignon spells Françoise
Corbineau's family name Charbonneau. Françoise died by
c1666, when Guillaume
Trahan
remarried to Madeleine, daughter of Vincent Brun & Renée Breau, at Port-Royal.
See White, DGFA-1, 1536. Massignon, 118-19, notes that Guillaume Trahan had been severely fined in 1634, 2 years
before his passage on the St.-Jehan, for cutting down trees in
the forest of Bourgueil, a possible motivation for his going to Acadia,
where trees could be felled with impunity.
Hébert, D., 1-A:547, 788 (Archives Paroissiales de Bourgeuil, France), records the marriage of Pierre Martin & Catherine
Vigneau on 30 Jun 1630 in France. Hébert, D., 1-A:203, 767 (Touraine,
France: Archives Paroissiales de Chinan), records the marriage
of Guillaume, son of Nicolas Trahan & Renée Desloges, to
Françoise Corbineau of the parish of St.-Étienne de Chinon, on 13 Jul 1627,
both marriages in France. See also White, DGFA-1, 1125, 1288-89,
1535-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 243, 323-34.
Arsenault, History, 37, says
Jeanne
Motin headed the list of passengers aboard the
St.-Jehan, calls her father Louis Motin, & says he was an
associate of Isaac de Razilly. White, DGFA-1 English, 262,
says "Father Couillard-Després ... provides the ancestry of the
Molin and de Salins families. The latter [Jeanne's
mother Marie's family] can be traced back, through two female lines, to
Amedeus VI, Count of Savoie." Jeanne's marriage to d'Aulnay is in White, DGFA-1,
1170. Faragher says they were married in France.
Arsenault, History, 26, says d'Aulnay married Jeanne Motin in 1636, which would have been soon
after she reached Acadia. Griffiths, 57, agrees, saying that
she was 21 at the time of her marriage & was "newly arrived from
France." Baudry, "Menou," says
d'Aulnay married her in 1638. White, DGFA-1, 1170, agrees,
placing the marriage "en Acadie." Why would the couple have
returned to France to do something they could have done in Acadia? For details of
her life, see MacBeth, "Motin." Baudry, "Menou," says Jeanne was
sister-in-law of Razilly/d'Aulnay associate Nicolas Le Creux du
Breuil & that d'Aulnay's marrying her "was a clear indication of his intention to
settle in the country." She was age 23 at the time of the wedding;
d'Aulnay was 34. She gave him 8 children, none of whom married:
daughter Marie, born at Port-Royal in Sep 1639, was named Dlle de Poussay in
Lorraine in 1676; son Charles, fils, born probably at Port-Royal in
c1642, was still a bachelor when he died in military service; daughter Renée
became a nun in Touraine; daughter Jeanne, born probably at Port-Royal in c1646,
also became a nun; son René, born probably at Port-Royal in c1648, also was
a bachelor when he died in combat; daughter Anne, born probably at Port-Royal in
c1649, became a nun at Jouarre; & son Paul, born probably at Port-Royal in
c1650, the year of his father's death, became a captain in the regiment
of Maréchal de La Ferté, was promoted to major, & died in the siege of
Luxembourg in 1684. See White, DGFA-1, 1170-72; White,
DGFA-1 English, 262.
Jeanne's brother-in-law, Nicolas Le Creux du
Breuil, was the Razilly associate who had constructed & commanded the
stockade at Canso & confronted the interloper, Jean Thomas, in late Jul
1635. See Baudry, "Le Creux de Breuil"; White,
DGFA-1 English, 219; note
24a, above. Nicolas had returned
to La Rochelle after the encounter with Thomas, saw to Thomas's
conviction & imprisonment, & evidently had retrieved his wife & in-laws
to join him in Acadia. Also with Nicolas, his wife, & Motin
in-laws were, according to Griffiths, 54, cousin Jacqueline de Glaisnee; Jehanne Billard, a young
girl, perhaps a servant; & "thirteen other migrants--farmers,
carpenters, someone with a particular knowledge of how to construct a
mill, and one lumberman (fauder de bois)." See also White, DGFA-1 English, 262. Baudry, "Le Creux de Breuil," says Le Creux brought
aboard the St.-Jean, as Baudry calls the ship, "a contingent of
12 settlers (6 of them farm-labourers) who had been recruited at Dijon."
Were these migrant/settlers intended for the fort at Canso, or was Le
Creux setting up his own settlement somewhere else in the colony?
Baudry says only that "Le Creux made several more voyages to France to
carry shipments of pelts and to bring back supplies for the colony.
In 1642 he went halves with d'Aulnay to buy a ship of 180 tons, the
Georges. Despite his links with Acadia, he [Le Creux] seems to
have left it for good some years before 1650 [the year of brother-in-law
d'Aulnay's death]. He was still living in 1652 and resided at
Saint-Eusèbe-sur-Bois in Burgundy." See also White, DGFA-1
English, 220. One wonders what Le Creux, if
he was still living, would have thought of his sister-in-law Jeanne's marriage to
Charles La Tour, Le Creux's former enemy, in Feb 1653.
27b.
Quotation from Taylor, D. J., "Bruns-Lebruns," 33.
See also <acadian-home.org>;
Arsenault, Généalogie, 448, 554, 566, 673, 718, 816; Clark, A.
H., Acadia, 397-400; D'Entremont,
"Origin of the Acadians"; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
65-66; White,
DGFA-1, 221-22, 289, 666-67, 691-92, 1125, 1288, 1535-36.
Lucie LeBlanc Consentino's website <acadian-home.org>,
contains an English translation of the St.-Jehan's passenger
list, found in the records of the Department of Charente-Maritime at La
Rochelle & in the Paris archives. On it can be found Isaac
Pesselin (from Champagne), Pierre Martin (laborer ... from
Bourgueil), & Guillaume Trahan (an "officer of the cavalry" ...
also from Bourgueil), but not Antoine Bourg, Vincent Brun,
Jean Gaudet, or François Gautrot. White,
DGFA-1, 221-22, 289, 666-67, 691-92, does not include
Bourg, Brun, Gaudet, & Gautrot as passengers
aboard St.-Jehan. Arsenault, Généalogie, Port-Royal
section, 448, 554, 566, 718, says Bourg, Gaudet,
Gautrot, & Pesseley arrived in "vers 1636."
He includes
in footnotes only Martin & Trahan on a 1 Apr 1636 La Rochelle
passenger list. See Généalogie, 673n85, 816n144. Unlike White,
Arsenault does not name the vessel that left La Rochelle on that date. Were
the presence of Bourg, Brun, Gaudet, & Gautrot
aboard the St.-Jehan simply the product of family legend? No matter, they
were among
the first recorded French settlers in Acadia. See note
44, below.
White attributes origins in France only
to Martin, Pesseley, & Trahan, & gives only their
places of marriage or where they lived. White is silent
on the origins, including places of marriages & residence, for Bourg,
Brun, Gaudet, & Gautrot, hence the qualified
language in this narrative. See DGFA-1, 221, 289, 666, 691, 1125,
1288, 1535-36. Arsenault, Généalogie, 718, says
Pesseley married his wife, Barbe Bajolet dite Bayol,
in c1641, which would have been in Acadia. White, DGFA-1,
1288, calls Pesseley a merchant of Piney, trois lieues de
Troyes, in Champagne. Calling his wife Barbe Bajolet, daughter
of Antoine premier muletier de la reine Marie de Médicis & Jeanne
Baudinet, Arsenault says they married in c1629, which would have been in
France. See also note 27a, above.
La Chaussée, in the Loudunais region of
northeastern Poitou, north-central France, is only a few miles southeast of Martaizé,
with the village of Aulnay lying between them. South LA linguist & cultural scholar Barry Ancelet, in Zachary
Richard's video, "Against the Tide," asserts that many of the early
Acadian settlers knew one another before they reached Acadia, that about
60 percent of them came from a 20-mile radius around a small community
in northern Poitou. He must be referring to Martaizé or La Chausée. For the significance of these towns in
Acadia's early settlement, see the list in
Appendex
of the names, known dates of arrival, origins, & occupations of the
pioneers of Acadia. Note also this author's caveat in that
appendix about research
on the origins of the first Acadians: "The reader must keep in
mind that the years of arrival and the origins of the patriarchs of
Acadia given in this history come mostly from Arsenault, Généalogie,
whose dearth of documentation renders the information not much more than
speculation. The arrival dates and origins in White, DGFA-1,
based on more careful research, are used when they are available. Arsenault's information is
based largely on the research of Ms. Geneviève Massignon, whose findings
have been questioned by Acadian historian/genealogist, Rev. Clarence d'Entremont." See also
A. H. Clark; Griffiths; note 44,
below. Fr. d'Entremont reminds us that
the Port-Royal church records before 1700, which could have provided the
true origins of the Acadian pioneers, were burned, and this information
is therefore lost to history. He contends that Ms. Massignon's
basic assumption about the origins of the early Acadians--that people
with names similar to the early Acadians lived in the area from which
the sieur d'Aulnay recruited the first settlers of the colony,
particularly Martaizé and La Chaussée in the Loudunais--is a flawed
assumption. First, Razilly, not d'Aulnay, recruited the earliest
Acadian families; second, the names of these families can be found in
other regions of France as well."
See
Appendix
& below
for more on Antoine Bourg, Vincent Brun, Jean Gaudet,
& François Gautrot.
28.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 251; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 57; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:594. See also
Arsenault,
History, 25; Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:503-05; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 90, 93; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 12;
Griffiths, 58-62; MacBeath, 1:595; MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour, 69-70, 209-10n12; Parkman, France & England,
1:1075-95; White,
DGFA-1 English, 300.
Detailed accounts of the struggle between
La Tour & d'Aulnay can be found in Parkman, 1:1075-95, part of chap. 1 & all of chap. 2 of his volume, The Old
Regime in Canada; Baudry, 1:503-05; Griffiths, 57-62; MacBeath, 1:594-95; MacDonald.
Clark, A. H., 90, says of the conflict between La Tour &
d'Aulnay: "The history of these twenty-two years [1632-54] has
often been written as a sort of opéra bouffe libretto based on
the vendetta between Charles de La Tour
and Charles de Menou d'Aulnay for control of the fur trade. It is
true enough that the energies of the settlers were greatly occupied by
that miniscule civil war between rival fur-trading seigneurs.
The struggle originated and persisted for many reasons: because of
the inconsistency and inaccuracy in the statement of terms of the
grants, or the failure to annul earlier rights in granting new ones;
because the responsible people in Paris knew little of Acadia and cared
even less; because Acadia was too far away for adequate enforcement of
authority from France or Quebec; and because in Acadia there was no
single authority. Of importance to us is that this armed feud
diverted so much attention from the actual settlement and its
agricultural activities that the few settlers brought out, when they
were not drafted for service on attack or forced to be active in their
own defense, were often left to fend for themselves." Second set
of italics added. Clark, A. H., 93n39, writing in the late
1960s, says that "Feelings among historians partial to one side or the
other still run as high as those of the early seventeenth-century
antagonists themselves. A bibliography of the literary feud would
be long." He then highlights some of more notable sources on the
La Tour/d'Aulnay feud. MacBeath, 1:594, agrees that the conflict "paralyzed colonization."
That having been said, it must not be
forgotten that La Tour had lived in Acadia since his teens--2
decades before d'Aulnay set foot in the colony. La Tour
had married in Acadia in the 1620s and was raising a family there.
Only he had maintained a lingering French presence on the peninsula
during the recent troubles with England. His role in the early
history of the colony brings to mind that of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne,
sieur de Bienville, in LA during the following century.
Bienville came to LA at age 19 and did not retire to France until 1743,
after 44 years in the colony. Both men held the title of governor,
& the histories of their respective colonies were irrevocably shaped by their
actions. See note 25, above; Book
Six.
28a.
See Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 57; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB,
1:594; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 69-70, 76-77,
83-85.
28b.
Quotations from
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 87; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 58; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB,
1:594.
See also Arsenault, History, 25; J.-Roger Comeau, "Gargot de La Rochette, Nicolas," in DCB,
1:323, &
online;
Griffiths, 481;
MacDonald, 90-92; White,
DGFA-1 English, 259.
MacDonald, 90, says Gargot went to Boston in
Nov 1641, but Griffiths says Jul 1642. Comeau gives no date for
the mission. Gargot's father, Hilaire, was a Huguenot
merchant from La Rochelle but, according to Comeau, Nicolas converted to
Catholicism. How else would he have been allowed in Acadia during
the time of Richelieu? Nevertheless, Griffiths, 481n59, says,
"There seems to be some confusion as to whether he converted to
Catholicism or not," & cites, along with Comeau, Clarence d'Entremont's
Histoire du Cap-Sable. Nicolas lost his leg & earned the
dit Jambe de Bois, or Peg-leg, in battle in Lorraine in 1645, after
he left Acadia. See Comeau. Arsenault does not mention Gargot
but says
La Tour used his agent Desjardins in France, as well as Huguenot
merchants in La Rochelle, to make the deal with the New English but that
the Boston merchants rejected the offer. Griffiths, 58, says
nothing of rejection by Winthrop & the Puritan authorities.
MacDonald, 91-92, says the Puritans agreed to direct trade between
La Tour & Boston but not to trade with England via Boston, &
certainly not to military assistance.
An indication of La Tour's
determination at
the time to maintain his presence in Acadia was his employment thru indenture, dated 7 Apr 1642, of
26-year-old salt-maker Pierre Morin from Coulonges-les-Royaux, near
Niort, Poitou, "for service on the Saint John River." See White,
DGFA-1 English, 259. MacDonald, 92, says in the
spring of 1642, Desjardins sent La Tour not only a re-supply, but
also 26 tradesmen, including a "baker, cook, apothecary, armourer,
upholsterer, tailor, cobbler, salt-maker [Morin], slate-layer, ship's
carpenter and sailor," all engaged to serve for 3 years.
28c.
Quotations from Parkman, France & England, 1:1080; Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:504; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 88, 90,
93. See also Arsenault,
History, 25; Baudry, 1:505; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 63; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 87, 89, 92, 94, 147; Parkman, 1:1081, 1102;
White, DGFA-1, 1024-26; White,
DGFA-1 English, 251.
MacBeath says "Under instructions from the king to put Fort
La Tour in the hands
of 'faithful personages,' he [d'Aulnay] captured and burned the post,
keeping all the goods he found there for himself," but gives no date for
the attack. MacBeath certainly was referring to Charles's fort at
Cap-Sable, not to his fort
at the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean. See note
22, above.
For more on Claude de Launay-Rasilly, see note
25, above. Evidently a half dozen
years after his brother Isaac's death, Claude was ready to sever his
ties with Acadia. One wonders what d'Aulnay had to pay for these
"rights" in the colony.
Baudry, 1:504, calls Le Borgne
"a Huguenot merchant of La Rochelle." Mason Wade, "Le Borgne,
Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:433-35, &
online, says nothing of Le Borgne
being a Huguenot. Parkman, 1:1102, calls him, simply, "a merchant
of La Rochelle." Perhaps Baudry assumed that Le Borgne's
being from La Rochelle made him a Protestant, but, according to Wade,
Le Borgne was a native of Calais who married a woman from La
Rochelle & settled there. Griffiths mentions Le
Borgne's birth city & says his wife was "the daughter of a
well-connected family, that of Jacques Françoys, noble 'de la
robe' and widely related to others of similar circumstance."
Griffiths says Le Borgne became not only a prosperous merchant but also
served "as the consular magistrate of La Rochelle from 1643 to 1672."
Erskine says Le Borgne was
d'Aulnay's "principal creditor" & that the governor had offered to the
merchant "five years of the profits of the seigniory" in Acadia. Le Borgne fathered 14 children, including 10 sons, so he was
wealthy in more ways than one. See White, DGFA-1, 1024-26.
Only second son Alexandre de Bélisle retained an association with
Acadia.
Baudry, 1:504-05, details d'Aulnay's trips to France
& back during the early 1640s. Arsenault says
that "During his frequent trips to France, d'Aulnay recruited many
families and hired hands for Acadia from around Touraine, Poitou, Anjou,
Saintonge and Champagne," which would have made him a very busy fellow
there. See also MacDonald, 94.
28d.
Quotations from Parkman, France & England, 1:1080; White, DGFA-1
English, 113, 274, 324. See also Arsenault, History,
25; Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:503; MacBeath, "Marot,"
in DCB, 1:490; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 70, 78-81,
85-87.
28e.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 58. See
also Griffiths, 57; George MacBeath, "Jacquelin, Françoise-Marie," in DCB,
1:383, &
online;
MacBeath, La Tour, Charles,"
in DCB, 1:595;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 24-30, 52-55, 72-77, 79, 84,
184-96, 203; Parkman, France & England, 1:1070-71; White,
DGFA-1, 869, 1170, 1433-39; White, DGFA-1 English, 183; note 27a,
above.
Parkman says of La Tour's
remarriage: "As D'Aunay had taken a wife, so too would La Tour,
and he charged his agent Desjardins to bring one from France. The
agent acquitted himself of his delicate mission, and shipped to Acadia
one Marie Jacquelin, daughter of a barber of Mans, if we may believe the
questionable evidence of his rival." We may not. Parkman
continues: "Be this as it may, Marie Jacquelin proved a prodigy of
mettle and energy, espoused her husband's cause with passionate
vehemence, and backed his quarrel like the intrepid Amazon she was.
She joined La Tour at Fort St. Jean, and proved the most strenuous of
allies." Charles married Françoise-Marie, daughter of
French physician Jacques Jacquelin, in
1640, 2 years after d'Aulnay married. Marie was age 38 when she married the 47-year-old widower.
She gave Charles his first son, born at Fort La Tour, formerly Fort
Ste.-Marie, Rivière St.-Jean,
in 1641, but the boy died young; his name, in fact, has not survived.
See note 30h, below. Most of Charles's
children, & his 2 surviving sons, sprang from his third wife, the
widow of d'Aulnay. See White, DGFA-1, 869, 1433-39, who, on 869
& 1433, calls Françoise-Marie Jacquelin's
father "noble homme Jacques docteur en médicine," resident
of Nogent-le-Rotrou, says her mother was Hélène Lerminier, & places the
marriage in 1640.
Nogent-le-Rotrou is on the Huisine River west of Chartres, in lower
Perche, now in the Department of Eure-et-Loir, northwestern France, not far from Le
Mans. White, DGFA-1 English, 183, asserts: "'Charles
de Menou d'Aulnay claimed that she (Françoise-Marie
Jacquelin) was the
daughter of a barber from Le Mans and that she became an actress at
Paris, but there is no proof of that and it seems more probable that she
was the daughter of a member of the lesser nobility.'" White adds: "'The marriage contract made before
notaries at Paris, on December 31, 1639, between Charles de La Tour
and Marie-Françoise Jacquelin, shows that the future bribe descended
from a family whose place of origin, social status, and occupation were
all completely different from those imagined by Charles d'Aulnay and the
romantic writers, and that she had lived up to that time in most
respectable circumstances.'" See MacDonald, 24-30, 52-55,
84, 194-96, 203n2, for the facts, & fictions, of Marie-Françoise's
life; & MacDonald, 72-76, 184-93, for details on Charles's efforts to secure a
wife via his agent Desjardins, the agent's success at securing
bride's & her parents' consent to the union, & a translation
of the marriage contract. Interestingly, according to MacDonald,
72, Charles's declaration of power of attorney for Desjardins, drawn
up at Cap-Sable on 19 Aug 1639, left the bride's name blank, implying that Charles left
it up to Desjardins to find him a suitable wife in France. MacBeath,
"Jacquelin," confirms that
La Tour
solicited marriage to Françoise-Marie in Paris via his agent,
Desjardins. MacBeath, "Jacquelin," &
"La Tour," say the wedding ceremony was performed at Port-Royal
"that same year," but White, DGFA-1, 1433, says it was
done at Fort St.-Louis, which was Charles's fort at Cap-Sable, as
stipulated in the marriage contract.
MacDonald, 77, agrees. Griffiths, 58, says they married
in 1639. Considering what was happening
between La Tour & d'Aulnay in 1639-40, Port-Royal would have been
the last place La Tour would have chosen for such an important
ceremony. More likely, a priest from Port-Royal journeyed to
Cap-Sable to officiate at the governor's wedding.
For Desjardins full name & naval rank, see
MacDonald, 185, a translated copy of La Tour's marriage
contract.
28f.
Quotations from Parkman, France & England, 1:1080; MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour, 78. See also Baudry, "Menou," in DCB,
1:503; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 71; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles," in DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 77, 80, 82, 206;
Parkman, 1:1079; notes 19c &
28, above.
Baudry insists La Tour
made the first aggressive move in the conflict by inciting the Indians
against d'Aulnay, calls the struggle between the rivals "a minor war,"
says it "half ruined" both of them as well as burdened the colony, &
points out that in 1640, during the conflict, "the Dutch made a number
of forays on the Acadian coasts." A d'Aulnay descendant, writing two centuries later, insists that
La Tour, having lost his patience with d'Aulnay, had gone to
Port-Royal "to stir D'Aunay's[sic] soldiers to mutiny; then
set on his Indian friends to attack a boat in which was one of D'Aunay's[sic] soldiers and
a Capuchin friar, the soldier being killed, though the friar
escaped." The fatal incident was supposed to have occurred on Rivière
St.-Jean, which d'Aulnay now considered a part of his realm.
Quotation from Parkman, 1:1079. MacDonald, 77, examines this incident, but MacBeath says nothing of it. Parkman, 1:1080, citing a d'Aulnay source, relates another incident that attempts to blame La
Tour for the troubles in Acadia: "About this time D'Aunay[sic]
heard that the English at Plymouth meant to try to recover Penobscot
[Pentagouët] from his hands. On this he sent nine soldiers thither
with provisions and munitions. La Tour seized them on the
way, carried them to Fort St. Jean, and, according to his enemies,
treated them like slaves. D'Aunay[sic] heard nothing of
this till four months after, when, told of it by Indians, he sailed in
person to Penobscot with two small vessels, reinforced the place, and
was on his way back to Port Royal when La Tour met him with two
armed pinnaces." MacDonald, 78, addresses the incident, but,
again, MacBeath says nothing of
it.
Griffiths points out that, during the
long conflict between d'Aulnay & La Tour, d'Aulnay favored
the Capuchins, who had come to New France with Razilly in
1632, but that La Tour favored their fellow Franciscans, the Récollets, who had come to New France with Champlain in 1615
& served in Acadia from 1620-24 before returning to Québec, which
they left in 1629 & where they were not allowed to return. See
also MacDonald, 82, 208n6; notes 15b &
21a, above. One wonders when the
Récollets, banned by Richelieu from returning to Canada, came to Acadia.
Did La Tour bring them over?
28g.
Quotations from Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:504; Parkman, France & England, 1:1081;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 97. See also MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 96, 98, 103-04; White, DGFA-1 English,
222.
White, DGFA-1 English, 222, says Martin Le Godelier "'was related through a family of La Trembais--Robin
to Charles de Menou d'Aulnay, whose grandmother bore this name,'" &
that, "According to the research of Bujold and Caillebeau [Bujold, N., &
M. Caillebeau, Les Origines françaises des prémières familles
acadiennes, Poitiers, Imprimerie l'Union, 1979], it was Le
Godelier, and not d'Aulnay, who recruited colonists for Acadia in the
vicinity of La Chaussée, particularly between the years 1636 and 1642."
One wonders if it was Le Godelier who recruited some of the passengers
aboard St.-Jehan. White says that
on c. 16 May 1642, "Le Godelier and d'Aulnay left for Acadia on the ship
Le Saint-Hélie. Le Godelier had contributed to the fitting
out of this vessel." For details on the Vierge, see
MacDonald, 98.
28h.
Quotations from Arsenault, History, 25; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
100. See also Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:504; MacBeath, "Jacquelin,"
in DCB, 1:383; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 98-99, 100-01; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:62; Parkman, France & England,
1:1081-82.
28i.
Quotation from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 104. See also MacBeath, "Jacquelin,"
in DCB, 1:383; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 100-05, 107.
For the profile of 1 of the Swiss engagés
who signed up to work for La Tour & the skillsets of other
workers sent to him in 1643, see MacDonald, 102. They included
soldiers--a cannoneer, a sergeant, 2 corporals, "and several sailors and
soldiers"--carpenters, masons, a pharmacist, a surgeon to join another 1
already at St.-Jean, a tailor, a domestic servant, & "a valet de chambre."
29.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 106, 112-13,
116-17, 119.
See also Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 58-60; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora,
23; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 97, 107-11, 114-15, 118 120-21; Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:62; Parkman,
France & England, 1:1080, 1083-89; note
22, above.
MacDonald, 107-11, offers a detailed
account of La Tour's initial encounter with Winthrop & his family
on Winthrop's private island in Boston harbor. Her chap. 10 details La Tour's month-long visit to the
New-English capital, including encounters between the Puritans & their
French guests & the stark contrasts between Boston, with its burgeoning
population, & the virtual wilderness of Canada & Acadia of the early
1640s. Parkman, 1:1083-89, also details La Tour's
stay in Boston &, as usual, offers the grand perspective. Parkman, 1:1087
says that, while rejecting
La Tour's claims to being a Protestant, the Puritans of Boston
"approved [Mme. La Tour] as a sound Protestant 'of excellent
virtues.'" Griffiths, 58-60,
also offers details of La Tour's venture in Boston, including
perspective on the religious "divergence" of that time, the debate in
the Boston assembly, the Puritan fear of d'Aulnay's growing power, & the
assistance given to La Tour. Griffiths, 60, notes that the
governor's son, John Winthrop, Jr., was a business partner of La Tour's
new creditors, Hawkins & Gibbons, who were involved in the fur trade
along the ME coast & provided La Tour with L940, 50 crewmen, & 38
cannon. Griffiths, 60, says that La Tour left Boston on
14 Jul 1643 with 270 men. Hodson says 300 "Massachusetts volunteers" aided La Tour in breaking
d'Aulnay's blockade.
For details on Edward Gibbons's past, see MacDonald,
97.
MacDonald, 119, says the rent for the 4 New
English vessels was L940 for 2 months & that La Tour would have
to pay the New English volunteers "four shillings a day for a total of
L272, plus the cost of feeding them"--all to be financed by furs, not
cash.
29a.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 122-23; Parkman, France & England,
1:1090. See also Arsenault, History, 26-27; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 60; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594.
For Poutrincourt's mill, see note
10a, above.
29b.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 124; Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:504-05. See also MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:594; MacDonald, 125-26; Parkman, France & England,
1:1090.
30.
Quotations from Parkman, France & England, 1:1092; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
139, 141, 148. See also Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:504-05; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 60-61; MacBeath, "Jacquelin,"
in DCB, 1:383; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:594; MacBeath, "Marot,"
in DCB, 1:490; MacDonald, 124-30, 138-40, 142, 149-50,
152-53; Parkman, 1:1093-94.
MacDonald, 127, says d'Aulnay leased the
Grand Cardinal, captained by Goorie Sonnebelle, in La Rochelle for an astonishing 50,000 livres,
which, says Baudry, he obtained from Emmanuel Le Borgne.
Parkman, 1:1094, says d'Aulnay's largest vessel, likely the Grand
Cardinal, was a "ship of three hundred tons." Baudry, naming the vessel, says it was rated at 200 tons.
MacDonald, 128, speculates that Charles
La Tour's stepbrother, François Goudart de Rainville, may have
served as security for Françoise-Marie during her sojourn in France.
30a.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune &
La Tour, 160, 164, 167; Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:505. See also Arsenault, History, 27; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
61; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 23; MacBeath, "Jacquelin," in DCB,
1:383; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595; MacDonald, 159,
161-63, 165-66, 168, 183; Parkman, France & England, 1:1091-95;
White,
DGFA-1, 1288-89, 1321-26; White, DGFA-1 English,
28, 183, 220, 274, 300-01; note 27a, above.
Arsenault says there were 50 men with Madame La
Tour at Fort St.-Jean when the siege began. Parkman's number--45--is used here.
Arsenault says d'Aulnay lost 33 men in the assault. Baudry,
"Menou," agreeing with Parkman's number of men fighting with Madame La
Tour, says d'Aulnay lost 8 men in the siege/assault & "paid
compensation to their families." Griffiths, 61, says d'Aulnay's force numbered 200.
Parkman, 1:1095, adds that d'Aulnay "mustered every man about Port
Royal" to raise such a force. See also MacDonald, 163-64. Quoting MacBeath, "Jacquelin,"
Griffiths, 61, says "'all the soldiers captured (there) were hanged, except for
one man ... who had agreed to be the executioner of his comrades.'"
See also Hodson. Arsenault, 27, & Parkman,
1:1095, citing Nicolas Denys, say Madame La Tour was
forced to witness the hangings "with 'a noose [or halter] around her
neck,'" but Parkman doubts the veracity of the story. Baudry,
following Parkman, 1:1095, insists that
"a few" of La Tour's men were pardoned before the others were
hanged. MacDonald, 166, gives the partial names of some of
La Tour's men: "Hérier, the cannoneer; the former sergeant
Beauregard; corporals Savrignac and Desmarais; Desloriers who
'understood fortifications'; young Bellerose who signed without so much
as a pair of shoes for his feet.... Apothecary LeBlanc...," none
of whom are mentioned as having been pardoned. MacDonald, 167, mentions "the forty-seven-year-old Swiss, Hans Vandre...," who
was pardoned. White, DGFA-1 English,
28, provides the name of the executioner of his fellow defenders & adds that he had come to Acadia in 1641
"a mason, native of Beauvais-sur-Mer, in Poitou," & worked under
contract for Charles La Tour. Please note that this
Bernard was not the progenitor of the Acadian Bernards
who emigrated to LA in the 1760s. That would have been René Bernard,
who came to Acadia in the 1680s, decades after the struggle between
La Tour & d'Aulnay. See note 237,
below; Book Three.
Isaac Pesseley had testified against
La Tour in d'Aulnay's inquiry at Port-Royal on 14 Jul 1640 &
remained a staunch ally of the governor. See note
28d, above. Killed in the final assault,
Pesseley left
behind a wife & 8 children, the youngest of whom was a newborn daughter
named Marie. His wife Barbe Bajolet evidently returned to
France soon after Isaac's death & remarried to Martin Lefebvre de
Montespy at La Rochelle in Jan 1647, & remarried again to Savinien de
Courpon, widower of Olive de Laubaure, at La Rochelle in October 1654. Neither of Pesseley's 2 sons--Étienne,
born at Piney, Champagne, in Oct 1630, & Gilles, born in Acadia in
c1642--created families of their own. Twenty years after Isaac's death,
in c1665, youngest daughter Marie, who had returned to Acadia, married Jean Pitre,
an edged tool maker who had come to Acadia during the late 1650s, probably
at Port-Royal. With
him she helped create a vigorous line of Acadian settlers, so the blood,
at least, of her father's family survived in the colony. See White,
DGFA-1, 1288-89, 1321-26; White,
DGFA-1 English, 220, 274; note 77,
below;
Pitre
family page.
30b.
Quotation from
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 132. See also Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
60-61; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595; MacDonald, 133-34.
Winthrop served as governor of the
Massachusetts Bay colony from its creation in 1630 until 1634, again
from 1637 to 1640 & from 1642 to 1644. He would return to the
governorship in 1646 & serve until his death in Mar 1649. See online Wikipedia, "John Winthrop."
Griffiths says La Tour
was back in Boston during the early spring of 1644 & remained there
until early Jul. MacDonald, 132, says he went to Salem to meet
Endecott in mid-July & was still there in Aug. Whichever dates are
correct, d'Aulnay would still have been in
France & Françoise-Marie still at sea.
30c.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune
& La Tour, 141; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 61; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595. See
also Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:505; Griffiths, 60;
MacBeath, La Tour, Charles," 1:594; MacDonald, 133-34, 142-46,
161-63;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:62.
Griffiths, 61, says the 18 Oct 1644
treaty between the Puritans & d'Aulnay, which recognized Acadia as
part of New France, did not specify boundaries between New France & New
England but "implicitly assumed that Pentagöuet and points northeast
would remain to the French and Pemaquid and points southwest to the
English."
Fr. François-Marie Ignace would be the priest who officiated at
d'Aulnay's funeral 6
years later. See note 34, below.
For a heated exchange of letters between
d'Aulnay & the Boston Puritans during Mar 1645, several months after
Madame La Tour's return to the St.-Jean fort, see MacDonald, 161-63.
30d.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 134-35. See
also Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:505; Faulkner & Faulkner, The French at Pentagoet, 19,
31-32n52; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:594-95; MacDonald, 136-38.
MacBeath says nothing of La
Tour's trade deal with Winthrop, Jr., et al., nor does Baudry mention
d'Aulnay's incarceration of Shurt, et al.
30e.
Quotation from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 144.
30f.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 143, 152, 155-57.
See also Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:505; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
61; MacBeath, "Jacquelin,"
in DCB, 1:383; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595; MacDonald, 145-51,
153-54, 158-59; Parkman, France & England, 1:1093-94.
For a poetic description of late winter
(Feb-Mar) 1645 at Fort Ste.-Marie, see MacDonald, 158-59.
30g.
Quotations from
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 173-74. See also
Arsenault, History, 27; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
61; Hodson, Acadian
Diaspora, 23; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB,
1:595; MacDonald, 172, 175-77, 217n3, chap. 14; Parkman,
France & England, 1:1098ff; White, DGFA-1 English,
301; online Wikipedia, "Newfoundland
Colony."
Griffiths says La Tour
spent the winter of 1645-46 in Boston. Arsenault says after he lost his
wife & his fort, "Latour roved the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a
privateer, before taking refuge in Québec with Governor Montmagny."
MacBeath says Montmagny,
Champlain's successor, not only
welcomed La Tour to Québec, but gave him lodging at the Château
St.-Louis. MacBeath continues: "During the four years that
followed he was busily occupied in trade, assisted the Jesuits in their
missionary efforts, and on at least one occasion fought with the Hurons
against the Iroquois." In other words, he abandoned Acadia &
became a Canadian, at least for a while. Hodson describes
Charles's exile as "awkward." White says Charles stood godfather for 2 children at Québec on 27 Sep
1646 & 7 Mar 1648. Detailed accounts of La Tour's adventures after his loss of the
fort and "his indomitable wife" are in MacDonald, chap. 14; Parkman.
MacDonald, 175-76, speculates that La
Tour may have visited Nicolas Denys at the latter's new base
on Île Miscou on his way up to Québec during the spring or summer of
1646, as well as Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island, where he
witnessed the marriage of Marguerite Barre, mother of René Guignard, &
Jacques Maillet, père. For Denys return to Acadia in
c1645, see note 23, below.
30h.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 169-71.
See also Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 23; MacBeath, "Jacquelin," in DCB,
1:383; MacBeath, "La
Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595; MacDonald, 83, 95;
Parkman, France &
England, 1:1095; White, DGFA-1, 1433-34.
White says La
Tour's wife died in May 1645. MacBeath, "Jacquelin,"
agrees. Hodson says
she died a few weeks after d'Aulnay's assault at Rivière St.-Jean
"seemingly of natural causes." Parkman says d'Aulnay "left [her] at liberty" after he captured the fort but that
after being "detected in an attempt to correspond with her husband by
means of an Indian, she was put into confinement; on which, according to
D'Aunay[sic]'s reporter, 'she fell ill with spite and rage,' and
died within three weeks, after, as he tells us, renouncing her heresy in
the chapel of the fort."
Parkman notes that "Madame de
la Tour's son, a mere child," was in the fort at the time of the
attack. According to White, this son, her
only child, whose name has been lost to history, was born at "fort
La
Tour, rivière St-Jean" in c1641 & died young. The boy would have
been 4 or 5 when his mother died. See also MacBeath, "La
Tour"; MacDonald, 83, 95. MacDonald, 171, says that, after he buried Madame La Tour, "D'Aulnay sent
her son back to France in the care of her waiting woman, where the boy
vanished from history." One thing is certain, this first of
Charles La Tour's 3 sons did not establish a family
line in Acadia. See White.
31. See
Baudry, Menou," in DCB, 1:505; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 93-94;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 61-62; MacBeath, "Denys,"
in DCB, 1:257; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 174-75; Parkman, France & England,
1:1091-92, 1096-97; White, DGFA-1, 487-88; note
30g, above.
Parkman details d'Aulnay's successful peace missions to Boston in 1644
and again in 1646 conducted by a Capuchin friar dressed as a gentleman,
"one Monsieur Marie"--Capuchin Fr.
François-Marie Ignace de Paris. See note
30c, above.
Denys's second, third, fourth, & fifth
children were born in Sep 1644, June 1645, Sep 1646, & Aug 1647,
respectively, but they were baptized at La Rochelle in Sep 1644, Aug
1647, Aug 1647, & Aug 1647, so Nicolas evidently took his wife &
youngest children to Acadia in c1645 but again retreated to La Rochelle
after he lost his post at Miscou. See
White. MacBeath, "Denys," speculates
that after he was driven from his post, "There is a possibility that ...
Denys built a trading post on the Miramichi," down the Gulf of St.
Lawrence shore from Miscou. If this implies that Denys remained in
Acadia after losing the posts at Miscou, the baptisms of his children
seem to say otherwise.
For Fort St.-Pierre, see note
24b, above.
32.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 62. See also Arsenault,
History, 28; Baudry, "Menou,"
in DCB, 1:505; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 93;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 486; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
174-75, 177-78; Parkman, France & England, 1:1099-1100; White, DGFA-1 English, 251.
Not until Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661 did Louis XIV, now age 23, rule without a chief minister.
He employed, instead, a High Council of 3 members. See note
39b, below.
Parkman,
1:1100, concludes: "Acadia, in short, was made an
hereditary fief, and D'Aunay[sic] and his heirs became lords of a domain as
large as a European kingdom."
Arsenault mentions a concession to Denys in
d'Aulnay's
new grant. Parkman, Baudry, & Griffiths say nothing of it. Baudry details
d'Aulnay's forays in the mid-1640s
against other competitors in the fur trade, including fishing vessels
from the Basque region, Bordeaux, & Brittany. See also
MacDonald, 174-75.
The first "enumeration" of families at
Port-Royal would not occur until 1671, & only 260 habitants would
appear in that census, giving one an idea of how slowly the agricultural
component of the colony grew. See note
43b, below.
Baudry says Le Borgne traveled to
Port-Royal to confront d'Aulnay about the unpaid debts, amounting to
200,000 livres by 1648, but that d'Aulnay sent the merchant back
to France with an empty ship. D'Aulnay then found other suppliers
among the merchants of Nantes & Bayonne.
For mention of d'Aulnay's will, dated 20 Feb
1649 & 20 Jan
1650, see MacDonald, 178, for the first date; & White for the second.
33.
Quotations from Erskine, Nova Scotia, 13-14; Fischer,
Champlain's Dream, 486; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 49.
See also Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:503;
Bleakney, Sods, Soil, & Spades, 5-6, 46; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
53-55, 87, 101, 103, 158; Erskine, 17; Faragher, 48, 50; Fischer, 34,
489-94, chap. 2; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 67-69; Historical Atlas of Canada,
1: plate 29;
Hodson, Acadian Diaspora,
25-26, 219;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 68, 85, 151; Book Two.
Clark, A. H., 53-55, discusses
dyking in the context of Acadian soil fertility. Faragher,
48-50, details the construction of aboiteaux, & also says on 49:
"Although [Nicolas] Denys attributed the diking to d'Aulnay, it is
doubtful that the lieutenant-governor had much to do with it."
Erskine, 17, seems to agree: "The peasants from Saintonge were
accustomed to the Dutch system of dyking marshlands where trees were
absent and soil was rich. In the absence of the seigneur
[d'Aulnay?] they began to take over the marshes, and for the first time
farming became profitable." Other sources place d'Aulnay closer to
the center of this important development in Acadian agriculture:
In a review of subsistence farming in the
Port-Royal valley from 1605-36, Clark, A. H., 87, says: "There is no
evidence whatsoever of the dyking of the salt marshes, the successful
establishment of fruit trees or, indeed, of any lasting improvements
that could be part of the capital equipment of subsequent settlers," so
the dyking operations would not have begun until the late 1630s at the
earliest, during d'Aulnay's time as Acadian proprietor. Clark, A.
H., 158, confirms that the dyking of the coastal marshlands had been
practiced "since soon after the reestablishment of settlement in the
Port Royal area in the late 1630s." See also Fischer, 489;
MacDonald, 68, 85. Cherubini, "The Peasant & Agriculture," 115, notes: "... in Brittany and Poitou ...
peasants successfully drained the salt marches...," so the technique was
well known in France. See also Fischer, 34.
Clark, A. H., 101, 103, published in 1968, adds:
"In speculation on the localities of the Acadians in France there has
been little advance beyond Sulte's conclusion of 1905 that '... their
dialect would indicate their place of origin to be in the neighborhood
of the Bay of Biscay and the mouth of the River Loire,' except for the
recent research of Geneviève Massignon [published in 1962] which implies that the
1632 settlers and perhaps others introduced by d'Aulnay before
mid-century, may have come chiefly from the Loudunais area in
northeastern Poitou (the northern part of the present Département of
Vienne). The discussion of origins is amplified in the Appendix
[his pp. 397-400], but the significance of Massignon's conclusions, if
we accept them, is that few of the earliest settlers would have come
from the vicinities where dyking of tidal marshes, recently introduced
from the Netherlands, was in progress at the time they left France.
Yet we may also suppose that the men even of inland Poitou, perhaps
occasionally following river tributaries flowing into the Loire and so
to Nantes and the sea, may well have known of such activity along the
coasts and estuaries from the Loire to the Gironde. Certainly
dyking got under way in the basin near the mouth of the Dauphin
(Annapolis) River within the first decade or two after d'Aulnay's move
to Port Royal." Clark, A. H., 103n66, adds: "In
the reign of Louis XIII (1610-43) extensive reclamation of tidal
marshlands by dyking had taken place near La Rochelle and in Saintonge
and Poitou, under the supervision of Dutch engineers. Many of the
Razilly group (or others) might have been familiar with the techniques."
Thus, the early Acadians from those regions would have had knowledge of
this process, either direct or observed, when they came to Port-Royal.
D'Aulnay certainly would have known if his farmers had such knowledge &
would have encouraged their efforts, especially after he would have seen
that the system worked. See Historical Atlas of Canada, for a detailed depiction of the extent of salt marsh dyking in
the valley of the Rivière-au-Dauphin by 1710. (For a critique of
the Massignon thesis, see
Appendix; note 44, below.)
Hodson, 25, says that,
in first days
of Port-Royal (1605-14),
Poutrincourt
"never knew what to make of these overgrown swamps" along the basin &
tilled, instead, the uplands,
but that
Champlain, a Saintongeois, "laid out a few 'gardens' near Port Royal, placing a 'little
sluice-way towards the shore, in order to draw off the water when I
wished.' In effect, he was experimenting with land reclamation
through dyking, using an earthen wall to keep the rising sea out but
including within it a mechanism that allowed him to drain fresh water
from the field at low tide." Hodson goes on:
"Champlain knew this process well. He came from the French town of Brouage near La Rochelle, site of an enormous dike separating solid
ground from the Marais de Brouage, a massive swamp studded with
evaporative salt pans." See also Fischer, chap. 2. Hodson adds: "Dikes like this one,
some built by Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries as early as the
eleventh century, littered the waterways of Poitou, Anjou, Saintonge,
Aunis, and Brittany. Many were destroyed during the Hundred Years'
War and the religious conflicts of the late sixteenth century, prompting
local reconstruction efforts that spread knowledge of diking techniques
and technologies among generations of Poitevin workers. In 1599,
Henry IV launched a centralized campaign to reclaim the marshes, but
political reversals and renewed fighting between Catholics and
Protestants stalled new projects until the late 1630s, when a royally
chartered company waded into the Marais Poitevin, a vast area of
swamps at the mouths of the Lay, Sèvre, and Vendée rivers. More
than fifteen thousand hectares would be diked and drained there over the
following twenty-five years, a run of activity that revived medieval
methods while refining new ones."
Champlain's mechanism may
have been a small-scale version of the Acadians' aboiteau.
See Fischer, 205; note 09, above.
But it
is doubtful, nor does Hodson even imply, that Champlain's early
experiment in land reclamation was known to the Acadian settlers
of the late 1630s. Hodson, 25-26, continues: "Perhaps
more to the point, many of the original settlers of Acadia, natives of
villages surrounding the Marais Poitevin, possessed some understanding
of the reclamation of tidal marshland--or, at the very least, they did
not reject the idea out of hand, as Poutrincourt and many other
Frenchmen did. Marine biologist Sherman Bleakney hints that the first Acadians' exposure to western France's engineered
marshes likely became a "source of the Acadians' conviction that equipped only with
an ox, a tiny spade, and a pitchfork, they could exclude the word's
highest tides" from the Bay of Fundy's shorelines. See also Hodson, 219n50.
Fischer, 489, hints that Charles La Tour may have
used the process on a small scale to create his gardens at Cap-Sable
in c1630, before Razilly & d'Aulnay came to the colony.
Clark, A. H., 103, says that at Port-Royal
d'Aulnay "developed two large farms for his own use worked by his own
engagés." Hodson, 25, says that "D'Aulnay seems to have
been steeped in these diking traditions" of his native Poitou, so the
governor may have experimented with dyking the salt
marshes on one or both of these farms. That he encouraged the
dyking operations cannot be doubted. See the account of his death
at note 34, below.
Baudry hints that the dyking
operation at Port-Royal may have been motivated not only by the lure of
better soil in the basin, but also by the need to produce an essential
product for the fishery & for life itself--salt. Baudry writes: "He [d'Aulnay] very soon
decided, no doubt in agreement with his chief [Claude de Rasilly, the
dead Isaac de Razilly's brother], to set up the colony's principal post at
Port-Royal. This site offered a double advantage: it had
fertile lands, which La Hève lacked, and it was hoped to establish
salt-pans there, in order to be able to gather near at hand the salt
needed for the fisheries. Claude de Rasilly sent salt-makers, and
the construction of the dikes was begun." Fischer, 489,
adds that Claude signed up 5 of these sauniers "in March, 1636,
at the Three Kings Tavern in La Rochelle," says Isaac de Razilly
had brought sauniers to Acadia in 1632, & adds: "Once
there, they discovered the fertility of deep topsoil in the tidal
marshes, and began to make salt marshes into arable fields. He
also brought saulniers[sic] from Touraine, where they were
well practiced in the dyking of freshwater marshes." See also
Bleakney; note
27a, above. Neither Baudry nor
Fischer explain
how sea salt leeching from the tidal marshes via an aboiteau
would provide, with the use of salt-pans, the essential ingredient for
the cod fishery. Perhaps at low tides, after a hard rain, the sauniers could capture the salt from the
water running out of the dyked fields via the sluices by the use of
salt-pans, though, over time, the amount of salt thus captured would
diminish, compelling the saltmakers to move on to newly-dyked fields.
Waste not, want not, the Acadians would say. Salt was a valuable
commodity in France; so much so that the government monopolized its
production & distribution. Salt would not have been less valuable
in Acadia, especially considering the importance of the cod fishery to
the colony's economy. What Baudry seems to be saying
is that d'Aulnay showed the settlers how to dyke the marshes to produce
salt for the fisheries, or, more likely, encouraged the ones who
understood the technique to commence dyking not only to create pasturage
& grain fields with which to feed the colony, but also to help the
sauniers capture salt for the fishery. Or perhaps Rasilly's
sauniers, encouraged by d'Aulnay, showed the settlers how to dyke the
marshes & produce salt for the fisheries, & the settlers figured out for
themselves how to create salt-free pasturage & crop soil with their
clever aboiteaux. No matter, perfection of the dyking
operation would have taken years & would not have been sustainable until
dozens of families lived in the basin & could have provided the
necessary manpower to build & sustain the aboiteaux. This was achieved by 1653, when
Denys observed the operation & attributed it to d'Aulnay. See
also Bleakney, 5-6; Fischer, 486, 489; note
39, below. Griffiths describes the extent, in time &
place, of marsh drainage in France, names 2 of the sauniers brought
to the colony by Razilly in 1636:--Jean Cendre & Pierre Gaboret of
the Bordeaux area--& describes Acadian dyke-building techniques.
For more details on the dyking process & its
affect on Acadian culture, see Bleakney; Fischer, 489-94, which offers, on 492, a
superb sketch of an aboiteau, drawn by modern-day Acadians
Bernard & Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc; Book Two. For details about the Bay
of Fundy tides that made the use of aboiteaux possible, see note
22c, above.
This researcher maintains that it is not possible to
overstate the role of dyking in the development of a unique Acadian
culture. See Book Two.
For the evolution & use of the word
aboiteau/x, see Book Two.
34.
Quotations from Hodson,
Acadian Diaspora, 23, 25; Parkman, France & England,
1:1100. See also Arsenault,
History, 28-29, 31; Baudry,
"Menou," in DCB, 1:505; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 93;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 61; MacDonald, Fortune &
La Tour, 69, 148, 177-78; Moody, Acadians, 17; White,
DGFA-1, 1170-72, DGFA-1 English, 251; notes 30c &
31, above.
Arsenault says d'Aulnay was traveling alone and
that he died of exhaustion and exposure.
Baudry says nothing of a companion being with
the governor, only that d'Aulnay
"was engaged upon clearing further tracts of land when he died
suddenly," that "His canoe capsized in the Port-Royal basin, and he died
of exhaustion after remaining an hour and a half in the icy water." Parkman says
d'Aulnay traveled with his valet, that they were "in a birch canoe
in the basin of Port Royal, not far from the mouth of the Annapolis,"
and that d'Aulnay died "not from drowning but from cold, for the water
still retained the chill of winter." MacDonald, 177, evidently follows Parkman. Erskine makes the remarkable assertion that "The servant who had been with
him [d'Aulnay] when the canoe upset had forgotten to report the matter."
Moody, agreeing with Parker, hints that the governor may have been
pushed from the canoe, an accusation this researcher has found nowhere
else; certainly not in Parker. Griffiths says d'Aulnay "drowned in a canoe accident on the Saint
John," perhaps a typographical error. Other sources
cited in this note--Arsenault; Baudry; A. H. Clark; Erskine; Hodson;
MacDonald; Parkman--say d'Aulnay died at Port-Royal.
D'Aulnay was age 46 at the time of his death.
He left his widow with 8 children, including 4 sons who perished on
French battlefields and 3 daughters who became nuns. None of his
children married or produced children of their own. See MacDonald,
178; Parkman,
1:1103; White,
DGFA-1, 1170-72, DGFA-1 English, 251. MacDonald, 69, notes,
without citation: "Apparently, d'Aulnay also had
other, earlier progeny, for New England historian Thomas Hutchinson
states that the Doneys, a Maine Métis family who figure in later
Indian uprisings, were descendants of the Acadian governor d'Aulnay."
See also MacDonald, 148. If so, they would have been his only
direct descendants. White, however, makes no note of
d'Aulnay's having other progeny, so this researcher ignores it
as well.
34a.
See Baudry, "Menou," 1:505-06; Parkman, France & England,
1101.
Baudry sums up d'Aulnay's contribution: "What
he achieved was appreciable. According to the testimony of the
earliest settlers, he had had three forts built, equipped with 60
cannon, and he maintained garrisons there. He had fetched some 20
families from France, and in order to establish them he had brought
grass-lands under cultivation, organized two farms at Port-Royal, and
cleared stretches of land at Pentagouët and the Saint John River.
To supply his settlers, he had three or four ships come each year from
France; he had two mills constructed, and built two small ships of 70
tons, five pinnaces, and several sloops. He had also established
two schools, and at his death he left a population of about 500 souls,
divided among four posts and served by 12 Capuchins." Baudry
concludes: "These results may seem rather slight, but they assume
considerable proportions when one remembers that d'Aulnay obtained them
by his own efforts, with no official help. Such achievements
betoken a high degree of intelligence and energy. While his rivals
were almost entirely concerned with trade, d'Aulnay's ambition was to
establish a lasting colony, and he realized that this could be done only
by settling families in the country and by giving them the means of
subsisting on the spot and by themselves, through the cultivation of the
land, through fishing, and through industry. The colony that he
left in Acadia was well rooted and vigorous enough to resist the English
occupation and the 20 years of neglect that followed. That is
enough for d'Aulnay to deserve consideration as a great colonizer and as
one of the first architects of the plan to give to the Atlantic
provinces a European population."
Parkman sums
up d'Aulnay's character: "He seems to have been a favorable
example of his class, loyal to his faith and his king, tempering pride
with courtesy, and generally true to his cherished ideal of the
gentilhomme Français. In his qualities, as in his birth, he
was far above his rival, and his death was the ruin of the only French
colony in Acadia that deserved the name."
34b.
See Clark,
A. H., Acadia, 90-95, 98, 264-65, 266 (Fig. 72, entitled "Cape
Breton to 1758, Early Eighteenth-Century Place Names); Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 63-64,
107; Lunn, "Denys (Denis) de La Trinité,"
in DCB, 1:261-62; MacBeath, "Denys," in DCB, 1:256-57; MacBeath, "Razilly,"
in DCB, 1:568;
Melanson, Cormier Genealogy, 11-12; White, DGFA-1, 488; White, DGFA-1 English, 105; notes 19,
24b,
36a, &
38, below; Books Two & Four.
Nicolas Denys's sixth & seventh children were
baptized at La Rochelle in Sep 1648 & Dec 1650, respectively, so he
likely did not return to Acadia from France until 1651, probably the
year he took over Fort St.-Pierre. See White, DGFA-1.
One would guess that after he learned of d'Aulnay's death, he wasted
little time returning to his holdings. Lunn, 1:262, says that "In 1650 he [older brother Simon] rejoined
his brother, moving his entire family to Acadia." This could mean
that, having heard of d'Aulnay's death, which occurred in May 1650, Nicolas could have
summoned his brother to Acadia to take advantage of the situation, or
that Nicolas could have been back at La Rochelle, heard of d'Aulnay's
passing, &, taking brother Simon & family with him, hurried back to
Acadia. White, DGFA-1 English, 105, says that in 1650
"Simon rebuilt Capt. Charles Daniel's post at St. Ann's, Cape Breton,
but the following year he was taken prisoner and brought to Québec where
he subsequently remained."
During
the short life of the French colony of Île Royale (1713-58),
headquartered at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Fort St.-Pierre/St. Peter's was called
Port-Toulouse. See Books Two & Four.
35.
Quotations from MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 62, 63; Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel,"
in DCB, 1:433. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 406; Arsenault, History, 31-32; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
93, 116; Clément Cormier, "Mius (Muis)
d'Entremont, Philippe," in DCB, 1:510, &
online; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14;
Griffiths, 67, 91; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
177-79, 197; Parkman, France & England, 1101-03; White,
DGFA-1, 616, 1024-30, 1201-11; White, DGFA-1 English,
129, 218, 256, 301.
Clark, A. H., 93, says La Tour was "resting" at Québec & "stood off" Le Borgne,
whatever that means.
Parkman, 1101-03, suspects that the
proclamation naming La Tour as governor and lieutenant-general of
Acadia was a fabrication. None of the other scholars cited here
agree.
MacBeath says La Tour did not return to Acadia until the summer of
1653. Arsenault, History, 32, gives the precise date of 23 Sep 1751 for
La Tour's return to "Jemseg." (Arsenault is one of those
historians who believed that La Tour's fort was sited upriver at
Jemseg, not at the river's mouth, where it actually was. See note
22, above.)
Parkman was not impressed with Le
Borgne's claims to d'Aulnay's assets, which in Parkman's account
sound more like extortion than a creditor's claims. See especially
1:1102. For a chronology of Le Borgne's dealings with
d'Aulnay
& Denys & his efforts to recoup the large debt, see White,
DGFA-1 English, 218. For details of Le Borgne's
progeny in Acadia, who eventually called themselves
Bélisle, and also the descendants of Mius d'Entremont, see
White, DGFA-1, 1024-30, 1201-11; Book Three. Ferrand
created no family line in Acadia. See White, DGFA-1, 616.
Parkman, 1:1102, implies that, soon after he
secured acknowledgment of d'Aulnay's debt to him from the dead
governor's father, Le Borgne himself went to Port-Royal to shake
down d'Aulnay's widow. Arsenault, Généalogie, 406, hints
that Le Borgne did not go to Acadia, his two sons in tow, until
1654, the year of the English attack. Wade, followed here, says
that Le Borgne himself did not go to Acadia until 1653.
According to Fr. Cormier, d'Entremont &
Charles La Tour had been friends from childhood. Soon after
ordering the rebuilding of the post at Cap-Sable, La Tour, now
governor,
granted his childhood friend the seigneurie of Pobomcoup at Cap-Sable.
Fr. Cormier adds: "To reward him for his services, La Tour
offered d'Entremont in 1651 or 1653 the letters patent of the
Pobomcoup fief, as a barony. The feudal rights conferred upon the
baron a territory stretching from Cap Nègre to Cap Forchu (Yarmouth).
The feudal castle was built near the entry to the natural harbour of
Pubnico, on the east side." Clark, A. H., 116, Fig. 5.2,
says that Mius d'Entremont's seigneurie was "a subgrant from
Charles La Tour. The precise date is uncertain, but may
have been in the early 1650s." Despite La Tour's mercurial
relationship with French authorities, the crown evidently approved the
grant. Amazingly, the Mius d'Entremonts held the barony for
over a century, until the Acadian expulsion of the 1750s.
Griffiths, 67, says Antoine Hervieux & Amand Lalloue also held
grants on islands near Cap-Sable. See also Griffiths, 91; note
44a, below. White, DGFA-1
English, 256, says that in c1651, "Philippe Mius d'Entremont
came to Acadia with his wife and daughter as adjutant to Governor
Charles
de Saint-Étienne de La Tour and [served as?] commandant in
the colony during the latter's absence." White, DGFA-1 English, 129, says that,
on 17 Jul 1653, "Jointly with Philippe d'Entremont, Pierre Ferrand received the fief of Pobomcoup at Cape Sable by letters patent
from Charles de Saint-Étienne de La Tour. He [Ferrand]
signed the grant with his wife. 'These names of Pierre Ferrand and
Mathurine Sicard ... appear here for the only time in all the history of
Acadie.'" See also White, DGFA-1, 616; White, DGFA-1 English, 256.
36. Quotations
from White, DGFA-1 English, 301; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 63; Arsenault,
History, 32.
See also Baudry, "Menou," in DCB, 1:505; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14;
Griffiths, 77, 83; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 23; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB,
1:595; MacBeath, "Motin," in
DCB, 1:514; MacDonald, Fortune & La
Tour, 69, 148, 179-80; Parkman, France & England,
1102-04; White, DGFA-1, 1170-71, 1432-34.
White, 1434, dates the marriage
contract 24 Feb 1653 at Port-Royal & lists the many witnesses, including
Doucet & Bourgeois. Griffiths, 63, says the ceremony took place
the following summer but does not say where. She also says that in
1653 La Tour was in his mid-50s, that the widow had turned to
him, & that the marriage contract kept "their financial affairs
separate." MacBeath says La Tour proposed marriage to the widow to solve their
mutual financial difficulties & to end the rivalry between them.
MacDonald, 179, agrees. Parkman says she initiated the marriage for the benefit of her children.
MacBeath, "Motin," says La Tour married
d'Aulnay's widow "in a
marriage of convenience" in Jul 1653 & that she was dead by 1667. See
White, 1432-33, for Charles's birth year of c1593, making his age 60
in 1653. Evidently La Tour & his new wife lived in her
house at Port-Royal. Hodson says that,
after La Tour remarried to d'Aulnay's widow, "Together they laid
plans to bring Acadia, then a collection of rudimentary forts and
villages dotting the Bay of Fundy from Port Royal in the east to
Pentagouet on Maine's Penobscot River, under one rule."
Griffiths, 63,
says of d'Aulnay's children: "None maintained any connection with
Acadia and the boys left no issue." Griffiths, 77, hints
that "some, if not all," of them were still at Port-Royal in Aug 1654,
when it fell to Englishman Robert Sedgwick; they would have been ages
15, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 5, & 4 at the time. See White, 1170-71. Baudry says that
d'Aulnay's father, René de
Menou, became his grandchildren's guardian, which means that they likely
were sent to France perhaps after Aug 1654 & lived out
their days there. After summing up
La Tour's activities after the death of his rival and noting that
descendants of the old outlaw remained in Acadia up to the present day,
Parkman, 1:1104, leaves us with these sad words about the fate of La
Tour's old rival: "As for D'Aunay[sic], no trace of his blood
is left in the land where he gave wealth and life for France and the
Church." See also Griffiths, 83; note 37c, below.
For a possibility that d'Aulnay did leave descendants in North
America, see MacDonald, 69, 148; note 34,
above.
36a.
Quotation from MacBeath, "Denys," in DCB, 1:257. See also
Griffiths, From Migrants to Acadians, 63, 76, 86, 487; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles,"
in DCB, 1:595;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 179; Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel,"
in DCB, 1:434; White, DGFA-1 English, 105; note
72, below.
White says
Nicolas Denys's 30 Jan 1654 royal commission named him "'governor and
general representative (of the King) in the whole country, Cape Breton,
Île St.-Jean, and other neighboring islands and direct seigneur and
owner of the said country.'" Griffiths, 86, says that on 1
January 1654, Nicolas received "a wide-ranging
grant as 'Governor and Lieutenant-General' over 'the coast and
islands' from the Gaspé to Canso and with fishing rights 'as far as
Virginia.'" Even Griffiths's citation on 487n84 shows
that the Jan 30 date is correct. See also note
34b, above.
36b. See
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 99; Griffiths, From Migrants to Acadians,
73, 133; online Wikipedia, "Thirty Years' War," "Cardinal Mazarin," "Fronde."
Griffiths, 73, offers this perspective: "In the final analysis, in 1653
Mazarin had to govern a vast land with a population of twenty million;
across the Atlantic, the French population along the St. Lawrence was
barely 1,500 and that of Acadia perhaps 300." She adds, on 75,
that the population of English North America in 1650 was over 50,000!
37.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 49. See also Arsenault, History,
32-33; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 94, 96;
Clément Cormier, "Le Borgne de Belle-Isle,
Alexandre," in DCB, 1:435-36, &
online;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 63-64,
499; Lunn, "Denys (Denis) de La Trinité,"
in DCB, 1:261; MacBeath, "Denys," in DCB, 1:257;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 179; Parkman, France & England, 1:1103; Wade, "Le Borgne,
Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:433-34; White, DGFA-1, 1024-25; White, DGFA-1 English,
49, 105; note
34b, above.
Erskine maintains
that after the death of her husband, "Mme. d'Aulnay had done her best to
harry Denys in her husband's style," but that she could not overawe
Le Borgne. Lunn & MacBeath also assert that d'Aulnay's widow sent her troops to seize the
Denys's settlements on Cape Breton Island.
However, Wade says "Le
Borgne's men appear to have raided Denys's establishments at
Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne in Mme d'Aulnay's name...."
Denys did not return to Acadia until a year or so after d'Aulnay's death, & by then
Le Borgne's men had neutralized the widow's ability to do anything against
anyone, so, as Wade tells us, it was Le Borgne's men, using her name, who
broke up Denys's holdings in 1651 as well as 1653. See note 36a,
above.
Griffiths, 63, implies that Nicolas Denys's post at
Nepisiguit had existed in the late 1640s, when d'Aulnay seized Nicolas's
holdings on the Gulf of St. Lawrence & burned them, but Clark, A. H., 96, says a post at Nipisiguit, as he calls it, did not arise until 1652.
Bourdon de Romainville's presence at Nepisiguit is dated 1654. See
White, DGFA-1 English, 49.
Is Griffiths confusing Nepisiguit with the post at nearby Miscou, founded
by Denys in c1645? Nepisiguit,
also spelled Nepigiguit & Nepisquit,
is today's Bathurst, NB.
For the duc de Vendôme, see online Wikipedia,
"César, Duke of Vendôme," who was King Henri IV's oldest son, borne by
his mistress, Gabriel d'Estrées, in Jun 1594, & thus 7 years older than
his half-brother, the future Louis XIII. César was legitimized the
year after his birth & named the first duc de Vendôme by his father
in 1598, but the circumstances of his birth prevented him from
succeeding his father as King of France in 1610. In 1652, the
duc was
governor of Burgundy & Grand Admiral of France.
Wade, 1:434, says: "The Capuchins at
Port-Royal persuaded the widow to send her steward, Brice de
Sainte-Croix, the son of Mme de Brice, to France to seek protection.
He was provided with a power of attorney for her goods in France, dated
11 July 1651. Exceeding his authority, Brice made a contract with
the king's uncle, the Duc de Vendôme, on 16 Feb. 1652, under which the
duke took over from the widow the seigneuries of Saint John and Île
Saint-Pierre in exchange for his protection." Is Wade, in defense
of Le Borgne's interests, implying that the widow's patronage in
France was fraudulent?
Interestingly, Fr. Cormier, Alexandre Le Borgne
de Belle-Isle's biographer,
says nothing of the boy's mission to Boston,
mentioned in Wade, cited above, so one wonders if it
actually happened, unless Le Borgne sent his older son Emmanuel
du Coudray, not second son Alexandre, to Boston in June 1651; Emmanuel
would have been 25 years old at the time, Alexandre only 11! White, DGFA-1, 1025, says that Alexander de
Bélisle was born on 12 Mar 1640 at St.-Barthélémy, La Rochelle.
Alexandre's godfather was François Guibourt, so one suspects that this
was the "Guilbaut" in Arsenault. Griffiths, 499n6, calls Alexandre his father's third son, but White, DGFA-1,
1024-25, makes it clear that he was the second.
37a. See
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 99; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
73, 75, 133; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:63; online Wikipedia, "English Civil War."
37b.
Quotations from Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 29; William I. Roberts,
3rd, "Sedgwick, Robert," in DCB, 1:604, &
online; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 77-78, 80, 81, 83. See also Arsenault, History, 32-34; Arsenault, Généalogie, 456,
505; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 107-08, 113n4; Cormier, "Le
Borgne de Belle-Isle, Alexandre" in DCB, 1:435; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
14; C. Bruce Fergusson, "Leverett,
John," in DCB, 1:474-75, &
online; Griffiths, 64, 75-76, 87; MacBeath, "Denys,"
in DCB, 1:257; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in
DCB, 1:595; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 179; Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:65; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon,
21; Parkman, France & England,
1:1103; Roberts, "Sedgwick," in DCB, 1:605; Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel,"
in DCB, 1:434;
White, DGFA-1, 251, 526-27;
White, DGFA-1 English, 57, 112-13, 218, 243, 301.
White, DGFA-1 English, 301, says La Tour "was forced to surrender to the English expedition
commanded by Robert Sedgwick" on 14 Jul 1654.
According to Hodson, Sedgwick's purpose
in attacking Acadia was to extend Boston's "'tradinge and fishinge.'"
Fergusson; & Griffiths, 76, note that Leverett was not with Sedgwick on the expedition to Acadia
but remained in Boston.
Bourgeois
likely served as the post's interpreter as
well as Doucet de La Verdure's lieutenant. The articles of
surrender say Bourgeois was Doucet's "brother-in-law."
Bourgeois's wife was a daughter of Guillaume Trahan, but the
names of Doucet's 2 wives have been lost to history. See
White, DGFA-1, 251, 526-27;
White, DGFA-1 English, 57, 113. White, DGFA-1 English,
112, states: "It is impossible for the mother of Germain Doucet's
children to have been a sister of Jacques Bourgeois's wife, as
some writers have claimed, considering that Bourgeois's father[-]
and mother-in-law were only married in 1627. It is nevertheless
possible that Germain Doucet married secondly Guillaume Trahan's
daughter, who subsequently gave him no children who survived in Acadia,
but it is also possible that his second wife was Jacques Bourgeois's
sister and not his wife's sister." Bourgeois later
founded the Acadian settlement at Chignecto.
The agreement with Sedgwick calls Guillaume
Trahan Guillaume Troum. See Griffiths, 78.
According to the capitulation document,
Doucet also served as "surrogate guardian of the minor children of
the late M. d'Aulnay." See White, DGFA-1 English, 113.
One wonders if Sedgwick gave Doucet, recently re-married, a choice in returning to France. The old soldier does not appear
in the first Acadian census of 1671 with his sons, daughters, & their
families, so, if he did not return to France in 1654, he died in the
colony before the census was taken. Evidence that he returned to
France can be found in the capitulation document, translated in White,
DGFA-1 English, 113, which says that "to better ensure the
keeping of the above articles the said Sr. de La Verdure has left as
hostage M. Jacques Bourgeois, his brother-in-law and the lieutenant of
the place, as well as the bearer of his power of attorney with
respects to the present treaty." Italics added. Does
this imply that Doucet was leaving the post, perhaps as
Sedgwick's prisoner? See also notes
43a, 44, below.
White, DGFA-1 English, 218, dates Le
Borgne's leaving his oldest son, Emmanuel, "as a hostage at
Port-Royal" at the "end of 1654." Does this mean that the merchant
remained at the captured settlement for a number of months before
returning to France?
White, DGFA-1 English, 243, says Robert Martin was one of the signers of the capitulation document
& concludes that he was not kin either to Pierre Martin, then in
the colony, or to Barnabé Martin, who came to the colony a dozen
years later. White concludes that Robert Martin "appears
among those of the English signers," so "it is quite improbable that he
was French."
37c.
Quotations from MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 180; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB, 1:595. See
also Arsenault, History, 33; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 55, 63, 81-83, 91; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 29; MacDonald, 179; Roberts, "Sedgwick,"
in DCB, 1:605; Huia
Ryder, "Temple, Sir Thomas," in DCB, 1:636-37, &
online; notes 35,
above.
Ryder says Temple & Crowne "had many disputes over their property in Nova Scotia," so much
so that in a letter to his uncle, Lord Fiennes, in Sep 1659, Temple
pleaded "for a new patent to Nova Scotia, 'with his name only on it.'"
Hodson, in
discussing the "strange bedfellows" resulting from Acadian trade with
New England, says: "The aging Charles Etienne de la Tour and
his wife, Jeanne Motin, for example, retired in 1656 to Port
Royal, living together in the fine house d'Aulnay and Motin had
once shared. Over the next few years, the couple imported '6
looking glasses,' cutlery, nails, shot, pots, pans, children's shoes,
combs, vinegar, oil, wine, and rum from Joshua Scottow, a prominent
Boston merchant." He cites Griffiths, 83, as his source for the
information. Griffiths, 83, says: "It is probable, given
the status of Jeanne Motin, that the Motin-La Tour family
lived in the accommodation in Port Royal that d'Aulnay had built."
37d.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 79. See
also Fergusson, "Leverett," in DCB, 1:475; Griffiths, 78, 82; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 179-80; Roberts, "Sedgwick," in DCB, 1:605; White,
DGFA-1 English, 301.
Griffiths, 82, says Leverett was
appointed "agent for Massachusetts in London" in Nov 1655, while he held
the post as military commander of Acadia. Fergusson says Leverett likely went to Acadia but is uncertain about
his whereabouts after his appointment as MA agent in Nov 1655. Leverett
later served as governor of Massachusetts Bay colony, from 1673 until
his death in Mar 1679.
37e. See
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 83; MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," in DCB,
1:595-56; George MacBeath, "Saint-Étienne
de La
Tour [fils], Charles de," in DCB, 2:591-92, &
online;
MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 180-83, 197-98; White,
DGFA-1, 1433-39; White, DGFA-1 English, 301; notes
75 & 210,
below; Book Three.
White, DGFA-1, 1433, says Charles died in c1664 but does not say where. Arsenault says La Tour died in 1666.
MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," 1:595, says in 1666 at
Cap-Sable. Griffiths says Michel Dantez, a French traveler who had
gone to North America, reported to Colbert in a letter dated 6 Nov 1663
that he had learned in New England "'of the death of Monsieur de la
Tour, formerly King's lieutenant in this country,'" so La Tour died
probably sometime in 1663. MacDonald, 180, says spring of 1663
probably at Port-Royal. MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles,"
1:595, adds that when he died,
La Tour "had been a resident of Acadia for 56 years and his is the
name that predominates during most of that period." Remember,
however, that 5 of those
years--1645-50--were spent in New England & Canada as an exile from d'Aulnay's Acadia,
& 2 more years--1654-56--in England as more or less a prisoner of
war.
Nevertheless, no one in Acadia's early history lived in the colony as
long or contributed as much.
MacBeath, "La Tour, Charles," 1:596, concludes: "Charles
de La Tour, who must remain something of a controversial figure, was
ambitious, confident of his own judgement, and the possessor of great
natural ability and determination. He was a born leader with the
happy faculty of making friends of of inspiring faith in his integrity.
His associations with the French court, Huault de Montmagny [governor of
Canada], Boston
merchants, and d'Aulnay's widow--if not d'Aulnay--testify to his
diplomatic persuasiveness, unusual in a man brought up from boyhood days
in a wilderness land. The pages of Acadia's history are much
richer for his presence."
White, DGFA-1, 1433-35, details Charles La Tour's remarkable family. His first
wife, an unnamed Indian woman who he married in c1625, gave him 3
daughters, Jeanne, born in c1626, who married Martin d'Aprendestiguy de
Martignon at Pentagouët in c1655; Antoinette, who became a nun in Jul
1646; & a third daughter whose name has been lost to history & who also
became a nun. Historian Fr. Clarence d'Entremont says they may
also have had sons. See note 15a,
above. Charles's second wife, François-Marie Jacquelin, who he married at Fort St.-Louis, Cap-Sable, in c1640, gave
him a son, whose name has been lost, born at his fort on
Rivière St.-Jean in c1641; the son died young, probably in France. Charles La Tour's
third wife was d'Aulnay's widow, Jeanne Motin de Reux, whom he
married at Port-Royal in the summer of 1653 (the marriage contract is dated 24
Feb), when he was 60 & she was 38. She gave him most of his children &
both of his surviving sons: Marie, born in c1654, married Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle at Port-Royal in c1674; Jacques,
born in c1655, married Anne, daughter of Charles Melanson, in
c1685; Marguerite, born in c1658, married first to Abraham Mius
de Pleinmarais in c1676, & then to Jean-François Villatte at Port-Royal
in Jun 1705; Anne, born in c1661, married Jacques Mius
d'Entremont de Pobomcoup, Abraham Mius de Pleinmarais's
older brother, in c1678; & Charles, fils, born
probably at Port-Royal in Mar 1663, married Jeanne-Angélique Loreau of
Paris
in c1700. Only Jacques's line, through his son Charles le jeune,
whose second wife was a Richard, seems to have survived past the
third generation. Jeanne Motin died giving birth to son
Charles, fils probably at Port-Royal; she was 48
years old. See also MacDonald, 197-98; note 75, below;
Book Two.
MacDonald, 198, points out that La Tour
descendants married into other seigneurial families in Acadia--those of
Vincent d'Abbadie, sieur de Saint-Castin; the Marquis de
Costebelle, governor of Île Royale; & the Damours of the Rivière
St.-Jean valley. Citing La Tour descendant &
biographer Abbé Azarie Couillard-Despré, MacDonald, 198, notes
that "Most of the
old families of Acadia can, if they wish, claim kinship with Charles
La Tour," & lists the following family names: Amirault,
Aucoin, Belleisle, Bourgeois, Comeau,
Couillard, d'Entremont, D'Eon (probably
Duon), Dugas, Dupont de Chambon, Duvivier,
Landry, LeBlanc, Leborgne, Melanson, Mius,
Petitpas, Poirier, Richard, Robichaud,
Theriault, Thibodeau, Viens (?), "and," the abbé
"adds, a host of others." Was Viens, like Couillard, Canadian,
not Acadian?
38.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 86, 87; MacBeath, "Denys,"
in DCB, 1:257-58;
White, DGFA-1 English, 106. See also Arsenault, History,
32-35; Alfred G. Bailey, "Denys de Fronsac, Richard," in DCB, 1:259-61,
&
online;
René Baudry, "Thury, Louis-Pierre," in DCB, 1:649, &
online;
Chiasson, Island of Seven Cities, 118; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 94,
156-57, 267, 415; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 24-25; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
14, 16; C. Bruce Fergusson, "Bergier, Clerbaud," in DCB, 1:90, &
online; Griffiths, 85-87, 103, 107,
116-17, 127-28; Haynes, The Forgotten Battle, 2-5; Wade, "Le Borgne,
Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:434; White, DGFA-1, 483-88, 492, 495; White,
DGFA-1 English, 103, 105, 155, 181; note
34b, above.
Griffiths, 86, says Nicolas Denys "managed to
establish a few settlers" on his holdings, "perhaps some seven families
in all," but she does not say, who, where, or when.
She does say on p. 107 that when Acadia became a royal colony in 1670,
Denys & his family still maintained "claims to property from the Baie
des Chaleurs to Cape Breton Island."
Clark,
A. H., 267,
says Nicolas Denys "was burnt out at St. Peters in the winter of 1668/69
and retired to Nipisiguit," implying violence in the act, not
happenstance.
Arsenault, 34, says Nicolas Denys
was 90 years old when he died but gives no place of death. White, DGFA-1,
487, says he died probably at Paris in Jul 1688 at age 89, but White
gives his birthday as 2 June 1603, which means Denys died at age 85. MacBeath, 1:258,
followed here, says Denys died "in 1688
at the age of 89, in all probability at Nipisguit."
MacBeath, 1:258, asserts that Denys's memoirs,
though written by a man with limited education &, like Denys's business
ventures, a financial failure, nonetheless "is one of the most
valuable accounts of Acadia produced in the 17th century." MacBeath
also provides a delightful description of this honest, energetic man whom the
Indians called La Grande Barbe, or Great Beard. MacBeath
concludes: "Above all else, he was intimately connected with the
material development of the country, a maker of history in Acadia for
over half a century. His is the distinction of being the the first
Acadian author and lumberman, an arresting figure whose remarkable
ability and force made him one of the principals in this new land during
its infancy."
S. A. Davis considers
Nicolas Denys
& his memoir one of the major early sources on the Acadian Indians,
especially the Mi'kmaq.
After Denys "retired" as an Acadian
concessionaire, it took decades to redistribute his holdings. In Jul 1672, New France's
intendant, Jean
Talon, granted to Pierre Denys de La Ronde, Nicolas's nephew, &
Denys de
La Ronde's partners Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye, & Charles Bazire, "'a
tract of land extending from Percé to La Malbaei; there they established
a sedentary fishery, ... which Denys de la Ronde managed. A few
years later, there were buildings at Percé to store fish and to lodge
crews, a house for the commandant, a chapel and lodging for two
Recollets, a few houses of settlers, and one hundred arpents of
cleared land." See White, DGFA-1 English, 105. Percé ended up in the hands of the Jesuits &
Récollets. Among them was Fr. Chretien Le Clercq, a Récollet who
came to the area in late 1675, remained there for a dozen years, & wrote
extensively about the Mi'kmaq of the north shore of today's New
Brunswick & Cape Breton Island. See Arsenault, 35; Davis,
S. A., 25. In the mid-1680s, Nicolas's son Richard
granted land at Miramichi to Seminarian priest Fr. Louis-Pierre Thury to
build an Indian mission there. See Baudry. Doubtlessly painful for
Denys,
the Company awarded Chédabouctou to Compagnie des
Pêches Sédentaire de l'Acadia, whose manager, La Rochelle merchant Clerbaud
Bergier, a Huguenot, built Fort Louis there in 1682. See Clark, A. H., 156; Fergusson; MacBeath, 1:258; note
293b, below. In 1687, Bergier
received from the sedentary fishing company the Cape Breton Island
concession, once held by Denys. According to Bergier's biographer,
in compensation for the loss of the Cape Breton fishing rights, Denys
received a concession at Miramichi on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. See Fergusson.
Denys evidently already held that concession. In Aug
1689, a year after Nicolas Denys's death, the governor-general &
intendant of New France, the Marquis de Denonville & Jean Bochart de
Champigny, granted to Michel Degrez [Degré], "inhabitant of Pokemouche
... 'a league of frontage by a league of depth on the Pokemouche River,
in the Bay of Chaleurs, Miscou coast, twenty-give leagues from Île
Percée, the said grant to begin at the mouth of the said river and to
run inland, with the right to trade with the Indians and to hunt and
fish in the whole extent of it.'" See White, DGFA-1 English,
103. On 17 Jun 1698, "Jacques Gourdeau received the grant of a
back fief on the Miramichi that he sold on February 17, 1699, to Pierre
Rey-Gaillard." See White, DGFA-1 English, 155. The "loss" of these concessions on the
Atlantic & Gulf of St.
Lawrence shores may help explain the Denys family's moving on to Canada & not remaining in greater Acadia.
Nicolas's older brother Simon married twice &
fathered 23 children by his 2 wives! See White, DGFA-1, 483-86.
The Denys of Canada spring from his many sons, several of whom played
prominent roles in Canadian & Acadian history. See
note
195, below; Book Two.
Despite geographical shortcomings, French
presence remained at Chédabouctou, first settled by Denys, long after he
left. The place was significant enough for the New English to
attack in 1688 & again in late May or early Jun 1690, during the first
months of King William's War. See Clark, A. H., 156-57; Haynes; note 157, below; Book Two.
For more on Nicolas Denys's antagonists La Giraudière,
Sr. de
Cangé, & their hapless agent, Jean Huret dit Rochefort, gleaned from
Denys's memoirs, see White, DGFA-1 English,
181.
Erskine, 14 says a fort still stood on Rivière
St.-Marie, once held by La Giraudière, in 1700 & that the fort was
located south of present-day Sherbrooke, NS. Erskine, 16, gives
a brief description of the fort site, c1975.
Ironically, one of the seigneurial grants in
the Gulf of St. Lawrence region that intruded on Nicolas Denys's earlier
grants was given to Denys's son-in-law, Michel Le Neuf de La
Vallière in Oct 1676 & included a large swatch of coast from
present-day Shediac to Pugwash, including Cape Tourmentine. See
Griffiths, 117; note 90, below.
38a.
Quotations from online Wikipedia, "John Leverett"; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 86; Ryder, "Temple," in DCB, 1:636. See also
Arsenault, History, 39; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 111;
Clément Cormier, "Melanson,
Charles," in DCB, 1:499-500, &
online; Fergusson, "Leverett,"
in DCB, 1:474-75; Griffiths, 77, 81-85, 87; Parkman, France &
England, 1:1103; Roberts, "Sedgwick," in DCB, 1:605; Wade, "Le Borgne,
Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:434; White, DGFA-1 English, 247.
Robert Sedgwick died in late May 1656, shortly
after Cromwell named him military commander in Jamaica. The sudden
passing of Sedgwick may explain the sudden fall from grace of son-in-law
Leverett & the rise of Thomas Temple. See Roberts.
Clark,
A. H., 111n1, says of the English governor: "Sir Thomas Temple was
the heir to the claims of the Alexanders [Stirling]. With William
Crowne and Charles La Tour (who had turned his coat for the
purpose), the Commonwealth granted him the government and monopoly of
trade in the area after Robert Sedgwick's expedition had captured the
forts on both shores of the Bay of Fundy. La Tour then made
an arrangement to occupy and exploit the Cape Sable area. The rest
was under strictly English control, more or less de jure until
1667, and
de facto until 1770." See also Parkman. Ryder, 1:636-37, says nothing of
Temple's relationship with the Alexanders of Stirling.
Ryder, 1:636, says Temple
brought settlers to Nova Scotia in May 1757, but Griffiths, 86-87,
says the English, including Temple, brought no settlers to the colony.
On 87, she says: "Temple showed no real interest in
establishing an English settlement. He put his energies and those
of his partners into the development of the fur trade...."
However, White, DGFA-1 English, 247, agrees with Ryder.
White says French Huguenot Pierre Mellanson dit La Verdure, his
English wife, & 3 sons, came to Port-Royal with Temple "in the spring of
1657," & adds that Mellanson, his wife, & youngest son "withdrew
to Boston after the Treaty of Breda in 1667," but the 2 older
Mellanson sons, Pierre, fils & Charles, having converted to
Catholicism to marry Acadian women, remained in the colony--as settlers.
In a deposition given by former Acadian partisan Joseph LeBlanc
dit Le Maigre to a French official at Belle-Île-en-Mer, France,
during the late 1760s, Le Maigre's "wife's maternal grandfather, Pierre
Melanson (the son) had 'come to Port-Royal from Scotland.'"
White goes on: "According to the research of Father Clarence
d'Entremont ..., however, Pierre (Melanson dit) Laverdure
(the father) was a French Protestant who married, during his exile in
England, an Englishwoman named Priscilla." White says Antoine Laumet dit La Mothe, seiur de Cadillac, future founder of Détroit
& governor of LA, "relates that in 1685 he saw these two brothers, whom
he calls Scotsmen, aged sixty and sixty-five years, who were married to
French women. In 1692 he saw their mother, than age ninety years,
at Boston." Cadillac may have been the author, then, of the
long-held belief that the Mellanson brothers were from Scotland,
not France. See Arsenault; Cormier; note
44c, below
38b.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 64-65, 69.
See also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 100-01; note 28i, above.
A. H. Clark offers this survey of the
Acadian population from the early 1630s to 1654: "There are
records of contrats d'engagement for Acadia in large numbers, by
the notaries of La Rochelle, for the period between 1630 and 1654.
It is true that few of their names, as far as we know them, are found in
the first Acadian census of 1671, but, while serving their contracts of
from one to three years, they must have swelled the population not only
at Port Royal but at the outlying posts as well. Among those
recruited for Port Royal by Emmanuel Le Borgne were five sawyers
in 1645 and a gunsmith in 1646. Even more numerous were those sent
out to Charles de La Tour by his intendant, Guillaume Desjardins.
For example, in 1640 his engagés included a gunsmith and a joiner
and, in 1641, a nailmaker-blacksmith, a sawyer, a mason, and a baker; in
1642 these were joined by twenty-two men who were hired as laborers and
soldiers for the fort on the Saint John. In addition we know that
some twenty-five men and five women were signed for Acadia in 1640, but
we know neither their names nor their destinations. Couillard-Després
[a Charles La Tour biographer]
quotes at length from a contemporary sources a list of sixty-three men
sent out on the vessel Saint-Clement in 1642 to reinforce La
Tour. Rameau concludes that d'Aulnay also imported some
families in 1640, and Lauvrière estimates that, at one time or another
before his death, d'Aulnay may have added a score of married couples or
families to the original La Have nucleus," most of whom likely moved on to
Port-Royal. Clark continues: "For 1650 an estimate of
forty-five to fifty European households at Port Royal and La Have has
been made, with some sixty single men--possibly 300 or 350 people in
all. Denys estimated perhaps 270, perhaps considerably more, when
the English captured Port Royal in 1654, including Le Borgne and
'... six vingts hommes des siens avec les habitans qui, faisoient (sic)
bien cent cinquante [86 men with the inhabitants who numbered a good
150?]....' We can be satisfied that at least two to three hundred
folk, half of them in settled families, lived in the Port Royal area at
the time of its capture in 1654." For the first Acadian census,
see note 43, below.
Pierre Thibodeau of
southwestern Poitou, recruited by Le Borgne in 1654,
evidently is an exception to Griffiths assertion that "There is no
evidence to suggest that any of these individuals remained after their
contracts were ended." See Griffiths, 65; note
72, below; Book Three.
A personal note: I am convinced that my
Acadian ancestor, Robert Cormier, whose contrats d'engagement
for 3 years service were notarized at La Rochelle in Jan & Mar 1644,
fulfilled his indenture as a master ship's carpenter at Fort St.-Pierre,
a post belonging to the Company of New France on Cape Breton Island.
Like most French immigrants to the colony, he did not remain in Acadia. He slipped
back to France with his wife & younger son perhaps in the early 1650s
or during the English occupation later that decade, certainly before the first Acadian
census was taken in 1671. His older son Thomas, however, remained at Port-Royal and
established the Cormier family in Acadia. See
Appendix. An example of craftsmen who came early to Acadia &
chose to remain at Port-Royal were Pierre Comeau, a cooper, & Guillaume Trahan, an edge-tool
maker--also my Acadian ancestors. See notes
26 & 27a, above;
Book Three.
For other French immigrants, numbering over 2 dozen, who came to the
colony between 1636 & the early 1650s & remained, many of them
craftsmen, see note
44, below.
38c.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 69-70.
38d.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 70, 80. See
also Griffiths, 71, 97; notes 37b, above,
& 111, below.
38e.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 84; White, DGFA-1 English,
218-19; Cormier, ""Le Borgne de Belle-Isle, Alexandre"
in DCB, 1:435.
See also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 107n74; Costain, The White & the Gold,
180-81; Griffiths, 85; Ryder,
"Temple," in DCB, 1:636; Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:434.
Griffiths, 85, says Emmanuel Le
Borgne Du Coudray, Emmanuel, père's older son, planned the
May 1658 seizure of La Hève but that younger brother Alexandre led the
assault, with "further backing by a merchant from Bordeaux named
Guilbaut." Was this Emmanuel, père's associate &
Alexandre's godfather, François Guibourt? See note
37, above. Cormier says Temple took young Le Borgne to London
after his capture, but Ryder says he took him to
Boston. Griffiths, 85, says Alexandre was taken to Boston
& also spent some time as a prisoner in London, so both are correct. Alexandre
de Bélisle may have returned
to Acadia by 1660 to engage in fur-trading activities. See A. H. Clark,
A. H.
38f.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 86, 88; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 107; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora,
29; Cormier, "Le Borgne de Belle-Isle, Alexandre" in
DCB, 1:436; Ryder,
"Temple," in DCB, 1:637. See also Clark, A. H.,
119; Griffiths, 87; "Morillon Du Bourg," in DCB,
1:513, &
online;
Martn, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:71; Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel,"
in DCB, 1:433-34; White, DGFA-1, 1025, 1027; White, DGFA-1 English, 219; online Wikipedia, "New Amsterdam," "Treaty of Breda (1667)."
Nicolls's actions garnered him the first
govenorship of New York colony. See Wikipedia, "New Amsterdam."
Clark, A. H., 107, says Alexandre de
Bélisle's authority as gov. also encompassed La Tour's
holdings from Baie-Verte to Canso & around to New England. La
Tour, remember, had died in 1663, several years before the young Le
Borgne was named gov.
Wade, 1:434, says
Bélisle "went to Acadia to take possession on 9 Oct. 1668...."
Clark, A. H., 119n11, says: "There is a tendency to confuse the
Le Borgnes, fils et père. 'Belle-Isle' should be
used only for the son, who adopted the title." Alexandre was not
counted in the first Acadian census of 1671. He married a daughter of
Charles La Tour in c1675, probably at Port-Royal. His
father did not die until Aug 1675. See Wade, 1:433; White, DGFA-1, 1025, 1027.
Griffiths, 86-87, details French
activities in Acadia/Nova Scotia during the English occupation,
especially during the tenure of Thomas Temple.
39. Quotations
from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 65; <acadian-cajun.com/denys.htm>,
quoting Denys, Description, 123-24; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 108; Bleakney, Sods, Soil, & Spades,
7.
See also Arsenault, History, 35-36; Clark, A. H., 102-03, 105;
Erskine,
Nova Scotia, 17; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 486, 489;
Griffiths, 67, 71-72, 97-98; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate
29; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 25, 28-29; André Vachon, "Laval,
François de," in DCB, 2:363, &
online.
For much more on the Acadian use of aboiteaux, see
A. H. Clark; Bleakney; Erskine; note 33, above; Book Two.
See Clark, A. H., 103, 105, for the same long quotation from
Denys's
Description. Hodson, 25, noting
Denys's observation of the dyking operations, cites Clark, A. H., 103.
See also Fischer, 486; Griffiths, 67, 71-72, 97-98.
Griffiths, 65, says that in 1652, Canada's
population numbered "approximately 1,500," while settlers on the coast
of ME, the great majority of them English, numbered about 1,000 in 1650.
Vachon
adds: In 1659, the year Canada received its first bishop, the Canadian
population had risen "to 2,000 people, divided among three centres of
settlement over a distance of more than 60 leagues: Québec,
Trois-Rivières, & Montréal, "an outpost," which "was the last
inhabited centre." Québec & its environs held "nearly 1,200
inhabitants," the largest French settlement in the Americas. Due to various factors, both geographical & political, Acadian population would never catch up to those of Canada & New
England. See Book Two.
Bleakney writes in the context of British
attitudes towards the Acadian dyking operations at Minas in the early
and mid-1700s, but one can rest assured that the same attitude would
have prevailed among the English at Port-Royal a century earlier.
For trade with New England, see note
89, below; Book Two.
Arsenault asserts that the English occupation
"had prevented new immigration to Acadia," but his Généalogie contradicts this.
The Port-Royal valley included the Rivière-au-Dauphin, now the Annapolis River, which forms a basin at it widens on
its way out to the Bay of Fundy via a narrow exit at the base of North
Mountain, called today the Digby Gut. See Historical Atlas of Canada. Clark,
A. H., 102, Fig. 4.3, a map, is entitled "Port
Royal Basin and Valley: Population, 1636-1654," & includes the
location of tidal marshlands during that time.
39a. See
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 90, 109, 386; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
95, 99-100; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:48; Moogk,
La Nouvelle France, 176; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
170-71.
The authors of Historical Atlas of Canada
offer this insightful summary: "The chartered colonization
schemes [of de Mons, Poutrincourt, Biencourt, Razilly, & d'Aulnay for
the French, & the many English ventures in Newfoundland] were financial
disasters for their investors, but they demonstrated that overwintering
and extended residence were possible, and they left behind a few men who
began prosecuting the fishery on their own accounts, encouraging
settlement to develop out of the migratory fishery. In Acadia
descendants of a few colonists sent after 1632 began to farm the tidal
marshes around the Bay of Fundy." From many failed efforts to
exploit the fishery & the fur trade in the first decades of the 1600s
emerged an almost accidental permanent agricultural venture--the colony
of Acadia.
Clark, A. H., 90, says: "For twenty-two
years after the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye in 1632, the Acadian lands
were in French hands and there became established by 1654 a resident
population, more or less sedentary and agricultural, from which a large
proportion of the later Acadians were descended. Indeed this is
the real beginning of French settlement in Acadia. An enduring
lodgement of agricultural settlers, with a social structure adequate to
their needs, was made at Port Royal in the Annapolis Basin and several
new posts were established around the coasts. Husbandry and
population expanded to the point that the intrusion of France into these
maritime lands assumed an air of permanence." Clark adds:
"As was to be characteristic of Acadia, these events took place almost
in spite of, rather than in conscious and studied direction from, the
leaders in the New World or the authorities in the Old." On 386, Clark summarizes the importance of the 1654-70 period in the development
of an emerging Acadian culture.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
170-71, notes that, "to encourage emigration and hasten the formation of
a European society in America," the charter for Richelieu's Company of
New France, granted in 1627, stipulated that "the descendants of
Frenchmen who settled in the colony, and even Amerindians who had been
baptized, would be 'deemed to be French-born,' without further
formality; if they came to France, they would enjoy the same privileges
as those born in the mother country."
39b.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 102, 104-05; Parkman,
France & England, 1:1233. See
also Griffiths, 103, 490; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:70-73, 75; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 13; Parkman,
1:1240-45; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 87-88; Vachon, "Laval,"
in DCB, 2:359-72; online Wikipedia, "Mazarin," "Louis XIV of France," "Jean-Baptiste
Colbert."; Book Six.
Griffiths, 490n3, adds: "All
ministers, even Colbert, were kept very much in a subordinate place" by
Louis XIV following Mazarin's death. Colbert was not from the old
aristocracy--the so-called noblesse d'épée, or Nobles of the
Sword, also called noblesse de race & noblesse ancienne--but
from the more recently created noblesse de la robe, or Nobility
of the Gown, "that part of the aristocracy that gained its status
through service in the judiciary and general administrative service to
the crown." Quotation from Griffiths, 103. See online
Wikipedia, "Nobles of the Robe," "Nobles of the Sword," for the
complexity of noble designations in ancien régime France.
The first bishop in New France was François de
Laval, of the powerful Montmorency family, who took his seat at Québec
as vicar apostolic (a kind of temporary bishop) in Jun 1659. Not
until 1675 did Rome, with approval of King Louis XIV, establish the
Diocese of Québec, & Laval became its ordinary, or bishop. See
Martin, F.-X., 1:75; Vachon, 2:359, 364, 368.
King Louis XIV reorganized the Sovereign
Council of New France in 1675, raising its membership to 7 (the
governor-general, the bishop, the intendant, & 4 others appointed by the
King for life). See Vachon, 2:369.
Griffiths, 105, details the difficulties of
maintaining control of the colonies, especially New France, from Paris
via La Rochelle.
40.
Quotations from Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 29; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
88, 89, 105; René Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine, Hector d'," in
DCB, 1:62, &
online. See also
Allain, "Colbert & the Colonies," 6; Arsenault,
History, 35; Baudry, 1:62-63; Clark,
A. H., Acadia, 107-08, 111-12, 130; W. J. Eccles, "Rémy de Courcelle (Coucelles),
Daniel de," in DCB, 1:569- 72, &
online;
Griffiths, 107, 134, 491-92; George MacBeath, "Joybert (Joibert)
de Soulanges et de Marson, Pierre de," in DCB, 1:398-399, &
online;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:65-66, 75; France &
England, 1:1288ff; André Vachon, "Talon, Jean (called
at one time Talon Du Quesnoy), in DCB, 1:614-32, &
online; Wade, "Le Borgne,
Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:434; White, DGFA-1, 6, 1201;
White, DGFA-1 English, 2, 96, 186, 256.
Baudry, 1:61-62,
says Grandfontaine was a native of Ruillé-Froid-Fonds in Mayenne, "belonged to a very old noble family from Anjou," & was in his early 40s
at the time of his appointment as governor of Acadia. He became a Knight of Malta &
served as a captain of the Carignan-Salières Regiment in Canada from
1665-68. There, he saw combat against the Mohawk & was singled out
for recognition by his superiors. Griffiths, 89, says Grandfontaine & Marson served together in the Carignan-Salières Regiment at Québec
in the mid-1660s, Grandfontaine as a captain & Marson as his lieutenant,
so they were familiar with New France, if not Acadia. See also
MacBeath, 1:399; White, DGFA-1 English, 186.
Clark, A. H., 130, notes: "Grandfontaine sent a score or more of
soldiers to Acadia in 1670 (he actually dispatched a company of fifty
men but twenty-six of them were lost in a shipwreck). These
probably were mostly used in the posts along the northern shores of
Fundy and the Gulf of Maine from the Saint John to the Penobscot."
For more on the regiment in Acadia, see note
42, below.
Baudry, 1:62, says
of Grandfontaine's instructions: "While leaving him free to set up
his principal post wherever he judged appropriate, his early
instructions, drawn up by the intendant of Rochefort, Colbert de Terron,
showed clearly a preference for Pentagouet, in order to hinder the
encroachments of the English. Grandfontaine accordingly
established his capital there. The choice of this site, lying in
disputed territory and separated by the Bay of Fundy from the main
settlement at Port-Royal, would create serious difficulties; but
Grandfontaine was only obeying the instructions that he had received."
See also Griffiths, 491n20.
Arsenault says of the new French gov.:
“Unlike his predecessors in Acadia, Grandfontaine was not just a
mere concessionary but the designated representative of the King of
France,” Louis XIV.
“However, like all French governors who succeeded him in Acadia,
Grandfontaine received his instructions from the Governor of Canada, his
immediate superior.” In other words, Acadia was now a royal
colony, not a proprietary one, as it had been when it was in the hands
of the French before and even during the English occupation. This
royal arrangement also placed Acadia under the jurisdiction of the
powerful royal intendants of Canada, the first of whom, Talon, paid
close attention to affairs in Acadia. See Baudry, 1:62; Vachon. Parkman offers a detailed explanation of the relative roles
of the governors-general & royal intendants of New France, a scheme
initiated by Louis XIV in 1663 while Acadia was still under English
occupation. See also note 39b, above. Griffiths, 134,
offers this interesting take on Grandfontaine's relation to the leaders
in Québec: "Logically, after the restoration of French control
over the colony in 1670, its administration should have been explicitly
either under the control of the governor and intendant of New
France or administered directly from France. In practice it was
both and neither."
Griffiths, 105, offers a startling contrast
to the relative positions of the governor-general of New France & the
governor of Acadia. Grandfontaine's salary was 2,400 livres per
annum, but the governor-general at Québec earned 12,000 livres per annum "and another 12,000 granted with
little delay, for expenses."
In 1672, Pierre de Joybert de Soulanges et de
Marson served as "commandant" of Acadia. He received grants on
Rivière St.-Jean in 1672 (Joybert), 12 Oct 1676 (Soulanges or Nashouat),
& 16 Oct 1676 (Jemseg). He served as commander & then gov. of Acadia from 1676-78, with
headquarters on Rivière St.-Jean. His widow, Marie-Françoise
Chartier, received "the seigneury of Marson in Acadia" on 23 Mar 1691.
Brother Jacques de Joybert, received a "Grant of a seigneury of one league
frontage and one league depth on the Saint John River, bordering on one
side the grant to Sr de Marson his brother," on 20 Oct 1672.
See MacBeath; White, DGFA-1 English, 186.
Ensign d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin would marry
an Abenaki chief's daughter & become the most famous capitaine de
sauvages. See White, DGFA-1, 6; White, DGFA-1
English, 2; note 141, below.
Two of the likely colonists who came to Pentagouët with Grandfontaine
were Jean Campagna, who moved on to Port-Royal & then to Chignecto,
where, in 1685, he was charged by his neighbors with having practiced
sorcery; & a fellow named Renault dit Bordonnaut, who testified
at Campagna's trail. See Griffiths, 492n36; Book Two.
In 1670, Grandfontaine appointed former La
Tour associate Philippe Mius d'Entremont, baron of Pobomcoup,
then age 61, as King's attorney in Acadia. Only in 1688, "because of
his great age" (he was 81), was the baron replaced in the office,
by Pierre Chênet Dubreuil. See White, DGFA-1, 1201; White,
DGFA-1 English, 256; note 290,
below.
As part of the new royal arrangement, the
parish priests of Acadia were subject to the ecclesiastical authority of
the Bishop of Quebec, the first of whom, François-Xavier
Montmorency-Laval, was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Québec in Jun 1658,
during the English occupation of Acadia. Laval reached Québec in
Jun 1659 & was appointed bishop in Oct 1674. Before Laval's
elevation, the priests of French Acadia belonged to several missionary
societies--Jesuits, Récollets, Capuchins--whose superiors were in
France. Judge Martin says Laval attempted to replace
the missionary priests of New France with a secular clergy.
Allain offers another, more recent, perspective on the
transition from proprietary to royal colony: "... he [Colbert] understood the
distinction between settlement colonies and trade colonies.
Therein lies Colbert's contribution, and in its corollary, that a
settlement colony needed to produce so as to export and needed to be
populated so as to produce. Eventually another corollary would
follow: while the trading colonies, colonies d'exploitation
commerciale, could be entrusted to companies, the colonies de
peuplement
would be administered directly by the Crown since they were to be
overseas extensions of the mother country." Consider this:
the peopling of Acadia began in earnest in the early 1630s, but not
until 1670 did it become a royal colony. Louisiana would begin as
a trading colony in 1699 & become a royal colony in 1733.
Each colony, then, (Acadia from 1632-70, Louisiana from 1699-1733), took
over 3 decades to evolve from trading colony to settlement colony.
Although the rule of proprietors &
concessionaires was over, the seigneuries granted before 1670 were still
honored by the French court, & many more were awarded afterwards. See note
100, below.
Clark, A. H., 112, points out that from 1670 to
1710, the 40 years in which the French held Acadia as a royal colony,
"More often than not [the] headquarters [of the Acadian governors &
commandants] were elsewhere than at Port Royal; on the Penobscot
[Pentagouët] or the
Saint John or, in the case of La Vallière, Beaubassin." During
much of that time, from 1689-97, 1702-10, France was at war with
England, so perhaps this gives an idea of the vulnerability of
Port-Royal to seaborne attack.
Alexandre de Bélisle may have come to Acadia
with Grandfontaine to protect the family's interests.
Grandfontaine, evidently thinking little of the young seigneur, insisted the young Le Borgne, now age 30, was
just another habitant. See Baudry, 1:62; Wade; note 290, below. Bélisle nevertheless held the
seigneurie for his family at Port-Royal. See Griffiths, 107.
The Port-Royal Acadians must have received
word of the new French gov.'s imminent arrival. On 18 Jun
1670, "'Pierre Sire [Cyr]' signed the agreement of the
parishioners of Port-Royal regarding the construction of a church and
the regulation of measurements." See White, DGFA-1 English,
96. The lower parish at Port-Royal was dedicated to
St.-Jean-Baptiste. How many churches there had stood before 1670?
See note 37b, above, for the
destruction of the church at Port-Royal during Sedgwick's short siege of
the place in Aug 1654. Was there no church at Port-Royal from
1654-70?
40a.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 106-07.
See also Vachon, "Laval," in DCB, 2:366-67; note 290, below.
Garrisoning Jemseg on Rivière St.-Jean became
even more compelling after Grandfontaine's second-in-command, Marson,
received grants along the river in Oct 1672 & Oct 1676. See notes
40, above, & 100 &
292, below.
One element in the restoration of French
control in Acadia the habitants would not have cared for was a
tithe for New France that had been initiated by the first "bishop" of
Québec, François de Laval, in 1663. See Vachon.
41. Quotations from Clark,
A. H.,
Acadia,
108; Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," 1:62. See also Arsenault, History, 36;
Clark, A. H., 111, 139, 143, 149, 175-76.
42. See Allain, "Colbert &
the Colonies, 23n34; Arsenault, History, 36; Baudy, ""Andigné de
Grandfontaine," in DCB, 1:62; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 111,
130-31, 386; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
107-09, 111; Parkman, France &
England, 2:243n1.
Arsenault says 50 came aboard L'Oranger & names the vessel. Parkman says: "In 1671, 30 garcons and 30
filles were sent by the king to Acadia, at the cost of 6,000 livres."
Was this L'Oranger? Clark, A. H., 130, says, "When Grandfontaine arrived at Port Royal in 1671[sic] an accompanying vessel
brought sixty passengers including four girls and one woman. There
is also a record of provision for passage money and feeding of thirty
boys [garçons] and thirty girls [filles], but the records are so
incomplete we are not certain of their destination." Was this
L'Oranger? See also Clark, A. H., 131. Baudy says "the
Oranger brought 60
passengers the following year [1671], among them one woman and four
girls, and the court paid 100 livres each for their passage and
their setting-up." Griffiths, 108, says: "In 1671 the first and last group of settlers on Grandfontaine's watch arrived on board the L'Oranger: sixty
in all including one woman and four girls." See also note
290a, below. Griffiths, 108-09, adds: "We have no
further information about these people as a group, although later
documents occasionally provide enough information to suggest that an
individual, or their ancestor, might have been on board this ship or
part of the group of eight or nine colonists who sailed with
Grandfontaine on the Saint-Sebastien. But in 1672, before
assisted migration to Acadia had resulted in any considerable number of
migrants, the financial pressures of Louis XIV's war against the Low
Countries ended the royal subsidies for transporting migrants to Acadia
and Quebec. Further recruitment would be, in the main, a matter of
individual enterprise with, occasionally, some assistance from a fishing
company." Genealogical records reveal that some of the new male
arrivals who may have arrived on the Oranger
did not settle for very long in the Port-Royal valley but helped pioneer
newer settlements rather up the Bay of Fundy. See
Appendix.
In discussing French mercantilism and the role of
monopoly, Allain says: "It
should be noted ... that Colbert was willing to expand freedom of trade
to include foreigners when necessary; he, for example, encouraged trade
between Acadia and New England because commerce between Acadia and
Canada was expensive and difficult." Griffiths, 107, says of the illicit trade with New England:
"It was clear from the instructions that Grandfontaine received that
those who drew them up had little real understanding of the intricate
relationship between Acadia and Massachusetts. In 1670 neither
Canada nor France was in a position to supply Acadia with the dry goods
that both the settlers and the fur trade needed. [Intendant]
Talon, accordingly, had told Grandfontaine to 'build a link and
communication structure with Boston to obtain necessities.' In his
first year as governor, Grandfontaine sent to Boston for a carpenter to
aid boat building, and he may also have purchased miscellaneous supplies
for the garrison and colonists. But, in short order, Talon became
convinced that the Port Royal-Boston relationship must be brought to a
peaceful conclusion, though he offered no proposal as to how this might
be accomplished." One should not forget the Acadians' collective
stubbornness, which probably was well developed by 1670. The trade
with New England after that date not only would have been important in
sustaining their quality of life, but also would have served as a mark
of independence from official interference in their everyday lives.
However, since Port-Royal was essentially a cul-de-sac for ships, not
until the Acadians moved higher up the Fundy shore would they have been
able to trade with the Yankees, sanctioned or otherwise, away from the
eyes of troublesome French
officials. See Clark, A. H., 111, 386.
43. See <acadian-cajun.com>;
Acadiensia Nova, 1:139; ; Arsenault,
History, 43; Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," in DCB,
1:63; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 121-22, 131-32; Din, "Empires Too
Far," 263, 264n4; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 486-87, 494;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 88-99; Hébert, D.,
Acadians in Exile, 456-71; LeBlanc, D. J., Acadian Miracle,
21; Parkman, France & England, 1:1270n1; Taylor, A., American Colonies,
368-69.
D. J. LeBlanc reproduces
the 1671 census with errors and omissions. Hébert, D., 459-71,
reproduces the 12-pp. census in Fr. Molin's hand. Hébert, D., 456-58,
offers a printed, English-language review of the census & notes that the
original copy of the census is in the Archives Nationale, Archives des
Colonies, 27 rue Oudinot, 75007, Paris, France; that a microfilm copy is
in the Archives Publique du Canada, Ottawa; & a photocopy resides at the
Centre d'études, acadiennes, Monction, NB. See also the
English-language copy in <acadian-cajun.com>,
which says Fr. Molin counted 392 colonists in Acadia, 350 of them
at Port-Royal, & that MA at the time had about 40,000 inhabitants!
The 1667 census of Canada had counted 4,312 souls. The town of
Québec alone contained 448 people, more than in all of Acadia. See
Parkman. Baudry, while pointing
out the limited scope of the 1671 census, including the garrisons at
Pentagouët & on Rivière St.-Jean, estimates the total number of soldier
& settlers in the colony at "about 500 persons. This figure," he
concludes, "shows clearly the smallness of the colony."
For an explanation of
why so relatively few French men & women emigrated to New France during
the 17th century, especially in contrast to English North America, see
Arsenault; Din; A. Taylor; note 21b, above.
Griffiths, 89, adds: "In orders Grandfontaine
had received on his appointment [dated 5 Mar 1670] , he was commanded to
send a detailed description of the state of the colony to France,
including a census of the buildings and their state of repair, the
number of settlers, and their pursuits. Requests for such reports
were typical of French seventeenth-century bureaucracy. It is
interesting that no request was made for information regarding the
seigneurial grants per se, since the registering of landholdings with
government authorities is one of the fundamental legal functions of a
state. Grandfontaine's report, which he dutifully had compiled,
has been the foundation of most writing about what Acadia was like in
1671." Griffiths points out that Grandfontaine's report also
included information about the Pentagouet fort, his headquarters,
gathered by French engineer Hugues Randin.
Clark, A. H., 121n15, explains:
"Unhappily, the nominal census has a number of duplications:
married daughters and sons are counted in two households (their own and
their parents'), or married daughters (whose husbands may be living
elsewhere) are counted in both places. What appear to be precise
numbers, therefore, are actually estimates in this and later censuses."
A. H. Clark goes on to say that in the first census, "In all, nearly
400 heads were counted of whom some 375 were in the territory that is
now Nova Scotia. The census was most nearly complete in the Port
Royal area: it clearly was both incomplete and ambiguous in the
outlying settlements. Assuming an additional twenty or thirty
settlers with year-round homes in various harbors on the southwestern
and southern coasts (and even ignoring completely the large seasonal
influx o[f] fishermen and traders), there cannot have been many fewer
than 500, of whom roughly 450 must have been on the present Nova Scotia
peninsula." Clark, A. H., 121-22, sums up Port-Royal's population as
340 to 350 individuals in "perhaps" 67 families, including "roughly" 65
men, 67 wives or widows, 125 sons, & 91 daughters. His Fig. 5.3,
on 122, entitled "Port Royal Basin and Valley: Population,
1671-1710," provides an illustration of the settlement's population
distribution. Clark, A. H., 121-22, says that "Perhaps 400 arpents
were cultivated; there were some 650 cattle and about 430 sheep."
Clark, A. H., 131-32, says of these first families and
their impact on Acadian history: "It is clear that a relatively
significant infusion of new blood had been made [in Acadia between
1671-1713], but the family names in the nominal census of 1693 were
still predominantly those recorded in Port Royal in 1671. Indeed,
Geneviève Massignon appears to support Rameau's [1889] conclusion that
at least two-thirds of the Acadians of the mid-eighteenth century were
descended from people recorded in that first, 1671, count. It may
be worth noting here that the identification of Acadians in the
twentieth century, whether in Maritime Canada or elsewhere in the
country, in Europe or in the United States is very largely by name. Massignon estimates [1962] that seventy-six Acadian names borne by at
least one hundred families each in the mid-twentieth century, covered
fully 86 per cent of present [1968] Acadians." Italics added.
See also Fischer, who exaggerates the
findings of Rameau's study.
For another solid analysis of the census, its shortcomings, as
well as its invaluable insights into the state of the colony, especially
at Port-Royal, see Griffiths, 89-99.
She says, on p. 89, that Father's Molin's census failed to include
"members of both the La Tour and Le Borgne families who
were known to be in Port Royal at that time." She adds, on 89-90:
"It is not surprising that the census is probably correct in those it
lists but does not include all who were in the colony. Census
takers were viewed with considerable suspicion in the seventeenth
century. Most Europeans were convinced that if someone wanted to
know details about your family, land, houses, and other possessions, the
information would, almost certainly, result in more taxes or the
imposition of some other irksome obligation. As well, the settlers
in Acadia had had remarkably little interference from outside authority
during the first thirty years and had little taste for officials of any
stripe." She uses Pierre Melanson as an example of Acadian
recalcitrance in the face of Father Molin's questioning. The
Port-Royal section of the census reveals that Étienne Robichaud &
bachelor Pierre Lanoue also refused to cooperate. Griffith's numbers for the census are different from other sources; on
p. 90, she says the total number of men, women, & children "of
European descent, living in six different locations" in the colony
(Port-Royal, Pobomcoup, Cap-Nègre, Pentagouët, Musquodoboit], &
St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island) was 302; on p. 92, she says the
Port-Royal population numbered 68 families of "just over 250
individuals: 65 men, 67 women, and 125 sons and daughters," followed
here. See
also notes 43b & 43c, below.
43a. See also Arsenault,
Généalogie, 505-24; <familyheritageresearchcommunity.org/doucet_dna.html>; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
77, 92, 99; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 466-67 (pp. 8 &
9 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 526-51; White,
DGFA-1 English, 112-16; notes 26,
28a, 36,
37b, above; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Doucet family page.
Recent yDNA
tests on direct male descendants of German Doucet, sieur de La
Verdure, thru his second son reveal that Germain, fils may have
been a
Mi'kmaq
adopted by Germain,
père & given his name; or perhaps Germain, fils was
the son of Germain, père's second wife, whose first husband, the
biological father of Germain, fils, may have been Native
American, making Germain, fils the captain at arm's stepson.
See <familyheritageresearchcommunity.org/doucet_dna.html>;
Doucet family page.
43b. Quotations from Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 90, 92, 93. See also Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine,"
in DCB, 1:63; Deans, The River Where America Began,
137; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 486; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians of Nova Scotia.
None of the new settlers who
may have arrived in the colony in 1671 aboard L'Oranger appear
in Fr. Molin's counting. For possible arrivals aboard that vessel,
see notes 220ff, below. Judging by some of
the ages he recorded for Port-Royal's youngest residents, Fr. Molin evidently did not finish his work on the census until late in the
year. E.g., the notation for farmer Barnabé Landry
on p. 11 of the 12-pp. written census says son René was age 8 months; the notation for farmer Michel Dupont,
actually Dupuis, on p. 4 of the written census, says youngest child Pierre was 3 months old;
the notation for farmer Pierre Sire, actually
Cyr, on p. 7 of the written census says son Jean was 3 months
old; the notation for farmer Jehan Corporon on p. 5 of
the written census says his still unnamed daughter was 6 weeks old; the notation for
farmer François Pelerin, actually Pellerin,
on p. 6 of the written census, says François's youngest child
Anne was only 2 days old. According to
genealogist Stephen A. White, René, son of Barnabé Landry,
was "n v mars 1671," that is, born about March 1671;
Jean, son of Pierre Cyr, was "n v août 1671"; Pierre, third child & second son of Michel
Dupuis, was "n v août 1671"; Marie, first
child of Jean Corporon, was "n v sept 1671"; &
François Pellerin's daugther Anne was "n v nov 1671." See Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 462-464, 69; White,
DGFA-1, 411, 433, 596, 1128, 1277. One wonders when L'Oranger
arrived in the colony. If it reached Port-Royal before Nov 1671,
was Fr. Molin under orders from Gov. Grandfontaine not to count new arrivals, only
established settlers?
On the last page of his census, Fr. Molin calls himself a
"religieux Cordelier," evidently another name
for the Franciscan Récollets. Ross & Deveau spell the priest's surname Molins,
perhaps a misinterpretation of his spelling on the last page of the
written census, but Griffiths, Baudry,
& other sources, followed here, spell his name Molin.
In contrast, the population of English VA, founded 2 years after
de Mons' Port-Royal, was approximately 40,000 in 1670. VA,
in fact, held 2,000 blacks that year, most of them slaves--10 times the
total population of French Acadia! See Deans.
Fischer says the
1671 census counted "227 children in sixty-three houses at Port-Royal
alone," which is much too high. See note
43, above.
43c. Quotations
from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 94-96.
43d. Quotation from
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 99-100; italics added. See also note
41, above; Book
Two.
44.
See <acadian-home.org>;
Arsenault,
Généalogie;
Arsenault,
History, 38; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 101,
397-400; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
487-88, 719n31; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 65-66, 69; White, DGFA-1.
Arsenault, History, contains a list of families based on Geneviève
Massignon's research. See
Appendix
for my own list of Acadian pioneers counted in the first census, those
who arrived aboard the L'Oranger, and those who came to Acadia
after 1671, with emphasis on the progenitors of the families that
emigrated to LA.
For balanced discussions on the so-called
Massignon thesis relating to the origins of early arrivals, see A. H. Clark,
397-400; Griffiths, 65-66 (quoted below);
Appendix, in which this author comments: "The reader must keep
in mind that the years of arrival and the origins of the patriarchs of
Acadia given in this history come mostly from Arsenault, Généalogie, whose dearth of documentation renders the information not much more
than speculation. The arrival dates and origins in White, DGFA-1,
based on more careful research, are used when they are available. Arsenault's information is
based largely on the
research of Ms. Geneviève Massignon, whose findings have been questioned by
Acadian historian/genealogist, Rev. Clarence d'Entremont (see
his article reprinted in AGE, October 2003, pp. 66-68; May 2004, pp. 31-32). Father
d'Entremont reminds us that the Port-Royal church records before 1700, which
could have provided the true origins of the Acadian pioneers, were burned, and
this information is therefore lost to history. He contends that Ms.
Massignon's basic assumption about the origins of the early Acadians--that people with names similar to the early Acadians lived in the area from
which the sieur d'Aulnay recruited the first settlers of the colony,
particularly Martaizé and La Chaussée in the Loudun area--is a flawed
assumption.
First, Razilly, not d'Aulnay, recruited the earliest Acadian families; second,
the names of these families can be found in other regions of France as
well." Nevertheless, when one sees the names of so many pre-1671
arrivals listed according to place of origin, such as here, one has to
concede that Ms. Massignon's thesis remains a solid one: many,
though by no means all, of the earliest, & largest, Acadian families
hailed from the Loudunais area of northeastern Poitou.
White, DGFA-1, & Arsenault,
Généalogie, provide most of the information used in the biographies
of the Acadian pioneers. The most accessible digitized copy of the first Acadian census can be found at <acadian-home.org>. As a result of White's caution, this writer
also is silent on, or uses qualifying language to describe, the origins
of Acadia's family progenitors.
White, the most conservative, & thus reliable,
source on Acadian genealogy, is silent on the birth places of many of
the earliest Acadians who some writers, especially Geneviève
Massignon & Bona Arsenault, claim were from Martaizé & La Chaussée.
See
note
27b, above. Griffiths, 65-66, is especially good in
questioning the Massignon thesis by pointing out the varities of French
emigration from village to town to port to colony. Griffiths says: "Geneviève Massignon,
writing at the opening of the 1960s, considered that a significant
majority of Acadia's early population had roots in the Loudunais
district of France. Recent work has called this assertion into
question. This is not to say that no one from the Loudunais area,
where d'Aulnay had considerable holdings, settled in Acadia. It
is, however, to suggest that those who came to Acadia, especially in the
years before 1650, were more broadly representative of the various
regions of France. In other words, those who came were not part of
a concerted migration from any particular area in France, and, although
many arrived as part of a group, that group was normally assembled in
the port from which it sailed. People drifted to the coastal
towns, migrating in incremental steps from small village to inland town
and then to the ports. While the northwest of France contributed
significantly to transatlantic emigration, there was also considerable
migration from elsewhere. However, tracing those who left the
centre and southwest of France for North America is a more complex task,
because they are the more likely to have wandered within France for a
great length of time before emigrating than those of the northwest.
Marcel Delafosse, the archivist who worked for many years among the
notarial records in La Rochelle, considered the destination of most
migrants, Acadia or the valley of the St. Lawrence, to be a matter of
chance: what was the destination of the next ship to sail?
Certainly, the evidence that does exist, about particular individuals
who came to the colony before 1650, rarely links these migrants to each
other or to the same regions of France. Even groups of migrants,
brought together for the express purpose of emigration, were usually
recruited from more than one region of France. The list of the
Saint-Jehan brought together people reported as coming from the
valley of the Loire, from La Rochelle, and from Brittany. But we
have little evidence that these were, in fact, their places of birth and
childhood. The Acadian genealogist Stephen White rarely hazards a
guess at the regional descent of those Acadian families he has studied,
whose ancestors are recorded as arriving before 1650."
Griffiths, 69, adds, in the context of early Acadian dyke-building:
"The emergence of marshland agriculture necessarily implied the
development of a strong sense of community among the settlers, most of
whom would not have known one another before they arrived."
Fischer, 487,
719n31, a recent publication (2008), subscribes to Massignon's thesis
without question. On 487-88, he offers a detailed analysis of
Acadian speech patterns viz "metropolitan" French. Citing linguist
Yves Cormier's Dictionnaire ue français acadienne & Pascal
Poirier's Glossaire & Le parler franco-acadien et ses origines,
as well as Massignon, Fischer points out that Acadian French is "derived
in part from the patois of Poitou, Saintonge, Aunis, Anjou, and Touraine."
The Loudunais lies in northeastern Poitou west of Touraine and south of
Anjou.
Families listed in the 1671 census at Port-Royal but not included
in this narrative were those of Jehan LaBatte;
Marie Salé, widow of Jehan Claude; & Barbe Bajolet,
widow of Savinien de Courpon, whose first husband was Isaac
Pesseley. The 1671 census also counted
the families of Armand
Lalloue, sieur de Rivedon, at Cap-Nègre; & Guillaume Poulet at
Rivière-aux-Rochelois--none of which appear in this narrative. See
Appendix
for some of them.
A. H. Clark, 101, brings up the old question
of Scottish origins among early Acadian settlers. He mentions the
surnames Peselet [Pesseley here], Pitre, Caissie,
Colleson, & Melanson, & concedes, correctly this
researcher believes, that, among
these, only Caissie was of Celtic origin, concluding that it was
Irish. See White for the best evidence concerning
the origin of these family names in Acadia.
44a.
See also Arsenault, Généalogie, 502, 1593-94; Cormier, "Mius (Muis) d'Entremont," in DCB, 1:510;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 91; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 471 (p. 13 of the written census); White, DGFA-1,
1201-11; White, DGFA-1 English, 256-57; notes
35 & 40,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
D'Entremont family page.
Fr. Cormier calls Philippe's wife Madeleine
Hélie (or Élie) Du Tillet,
but Arsenault, 1594, & White, DGFA-1, 1201, call her simply Madeleine
Hélie, followed here.
44b.
Quotations from Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:434; Cormier, "Le
Borgne de Belle-Isle, Alexandre," in DCB, 1:436. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 405-06; Cormier,
1:435; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 89; White, DGFA-1,
1024-30; White, DGFA-1 English, 218-19; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Bélisle
family page.
The exploits of Alexandre de Bélisle,
his father, & his older brother, beginning with note
28c, above, fill many pages of Book One.
44c.
Quotation from Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 23, 37 (italics in
the original). See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 686-95; Arsenault, History,
39, 44, 53; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 148; Cormier, "Melanson,
Charles," in DCB, 1:499-500; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 90-91, 93, 97, 99, 119, 130, 162, 176, 178-81, 201, 241,
260, 382-83, 453; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 470 (p.
12 of the written census); Melanson, 21-22, 24-27, 38-42; Dale Miquelon, "Le Poupet de La Boularderie,
Louis-Simon," in DCB, 2:417-18; M. C. Rosenfield, "Basset,
David," in DCB, 2:46-47, &
online; White, DGFA-1,
78-80, 862, 1145-67;
White, DGFA-1 English, 247-50; note
38a, above; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Melançon family page.
The original spelling followed here--Mellanson--is
from Melanson. White, DGFA-1, 1145, calls the father Pierre
Melanson dit Laverdure,
implying that Melanson was the original family name.
Melanson, 21-23, followed here, is clear that the father's surname was
Laverdure & that he did not call himself anything else.
Melanson says the older sons "used the surname
Mellanson" but cannot explain why they preferred it
over the
family's original name. See Melanson, 39, 41.
Fr. Cormier, 1:499-500, reflecting outdated scholarship,
says: "Historians agree neither on his [Charles
Mellanson's] ethnic origin nor on the date of his arrival in Canada.
Undeniably, he 'came from Scotland'; but, as a notarial contract
designated him 'Sieur de La Ramée,' and as his brother Pierre was
nicknamed 'La Verdure,' Placide Gaudet concluded that the family might
have been of French origin, and that, because it was Huguenot, it might
have emigrated to Scotland, whence it went to Acadia. Arsenault, Généalogie,
686, probably echoing Placide Gaudet, says Pierre, fils was
born in 1632, "d'origine écossaise," that is, of Scottish
origin, &, 686n92, cites the memoir of Lemothe Cadillac, dated 1692,
which mentions "deux Écossais" living in Acadia while their
mother lived in Boston. Some writers
claim that the Mellansons belonged to the settlement founded by
Sir William Alexander, the younger. According to Placide Gaudet,
the family arrived in the colony in 1657 with Governor Temple; it
settled at Port-Royal; later it is thought to have emigrated to Boston,
leaving in Acadia Pierre and Charles, the only members of the family
whose names have been preserved in history." Stephen A. White,
following & then greatly supplementing Gaudet's work, concludes that the
Mellansons were indeed French Huguenots, not Scots, that the
father of Pierre & Charles married an Englishwoman, not a Scotswoman, &
that they had come to the colony with Temple in 1657, long after the
Alexander colony was dismantled by Isaac Razilly in 1632. See also
See also Arsenault, History, 39; Melanson, 21.
For
Pierre Laverdure serving as tutor to the
d'Aulnay children, see A. H. Clark. Pierre,
père died
either at Boston or Port-Royal, or perhaps at sea between the two ports, during the winter
of 1676-77, age unrecorded. See Melanson, 21, 37; White, DGFA-1,
1145. White, DGFA-1 English, 247, notes that Cadillac saw his widow Priscilla, now
remarried, at Boston in 1692; Cadillac said she was age 90. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 686n92. For
details of her final days & her death in early 1692, see Melanson,
23-24, 37. White, DGFA-1, 1145, says she died "au début
de 1692," so Cadillac would have seen her at the very end of her
life. Melanson, 23-24, presents a long list of personal
possessions she had inventoried after her remarriage which she promised
to leave to a granddaughter upon her death. "Priscilla," Melanson, 24,
notes, "did not write the document itself, however, she did sign
her initials to the bottom--PM. It would appear from the
initials that she was not literate and probably learned to write these
two letters as a child. If this was the case, her maiden name
began with the letter M." Melanson ends his speculation
there, but one is intrigued by the possibility that her maiden name
might have been ... Mellanson.
Family historian Michael B. Melanson says both
brothers not only could speak English & French fluently, but they also
were literate in both languages--a rare thing among their francophone neighbors. See Melanson, 21, 25,
39, 41.
One wonders if the brothers' experiences in England (they were ages 25 and & 14,
respectively, when they came to greater Acadia) & their recent
conversion to Catholicism (Charles in c1663, Pierre, fils in
c1665) had anything to do with the reluctance of the older brother to
share economic information with a Catholic priest working on orders from a French
colonial governor. See Griffiths, 89-90; Melanson, 21-22. The French Crown did not tax habitants
directly, but the settlers were expected to pay quit rents to their seigneurs, in this case
the roundly despised former gov. Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle,
seigneur of Port-Royal. See note 44b,
above.
For Charles Melanson's
treasonous activities in the mid- & late 1690s during King William's
War, see note 163b, below.
Pierre, fils's & Charles's youngest brother John became, like his older brothers, a family man but a man
evidently unburdened by moral scruples. White, DGFA-1 English, 248,
citing SHA [Cahier de la Societé historique acadienne], 4:417-18, relates: "John Laverdure 'had gone
towards the end of the winter of 1676 or the beginning of the spring
[during King Philip's War] with Henry Lawton to Cape Sable where by ruse they lured on board their
vessel a certain number of Indians whom they sold as slaves in the
Azores, on Fayal Island. [Melanson, 22, says the original abduction
of 9 Indian men occured at Machias in ME, & that 8 more, including women
& children, were abducted at Cap-Sable, where the New Englanders' ketch,
the Endeavor, had been driven by stormy winds.] ... (I)n August Lawton had already been
thrown in prison ... (where), as principal agent, (he) had to wait ...
for his trial which was to take place in Boston at the same time as that
of his band, including John Laverdure who had been granted temporary
leave after posting a surety-bond for one hundred pounds which had been
supplied by Samuel Sendall, whom John's mother Priscilla later refers to
as her landlord. Unfortunately, John Laverdure, "whether by his
Ignorance or ... inveighed," did not appear in time for the trial and
the deposit posted for him was forfeited. ... 'What happened to
(the) fugitive ... John Laverdure? We said in our other article
that one encounters in the region of Boston a John Melleson,
married to Sarah, who had five children.... One may wonder whether
this John Melleson was not the John Laverdure, Pierre's son, who
dropped from sight in 1676 and who might have reappeared under another
name, in order not to be brought to justice. In any event, he did
not have to flee, because, like his companions, he would probably have
been acquitted.'" Melanson has no doubt that this was Pierre
Laverdure's son. Jean/John married Sarah, her surname lost to
history, probably at Boston in c1680. Their 5 children, 4 sons & a
daughter, were born between Dec 1681 to Jan 1689. See Melanson,
22, 39-40; White,
DGFA-1, 1150; note 292c, below. Melanson
offers the greatest detail of John's exploits & says this youngest of
Pierre Laverdure's sons favored the surname Laverdure, his
father's actual family name, so
John Laverdure and John Melleson were one & the same.
According to Melanson, 23, 37, Pierre
Laverdure's death in "Nouvelle-Angleterre au cours de
l'hiver 1676-1677," as White, DGFA-1, 1145, relates, was
hastened by his fruitless search for youngest son John, who had become
involved in an unauthorized slave-selling venture in ME & Acadia during
King Philip's War, was arrested by Boston authorities, forced to post a
50-pound bond, which was covered by his parents' Boston landlord,
skipped out on his trial, and disappeared, leaving his parents to cover
the bond with money they did not have. Old Pierre, thinking John
had taken refuge with his older brothers at Port-Royal, went to the Acadian capital, but John was not
there. The old man returned to Boston after "a grueling" venture &
died the following winter. His widow Priscilla was then stuck with
the legal fallout from son John's indiscretion. After her
husband's death, Priscilla lured her teenage granddaughter Marie, oldest child of son Charles
Melanson, to Boston to help care for her. Marie Melanson, at age 18, married David Basset,
a 23-year-old Huguenot merchant-mariner & native of Marennes, Saintonge,
France, probably at Boston in c1682. See Melanson, 23, 37; White, DGFA-1,
78-80, 1146. Basset took full advantage of his
wife's family connections to enhance his commercial interests in the trade between
Acadia & New England that resumed after King Philip's War ended in 1678.
See Melanson, 25-27, 41-42; Rosenfield, 2:46. For an interesting interaction between
son-in-law & father-in-law on the eve of the New-English attack on
Port-Royal in May 1690 during King William's War, see note
157, below. Rosenfield,
2:46-47, insists that Basset's home in North America
was, from the beginning, at Port-Royal, not Boston. Melanson, 23,
places Basset in Boston as early as 1673, when he would
have been age 14, & says in Apr 1679, at
age 20, he took an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. Three
times, Melanson notes, in 1687, 1698, & 1700, French authorities, after
arresting the wily Huguenot, compelled Basset, as a
condition for his release, to promise he would move his home to Acadia,
but each time "he failed to relocate his family" there. See Melanson,
25 (source of quotation), 27, 41; Rosenfield, 46. One refusal even
led to his deportation to France "as a dangerous person," but
MA authorities secured his release. See Melanson, 41. There
were a number of reasons why the Huguenot failed to comply with French
orders. Most likely, Basset used his
father-in-law's domicile on the lower basin at Port-Royal to facilitate his trade with the Acadians,
thus precluding the need for him to abandon his home in the busiest port in North
America. Basset's brother-in-law Abraham
Boudrot, an Acadian merchant who was just as fixed as
Basset with the MA authorities, also lived on the Charles
Melanson habitation on the lower basin, so the place
was essentially a trading post. Moreover, one of Basset's
trading partners was his wife's uncle Pierre Melanson,
who had pioneered the Minas settlement of Grand-Pré in the early 1680s.
The busy Huguenot likely worked out of that place as well. See
Melanson, 25, 41. And then there was the religious issue.
David Basset emigrated to Boston, not Port-Royal, in
his early teens, a Huguenot. See Melanson, 41. His marriage to
Mary Laverdure, as she preferred to be called, likely
took place in Boston while she was caring for her paternal grandmother,
an English Protestant. Mary had been in her teens when she
went to Boston, so, under the influence of her grandmother, she likely
had turned away from her parents' Catholicism by the time she married
Basset. See Melanson, 41. With this in mind, one can see
that Basset's refusal to "resettle" at Port-Royal had a
religious as well as a commercial motivation. He & his wife were
Protestant, & they raised their children, born at Boston and nearby
Charlestown, between 1684 &
c1703, as Protestants. See Melanson, 41; White, DGFA-1,
78-80. Note also that the first time the French insisted
Basset move his home from Boston to Catholic
Port-Royal--1687--was 2 years after Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of
Nantes. Here was even greater motivation for the Huguenot trader
to avoid at all costs residing in a province in which Protestants would
have been subject to persecution. Had he moved his family from
Boston to Port-Royal at any time between the late 1680s and early 1700s,
the priests at Port-Royal, with the governor's approbation, would have
done what they could to transform the family, especially the children,
into proper Roman Catholics. Basset died by Jun
1707, when his wife was recorded in Boston as a widow. See
Melanson, 42. Rosenfield, 2:47, & White, DGFA-1, 78,
insist that Basset died in the Antilles in Aug 1724, when he would have
been in his mid-60s. Rosenfield adds that Basset's
"throat was slit as he lay sleeping on the quarter-deck of his ship."
Melason, 42, says this was how Basset's son David, Jr.,
also a mariner-trader, met his end on 17 Aug 1724, not David
Basset, Sr. Mary Laverdure was still
alive & in her early 60s when she learned of her oldest son's death.
He would have been age 37. See White, DGFA-1, 78.
In the early 1680s, perhaps to put distance
between himself & the authorities in the colonial capital, Pierre
Melanson, fils, who had prospered at
Port-Royal, was the first to settle at Grand-Pré in the heart of the
Minas Basin. See note 92, below;
Books Two & Three.
45.
Quotations from Eccles, "Meulles," in DCB, 2:473; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
129.
See also <acadian-home.org>; Acadiensia Nova,
1:139-40; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 123-24; Griffiths, 124-27;
Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:126; note 43b, above.
For a thorough itinerary of de Meulle's
venture to greater Acadia, including a map & short biographies of his
assistants, based on his diary of the trip, see Acadiensia Nova,
1:85-124. from Oct 1685 to July 1686, he traveled down the St.
Lawrence from Québec, stopped at Île Percé, Miscou, Nepisiguit,
Tracadie, Miramichi, Shediac, & Baie-Verte, crossed the Chignecto
isthmus to Beaubassin, where he spent the winter of 1685-86 with
La Villière, then to the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean, Port-Royal,
overland to Port Rossignol (now Liverpool) on the Atlantic, to nearby Île du Rossignol
(now Coffin Island), up the Atlantic coast to La Hève,
Chébouctou (now Halifax), Canso, & Chédabouctou, thru the Stait of Canso
& along the northern shore of Île St.-Jean, now PEI, back to
Île Percé, & then on to Québec. See also note
294e, below.
Again, the most readily available digitized copy of this
census can be found in <acadian-home.org>. See
also Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 472-521, which offers a
facsimile of the 44 pp. of the written census on 478-521. In
contrast, Fr. Molin's census of 1671 was 12 written pp. See note
43, above. D. Hébert, 472-77,
offers a printed, English-language review of the 1786 census & notes
that the original copy is in the Archives Nationale, Archives des
Colonies, in Paris, France; that a microfilm copy is in the Archives
Publiques du Canada in Ottawa; & a photocopy resides at the Centre
d'études, acadiennes, Monction, NB--the same places where the original &
copies of the 1671 census may be found.
De Meulles's census counted at Port-Royal 197 men & woman, 218
boys, & 177 girls, 75 guns, 643 cattle 627 sheep, 351 hogs, with 377
arpents under cultivation; at Cap-Sable, 15 persons, 16 guns, 17 cattle,
7 arpents cultivated; at La Hève/Mirliguèche, 19 persons, 9 guns, 1 hog,
3 arpents cultivated; at Minas, 57 persons, 20 guns, 90 cattle, 21
sheep, 67 hogs, 83 arpents cultivated; on Rivière St.-Jean,
Passamaquoddy, Mégais, & Pentagouët, 16 persons, not counting servants;
at Chignecto, 127 persons, 102 guns, 236 cattle, 111 sheep, 189 hogs,
426 arpents cultivated; at Miramichi, the seigneur & 4 or 5 servants; at
Chédabouctou, "3 or 4 inhabitants who are clearing the land," a royal
lieutenant in the fort, with 15 or 20 servants; Nepisiguit, 1 family,
including an Indian wife, & 3 or 4 servants; & at Île Percé, 59 persons
& 5 families. Griffiths, 125, points out the startling
contrast in population between Acadia & other North American regions:
New France, that is, Canada, boasted a population of around 10,000 at
the time, &, among the English colonies to the south, the population of
MA alone was close to 50,000! Acadia's relative
isolation, despite its location on the Atlantic coast, & the generally
poor quality of its upland & inland soil, meant that the colony's
population was destined to remain miniscule compared to its neighbors
above & below. See also Griffiths, 129; F.-X. Martin.
45a. See
<acadian-home.org>; Arsenault,
History, 39-40; note 46, below.
The census copy in <acadian-home.org>
includes Fr. Clarence d'Entremont's estimated ages for many of the
settler's children not found in the original census, as well as notes on some of
the families also not found in the original census. White,
DGFA-1, officers details, in French, of the 1678 count by family.
46. Quotations from
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, xvii, 124-25, 132. See
also Savard, DGFde Arsenault, x.
Savard provides
the date for L'Oranger's embarkation records, which he says do not
include the names of the passengers.
47. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 484-93; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 92, 98; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456,
468-69 (pp. 10-11 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 369-93;
White, DGFA-1 English, 83-88; note 26,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Comeaux family page.
Despite Fr. Molin's rendering, the standard
spelling for this family in Acadia was Comeau without
an "x". See White.
48. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 673-74; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 55, 70, 92, 99, 193; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 463-64, 468 (pp. 5-6, 10 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1125-28,
1130-32, 1134-37;
White, DGFA-1 English, 243-45, 268; notes
27 &
27a, above, note 95, below; Books Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Martin
family page.
49. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 816-17; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 55, 78, 92, 99, 130, 173, 181-82; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
458, 464 (p. 6 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1535-48;
White, DGFA-1 English, 323-27; notes
27,
27a,
28a, 37b, 43d,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten; Trahan
family page.
50. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 554-61; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 96, 173, 179; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457,
461 (p. 3 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 666-86;
White, DGFA-1 English, 139-44; note
27b, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Gaudet
family page.
Jean Gaudet, père
died at Port-Royal by 1678, a year or 2 over the age of 100. See
White, DGFA-1, 666.
51. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 448-56; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 179, 325, 343, 369, 393-94, 544n133, 555n4; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 465-67 (pp. 7-9 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 221-51;
White, DGFA-1 English, 48-56; note
27b, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bourg/Bourque family page.
52. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 566-67; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 96, 97; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457,
464 (p. 6 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 691-705;
White, DGFA-1 English, 145-48; note
27b, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Gautreaux family page.
53. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 804-06; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 179, 192, 260, 263; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
458, 463, 465 (pp. 5, 7 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1483-1506;
White, DGFA-1 English, 312-18; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Theriot
family page.
White, DGFA-1 English, 313, says of Jean,
fils in 1671: "He evidently settled elsewhere, as did several
other children of the first colonists of Acadia." White, DGFA-1,
1488, does not say where he settled. Arsenault, Généalogie,
804-05, shows him with his family but also does not speculate on where
he settled.
Jean's son Pierre become a pioneer of the settlement at Minas Proper
in the early 1680s.
See note 92, below. For his run-in
at Grand-Pré with an overzealous priest during the early 1690s, see Book
Two.
54. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 794-99; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 96; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 463 (p. 5
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1456-63;
White, DGFA-1 English, 306-07; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Savoie/Savoy family page.
55.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 209. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 647-58; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 96, 173, 179, 243, 328, 341, 343-44, 359, 368-69, 382, 436,
438, 489, 555n4; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 468 (p. 10
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 983-1022;
White, DGFA-1 English, 210-17; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
LeBlanc
family page.
For the largest-family claim, made by Stephen
A. White, a LeBlanc descendant who just happens to be the
pre-eminent Acadian genealogist, see Griffiths, 489n128.
56. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 474-81; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 464 (p. 6 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 289-98;
White, DGFA-1 English, 64-66, 75; note
27b, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Brun
family page.
57. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 567-79; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 94, 98; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 467
(p. 9 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 718-39;
White, DGFA-1 English, 150-53; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Girouard/Giroir family page.
58. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 612-23; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 99, 179, 343; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 469-70 (pp. 11-12 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 915-16,
921-24, 940-41, 945-46, 952;
White, DGFA-1 English, 194-204; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Landry
family page.
59. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 429-30; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 98;
Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 469 (p. 11 of the written
census); White, DGFA-1, 134-35;
White, DGFA-1 English, 30; note 225,
below;
Bertrand family page.
Arsenault insists the couple had children. White is followed here.
60. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 408-27; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 469 (p. 11 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 96-104;
White, DGFA-1 English, 19-20; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Belliveau family page.
61. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 466-71; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 468, (p. 10 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 270-82;
White, DGFA-1 English, 59-63; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Breaux
family page.
62.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 120. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 524-34; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 96-97, 99, 178-79, 344; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 470 (p. 12 of the written sentence); White, DGFA-1, 562-80;
White, DGFA-1 English, 119, 121-24; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Dugas family
page.
Arsenault, 524, citing the work of Fr. Ange
Godbout, says Abraham was from Toulouse, which is in the south of
France, far from Poiters & the origins of most of Abraham's fellow
Acadians. White, DGFA-1, 562, always the careful scholar,
gives no birthplace for the gunsmith.
63. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 599-606; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 98, 436, 549n64; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 461-62, (pp. 3-4 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 798-840;
White, DGFA-1 English, 163-76; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Hébert
family page.
For
Louis Hébert, an early settler in La Cadie & progenitor of
the first family in Canada, see notes
10e & 21,
above;
Hébert
family page; Book Ten.
White, DGFA-1, 798, 800, always
the careful scholar, does not name the parents or even the birthplace of
the Hébert brothers. Arsenault, Généalogie,
600, citing the work of Fr. Adrien Bergeron, says the brothers'
parents were Jacques Hébert & Marie Juneau
of La-Haye-Descartes, Parish of Balesne, Touraine. However, White
has demonstrated that Jacques Hébert, fils, son
of Jacques and Marie of La-Haye-Descartes, whose name appears in a notarized marriage contract in
Québec in 1688, witnessed by Marie-Guillemette Hébert, a daughter
of Québec pioneer Louis Hébert, was actually Jacques Habert, a different family
from the Héberts of Québec and Acadia. See White, DGFA-1,
799; White, DGFA-1 English, 163-64. So the parentage and
birthplace of the Hébert brothers are still
unknown. Still, one has to consider that La-Haye-Descartes lies
not very far east of Martaizé and La Chausée in the Loudunais area, home
of many of the early settlers who went to French Acadia about the time
the brothers arrived there. See Books Three & Ten.
64. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 456-58; Clément Cormier, "Bourgeois, Jacques (Jacob)," in DCB,
2:94, &
online; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 78, 92, 96-97, 116, 130, 181, 191-92, 260, 341; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 461 (p. 1 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 251-63;
White, DGFA-1 English, 56-58; notes
36, 37b,
above, note 89, below; Books Three, Five,
Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bourgeois family page.
A plaque in honor of Jacques Bourgeois,
erected in Aug 2004 by the Bourgeois family association, stands
outside of the NS visitor's center at Fort Lawrence, near Amherst.
It reads, in English: "Founder circa 1672, of Beaubassin first
establishment in the region of Missiguash River and initiator of salt
marsh farming in Acadia[,] Jacob Bourgeois arrived at Port-Royal
in 1641 as surgeon for the Acadian colony[.] He is a common
ancestor, with Jeanne Trahan, to the whole Bourgeois
family from Acadian descent[.]" See <heritage.tantramar.com/HS17_1C.html>.
65. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 729; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 94; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 468 (p. 10
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1327-29,
1331-37;
White, DGFA-1 English, 282-84; note
248, below; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Poirier
family page.
66. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 441-48; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 157, 161, 176, 179, 181-82, 188, 251, 532n171; Hébert,
D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 465-66 (pp. 7-8 of the written
census); White, DGFA-1, 184-217;
White, DGFA-1 English, 38-47; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Boudreaux family page.
67. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 431-37; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 97, 173, 192; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456,
462 (p. 4 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 143-56;
White, DGFA-1 English, 32-34; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Blanchard family page.
67a. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 769-70; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
458, 470 (p. 12 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 917, 925,
1397-98; Book Three.
68. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 769-70; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
458, 470 (p. 12 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 917,
925, 1310-17, 1397-98; White, DGFA-1 English, 279-80; Books Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Pinet/Pinel family page.
69. See
White, DGFA-1, 1170-72; White, DGFA-1 English, 251;
notes 34 &
36, above.
Arsenault, Généalogie,
does not include the family in his Port-Royal section.
70. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 494; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 98; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 470 (p. 12
of the written census); Melanson, Cormier Genealogy, 11-12;
Surette, Mésagouche & LaButte; Surette, Tintamarre & Le Lac; White, DGFA-1, 400-10;
White, DGFA-1 English, 89-92; notes
24b, above;
90, below;
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Cormier
family page.
Melanson offers that best scenario of Robert &
Thomas's time in the colony. Arsenault makes the
astonishing claim that Robert Cormier died at Annapolis Royal on
12 Feb 1712, when the old master ship's carpenter would have been 101 or
102
years old! Robert appears in no Acadian census between 1671 & his
death, & Arsenault offers no citation for Robert's death/burial, so one can only guess where
Bona got his information. White, followed here, says nothing of
Robert's passing.
71. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 662-64; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93; White, DGFA-1, 1048-58;
White, DGFA-1 English, 223-28; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Lejeune
family page.
72. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 807-13; Clément Cormier, "Thibaudeau
(Thibadeau, Thibodeau), Pierre," in DCB, 2:629-30,
&
online; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 191-92; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 465
(p. 7 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1508-23;
White, DGFA-1 English, 319-22; notes
36a, above, & 96 &
100, below; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Thibodeaux family page.
73.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 290. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 752-67; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 97, 324; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 470
(p. 12 of the written census); White, DGFA-1,
1373-83, 1385-95;
White, DGFA-1 English, 291-92; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Richard
family page.
74. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 592-94; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 96; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 468 (p. 10
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 753-54;
White, DGFA-1 English, 154.
Arsenault, 592, begins the genealogy of this family
with Joseph Gueguen or Guoguen, born at Plougenver,
Trégnier, France, in 1741 & evidently not kin to Antoine Gougeon
of the previous century.
75. See
MacDonald,
Fortune & La Tour; White, DGFA-1, 1430-39.
For
more on the La Tours, including their descendants, see MacDonald; notes
22, 37c,
37e, above,
210, below; Books Two & Three.
75a.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 5. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1613; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
197; White, DGFA-1, 21-22; White, DGFA-1 English,
6; note 105, below.
Arsenault says Martin was from La Rochelle &
married Jeanne in c1656. White is followed here. Arsenault
calls Martin's first "fief" on Rivière St.-Jean Maquapit, which may have
been its Maliseet name.
76. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 583-87; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 99; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 466 (p. 8
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 761-70;
White, DGFA-1 English, 157; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Granger
family page.
77. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 499-50, 718, 726-29; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 94, 99, 393-94; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458,
469 (p. 11 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1321-26;
White, DGFA-1 English, 280-82, 424-24; notes 30a,
above, & 242, below; Books Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Pitre family
page.
78. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 594-95; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 462 (p. 4 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 775-79;
White, DGFA-1 English, 158-59; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Guérin
family page.
79. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 544-49; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 461 (p. 3
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 621-40;
White, DGFA-1 English, 131-35; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Foret family page.
80. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 623-26; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 99, 179, 343; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
474, 481-82; White, DGFA-1, 916-20,
924-52;
White, DGFA-1 English, 194-204; note 58,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Landry
family page.
81. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 702; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 464 (p. 6 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1220-30;
White, DGFA-1 English, 259-61; Books Two & Three.
82. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 394-95; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 173, 368; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 462
(p. 4 in the written census); White, DGFA-1, 57-64;
White, DGFA-1 English, 13-14; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Babin family
page.
83. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 819, 1454-58; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
458, 467 (p. 9 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1575-85;
White, DGFA-1 English, 332-34; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Vincent
family page.
No dit
Clément from the Vincent family emigrated to LA. The Acadian Cléments
of the Bayou State were from another family that lived in greater
Acadia. See Books Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten; Clément
family page.
84. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 538-42; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 462 (p. 4 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 596-606;
White, DGFA-1 English, 126-27; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Dupuis/Dupuy family page.
Arsenault, 538, calls the progenitor of
this family Michel Dupeux dit Dupuis, but White, DGFA-1,
596, followed here, calls him simply Michel Dupuis. The
Acadian Dupuiss were called Dupuy in France & brought that
spelling to LA. See Books Five, Six, Eight, & Ten.
85. See
also <acadian-cajun.com>; Arsenault, Généalogie, 770-84; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 90, 179, 266, 268, 292-93, 308-09, 313, 325, 342,
541n51-52; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 470 (p. 12 of
the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1402-12;
White, DGFA-1 English, 293-95; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Robichaux family page.
86. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 710-17; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 92; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 464 (p. 6
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 1277-78;
White, DGFA-1 English, 271-72; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Pellerin family page.
By the time of Le Grand Dérangement,
this family's male line had become Canadian. See Book Three.
87. See
also <acadian-cajun.com>; Arsenault, Généalogie, 897-908; White, DGFA-1, 347-58;
White, DGFA-1 English, 78-80; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Chiasson family page.
88. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 500-01; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 462 (p. 4 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 446-52;
White, DGFA-1 English, 100; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Daigre/Daigle family page.
89.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia,
141; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 116, 130; Cormier, "Bourgeois,"
Jacques (Jacob)," in DCB,
2:94. See also Arsenault, History, 47-49;
Clark, A. H., 109, 113,
139, 386, 388;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 17-18; Griffiths, 126, 129; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 27-29; Milner,
"Chignecto"; note 294c, below.
The
traditional date of the founding of the Chignecto settlement is 1672.
See, e.g., Arsenault, 47-48; Cormier.
A. H. Clark, 139, says 1671, but the census of that
year shows no settlers there. See D. Hébert, Acadians in Exile,
460, 471.
The importance
of the trade with New England is well documented in Arsenault &
other sources. See, e.g., A. H. Clark, 139, 388; Erskine, 17; Hodson, 28-29.
A. H. Clark, 386, offers this important
observation: "It may have been the attempts by French governors
after 1670 to re-establish a firm, paternal, central control which
encouraged migration from Port Royal to Chignecto and Minas and the
fact, or threat, of such movement was enough to lighten the official
hand in the mother settlement lest the local supplies of food on which
the officials depended so heavily should be seriously threatened by
depopulation. Governors were constantly complaining of 'demi-republicaine'
attitudes in the outer settlements." See also A. H. Clark, 113, 139.
Hodson, 27, adds: "Making ends meet
on the isthmus was hardly easy. In the late 1680s, the bishop of
Québec reported that the earliest settlers had been 'reduced to living
on hay' before catching on to fishing--doubtless with the help of the
Mi'kmaq--and protecting the marshes with 'dikes they constructed with
much labor and expense.'" Hodson includes Memramcook &
Petitcoudiac among the Chignecto settlements.
89a.
Quotations from Erskine, Nova Scotia, 30; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 118.
90.
Quotations from Clark,
A. H., Acadia, 142; White, DGFA-1 English, 57. See also
<acadian-cajun.com>; Arsenault,
Généalogie, 393, 457, 827, 845, 859, 909, 929, 976, 1012; Arsenault,
History, 47-48; A. H. Clark, 109-11, 141;
J.-Roger Comeau, "LeNeuf de la
Vallière de Beaubassin, Michel (the elder)," in DCB,
2:409, &
online;
Cormier, "Bourgeois, in DCB, 2:94; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 116-117, 119; Melanson, Cormier
Genealogy, 8, 13-20; Milner, "Chignecto"; Surette, Mésagouche & LaButte; Surette, Tintamarre & Le Lac; White, DGFA-1,
1067-68; White, DGFA-1 English, 57, 89, 150, 230; Book Two.
Surette's studies are the most detailed
histories/genealogies of the Chignecto settlements.
Griffiths says that, although there is no
question that Jacques Bourgeois & his family were the first to
settle at Chignecto, it was not until "either immediately before or at
the very time" of Bourgeois's settlement that Frontenac awarded
Le Neuf de la Vallière a large
grant in the area. La Vallière's grant was dated 24 Oct 1676.
Griffiths adds: "Its limits were extensive: on the
Atlantic coast, roughly from just below present-day Shediac to the
Philip River, including Baie Verte; on the west, from Memramcook as far
south as Springhill. The original grant used some Mi'kmaq place
names, drawing the boundaries on the Atlantic between the
Kigiskouabougoouet River and the Kimongouitche. On the Bay of
Fundy side, the landmarks used were Chignecto Bay and Cape Tourmentine."
Ironically, when Nicolas Denys learned of the 1676 grant to his son-in-law,
he protested, insisting that it was an infringement on his own
concessions in the area. Denys protested to Intendant Duchesneau,
informing him that the Denys grant was dated 1654, which preceded that
of La Vallière by over 2 decades. See Griffiths, 116-17.
A. H. Clark, 141, is certain that
Bourgeois came to Chignecto before La Vallière. See also White, DGFA-1 English, 230.
La Vallière's
seat at Chignecto was on today's Tonge's Island, originally called Île
de La Villière, & was an island only before the Acadians dyked the
surrounding salt marshes; after that, it became a "hill," now located
along Cumberland Basin between the Tantramar Marsh to the northwest &
Amhert, NS, to the southeast. According to online Wikimapia, "Tonge's
Island," that hill "is now currently home to a farm-house that has been
converted into a research station for Acadia University and Duck's
Unlimited." Having served as the capital of Acadia from 1678-84,
on 15 May 1925, Tonge's Island was recognized as a National Historic
Site of Canada. An historical marker has stood there since 1927.
Griffiths, 116, adds: "A number of
writers quote La Valliere's concession as containing a clause that
enjoined him not to disturb 'inhabitants of the province that are to be
found in possession of land and inheritance that they are cultivating,
living on and working to increase its value,' but documentation of this
does not seem to have survived." Comeau, who
details La Vallière's grant from Frontenac, says nothing about any
stipulation that La Vallière not disturb the Chignecto habitants
already there. One has to ask the question: What aristocrat would
agree to such a limitation on his seigneurial rights, especially one as
proud & domineering as Michel Le Neuf, sieur de la Vallière?
A. H. Clark, 142; & Griffiths, 119, detail a lawsuit in 1682 in which La Vallière sought to collect
rent from 11 censitaires at Beaubassin. A. H. Clark, 141, concludes: "... either
they [the habitants] had taken new lands outside of the Bourgeois
'reserve' or La Vallière was asserting at least nominal control over the
whole area." Griffiths says La Vallière's 1682 suit
against the Beaubassin habitants, made before the Conseil Souverain in
Québec, was decided in his favor. She adds, on 119: "None
of the settlers whom La Vallière had brought from Canada was party to
this suit, which seems to have been the result of an attempt by La Vallière to extend his authority over the whole of the isthmus, in spite
of the possible existence of orders against this." White, DGFA-1 English, 57, says "the
names of Jacques Bourgeois's sons Guillaume and Germain appear on
the record of La Vallière's allotment to his tenants, March 20, 1682."
White, DGFA-1 English, lists many other Beaubassin
"tenants," including, on 89, the author's paternal ancestor
Thomas Cormier, described as "One of the first settlers at
Beaubassin....," &, on 150, Germain Girouard,
Thomas's brother-in-law & another original settler. This sounds like a seigneurial arrangement. One could conclude,
then, that the agreement not to "disturb" the original settlers is
either the
stuff of legend, or the sieur was not allowed to dispossess his tenants
of their land without good cause, a typical seigneurial arrangement.
See notes 100 &
293f, below.
According to Milner: "La Vallière was a member of the Poterie family, that came with the
Repentigny family from Caen to Quebec in 1638," & that the Poteries,
along with the Repentignys, were among the 4 noble families in Canada
who lived by the sword, not by the plow, and who were helpless without
"their official pay." Milner goes on: "Outside of his
poverty, La Valliere was a man of consequence. While he
held the Commission of Captain of the Court's guards, he was a voyageur,
a wood ranger, a mariner, a trader and a diplomat, and in one capacity
or another was constantly on the move on the frontiers of French domain
in Canada--at one time in the wilds of Hudson's Bay and at another a
beau gallant at Boston." According to Comeau, La Vallière, while a part of his
father-in-law's operations, "In 1672 ... is supposed to have set up a
fur-trading post on the isthmus of Chignecto, while devoting part of his
time to the fishing industry, farming, settlement, and soldiering."
This still would have been about the same time, if not slightly after,
Bourgeois began the Chignecto settlement. One wonders what
role the supposed fur-trading post played in La Vallière's securing the
seigneurial rights to the area from Frontenac in 1676. White,
DGFA-1 English, 230, says that in Jun 1689 (during the governorship
of Meneval), La Vallière served as "Lieutenant in Acadia"; in Oct of
that year, now back in Canada, he was "Captain of Frontenac's guards";
in May 1699 he was "Town major of Montréal"; & became Chevalier de
St.-Louis "probably" in 1705, the year of his death--he died in Jul,
age about 64. Both of his wives were Denyss, the first a daughter
of Nicolas, the second of Simon, which made his wives first cousins.
See White, DGFA-1, 1067-68. Griffiths, 117, adds that La Vallière
served as commander & then governor of the colony from 1678-84, but his
governorship was not confirmed by the king until 1683. See also
note 293, below.
Interestingly, Jacques Bourgeois did
not remain at Chignecto but returned to Port-Royal, where he died in
c1701. See Cormier.
See
Appendix for Acadian church parishes.
91. See Arsenault, Généalogie, 629, 729, 846, 863,
884, 886, 897, 946, 952-53, 959-60, 964, 982-84, 989, 1007-09, 1013-14, 1026,
1030-31, 1054, 1057, 1067, 1086; Arsenault,
History, 48; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 114, 142,
144, 210; Erskine, Nova
Scotia, 30; White, DGFA-1, 305, 348, 350, 791-94, 1327-29; White, DGFA-1 English,
78-79, 135, 162-63.
For Gabriel Chiasson,
see Arsenault, 897; White,
DGFA-1, 350; White, DGFA-1 English, 78-79; Book Three.
For Michel Haché
dit
Gallant, see Arsenault, 983-4; White,
DGFA-1,
791-94; White,
DGFA-1 English, 162-63; Book Three. The family name evolved into Haché-Gallant
then
Haché then Achée
by the time Michel's descendants reached Louisiana. The family name in
Canada is usually spelled Gallant, but also Galland, Hachey,
Larché dit
Gallant. Milner, "Chignecto," says that
La Vallière "had a
secretary named Hache Galand, who married an Acadian lass named
Anne Courmier and their descendants today [1911] number hundreds
of families." So spelling isn't everything.
A. H. Clark, 142, says: "After
1686 there seems to have been little migration from Port Royal to the
Chignecto area and it probably grew largely by natural increase,
although some accretions from the fishing fleet, from France, or even
from New France are assumed." A. H. Clark, 144, adds: "By the
later 1680's both La Vallière and Bourgeois built gristmills at
Beaubassin and the latter appears to have had a sawmill as well.
Grain was being produced in some quantity. Gradually the settlers
adopted all of the field crops and animals known at Port Royal, and
fruit trees (plums, pears, and apples) were well established by the turn
of the century, perhaps introduced by Roger Quessy (Kessey,
Casey? [Caissie]), one of the early settlers.
Apparently the more severe winter of Beaubassin kept out cherries."
Caissie was married to Michel Poirier's only sister
Marie-Françoise. See White, DGFA-1, 305, 1327.
A. H. Clark, 144, notes: "Beaubassin failed
to achieve the rate of growth of the Minas Basin settlements. The
departure of La Vallière and his family for Canada and the actions of
his son-in-law and agent, Sébastien de Villieu, probaby were
factors, but the raids from New England under Benjamin Church in 1696
and 1704, with their destruction of buildings and cattle, were reason
enough for discouragement. Nonetheless, ... agricultural
statistics over a twenty-year period [1686-1707], shows a substantial
steady growth." See notes 170 &
190, below, for Church's raids.
Clark, 144, adds: "The Chignecto isthmus was, still, rather a
crossroads for Indians moving from the Bay to the Gulf or from the
mainland out to the peninsula and their frequent presence may deterred
some more timid souls."
Clark, A. H., 210, offers detailed,
though always estimated, population figures for Chignecto during British
control of the colony. See Book Two for geographical & historical
details of the Chignecto settlements after the British took over Acadia.
For the archaeological remains of the area, c1975, see Erskine.
White, DGFA-1 English, 135, says:
"According to a tradition, preserved by the elders of Memramcook,
Jean-Baptiste Forest, husband of Élisabeth LaBarre, was the
seigneur of Menoudie before the Expulsion ...." Italics added.
92.
Quotation from Arsenault,
History, 53. See also Arsenault, Généalogie,
804-05, 1081, 1086, 1092, 1101, 1104-05, 1108, 1116, 1121, 1125,
1132-34, 1136-38, 1143, 1150-51, 1153, 1155, 1158, 1160, 1170, 1174,
1183, 1195, 1198-99, 1216-17, 1261-62, 1273, 1276, 1279-80, 1284, 1285,
1293-94, 1303, 1308; Arsenault, History, 54; BRDR, vol.
1a; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 109-10, 139-40, 148,
150, 209, 214-17;
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 18, 31-39; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 129-30, 168; Hodson,
Acadian Diaspora, 27; White, DGFA-1,
1098, 1484, 1489; White,
DGFA-1 English, 130, 195-96, 210; note
98a, below.
Griffiths, 168, Map 5, entitled "Expansion
of Acadian settlements, 1605-1710," is especially helpful in visualizing
Acadian settlement patterns.
Arsenault's genealogy says Pierre
Thériot & Cécile Landry were married in 1685, but White,
DGFA-1, 1484, 1489, says in c1678.
Clark, A. H., 148, says the
settlement at Minas began around 1682. Erskine, 33, says early settlers at Minas may have used an Indian chapel & cemetery on a
knoll above the beach of today's Avonport peninsula until they had a
church of their own. "Respect for the Indians may have delayed
occupation" of the Avonport site, Erskine adds, "until a church in Grand
Pré made the chapel unnecessary. There were both church and priest
in Grand Pré by 1687." The church at Grand-Pré is called
St.-Charles-aux-Mines as well as St.-Charles-des-Mines. For the former
appellation, see BRDR, 1a:I-1.
The Minas settlement also was called Les Mines
and Mines. The name Grand-Pré is often applied to all of the
settlements at Minas, but, in truth, Grand-Pré was only one of the many
settlements in the area. See Book Two. Clark, A. H., 148, calls Grand-Pré " that
much-storied settlement," which probably explains why the name loomed
large among the Minas communities. Besides Grand-Pré, there were,
from north to south, Rivière Pereau, Rivière-de-la-Vieille-Habitation
(today's Habitant Creek), Rivière-aux-Canards, Rivière-St.-Antoine (also
called Rivière-des-Habitants, today's Cornwallis River), & Rivière
Gaspereau. See Clark, A. H., 209, Fig. 6.2, entitled "Minas and Pisiquid: Population, 1714";
Book Two.
Erskine, 38, says of the possible site of
St.-Joseph-des-Mines: "There was a church somewhere in Canard and,
when a barn east of the present Anglican church at Church Street was
being extended, an iron kettle was found buried, under it a smaller
kettle and in this, wrapped in birchbark, two glass cruets and the
double cup of communion service. These must have been buried at
the time of the imprisonment of the menfolk at Grand Pré. No trace
of the church remains, but the most likely site would have been where
the rectory now stands on the top of the ridge, visible to the valleys
of both Canard and Grand Habitant."
The gaspereau, taxonomic name Alosa
pseudoharengus, commonly known as the alewife, is a kind of shad;
however, gaspereau is the name favored in Atlantic Canada, though in
southwest Nova Scotia it is also called the kiack or kyack, probably
from the Mi'kmaq. Sadly, today it is a "species of concern" not
only in its natural habitat along the Atlantic littoral, but also in the
Great Lakes, which it invaded during the early 1800s via the Welland
Canal, which bypasses Niagara Falls. Quotation from Wikipedia., "Alewife"." See also Clark, A. H., 150; Book Two.
Pigiguit also could be considered a Minas
settlement because Rivière Pigiguit, now the Avon River, also flows into
the Minas Basin. Cobeguit lay at the extreme northeastern corner of the
basin, more distant from Minas than Pigiguit but still a part of the
Minas region. See Clark, A. H., 109-10. Clark, A.
H., 140, Fig. 5.9,
offers a good map of the entire basin with Acadian & modern-day place
names. See Clark, A. H., 209, Fig. 6.2, for rivers & settlements in
the Grand-Pré area, c1714, that also includes population estimates for
that year.
93.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 148-49. See also Arsenault, History, 56;
Clark, A. H., 113, 139, 208-10; Erskine, Nova
Scotia, 31-39; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
144; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 27.
Clark, A. H., 148, says that at Minas in 1686
there were 83 arpents, probably dyked lands, in cultivation.
For the Le Borgne seigneurial claim to
the Minas Basin, see Clark, A. H., 149, who says: "...their hold was
light, their claims small..., and they did nothing to assist the
settlers or, apparently, even to guide them." Clark says the
early settlers at Minas may
have "squatted" but that Pierre Melanson, fils "acted as
their seigneurial agent or procureur fiscal (and was the "captain
of militia" in the area and the recognized leader or local authority),
guided them in their location."
A French colonial official during the late
1680s averred that the new Minas settlement was "'... too remote for
commerce; only small vessels can risk going there.'" See Clark,
A. H., 149, who continues: "This in fact expresses correctly the degree
of isolation but it is not correct in terms of commerce, for these
people, like those at Port Royal and Beaubassin, depended on New England
goods...."
Clark, A. H., 149, says "All the Minas Basin
settlements [including Pigiguit & Cobeguit] enjoyed the fruits of their
own abundant natural population increase greatly aided by the continued
migration of young couples from Port Royal with the wives at the peak of
their child-bearing capacity." Clark, A. H., 208-10, offers
detailed, though always estimated, population figures for the Minas
Basin during British control of the colony. He concludes, on 208, "On the basis of any reasonable assumption or evidence, the
population grew more rapidly in the Minas district than in those of
either Annapolis or Chignecto."
For geographical & historical details of what Clark calls
Minas Proper after the British took over Acadia, see Book Two. For
the archaeological remains of the area, c1975, see Erskine.
Hodson says that "To guard Grand Pré against the rivière Gaspereau and the bay
itself, Acadians eventually built seventeen and a half miles of dikes
equipped with more than thirty sluices."
94. See Arsenault,
Généalogie, 1320, 1322, 1330, 1336, 1346-50, 1364-68, 1374, 1383,
1386, 1388-89, 1392, 1401, 1411, 1415, 1419-23, 1427, 1430, 1432, 1434,
1441, 1454; Arsenault,
History, 56; René Baudry, "Thury, Louis-Pierre," in DCB,
1:649, & online; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 149,
209, 217-18; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
18, 39-41; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 193; note
179a, below; Book Three.
Griffiths points out that the original land grants in the
Pigiguit area have been lost, so no one can now say who founded the
settlement.
Pigiguit, pronounced PIDG-ee-gwit, also is spelled
Pesaquid, Pisiguit, Pisiquid, Pisiquit, Piziguit, Piziquid, Piziquit.
The settlement was large enough to support 2 church
parishes, but a shortage of priests usually meant that only 1
priest served both parishes. Online Wikipedia, "Pisiguit," citing
Flannery Surrette, Mapping Catholic Acadia - Parishes, Churches,
Chapels, and Missions, published by Saint Mary's University in 2005,
gives the Pigiguit parish founding dates used here. Signs
in the area, however, including a granite marker dated 13 Aug 2000,
commemorating the re-discovery of the Ste.-Famille Parish cemetery, give
1722 as the date for the founding of Ste.-Famille, implying that
l'Assomption was the older parish.
The lower-case "l" is used here instead of its
capital so as not to confuse this l'Assomption with other L'Assomptions
in Acadian history. See especially Books Five, Six, & Eight.
Clark, A. H., 149, says by 1701 there were 33
families of 188 individuals at Pigiguit & that it grew "at a slightly
more moderate rate" compared to its sister settlement at Cobeguit.
For geographical & historical details of
Pigiguit after the British took over Acadia, see Book Two. For the
archaeological remains of the area, c1975, see Erskine, 39-41.
The St. Croix River at today's Windsor, NS,
should not be confused with the St. Croix River that forms today's
international boundary between ME & NB. See
Clark, A. H., 209, Fig. 6.2, for a good map of the Pigiguit area, c1714,
that also includes estimated population figures.
95.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 244. See also <acadian-home.org>; Arsenault, Généalogie, 1465, 1470-71,
1474, 1480-82, 1484, 1488, 1490, 1492-94, 1496, 1504, 1506-07, 1511,
1528; Arsenault,
History, 56-57; BRDR, 1a(rev.):155; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
116, 118, 127, 129, 149, 171-73, 209 (Fig. 6.2), 218-20; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 18,
41-43; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 193; Massignon,
"Trahans of Acadia," 117; White, DGFA-1, 145, 229, 778, 1134-35;
White, DGFA-1 English, 54, 111.
Clark, A. H., 127, Fig. 5.7, entitled "Northern
and Eastern Acadian Settlements: Population, 1707," is a map,
replete with mileage scale, that shows the distances between Beaubassin, western Minas,
Pigiguit, & Cobeguit.
Arsenault, History, 56, says Mathieu Martin "was given a seigneury on the Wecobequitk (Cobequid)
River in 1689 because 'he was the first born in Acadia among the French
of the country,'" which follows Massignon, "Trahans of Acadia",
117. Clark, A. H., 118, 219, agrees that Martin
received his grant in 1689 but notes that Cobeguit was settled
years later. White, DGFA-1 English, 244, is clear that
Mathieu received his grant at Cobeguit on 28 Mar 1689. He was at
Port-Royal in Aug 1695, when an oath of allegiance to the English
monarch was foisted on the habitants there (he signed it, rather than
place his mark, like his other brother Pierre, fils), so
Mathieu evidently used his grant at the far end of the Minas basin
originally for the fur trade & not for agriculture. See Clark, A.
H., 149. In the censuses of 1693 & 1700, Mathieu Martin,
Martin Bourg, & Martin Blanchard, who Arsenault,
History, 57, lists as pioneers of the settlement, were still being counted at
Port-Royal. See <acadian-home.org>.
Not until 1701 were Martin Blanchard, Martin Bourg, &
Jérôme, called Giraud, Guérin counted at Cobeguit, the only 3
families there; Mathieu Martin himself was not counted there
until 1714, so he must have invited those families to live on his
seigneurie, & they transformed it into another agricultural settlement before he
took up residence there. The settlement thrived. By
1707, there were 17 families & 82 individuals at Cobeguit. See
<acadian-home.org>;
Clark, A. H., 129, 149; White, DGFA-1, 145, 229, 778, 1135.
Clark, A. H., 116, Fig. 5.2, includes a list of the seigneuries
granted in peninsula Acadia, replete with location & dates of the grant,
places Martin's grant in the category of "The date is
uncertain," & is the source for the names Ouëcobeguy & St.-Mathieu.
Griffith, 193, calls
Martin "one [of] the first children born in Acadia, both of whose
parents were European ..." & says, "The early years of settlement [at
Cobeguit] were troubled with disputes over ownership with [colonial
official Mathieu] de Goutin." For Mathieu Martin's
marriage (his wife's name has been lost to history), & his
childlessness, see White, DGFA-1, 1134, which notes that Mathieu
died before (av) Apr 1724, when he would have been in his early
80s. Arsenault, Généalogie,1506, the Cobeguit section,
inexplicably says of Mathieu Martin that "Il est resté
célibataire," that is, he remained a bachelor. White is followed here. For the claims of several of the Cobeguit settlers--Noël
Doiron, Jean Bourg, Louis Bourg, & Joseph Robichaud--that
they were Mathieu's heirs & therefore inherited his seigneurie, see
White, DGFA-1 English, 54, 111, 244; note
48, above.
Cobeguit also is spelled Cobequid, Cobequit.
Since Cobeguit, today's Truro, NS, lay at the extreme
northeastern corner of the Minas Basin, it may be considered a part of
the Minas region. Clark, A. H., 219, says that Mathieu Martin's
seigneurie ran "east of the longitude of the mouth of the Shubenacadie
[River]," so it did not include the north & south shores of today's
Cobequid Bay, where some of the Acadians settled. See Book Two.
Clark, A. H., 209, offers detailed, though always
estimated, population figures for Cobeguit during British control of the
colony.
For cattle production at Cobeguit & illegal
trade of the settlers there with the French at Louisbourg via
Tatamagouche, see Clark,
A. H., 171-73, 219; Erskine, p. 41.
For geographical & historical details of
Cobeguit after the British took over Acadia, see Book Two. For the
archaeological remains of the area, c1975, see Erskine, 42-43.
For the highest tides recorded on the planet in the Cobeguit area, see
note 22c, above.
96. See <acadian-home.org>; Arsenault, Généalogie, 431, 508, 643-44, 646,
807, 1535, 1539-40, 1543, 1545-46, 1557-62, 1564, 1566, 1568-69, 1572,
1574, 1581; Arsenault,
History, 50; Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 28, 30, 33; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 111,
116, 145, 147-48, 210-11; Cormier, "Brossard,
Jean-François," in DCB, 2:105; Cormier, "Thibaudeau," in DCB, 2:629-30;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 191-92; Historical
Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29; Surette, Tintamarre & Le Lac,
14; Taillemite, "Villieu, Claude-Sébastien de," in DCB, 2:653-54; White, DGFA-1 English, 33, 64, 96, 208,
319-20;
note 299, below.
Clark, A. H., 116, Fig. 5.2, says Chepoudy
was granted "to Sieur de Villieu (son-in-law of the Sieur de La Vallière)."
He adds, on p. 144: "La Vallière [the seigneur of Chignecto] may
have got on well with his own servants or engagés but his son-in-law,
de Villieu, made himself unpopular by, among other acts, getting eviction
orders for settlers who had squatted in Shepody Bay and dispossessing
them. No doubt this was within the rights of a rather expansive
seigneurial grant but it did not encourage settlement, for others could
not be induced to replace them." White, 208, says de Villeu received his "grant of seigneury of Chipoudy"
on 21 Aug 1700. Clark, A. H., 145, calls Pierre
Thibaudeau, as he spells his name, "A miller of Pré Ronde, up the
river from Port Royal...," & says, on 145 & 147, that Pierre & his
sons explored the Chepoudy area in 1698, encouraged the Blanchards
to settle at nearby Petitcoudiac, & that "The first wintering by three
of Thibaudeau's sons was in 1699/1700, when they did well trading
furs with the Indians." It was then that de Villieu "heard of the
activity and immediately protested that they were on his father-in-law's
seigneurie without permission, although the precise boundaries of
La Vallière's grant are almost impossible to determine from the wording of
the concession." Clark says that Thibaudeau, who "had
dreamed of a seigneurie of his own, like that of his old friend Mathieu
Martin at Cobeguid ..." offered to compromise, but de Villieu
refused & pressed his case with authorities in France. In 1702,
however, de Villieu evidently changed his mind & offered to compromise, but "the Thibaudeau
group, believing that a petition of their own to Paris would succeed, in
turn refused." They were so certain of success that they dyked the
salt marshes, erected a gristmill & a sawmill, & otherwise took
possession of the Chepoudy coast. In the end, they won & then lost
their claims: "In 1703 they had their lands confirmed but 'without
prejudice' to the rights of La Vallière. The old man [Pierre
Thibodeau] died [in Dec 1704, in his early 70s, at Prée-Ronde, not
Chepoudy] thinking himself a true seigneur but, in an arrêt of June 2,
1705, the
Thibaudeaus' right to the land was expressly granted as a concession
from La Vallière's seigneurie. Officially, the Thibaudeaus
could not extend their lands, nor could others settle without assuming
the legal position and charges consequent to being censitaires of the
seigneur of Beaubassin." Griffiths also offers a detailed description of the founding of these
settlements, including the conflict of land claims between the
Thibodeau & Blanchard
settlers & La Vallière/de Villieu. See also Taillemite,
2:654; White, 319-20. Villebon's sudden death in 1700
doubtlessly complicated Thibodeau's & Blanchard's case against
La Villière & de Villieu. De Villeu, in fact, succeeded Villebon
as temporary commander of the colony & remained in that position until
Jacques-François de Mombeton de Brouillan took over as colonial
commander in 1701. See Taillemite, 2:654.
Clark, A. H., 147, says in 1702 there were 7
households of roughly 33 individuals at Chepoudy, & 5 households of 13
individuals at Petitcoudiac. By 1707, Chepoudy & Petitcoudiac held
14 families & 7 engagés, a total of 55 individuals, with 12 horses, 70
cattle, & 50 sheep. Expansion was slowed, however, by the on-going
war with Britain & by de Villieu's obstructions. During Queen Anne's
War, Chepoudy, despite being a coastal settlement, "never actually was
raided but English ships effectively cut it off from Port Royal and
Quebec." Surette, on the other hand, insists that Benjamin
Church & his New Englanders hit the trois-rivières settlements
hard in their Jul 1704 raid up the Bay of Fundy, so much so that the
villages there were abandoned for years. Clark notes that approximately 50 to 75 individuals, "four-fifths of them
of European blood," lived at Chepoudy in 1715. Clark, A. H., 147-48,
adds: "It [Chepoudy] became a favorite summer camping spot for
Indians, both Micmac and Malecite, and at least one engagé started a
métis family with an Indian bride." By 1734, settlers in the
trois-rivières area numbered "some" 65 families, & "an estimated further
hundred families by 1750." (In this study, I spell the name of the
Chepoudy/Petitcoudiac/Memramcook area "trois-rivières," using lower-case
letters, so as not to confuse the reader with the prominent Canadian
settlement of Trois-Rivières, on the St. Lawrence between Québec &
Montréal. There also was a Trois-Rivières on the east coast of Île
St.-Jean, today's Prince Edward Island.)
Chepoudy also is spelled Shepody.
Clark, A. H., 210-11, offers detailed, though always
estimated, population figures for Shepody during British control of the
colony. Petitcoudiac also is spelled Petitcodiac, Petit Codiac,
Pécoudiak. See,
e.g., Brasseaux;
White, 33.
A chronology of the history of Memramcook can
be found at the end of the article "Memramcook: Birthplace of the New
Acadia" at <acadian-home.org>.
The time line was taken from the Monument Lefebvre at Memramcook.
For the best map of the Bay of Fundy
settlements, using colors to show topography & including the standard
spellings of place names used here, see the Historical
Atlas of Canada. This map even includes the tidal
ranges in meters: 7-9 at Port-Royal, 13-14 in the Bassin
des Mines, 15 at Cobeguit, 13 at Beaubassin, Chepoudy, & Petitcoudiac.
In feet this is ... awesome. No other region on earth boasts such
dramatic tides.
97.
Quotation from MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges," in DCB, 1:400. See
also Arsenault,
Généalogie, 1614-49, 1634n8; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 157; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
126; notes 07, 12e, &
19a, above, &
108 & 161,
below.
A. H. Clark says of the
settlements on the St.-Jean: "They became, increasingly, simply
fur-trading posts and bases for raids on New England. The Acadians
in the [Fundy] settlements appear to have had almost nothing to do with them
[the fur traders & the capitaines de sauvages], and they were little
more relevant to their farming community than the more distant Canadian
people along the St. Lawrence. The north shore of the Bay of Fundy
and east to the Penobscot River appears to have had fewer than one
hundred settlers in any of the seventeenth-century accounts.
Rameau [published in 1889] estimated a total of ninety-six for 1701, on
the Saint John River and westward." Nevertheless, as names
like Dugas, Henry, Part, & Roy attest, some
"typical" Fundy families helped settle the big river valley.
98.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 125. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 391-819; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 122 (Fig.
5.3, entitled "Port Royal Basin and Valley: Population,
1671-1710"), 132-38, 206 (Fig. 6.1, entitled "Annapolis Basin and
Valley: Population, 1714), 212-14; Cormier, "Le Borgne de
Belle-Isle, Alexandre," in DCB, 1:436; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
28-30; Griffiths, 126.
For geographical & historical details of the Annapolis
valley after Acadia fell to the British, see Book Two. For the
archaeological remains of the area, c1975, see Erskine.
98a.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 129-30.
See also Griffiths, 169.
The families used to illustrate this Acadian phenomenon are
Bourgeois & Melanson, pioneers of Chignecto & Minas,
respectively. See Griffiths, 130.
Griffiths, 168, Map 5, entitled "Expansion
of Acadian settlements, 1605-1710," is especially helpful in visualizing
the slow but steady movement of Acadians from their base at Port-Royal.
99. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1585-1609; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 116, 118,
151-53; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 18, 45-46; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 126; White, DGFA-1, 1321-22; note 35, above.
For Le Loutre, see Book Two.
99a. See
C. Bruce Fergusson, "Bergier, Clerbaud," in DCB, 1:89-90; Haynes, The Forgotten Battle.
100.
See Champlain's Dream, 470-71; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 109; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
xi; online Wikipedia, "Manorialism."
The French word seigneurie, the
spelling favored here, also is rendered seigneury, perhaps an
anglicized version of the word. See Trudel for the use of both spellings in a single paragraph.
101. See
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 470-71; Moogk, La Nouvelle France; online Wikipedia, "Seigneurial System of New France";
notes 02za,
05b, & 05i, above.
The first land grant in French Canada was made
in 1623 when Champlain awarded Louis Hébert a piece of land on
Rivière St.-Charles, just below Québec, 6 years after the apothecary
took his family to the colony. See note
10e, above. After 1627, the seigneurial system took a firm
hold in New France & persisted even after the British took over Canada
in the early 1760s.
During the first half of the 1700s, seigneurial grants existed, but were rare, in the French Maritimes colony
of Île Royale, which included Île St.-Jean. See books Two & Four.
On the insistence of
King Louis XIV, French LA, founded in 1699, never had a seigneurial system. All
lands granted there, even to the highest officials, were given
en routure--without seigneurial privileges.
See Book Four.
102.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 66, citing both A. H. Clark & Joan Bourque Campbell.
See also Griffiths, 127-28; White, DGFA-1 English, 66; notes
06, 07,
08a, 13,
15, 20,
22, 22a, 38,
above.
103. See
notes 25, 26,
33, above.
104. See
Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 118; notes 35, 36,
36a, 38, above.
105.
Quotations from Webster, Acadia, 167-68; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 109, 110; White, DGFA-1 English,
82, 103, 105, 186, 261. See also Arsenault, Généalogie,
1613; Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine,"
in DCB, 1:63; Clarence J. d'Entremont,
"Serreau (Sarreau) de Saint-Aubin, Jean," in DCB,
2:604-05,
&
online; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
14-15; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
471-72; Griffiths, 126; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,"
Jean-Vincent, d'," in DCB, 2:4-7; White, DGFA-1,
754-55, 1067, 1123-24, 1225, 1408; White, DGFA-1 English, 5-6,
100-01, 155, 220-21, 230, 242, 268; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6; notes 90,
above, & 141 &
159a, below; Book Four.
Erskine, 14, insists that
after the French resumed control of Acadia "in 1667[sic],"
"Grants to seignories were sold to seigneurs hungry for the
profits of the fur trade...." Italics added. No other source
says that French authorities "sold" seigneurial grants.
Griffiths, 109, details d'Aprendestiguy's
Oct 1672 grant, concluding: "The grant did no spell out explicitly
any obligation to establish settlers, as opposed to establishing
residence--feu et lieu--on the the land within a year.
Fealty, of course, was owed to the king, in the person of the governor
of the colony at Pentagöuet. The rest of the conditions in the
concession were similar to those in Canada: the rights of
seigeneurial justice (judging disputes surrounding land usage and
inheritance), the rights of transfer subject to the Coutume du Vexin
Français, the preservation of oaks suitable for shipbuilding, and the
obligation of informing either king or the Compagnie des Indes should
mines be discovered." Professor Griffiths states, on p. 110, that
the conditions for holding the concessions granted to Soulanges de
Marson & his brother Jacques along the St.-Jean, made a few days later,
"were the same as those stated in d'Aprendestiguy's grant."
Arsenault calls d'Aprendestiguy's first
"fief" on Rivière St.-Jean Maquapit, which may have been its Indian
name.
For the Le Neuf/Morin scandal at Beaubassin in the
late 1680s, involving the seigneur's daughter, see White, DGFA-1, 1225; Book Two.
106.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 76, 208. See also
Erskine, Nova Scotia, 15-16;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 131; Bernard Pothier, "Gannes de Falaise (Falaize), Louis
de," in DCB, 2:236, &
online; Bernard Pothier, "Goutin (Degoutin, Degoutins,
Desgoutins, De Goutin), Mathieu de," in DCB, 2:257-58,
&
online;
Étienne Taillemite, "Villieu, Claude-Sébastien
de," in DCB,
2:653-54, &
online; White, DGFA-1, 339,
663, 756, 1099; White, DGFA-1 English, 38,
76-77, 155, 237; notes 96, above,
&
108, below.
Griffiths says that, during the tenure of Abbé Louis Petit as vicar-general
of Acadia, "an unnamed colonist" gave "lessons to the boys at Port
Royal," but White, DGFA-1 English, 76, citing a letter from Fr.
Petit to the new Bishop of Québec, Saint-Vallier, makes it clear that
the schoolmaster at Port-Royal was Pierre Chênet. See also
note 222, below.
107.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 140. See
also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 116; Griffiths, 141.
Clark, A. H., 116, figure 5.2, entitled "The Acadian
Lands: Seigneurial and Territorial Grants in the Chignecto Region
and Peninsula Nova Scotia," is a detailed map, complete with dates &
appended explanations, of all the known seigneurial grants in that part
of greater Acadia from 1603-1703.
108.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 135, 319. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1634n8; Cormier, "Thibaudeau," in DCB, 2:629-30; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
16; White, DGFA-1, 631, 747-48; White, DGFA-1 English, 33, 244,
320; notes 90 &
97, above, &
161, below; Books Two & Three.
Cormier details Pierre's fight with La Vallière of
Beaubassin over seigneurial rights to the Chepoudy area. Fr. Cormier
points out that, in the end, Pierre lost his suit against La Vallière,
who could wield much more influence at court than Thibodeau the
commoner. See also White, DGFA-1 English, 319-20; note
96, above.
Jean-Baptiste Forest, son of Michel
de Forest, served for a time as a domestique for
fellow Acadian Daniel
LeBlanc at
Port-Royal before moving to Chignecto, so Jean-Baptiste's elevation
to seigneur of Menoudy would
have been quite a promotion in life for a man who once had been a servant. See
White, DGFA-1, 631. Erskine says,
enigmatically, in a short discussion of the seigneuries of Acadia:
"The tradition of the seigneur of Minudie is exceptional. He is
said to have brought in a hundred colonists, to have dyked the present
public pasture and to have had a flourishing fishery, but the
encroaching sea has taken church and cemetery and little remains."
Erskine does not mention the name of the seigneur. Was it
Jean-Baptiste Forest? Or La Vallière of Beaubassin?
One suspects the latter.
109.
Quotation from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 113-14. See also
Clark, A. H., 106-07, 115, 119, 195-200; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 67, 79-80.
Clark, A. H., 115, adds:
"For almost all practical purposes the censitaires of the Acadian
seigneurs might as well have been freeholders with nominal quitrents or
land taxes." See also note
22a, above. Clark, A. H., 119,
says that some of the weakest seigneurial claims were in what became the
richest part of Acadia, the western portion of the Minas Basin around
Grand-Pré & Pigiguit. Clark, A. H., 106-07, adds: "... after
1654 [when the English took over the colony for the second time] Acadia
never had whatever degree of institutionalization was known in New
France; the relation between seigneur and habitant was loose and fluid
and one would have been hard put to it to have recognized anything like
our traditional conception of seigneurial forms and practices in any of
the later Acadian settlements. It may be that the form had some
substance at La Have [from 1632-36, when Razilly was governor] ... but
we have little evidence on which to go." See also Clark, A.
H., 195-200; Griffiths; note 37b,
above.
110.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 114, 118-19.
111.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 120-21; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 66, 110-11. See also Arsenault, History,
50; Clark, A. H., 144; Griffiths, 492.
Griffiths, 492n45, reminds us: "Nor
was seigneurial control in France ever a uniform system from Normandy to
Provence."
Clark, A. H., 144, contradicts himself by saying
that "By the later 1680's La Vallière [seigneur of Beaubassin] and
Bourgeois [the pioneer settler there] had built gristmills at
Beaubassin...." Pierre Thibodeau, seigneur of Chepoudy,
also built a gristmill at that settlement when he moved there from
Port-Royal during the late 1690s; having built a grist mill at Prée-Ronde
on the river above Port-Royal, he was familiar with the technology. See Arsenault.
Book Two offers an instance in the 1730s when
the governor of NS refused to respect the seigneurial rights of
a La Tour descendant. She took her cause to London & bested
the governor, Richard Philipps, before the British Board of Trade.
See Griffiths, 492n46; note 75, above.
112. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 678-85; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 55, 70, 92, 99, 118, 193; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 469 (p. 11 of the written census); White, DGFA-1,
1128-29, 1132-34, 1138-40;
White, DGFA-1 English, 243-46; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Martin
family page.
113.
Quotation from Milling, Exile Without End, 30. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 628-34; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 90; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 470-71
(pp. 11-12 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 958-60;
White, DGFA-1 English, 204; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Lanoux
family page.
114. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 494-95; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 96; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 456, 463 (p. 5
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 411-17;
White, DGFA-1 English, 92-93; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Corporon family page.
115. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 595-99; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
457, 466 (p. 8 of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 780-82;
White, DGFA-1 English, 159; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Guilbeau family page.
117. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 481; Clark, A. H., Acadia,
144; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 457, 461 (p. 3 of the
written census); White, DGFA-1, 305-12;
White, DGFA-1 English, 68-69; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Roger/Caissie family page.
117a.
See also Arsenault, Généalogie, 427, 845-46; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
456, 467 (p. 9 of the written census); Surette, Mésagouche & LaButte; White, DGFA-1,
160-61; White, DGFA-1 English, 35; Book Three.
118. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 500; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 98; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 458, 465 (p. 7
of the written census); White, DGFA-1, 433-39;
White, DGFA-1 English, 96-97; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten.
119. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 393; Arsenault, History, 39;
Savard, DGFde Arsenault, ix-x; White, DGFA-1, 23-31;
White, DGFA-1 English, 6-8; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Arceneaux family page.
<http://genforum.genealogy.com/cgi-bin/pageload.cgi?ABRAHAM,ARSENAULT::arsenault::2416.html>,
& <http://genforum.genealogy.com/arsenault/messages/2418.html>,
offer the possibility that the progenitor of the Arseneau family
in Acadia may have been Pierre, fils, son of Pierre Arsonneau & Jeanne
Goizin, born at La Flamancherie & baptized at Migré, in the
Saintonge region, not far from La Rochelle, on 25 Sep 1646. This
would have made him age 25 in 1671.
120. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 505; Arsenault, History, 40; White, DGFA-1, 513-26;
White, DGFA-1 English, 109-12; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Doiron
family page.
121. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 738-49; White, DGFA-1, 1077-82;
White, DGFA-1 English, 232-33; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Prince/Le Prince family page.
122. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 427; Arsenault, History, 40; White, DGFA-1, 105-18;
White, DGFA-1 English, 20-25; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Benoit
family page.
123. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 1086-92; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 393-94; White, DGFA-1, 40-51;
White, DGFA-1 English, 8-11; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Aucoin
family page.
124. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 635-43; White, DGFA-1, 1100-05;
White, DGFA-1 English, 237; Book Three.
125. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 710-17; White, DGFA-1, 1278-82;
White, DGFA-1 English, 272; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Pellerin family page.
126.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 307; Clarence J.
d'Entremont, "Serreau (Sarreau), De Saint-Aubin, Jean," in DCB,
2:605, &
online; <acadian-home.org>.
See also Arsenault, Généalogie, 791; White, DGFA-1,
1463-66; D'Entremont, "Serreau," 2:604; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 155, 157, 506n55; note 163a,
below; Book Three.
127. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 551; White, DGFA-1, 665-66;
White, DGFA-1 English, 138; note 45a,
above; Book Three.
128. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 665-68; Arsenault, History,
40; White, DGFA-1, 1092-95;
White, DGFA-1 English, 234-35; note
45a, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Levron
family page.
129. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 1430-32; White, DGFA-1,
1399-1402;
White, DGFA-1 English, 293; note 45a,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Rivet family
page.
130. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 634-35; White, DGFA-1, 1548-49;
White, DGFA-1 English, 327; Book Three.
131. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 471-74; Arsenault, History,
40; Clément Cormier, "Brossard,
Jean-François," in DCB, 2:105, &
online;
C. J. d'Entremont, "Brossard (Broussard),
dit Beausoleil, Joseph," in DCB, 3:87-88, &
online;
Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 93, 393-94; Perrin, W. A., Acadian Redemption; White, DGFA-1, 284-88;
White, DGFA-1 English, 63-64; notes
45a, above, & 213a, below;
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Broussard family page.
Fr. Cormier says François came to Port-Royal in 1671. Since he cannot be
found in the first Acadian census of 1671, & if he did come to the
colony that year, it may have been aboard L'Oranger, though Fr.
Cormier does not mention the ship. Fr. Cormier says François
married Catherine Richard in 1781 & that they had 10 children, 6
boys & 4 girls, but White, DGFA-1, 284-85, says they married in
c1678 & lists 11 children for them, 6 boys & 5 girls.
132. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 610; White, DGFA-1, 884-90;
White, DGFA-1 English, 188-89; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Labauve
family page.
133. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 983-88; White, DGFA-1, 791-96;
White, DGFA-1 English, 162-63; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Achée family
page.
133a.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 255. See also Arsenault, Généalogie, 1019-20; White,
DGFA-1, 1198-1201; Book Three.
133b.
See also Arsenault, Généalogie, 1014-18; White, DGFA-1,
1188-94; White, DGFA-1 English, 254; Book Three.
134. See
also White, DGFA-1, 1041; note 253,
below;
Léger family
page.
135. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie,
1010-11, 1215-16; White, DGFA-1, 961-64;
White, DGFA-1 English, 205-06; Book Three.
136. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 588-92; White, DGFA-1, 771-74;
White, DGFA-1 English, 158; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Guidry
family pages.
136a.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 1007, 2355; White, DGFA-1, 882.
137. See
also <acadian-home.org>; Arsenault, Généalogie, 579; White, DGFA-1, 740-50;
White, DGFA-1 English, 153-54; note
45a, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Godin/Gaudin family page.
138. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 606; White, DGFA-1, 840-45;
White, DGFA-1 English, 177-78; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Henry family
page.
139.
Quotations from Robertson, Red Earth, 1; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 21; Quinn, "Bellenger,"
in DCB, 1:87-88. See also Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 9;
Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 195, 200; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
13-14; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 184; Robertson, 2-4;
Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 7; notes
02f, 05a,
& 05t, above.
Hoffman, 195,
suggests the Portuguese may have made early contact with the
Mi'kmaq.
Weidensaul says the Eastern Abenaki called the
land of the Mi'kmaq, or mi'k'makik, mikmurkeag.
MacDonald,
13, perhaps influenced by Bellenger's comments, paints an interesting
picture of the Mi'kmaq & their kin, the Maliseet & Eastern Abenaki:
"These Micmacs, and their cousins the Maliseets of the St. John river
valley, were of a milder nature than the Hurons and Iroquois the French
encountered farther inland. What the Jesuits reported of their
Abenaki cousins seems to have been true of the Micmacs: that they
took prisoners 'not to burn them, for that is not their custom; but to
hold them in servitude.' Their temperament is symbolized in rock
carvings in the cliffs of Kejimkujik [on the Atlantic coast of Nova
Scotia, south of Port Mouton]: stars; a woman with a high
headdress and decorated ceremonial skirt dancing, arms outstretched; a
ship with men in it; deer, fish, a bear; the Woman-who-married-a-Snake;
and the heron-like bird who carries off children. Not warriors,
nor spears and the hunt, but generally peaceful, mythic subjects."
See also MacDonald, 14.
139a.
Quotations from Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 509-10; White, DGFA-1 English, 186. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia,
188-89; Bunnell, French & Native North American
Marriages; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 68, 387; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
46-48; Fischer, 724; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 36; Milling, Exile Without End, 4; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country,
183; White,
DGFA-1, 1511-12, 876-77; Books Two & Three.
For Acadian family lines listed here, see Arsenault, Généalogie, & White, DGFA-1. Griffiths adds Thibodeau
to a short list of families who she says intermarried with the Mi'kmaq
in the 1630s & 1640s. However, Pierre Thibodeau, who appears on her
list, did not come to the colony until
the early 1650s, & his wife, whom he married in c1660, was a Thériot.
None of their 16 children, all of whom married, took Native spouses.
Thibodeau, who was a merchant as well as a miller &
founder of the Chepoudy settlement in the trois-rivières area
west of Chignecto, certainly would have had extensive contact with local
Natives, but it does not seem to have resulted in métissage.
See Book Three. Perhaps DNA test results from Thibodeau
descendants will say otherwise. Griffiths's list includes Lejeune & Martin, who did intermarry with
Natives. See White, DGFA-1, 1511-12;
Books Two & Three. Bunnell reviews known Acadian-Indian
marriages.
Faragher, published in 2005 & reflecting current ethnic
sensibilities, emphasizes, with many examples, the role of métissage,
or the intermarrying of Acadian & Mi'kmaq, in the cultural relationship
between the two people. Clark, A. H., 68, published in the late 1960s,
plays down the influence of intermarriage: "Gradually they came to
a position of mutual interdependence with the French and in places, as
at La Have (La Hève), interbred with them to produce small métis
populations. However, although some Micmac contributions to the
subsequent Acadian gene-pool must thus have taken place, the mixed-blood
offspring generally were raised as Micmac by their (almost exclusively)
Indian mothers and the physical results of miscegenation were seen much
more among the Indians than the French." Clark, A. H., 89, notes:
"Resort to Indian women must have been common enough among the fur
traders but it never became an accepted or established practice in the
organized settlements, in good part because of the influence of the
priests. In any event, dalliance with the Indian maids was more
likely to lead the men to the forest than the women to the cornfields.
There is no doubt that the blending of French and Micmac genes did get
underway in the period [the 1600s] and that this process continued,
clandestinely at least, through the remaining Acadian residence,
somewhat diluting the 'genetic purity' of both Acadian and Acadian
groups (principally the latter)." Brasseaux makes the interesting
observation: "Forged by the eastern Canadian frontier and tempered
by 150 years of isolation, Acadian society had become fiercely
independent and equalitarian by the middle of the eighteenth century.
These cultural characteristics fostered peaceful coexistence with
Acadia's indigenous inhabitants, and an economically symbiotic
relationship with the region's red men. Group boundaries, however,
were rigidly maintained by thinly veiled racism in the red and white
camps, and offspring of mixed blood were generally exiled to the
isolated Atlantic coast community of La Heve." Italics added.
To be sure, members of the
Guédry, Lejeune, & Petitpas families
lived at La Hève at one time or other, but the term "exiled" may be a
bit strong. See Clark, A. H., 387, for a possible influence.
Fischer, 510, says the term Métis
"was recorded as early as 1615. By the late eighteenth century,
that word also acquired another meaning. It referred to an entire
population of French-Indian descent. In the nineteenth century it
began to be used in a third way to describe communities and cultures."
See also Fischer, 724n58. For these reasons, the first letter of
the word "Métis," like "Native," is capitalized here.
139b.
Quotations from McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 17; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 217; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 32. See also Arsenault,
History; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia,
188; Chiasson, Island of Seven Cities, 148, 157-79, 275-89; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 10, 56-70, 85, 361,
387, chap. 3; Davis, S. A., 23, 25-26; Deans, The River Where America Began, 134; Erskine, Nova Scotia,
5, 33-34; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 17, 494; Fischer, 218,
494, 527-30, 564; Greer, People of New France, 93-94; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 9, 11, 36-37,
85, 107, 131-32, 146; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 20; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier,
214; Leckie, Wars of America, 7-8; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
13-14, 64-65; Melanson, Cormier Genealogy, 10; Robertson,
Red Earth, 1; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians of Nova Scotia, 3-4; Taylor, A., American Colonies, 99;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 80, chap. 12; Weidensaul,
The First Frontier, 5; Whitehead &
McGee, The Mi'kmaq; notes 02f,
05o, 12l, 16, & 40a, above.
Fischer, 527-30, not only places Samuel de
Champlain at the center of success in living in harmony with most
of the Natives the French encountered in New France, but also offers a larger
perspective in the light of early modern French humanism. "They,"
King Henri IV's circle of humanist friends, "are important and neglected
figures in modern history," Fischer, 529, asserts: "--men who
inherited the Renaissance and inspired the Enlightenment. They
kept the vital impulse of humanism alive in a dark and difficult time.
In that way they were world figures of high importance, and Champlain
had an important place among them." Among the French humanists
from 3 generations whom Champlain encountered in his long career,
Fischer includes Aymar de Chastes, the sieur de Mons, Marc Lescarbot,
Isaac de Razilly, & Charles La Tour, all of whom have found their
places in the current narrative.
For the French terms Souriquois & Gaspésie, see
Chiasson, 158; Clark, A. H., 58,
Fischer, 217; Trudel, 80.
The name preferred by members of the tribe today is pronounced MICK-maw
& is often written as Micmac. Davis, S. A., 23, says the
name Micmac replaced Souriquois "With the defeat of the French and the entry of the English...."
Does this imply
that the English were more sensitive to the tribe's actual name?
Probably not. Faragher, 494n2, says "M'ikmaw" is singular, "M'ikmaq" plural.
Davis, S. A., 23,
says the word comes from nikmaq, which means "'my
kin-friends,'" that nikmaq "was a form of greeting used by the Mi'kmaq
in the early seventeenth century and became associated with the people
themselves." According to Griffiths, 9, the Mi'kmaq & their descendants call the
area of old Acadia Mi'kmaq'i or
Lnue'gati, also Esisgeoagig. Robertson says: "In the old days the Mi'kmaq thought of
their land as a mighty giant with one foot at 'land's end' at Yarmouth
[north of Cape Sable], the other at Gaspé, and his head, the island of
Cape Breton. This was the land they knew as Megumaagee, a word
which perhaps meant 'red earth country' from megakumegek, 'red
ground' 'red earth' and the suffix 'age' meaning 'country.'" Griffiths, 390, includes an explanation of Mi'kmaq independence based on ownership of the
land that
comprised much of greater Acadia--something they never fully conceded
even to their French & Acadian allies. See also Griffiths, 107. For details of a Mi'kmaq burial site at present-day Avonport, NS, near
Grand-Pré, see Erskine, 33-34.
Davis, S. A., 25-26, quoting Jesuit Fr. Pierre
Biard, gives a summary of the Mi'kmaq "calendar," including the many
animals--fur-bearing, feathered, marine--on which the tribe subsisted,
the moose being the most important. S. A. Davis, 26, details
how the Mi'kmaq trapped beaver for themselves & for trade with the
French. See also Robertson; Whitehead & McGee.
Hoffman offers
this grim summary of the fur trade's impact on Mi'kmaq culture:
"... fish, sea mammals, and other marine products were basic to the
Micmac economy, and that hunting activities became important and
essential only during three months of the winter. The rise of the
fur trade completely disrupted this ancient pattern, for in order to
obtain such valued trade items as axes, dried foods, clothes, and
brandy, the Indians found it absolutely necessary to obtain furs when
the coats were at their best, that is during the winter, in the period
of heavy snowfall. Their removal from the sea coast at this time
(which was contrary to the ancient practice) greatly reduced the
subsistence base, resulted in frequent conditions of famine, and caused
social disorganization and reorientation."
For Mi'kmaq numbers, see Clark, A. H., 58.
Clark's chap. 3 is a detailed description of the tribe's history & culture. Griffiths, 146, analyses numbers reported on the tribe in
Gargas's census of 1687-88. Chiasson, 148, 157-79, 275-89,
unfortunately, is burdened by
the thesis, elaborated in the second half of his book, that the
Chinese settled on Cape Breton Island decades before Columbus's
voyages & that these strangers from the East influenced Mi'kmaq
culture. For a critique of Chiasson's bizarre thesis, see Book Two.
Thanks to implacable imperial rivalries & the
machinations of French missionary Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre, Acadian/M'ikmaq
relations turned sour during the early 1750s. See Book Two. Before then,
however, with the exception of the Thomas affair at Canso in 1635 &
other isolated incidents, the
two cultures lived in remarkable harmony, including intermarriage.
See especially Clark, A. H., 361, 387; note 139a, above.
For a description of English lust
for Indian land, see Leckie.
139c.
Quotation from Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 56-57. See also Havard, "'Protection' & 'Unequal Alliance'"; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 161; note
02f, above.
Griffiths's quote reads, in part, "... the
Jesuit missionaries who did work among the Mi'kmaq seem to have been
more closely connected to the colonists than they were in New
France...." I have substituted [Canada] for the simple reason that
Acadia, too, was part of New France. Moreover, the Jesuits in New
France were known to practice the so-called "Chinese Rites"--that is,
preaching to the Natives in their own language & incorporating Native
culture in the conversion experience--which the other missionary orders
vehemently opposed. See Book Seven.
140.
Quotations from Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 21; Webster,
Acadia, 213-14. See also Campanella, "Sagamité,"
472; Chiasson, Island of Seven Cities, 175; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 57, 89; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq, 23-24; DCB, 2:xxvi-xxvii, xxix, xxxii-xxxiii,
xxxvi-xxxix; Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 134-35, 182-200,
217, 564, 609, 611, 673n49, 678; Greer, People of New France, 84;
Grenier, Far Reaches of Empire, xiv; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 9, 138-39; Leckie, Wars
of America, 3-5; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:63-64;
Parkman, France &
England, 1:345-402ff, 2:115, 162; Paul, We Were Not the Savages; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, chaps. 12
& 19, especially 182-83; Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:190; Webster, 211-12; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 3-8,
390n5; notes
02m, 12a,
& 16, & 139a, above,
292c, below; Books Two, Four, & Five.
The Maliseet are also called Maliceet, Malecite,
Malécite, & Maleseet.
The name they gave themselves--Wolastoqiyik--comes from Wolastoq, the word in their
language for Rivière St.-Jean, which runs through the heart of their
territory. Chiasson, & Weidensaul, 390n5, say the name Maliseet is based on the
Mi'kmaq words for "they don't talk as we do," which, if true,
reflects Mi'kmaq pride
in their own language. The French also called the Maliseet the Etchemin or Etgeminquois. See Chiasson; Clark, A. H., 57n3; Davis,
S. A., 23; Fischer; Griffiths; note
08b, above. Griffiths, 9, says the Maliseet &
Passamaquoddy "are virtually identical people," the only difference
being where they lived--the Maliseet along Rivière St.-Jean, the Passamaquoddy at the mouths of
rivières St.-Jean & Ste.-Croix.
Griffith, 9, adds that by 1600 the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy numbered
about 1,000. Fischer, 187-88, says the Almouchiquois did
not choose that name for themselves but were called that by "neighbors
to the north," & that the name meant "something like 'dogs who raise
corn,'" not a compliment. The Almouchiquois, also called the
Saco, seem to have been the only sedentary Indians in the region, unlike
their hunter-gatherer-fishing cousins to the northeast.
See also note 08a, above. The Wabanaki
also were called the Wabenaki, an alternative name for the Abenaki.
The Eastern Abenaki called themselves Wapanahki, "the people of the
east" & their land Wobanakik, "land of the dawn," because the coastal
bands of the nation lived fartherest out to sea. See
DCB, 2:xxvi; Fischer, 217, 611; Grenier; Weidensaul, 5.
Davis, S. A., 24, offers a map entitled
"Distribution of historic tribes within the Maritime provinces, c.1700."
See also online Wikipedia, "Maliseet."
For a good map of Wobanakik of the Eastern
Abenaki, see Weidensaul, 9.
The Algonquin tongue also is called Algonkian,
Algonquian,
& Algic & was widespread in eastern North America. But the
language group should not be confused with the Algonquin nations,
among them the Ottawa, who lived in present-day Québec & Ontario
provinces in the early 1600s. The French called these nations
Algoumekins, the English Algonkin, & they called themselves Anishinabe,
"the humans." See Campanella;
Fischer, 609.
For a classic description of the Indian
nations
from New England to the Hudson Bay & the efforts of French
missionaries to convert them to Catholicism, see Parkman. Griffiths, 138-39, provides a careful analysis of the
difficulties the Eastern Abenaki endured with the New English settlers in
ME.
Trudel, "Champlain," in DCB,
1:190, details Champlain's activities in Canada in 1608-09, including
the fight with the Iroquois on 29 Jun 1609 at Ticonderoga on Lake
Champlain. Fischer, 678n61, chides "academic iconoclasts who
argue that [Champlain] tried to play off one Indian nation against
another. His repeated words and acts were the reverse.
Champlain," along with his contemporaries de Mons & Poutrincourt in
Acadia, "always regarded continued hostilities among the Indians as a
mortal threat to his design for New France, and he was more effective
than any colonial leader in discouraging it."
Clark, A. H., 89, describes the Mi'kmaq
conversion to Roman Catholicism as "often superficial."
It certainly was in the beginning. See, e.g., note
13, above.
The Society of Jesus provided its share of
warrior-priests, such as Fr. Sébastien Râle of
Norridgewock, ME, in the early 1700s, but the most war-like priest of all, Abbé Jean-Louis Le
Loutre, was not a Jesuit but a Séminarian, sent to Acadia by the
Seminary of Foreign Missions in Paris during the late 1730s. Also
a Seminarian from an earlier time in greater Acadia was Father
Jean-Louis Thury, who the New Englanders called "the Fighting Priest." See
note 152, below; Book Two.
141.
Quotations from Arsenault,
History, 45-46; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6. See also Arsenault, Généalogie,
1646; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 111;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 509; Parkman, France & England,
1:1281-87; Pritchard, In Search
of Empire, 336; Salagnac, "Abbadie
de Saint-Castin," Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3-4;
Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:4-5, 7;
Webster, Acadia, 27; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6; White, DGFA-1, 5-7; notes
150 & 297, below.
Parkman provides the classic description of the Canadian gentilhomme, or
untitled nobleman, from whose ranks sprang most of the captaines de sauvages;
Saint-Castin, however, was eminently "titled."
Arsenault, History, 45, says Saint-Castin, also spelled
Saint-Castain, married the chief's daughter in 1680. White, 6, gives the marriage date to
Marie-Mathilde,
Saint-Castin's first Indian wife, of c1670 (réhab 1684). Arsenault, Généalogie,
gives no date for this marriage & calls her Marie-Mathilde
Pidicwanmiskwe, but Arsenault is describing Saint-Castin's second wife,
whom he married in c1685, and who, according to White, 7, was named
Marie Pidiwammiskwa & was a sister of the first wife
Mathilde. Saint-Castin fathered 10 children by the first wife,
including Bernard-Anselme, his sixth child & second son, born in c1689,
who married Charlotte d'Amours de Chauffours at Port-Royal in
October 1707; Bernard-Anselme also became a captaine de sauvages & was
as formidable in battle as his father. See Salagnac, "Abbadie
de Saint-Castin," Bernard-Anselme";
note 197, below. Jean-Vincent's second wife bore him 2
daughters. White, 5-6, documents Jean-Vincent's elevation to
third baron de Saint-Castin.
The lovely town of Castine, ME, the site of
old Pentagouët, is named for
the Saint-Castins.
141a.
The Canadian historian W. J. Eccles wrote in Jul 1982 in his preface to
the revised ed. of his Canadian Frontier, xiii: "One major
revision that I would make today would be to enhance greatly the role
played by the Indian nations" in the history of New France. "In
the seventeenth century they were vital to the economy of New France; in
the eighteenth century they played a political role far more important
than I realized in 1966. Today I see them as sovereign,
independent nations who tolerated the French on their territory merely
because it suited their convenience. ... The French were not
really sovereign in the lands to which they claimed title in the west
and in Acadia; the Indians were...." For a recent treatment
(2015) of this revisionist view of European-Native relations in North
America, specifically the Great Lakes region, see McDonnell, Masters of Empire.
See also Book Two.
LeBlanc, T., Acadian Driftwood, 9,
offers an eloquent recognition of Mi'kmaq sovereignty by an Acadian
descendant born in NS. It reads: "This book tells the story
of a settler culture that attempted to remove and erase another settler
culture from lands that neither had the right to call their own.
The story is one small part of a much broader history, covering events
that predominantly occurred within Mi'kma'ki, the ancetral and unceded
territory of the Mi'kmaq People. This territory is covered by the
Peace and Friendship Treaties that the Mi'kmaq, Welastekwiyik
(Maliseet), and Passamaquoddy Peoples first signed with the British
Crown in 1726. These treaties recognized Mi'kmaq and Welastekwiyik
title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing
relationship between Nations. I acknowledge Mi'kma'ki, the land
where I live and where this book was written, to be unceded territory."
142.
See Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadia, 103-04, 133; Micelle, "The
Superior Council of French LA," 27; Parkman, France &
England, 1:1274, 2:138-39.
Griffiths, 103-04, offers details on
Colbert's life & connections.
Parkman, 1:1274, says: "The king [of France],
once powerless among a host of turbulent nobles, was now a king indeed.
Once a chief, because his equals had made him so, he was now the
anointed of the Lord. This triumph of royalty had culminated in
Louis XIV. The stormy energies and bold individualism of the old
feudal nobles had ceased to exist. They who had held his
predecessors in awe had become his obsequious servants. He no
longer feared his nobles; he prized them as gorgeous decorations of his
court, and satellites of his royal person." See also Parkman, 2:138-39.
Micelle
uses more precise
language in describing the role of absolutism in France, focusing on the
final years of the Sun King's reign: "The strength of custom and
tradition in eighteenth-century France lies hidden behind the facade of
legal documents by which the French crown attempted to realize the ideal
of absolute government. The theory of absolutism was based, not
upon the experience of the French kings, but upon the idea of a united
kingdom which constant civil strife had made desirable. As a
result, the formality of using the king's name on all legal documents
was based, not upon the fact of the monarch's actual power, but rather
on a rationalization of the diversity of customs that prevailed in a
kingdom where ideal unity constituted an impossible dream."
143.
Quotations from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "II. Early Life," and "V. Early
Reign."
144.
Quotations from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "VI. Expansion of French Power in
Europe." See also <acadian-cajun.com>;
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 112; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
267-300; Roberts, "Aernoutsz," in DCB, 1:39.
For the action in Acadia, see <acadian-cajun.com>;
A. H. Clark.
The secret Anglo-French treaty between
England's Charles II & Louis XIV, signed in June 1670, is called the
Treaty of Dover. See Pritchard, part of a chap. (267-300) that
details the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78 & its impact on French colonies,
especially in the West Indies. The Treaty of Dover came at the
beginning of the Third Anglo-Dutch War of 1670-72, "a brief two-year
struggle," Pritchard notes, that was "fought entirely at sea." The
treaty allowed the English to fight the Dutch without French
interference. The English response to France's aggression in the
Low Countries in 1672 was to step aside as the French had done in 1670.
England was an erstwhile ally of France during the first years of the
war, but in Feb 1674, Parliament denied Charles II funds for the war
against Holland, & so Charles abandoned his ally & made peace with the
Dutch in the Treaty of Westminster, leaving the French to fight the
Dutch coalition alone. This emboldened the Dutch & led to their
attack on the French West Indies, which was repulsed at Martinique.
See Pritchard.
For the Dutch attack on Acadia, see Pritchard,
282, which adds that Aernoutsz had been encouraged to attack French
Acadia by the English at New York, whom the Dutchman had overawed on his
way north from the West Indies. Pritchard adds that "At Fort
Jemseg on the St. John River, he [Aernoutsz] captured Chambly's
lieutenant," Joybert de Soulanges et Marson. See Roberts. Jemseg lay about 70 miles up Rivière St.-Jean, so the
Dutchman probably also attacked, or at least bypassed, Charles La Tour's
old fort at the mouth of the river, in the seigneurie of La Tour's
son-in-law, Martin d'Aprendestiguy, sieur de Martignon. See note
22, above, for a discussion of the lower fort's location & identity,
& 291a, below.
145.
Quotation from "Louis XIV", online Encarta, "VI. Expansion of French Power in
Europe" [no longer accessible]. See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
269.
Pritchard concludes that Louis XIV's "victory" over the Dutch in 1678 "set the
stage for the subsequent struggle between the English and French in the
Americas." He adds: "By excluding the Dutch from major
political and military roles in the New World, the French also brought
to the fore the irreconcilability of their own and England's colonial
ambitions, a consequence they had not envisioned"--a consequence that
would greatly influence Acadian history.
In Aug 1684, France & Spain negotiated a truce
at Regensburg & agreed to call off hostilities for 20 years.
146.
Quotations from "Louis XIV", online Encarta, "II. Early Life" & "VII. The
Beginning of Decline" [no longer accessible]. See also Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 102-03.
147.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 121, 137; Conrad, "Alsatian Emigration to LA," 164; "Louis XIV,"
online Encarta, "VII. The Beginning of Decline" & "VIII. The European Wars" [no longer
accessible];
online Wikipedia, "Edict of Fontainebleau." See also
Clark, A. H., Acadia, 112; Griffiths, 136-39; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:123-24; Parkman, France
& England, 2:127-28; Webster, Acadia, 1, 8, 228.
Conrad says 400,000 Huguenots fled France between 1685 & 1710.
Other estimates range from 210,000 to 900,000. Louis XIV's
evocation of the Edict of Nantes was accomplished by the Edict of
Fontainebleau in Oct 1685. Huguenots fled to England, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, Brandenburg-Prussia, Denmark, the Protestant
area of the Holy Roman Empire, South Africa (where they became Boers), & the English colonies of North America, especially SC & VA.
Webster, 1, 8, 228, provides
the text of the Treaty of Whitehall that includes the colonies. Webster, 1,
believes "It is doubtful if the terms of the Treaty of Whitehall
were ever known in the Colonies." However, Parkman hints that it was known at least to the
French in the summer of 1688. A. H. Clark says it "was ignored, if,
indeed, it was widely known of across the Atlantic," that is to say, in
North America. Martin, F.-X., 1:124, contends "It does not appear
that the English had any other view, than to lull the French into
security" by proposing such a treaty.
In Sep 1783, Colbert's son, Jean-Baptiste
Colbert,
fils, marquis de Seignelay, had replaced his father as
finance minister.
148. See Deans, The River Where America Began,
153; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 136; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:126; online Wikipedia,
"James II of England," "William III of England";
notes 153 & 292b, below.
Griffiths says the Treaty of
Whitehall also was called the Treaty of Neutrality & became a "dead
letter" 3 years after its ratification when William III came to the
throne of England, Scotland, & Wales.
149. See
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 135; Parkman, France
& England, 2:124-25, 164; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
186-87; online Wikipedia,
"Dominion of New England."
Andros, born in 1637, had served as governor of NY from
1674-81, during the reign of Charles II, & had not been popular with the
colonists. This did not deter James II from appointing him
governor of the Dominion of New England. In early April 1689, when
the colonists in Boston heard of the overthrow of James II, they
revolted against Andros & sent him packing. He returned to England
as a prisoner of war along with other officials of his government.
They were soon released. Later, Andros found favor with King
William & also with Queen Anne & served as governor of VA (1692-97) and
of Guernsey (1704-06), his birthplace. See Parkman.
149a.
Quotations from
Chard, "Nelson," in
DCB, 2:494; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 139; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6.
See also <acadian-cajun.com>; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:127-28; note 293b, below; Book Two.
La Vallière, who served as commander & governor of Acadia from 1678 to 1684, was
the one who had moved the
military capital from Pentagouët to Chignecto. His successor, Perrot, who became governor in 1684, moved the capital back
to Port-Royal. See note 294b,
below; <acadian-cajun.com>;
Appendix.
149b.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 141-42.
See also note 295, below.
150. See
Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:183; Drake,
Border Wars, 10-11, 27; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:127-29; Parkman, France & England, 2:162-64;
Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 333, 341-42; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6; note 295e, below.
If one counts European incursions against
Indians as part of the conflict between the European powers, the North
American antecedents of the war that erupted between England & France in
1689 go back even farther than Andros's depredations in ME in the
spring of 1688. In July 1687, the governor of Canada, the Marquis
de Denonville, with nearly 3,000 French troupes de la marine, Canadian militia,
coureurs de bois, & Indian allies, the largest force mustered in
Canada up to that time, had waged a campaign against the Seneca in
northern New York & destroyed their villages before returning to
Montréal in Aug. Before Denonville struck the Seneca, some of
his men had seized two parties of New York traders in the Great Lakes
area. After he struck the Seneca, Denonville built a new fort on
Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagara River in territory claimed by
the English. The governor of New York colony at the time, Thomas
Dongan, protested mightily. The Iroquois exacted their revenge in
the months that followed until they signed a treaty of neutrality with
Denonville in late 1688. These events are not considered by
historians to be part of King William's War, but they certainly are part
of the causation of the conflict. See Martin, F.-X., 1:124-26; Parkman, 2: chaps.
8 & 9; Pritchard, 333, 341. In Aug 1688, New Englanders attacked and
destroyed the French fishing establishment at Chédabouctou, on the
Atlantic coast of Acadia. This also factored into the developing
conflict between France & England. See Pritchard, 342; note
295e, below.
Pritchard, 341, notes: "The local
conflict involving the Indians known as Abenaki was over sovereignty and
influence along 150 miles of coast between the Kennebec and Sainte-Croix
rivers in present-day Maine and the access of New England fishermen to
offshore waters off Acadia. Neither issue directly concerned
Acadian colonists, whose relations with neighbouring New England were
friendly and subordinate." Italics added.
151. See
Drake,
Border Wars, 14-22, 34; Parkman, France & England,
2:163-65; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 179-81, 187-89.
152. See
René Baudry, "Auger de Subercase, Daniel d'," in DCB, 2:35-36, &
online;
Baudry, "Thury," in DCB, 1:649; Brebner, Canada, 62; Drake,
Border Wars, 27-30; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:128-29; Parkman, France & England,
2:133-34, 143-44, 163, 165-66; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 335,
342; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6.
Parkman, 2:163n2, citing a
French source, says 143 men, women, & children were killed in the
raid on Pemaquid. Parkman, 2:165-66, offers details of the
attack. He says little about Saint-Castin's role in the raid & much
about the Abenakis' spiritual leader, Fr. Thury, adding,
on 2:166: "Religion was one of the impelling forces of the
war. In the eyes of the Indian converts, it was a crusade against
the enemies of God. They made their vows to the Virgin before the
fight; and the squaws, in their distant villages on the Penobscot, told
unceasing beads, and offered unceasing prayers for victory."
Fr. Thury, who Parkman dubbed "an 'apostle of carnage,'" was a Norman,
born at Notre-Dame-de-Breuil in c1644. He came to Canada in c1675,
finished his priestly studies there, & was ordained by Bishop Laval in
Dec 1677. His first services were in various parishes on the St.
Lawrence & at the Seminary at Québec, the headquarters of his order
(Weidensaul, 191, erroneously calls him a Jesuit).
In 1684, the Bishop of Québec sent him to Acadia on an observation tour
that took him from Gaspé to Port-Royal. After Thury sent his
report on the state of the colony to the bishop, he chose to remain at
Miramichi, where Nicolas Denys's son, Richard, offered him land on which
to build an Indian mission. He remained at the remote post for 3
years & ministered also to Indians & settlers on Rivière St.-Jean & at
Port-Royal. During the late 1680s, encouraged by his immediate
superior, Fr. Louis Petit, vicar general in Acadia, Fr. Thury moved on
to Pentagouët, where he ministered to the Abenaki & became close to the
Saint-Castins. He remained there for 8 years.
According to his biographer, Thury only "accompanied" Saint-Castin
& his Abenaki in the raids against Pemaquid, York, & other ME
settlements. See Baudry, "Thury."
One
has only to study the so-called King Philip's War of 1675-76 to see how
barbarous the hyper-religious English Puritans could be when their
battle blood was up. Brebner says 1,400
Iroquois attacked Lachine. Parkman, 2:133, says the Iroquois who
fell on Lachine numbered 1,500 warriors & got into the settlement
undetected during a violent hailstorm the night of August 4-5.
The marquis de Denonville was still governor-general of New France at the time.
Details of the Lachine fight, described by Parkman as "the most
frightful massacre in Canadian history," can be found on 2:133-34. Parkman
says that at the head of the 200 French regulars from Montréal who
arrived at Lachine in the wake of the massacre was a French officer
named Subercase. This was Daniel d'Auber de Subercase, only 28
years old at the time. Subercase was a captain in the troupes de
la marine, who essentially were colonial regulars, & he would serve as the
last French governor of Acadia, from 1706-10. See Baudry, "Auger
de Subercase"; note
194b, below. Baudry
goes on to say: "After the Lachine massacre in August, Subercase
wanted to pursue the Iroquois, but [Philippe] Rigaud de Vaudreuil," then
commander of French forces in New France, "forbad it." Parkman, 2:133, describes the fate of some of
the Lachine men, women, & children who fell into the hands of the
Iroquois--"scenes ... of indescribable and nameless horror."
Parkman, 2:136n1, is convinced the Iroquois struck Lachine on
their own, without instigation from the English officials in NY.
He does not give the Abenaki who struck the ME settlements such
open-minded treatment. See 2:163. For French
abandonment of Fort Frontenac on lower Lake Ontario & other posts before Denonville's successor, Frontenac, arrived at Quebec, &
Frontenac's anger over this, see Parkman, 2:143-44.
153. See
Drake,
Border Wars, 38-43; W. J. Eccles, "Buade de Frontenac et de Palluau, Louis de," in
DCB, 1:133-42, &
online;
Leckie, Wars of America, 14; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:129;
Parkman, France &
England, 2:139, chaps. 1-4, 10-20; Pritchard, In
Search of Empire, 242, 303, 341; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6.
In England, King William's War was also
known as the War of the League of Augsburg, but the more accurate
European name may be the War of the Grand Alliance. It was also
called in Europe the War of the Palatinate and the Nine Years' War. Pritchard, 303, uses a different name entirely for the
1688-97 struggle, with the following explanation: "The War of the
League of Augsburg is a misnomer. The name fails to link the great
maritime struggle between 1689 to 1697 to the European continental
conflict. Known in American and English historiography as King
William's War or the War of William III, these names do not capture its
complexity either. Various Indian nations in North America were
major participants rather than imperial pawns. Some historians
have recently referred to it as the War of the English Succession, for
it was the arrival of an heir to James II of England in the summer of
1688 and William of Orange's coup d'état in early November that
rapidly transformed Louis XIV's attack inthe Rhineland into a larger war
involving the United Provinces, the Emperor, Spain, and England, and
reached across the Atlantic to the Americas, but this new designation
ignores the fact that Louis XIV initiated the war. Though not
entirely satisfactory, the neutral appellation, the Nine Years' War, is
used hereafter." Pritchard, 341, adds: "An unofficial war
between the French and English had been in progress in Acadia for at
least two years before European hostilities began," making the name Nine
Years' War a misnomer when applied to New France.
Leckie says Frontenac was the first
"professional soldier on the new European model" to appear in the New
World. Frontenac, born in 1620, first arrived at Québec as
governor-general in 1672 and left 10 years later after quarreling
bitterly with the bishop and the intendant of Canada. But, luckily
for the French, he was restored as governor-general in the autumn of
1689, replacing the Marquis de Denonville just in time for the war
against England; it was the outbreak of war between the European powers
that doubtlessly motivated the king to restore Frontenac to the
governorship of his most important colony. See Parkman, 2:139. For details of Frontenac's life &
accomplishments, including the interesting relationship with his
headstrong wife, see Parkman, 2: chaps. 1-4, 10-20, the bulk of the
volume entitled Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV.
According to Pritchard, 242n42, Eccles demolishes "the myth created by Francis Parkman."
154. See
Brebner, Canada, 62; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, chap. 3;
Drake, Border Wars, 45n, chap. 6; Leckie, Wars of America,
15, 17-18; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:129; Parkman, France & England,
2:143-46, 154-62, 167-71; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 335-36; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; Weidensaul, The First Frontier,
chap. 6.
For Frontenac's
preparations for the raid into New York & New England with the limited
resources available to him, see Parkman, 2:143-46, 154-55. For details of the Schenectady raid, see
Brebner; Leckie;
Parkman, 2:155-61. Sixty or more settlers died at Schenectady,
including 22 women and children, and between 80 and 90 settlers were
taken as prisoners. There were 400 residents of the town in Feb
1690, yet a New York official estimated that only 1/6 of the inhabitants
of Schenectady escaped death or capture. See Parkman, 2:160n.
Only 1 Frenchman died in the assault. Interestingly in the context
of this narrative, three of the French officers on the Schenectady raid
were sons of prominent Canadian nobleman Charles Le Moyne, one of whom,
Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, would pioneer French settlements in
the Gulf of Mexico during the late 1690s & early 1700s.
Remember that Frontenac arrived at Quebec only
2 months after the massacre at Lachine, and that the Le Moynes and other
colonists, as well as the Christian Iroquois, witnessed the aftermath of
the Lachine massacre, which may have stimulated the ferocity of the
attack on Schenectady & the New England settlements.
Drake, 45n, addresses this assertion: "It is
claimed that this [the Schenectady massacre] was done in retaliation for
outrages committed by the Iroquois in Canada. But the Iroquois
also were savages, neither governed by the rules of civilized war, nor
led by English officers." The Trois-Rivières column,
commanded by François Hertel, numbered 24 Frenchmen, 20 Sokoki Abenaki,
& 5 Algonquins; their surprise attack resulted in "about thirty persons
of both sexes and all ages ... tomahawked or shot; and fifty-four,
chiefly women and children, ... made prisoners." See Parkman,
2:161-62, 167-68 (quotation from 2:167). The third column, led by René Robinau de Portneuf,
brother of a future commander of Acadia, left
Quebec in Jan with only 50 Frenchmen & 60 Abenaki. However, when
it reached the Kennebec in May, it numbered 400 or 500 men, mostly
Abenaki reinforcements, some of them under Madokawando & Saint-Castin, & 36 men under
Hertel who had fought at Salmon Falls. See Parkman, 2:168-71;
Salagnac.
For other overviews of Frontenac's grand offensive, see Drake, chap. 6. Crouse highlights the
participation of the Le Moyne brothers & details the attack on
Schenectady, then called Corlaer.
154a.
Quotation from Parkman, France & England, 1:141-42. See
also Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:128-29; Parkman, 2:139-40.
After detailing the King's instructions to
Callières on the disposition of the inhabitants of New York colony, Parkman,
2:142, asserts: "In the next century, some of the people
of Acadia were torn from their homes by order of a British commander.
The act was harsh and violent, and the innocent were involved with the
guilty; but many of the sufferers had provoked their fate, and
deserved it." Italics added. Parkman continues: "Louis XIV.
commanded that eighteen thousand unoffending persons should be stripped
of all that they possessed, and cast out to the mercy of the wilderness.
The atrocity of the plan
is matched by its folly. The king gave explicit orders, but he
gave neither ships nor men enough to accomplish them; and the Dutch
farmers, goaded to desperation, would have cut his sixteen hundred
soldiers to pieces. It was the scheme of a man blinded by a long course
of success. Though perverted by flattery and hardened by unbridled
power, he was not cruel by nature; and here, as in the burning of the
Palatinate and the persecution of the Huguenots, he would have stood
aghast, if his dull imagination could have pictured to him the miseries
he was preparing to inflict." Italics added. If Parkman were
alive today (he died in 1893), any descendant of those hapless Acadians
would be happy to remind him of the vast difference between a plan &
an actual event, that what happened to our ancestors in the 1750s
transcended a mere scheme of some distant king six & a half decades
earlier. Moreover, Parkman certainly would have known when he
wrote these words that in 1755 the Acadians had been the subjects of
British monarchs for 42 years. See Books Two, Three, & Five.
155.
Quotation from Drake,
Border Wars, 55. See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
336.
Drake was first published in 1910, hence the
"politically incorrect" language.
155a.
See Drake,
Border Wars, 58n3; Parkman, France & England, 2:173;
Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 336.
Parkman says "the plan of a combined attack on Canada seems to have
been first proposed by the Iroquois" & that the English colonists met in
New York City to embrace the plan. Parkman goes on to describe the
Iroquois pledge to join the expedition with all their warriors as
"worthless." Pritchard insists
the English colonials "intended to conquer New France," not just
retaliate against Frontenac's offensives.
156.
Quotation from Drake, Border Wars, 57. See also Baudry,
"Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:183; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora,
32; Leckie,
Wars of America, 18-19; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 24; Parkman, France & England, 2:174.
Parkman says that depredations against New
England's commerce from French cruisers "which found convenient
harborage at Port Royal" occurred that winter of 1689-90, and that
hostile Indians also drew supplies from Port-Royal, hence the necessity
of a New-English expedition against
Acadia, which Parkman characterizes as "less remote and less critical"
than the attack on Canada.
Hodson says the Phips expedition against Acadia had 2 purposes: (1) "to smash
Port Royal as revenge for French involvement in Iroquois and Abenaki
raids on the New England backcountry," & (2) "to cement old trade
partnerships with Acadians by bringing them into the English fold for
good." Hodson concludes: "Phips did neither. After
dismantling Port Royal's fort and raiding the surrounding farms, he
left. One week later, a new French governor arrived."
156a.
Quotations from C. P. Stacey, "Phips, Sir William" in DCB, 1:544,
&
online;
Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:183.
See also Arsenault,
History, 63; Drake, Border Wars, 57; Leckie, Wars of
America, 19; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 24; Parkman, France & England, 2:174-79;
Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 343.
One suspects Phips's expedition did more than
"call" on Pentagouët & other French settlements & seigneuries
on the ME coast.
Parkman, 2:174-79, provides details of
the embarkation from Nantasket, a peninsula a few miles southeast of
Boston, & Phips's remarkable rise to power. Arsenault says
Phips's Port-Royal expedition reached Port-Royal on May 19 & numbered 30 ships &
2,000 men. Drake, 57, gives no
date of arrival & says 8 vessels & "seven or eight hundred men afloat." Leckie says Phips' force arrived on May 11, numbered 7
ships & 500 militia, & that Meneval's garrison numbered only 70.
Parkman, 2:174, agrees with Leckie's date & numbers, listing 7 ships,
288 sailors, & 400 to 500 militia, & giving Meneval only 70 soldiers.
Pritchard says Phips took with him a frigate of 44 guns, 6
small sloops & ketches, & "about 700 men."
Baudry says Phips reached the
Port-Royal basin on May 9, New Style (May 19 by the Old Style calendar),
hence the confusion, with the number of ships, cannon, & men used in the
narrative.
Drake, 57, insists
that Phips's expedition against Port-Royal was the first of its kind by
New Englanders. He seems to have forgotten the 1654 assault on
Acadia by Robert Sedgwick of Boston. Meneval later testified that
Phips's New Englanders were "excessively irritated at the late slaughter
of settlers at Salmon Falls and elsewhere" & obviously took it out on
the Port-Royal settlers. See Parkman, 2:174-175n, (quotation from
2:174).
157.
Quotations from Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," 2:183; Parkman,
France & England, 2:174. See also Arsenault,
History, 63; Noël Baillargeon, "Trouvé, Claude," in DCB,
2:637-38, &
online; Baudry, 2:182, 184; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 112-13, 157; Cormier, "Le Borgne
de Belle-Isle, Alexandre," in DCB, 1:435; Gérard Desjardins, "Petit,
Louis," in DCB, 2:521-22, &
online; Drake,
Border Wars, 55-58;
Charles Bruce Fergusson,
"Alden, John," in DCB, 2:14-15, &
online; Grenier, Far Reaches of Empire,
12; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 150-55; Haynes, The
Forgotten Battle, 3; Leckie, Wars of
America, 19; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:130; Melanson,
Melanson-Melançon, 24-25; Parkman,
2:157, 175-77, 193; Bernard Pothier, "Goutin (sometimes
written Degoutin, Degoutins, Desgoutins, but he
signed De Goutin), Mathieu de," in DCB, 2:257, &
online; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 343;
Rosenfield, "Basset," 2:46-47; Webster, Acadia,
9-10; White,
DGFA-1, 78-80, 345, 1027, 1114-15, 1146;
Zoltvany,
"Laumet," in
DCB, 2:352; notes 44c, above, &
167a, below;
Books Two & Three.
According to Melanson, 25, after David
Basset brought his father-in-law to the expedition's commander,
"Phips then called on ... Meneval, and negotiated terms for the
surrender of the fort. Although initially ageed upon, the truce
broke down...." Basset, a native of Marennes,
Saintonge, France, had converted to Protestantism, settled in Boston by c1673
while in his early teens, &
married Marie, then in the care of her widowed grandmother Priscilla
Laverdure, the English-born mother of Charles
Melanson, at Boston in c1682; David was age 23, & Marie 18.
Marie was Charles's oldest child, and, even though she was only in her
early teens, he had granted her permission to go to Boson & live with
his mother after his Huguenot father's death there in 1676. One
suspects that Basset was more than happy to be a part
of Southack's raid against La Hève & Chédaboutou instead of witnessing
the sacking of Port-Royal & the outlying settlements. One wonders
if Charles Melanson's habitation, below &
across the basin from the fort, was among the places the New Englanders
pillaged and burned. His older brother Pierre, the interpreter,
had moved to the Minas Basin in the early 1680s, so he & his family no
longer lived at Port-Royal. Later in the
war, in 1697, French privateer Pierre Maisonnat dit Baptiste,
whose wife was a daughter of François Bourg (and whose third wife
would be a daughter of Jacques Bourgeois), captured David Basset
at Cap-Sable & took him to French Commandant Villebon's fort at Nashouat
on Rivière St.-Jean. Basset
begged "to go fetch his family from Boston." Peace having come,
Villebon granted the Huguenot permission to go, but Basset
returned alone in Dec 1698. "Villebon had him arrested and sent
him to France on the pretext that he was a dangerous character.
(Once again) ... Basset was released and permitted to return to
Acadia." See Rosenfield, 2:46; White,
DGFA-1, 78-80, 1114-15, 1146; White, DGFA-1 English, 16-17 (quotations from p. 17).
Grenier says "William Phips's army of New England militia spent twelve days
sacking Port Royal before returning to Boston...." Melanson,
25, says 10 days. Arsenault
says Phips burned 30 houses in the village. Despite the widespread destruction & the
mayhem, fueled by vengeance, that would have accompanied it, no one was
killed at Port-Royal as a result of this expedition. Another
factor in the treatment of the Acadians by Phips's
Puritans is hinted at in Parkman, 2:193, when discussing the rude
welcome that Phips received at Québec later in the year: "Phips
imagined that the Canadians would offer little resistance to the Puritan
invasion; for some of the Acadians had felt the influence of their
New England neighbors, and shown an inclination to them. It
was far otherwise in Canada, where the English heretics were regarded
with abhorrence." Italics added. Parkman doubtlessly is
referring to the relationship established between the New Englanders &
the peninsula Acadians by their illicit but extensive trade over the
years--the Acadians, in fact, referred to their New-English trading
partners as "our friends, the enemy." Names of the Port-Royal
councilors are from Griffiths, 155. Phips himself was back at Boston on
May 13, only 2 days after he had descended on Port-Royal. See
Parkman, 2:175. Arsenault says Phips brought away 38 French
soldiers; Parkman's number is used here. The pirate depredations
are from A. H. Clark & Webster. Leisler's part in the attack is from
Webster, 9n, who calls him "a Walloon settled in New York."
Parkman, 2:157, describes Leisler as a New York demagogue who tried to
take over the colony after the ouster of Andros in 1689.
Pritchard adds a cynical motivation
to the New England expedition: "Massachusetts's attack on Port
Royal at the end of May in 1690 was in response to the attacks of
combined French and Indian war parties sent out from Canada. The
officially sanctioned private war begun in Massachusetts by land
speculators, fishing interests, and Boston merchants was going nowhere
until news of the Canadian attacks on Schenectady and Salmon Falls
reached New England and reinvigorated the plan by allowing Puritan
divines to portray the proposed attack on Port Royal as a religious
crusade, disguising its true nature as an affair of pillage with no
strategic or military objective."
White, DGFA-1 English, 78, names
Chevalier as head of Phips's Port-Royal council & says
Chevalier
"remained in this position under Governor Villebon until 1693."
Two years after the attack on Port-Royal,
Chevalier became the husband of Catherine Bugaret,
daughter of former associate Nicolas Denys associate
Bernard Bugaret dit St.-Martin, who first came
to the colony in 1636. Catherine gave Chevalier
no children, but she had given many to her first husband, Claude
Petitpas de La Fleur. See notes
17 &
25a, above; White, DGFA-1, 300,
345, 1295-96.
Pothier says of de Goutin only that
"After being taken prisoner and later released, de Goutin went
first to the Saint John River, and then to Canada." Does this mean
that de Goutin was held for a time at Port-Royal before going to
Canada via the Rivière St.-Jean portage?
Fergusson, 2:14, says Alden went with Southack to La Hève &
Chédabouctou, but Griffiths, 153, followed here, says Alden was sent
into the Bay of Fundy to overawe the Acadian settlements there. For Alden's fate
later in the war, see note 161.
Haynes says "Fort Chedabuctou" fell on 5 Jun
1690, adding: "... the French soldiers had to be sent elsewhere in
1691 and the settlers, without protection, must leave." No one was
counted there in the Acadian census of 1693, so the place was abandoned
until the early 1700s, when Acadian fishermen moved in. See Book
Two. For more on the 1688 raid at Chédabouctou, which had an
impact on the entire colony, see Baudry, 2:182-83; note 295e, below.
Fr. Louis Petit, a former captain in the
Carignan-Salières Regiment, was the first vicar-general for Acadia in
the Diocese of Québec. He served in that capacity, covering
Port-Royal, Pentagöuet, & Rivière St.-Jean, with headquarters at
Port-Royal, from 1676-90 & 1691-93. He was especially close to the
King's attorney & judge at Port-Royal, Dubreuil, who
also served as a teacher in Petit's school for boys there. After
taking the priests to Boston, Phips took them with him on his offensive
against Québec, where, after failing to take the Canadian capital, they
were exchanged for English prisoners. Desjardins, 2:522, says Abbé Petit returned
to Port-Royal to rebuild the church & the presbytery, destroyed by the
New English, but does not say when or how long he remained. Abbé Trouvé remained at Québec. See
Baillargeon, 2:638. Fr. Trouvé was the priest whom
de Goutin criticized for his rough handling of the Le Neuf/Morin
scandal at Beaubassin a couple of years before Phips appeared at
Port-Royal. See Book Two; Baillargeon, who does not mention the scandal.
Baudry, 2:184,
says Phips took "some 50 soldiers" of the Port-Royal garrison to
Boston, that the rest--20 or so--had fled to the Acadian settlement at
Minas, which was linked to Port-Royal by a cart track than ran
northeastward from the upper reaches of haute-riviére, across a
divide, & down into the Minas Basin. See Book Two.
Melanson, 25, citing a biography of Phips, says the Acadians' "stolen
belongings, which included boots, shoes, clothing, blacksmith tools,
communion wafers from the church, priest vestments, firearms, military
supplies, a brigantine and two ketches, were offer[ed] for public sale
in Boston, mid-June 1690. Also taken was L740 in cash."
Meneval never returned to Acadia. After
being held in Boston on Phips's insistence for 3 months "closely guarded
in a house," the captured governor was
released by the MA authorities, who insisted Phips return the
governor's clothes & other valuables. See Drake, 58n1. Phips refused to return the more valuable of Meneval's private possessions, doubtlessly keeping them as a prize of
war, but gave him 1,000 livres & "a few bits of old clothing."
Baudry, 2:184, says: "Meneval next obtained a passport for London,
but Phips, fearing disclosures, had him put in prison again."
Simon Bradstreet, with whom Meneval had negotiated during the dispute
over fisheries, was still governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, but
evidently Phips, who succeeded Bradstreet in May 1692, had much
influence at Boston. Despite Phips's influence, Meneval finally
secured his release from prison & sailed to France, which he reached
aboard a small 25-ton chartered vessel in the spring of 1691.
Before the war, Meneval had befriended Boston merchant John Nelson, with
whom he left his papers & valuables before he returned to France.
Meneval was not restored to the governorship of Acadia; his successor,
former second-in-command Joseph Robinau de Villebon, served as the
colony's commander, essentially its governor, from 1691 until his death
in 1700. Meneval, meanwhile, remained in France, serving as an
adviser to the French Court on military matters & boundary questions.
He also tried to extract compensation from Phips & then from Phips's
heirs, but in this he was unsuccessful. Meneval, who never
married, evidently was still alive in 1703, but Baudry provides neither
his birth nor death dates, saying only, on 2:182, that he "fl.
1687-1703" & died between 1703-09. Baudry, 2:184, concludes:
"Meneval's career as governor was not very brilliant. Doubtless he
had qualities; he appeared to be honest and anxious to serve well.
If, of necessity, he tolerated trading with the English, nothing proves
that he took part in it himself. His reports reveal intelligence
and a good understanding of the situation. But he showed himself
to be of a difficult and captious disposition.... In the exercise
of his authority he was often arbitrary and immoderate, condemning
people to prison for trifles and taking excessive steps, such as the
exile of the Morin family. As a soldier, he was scarcely
effective in the defense of Port-Royal; despite the court's decision to
rebuild the fort in 1687, he hesitated, decided nothing, then left all
the responsibility to the engineers; he was placed severely for this by
Seignelay. At the time of the siege, he appeared in somewhat of a
hurry to capitulate; Perrot and Frontenac looked with disapproval on a
surrender made without even a show of resistance. But Meneval was
perhaps more to be pitied than blamed. He was ill, poorly aided,
and probably little prepared to hold a command which carried such heavy
responsibilities. He became discouraged and took a dislike to the
country, and his letters present a long string of lemantations. In
a word, in the difficult circumstances in which he exercised his
mandate, he made the mistake of displaying only rather ordinary
qualities, whereas what would have been required was exceptional courage
and talents." See also Parkman, 2:175-77.
As a side note, according to
Zoltvany:
"In May of the previous year [1690] his [Laumet dit Cadillac's] Acadian habitation
[on the ME
coast] had been destroyed, along with several other houses in the
vicinity of Port Royal, by Sir William Phips." Cadillac, of
course, after moving to Canada, became a shaker & mover in that
colony & later governed LA. See Book Seven.
157a. See E. LeBanc,
"Saccardy," in DCB, 1:586; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon,"
in DCB, 1:576.
E. LeBlanc, "Saccardy," adds that Saccardy
died "On his return journey to France" & was buried at Amboise
on 7 May 1691, so the pirates must have released him & he accompanied
Villebon to Québec. From Québec, Villebon returned to France & did
not return to Acadia until the summer of 1691. See E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon";
note 161, below.
Leisler, the rebel leader of NY following the
collapse of Andros's government, was not present when his freebooters
captured the Union at the end of Jun 1690 He was, at the
time, presiding over the first intercolonial congress in English
colonial history at Manhattan. In May 1691, after he was driven
from power, he was executed by English authorities for treason & murder.
See online Wikipedia, "Jacob Leisler."
158.
See Drake,
Border Wars,
58-60; Leckie, Wars of
America, 19-21; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:130-31; Parkman, France &
England, 2:173, 179-93; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6.
Drake says 32 ships & 2,300 men in Phips's expedition. Leckie counts 36 ships and 2,200 men. Parkman, 2:179-81, 191-92, says 34 ships, including 4 large ones, &
that the 2,200 men in the expedition included sailors. Parkman,
2:179, details the failed efforts of the MA authorities to
seek aid for the attack from the mother country, something New England
had never done. Despite this fact, the English government refused
the aid because "its resources were engrossed by the Irish war" that
King William had begun earlier that year. After some bickering
among colonial officials, the land expedition was placed under command
of a Connecticut officer, Fitz-John Winthrop. The expedition
failed for a number of reasons, among them contention between the New
York political factions that had grown out of the recent rebellion
against Andros, lack of birch & elm bark to fashion more canoes, small
pox, & reluctant Iroquois. See Parkman, 2:173, 181, 187-89.
For Frontenac's almost comic struggles with the supreme council in
Québec after he assumed the governorship, see Parkman, 2:181-84.
For his preparations to secure Québec & the other settlements against
the Iroquois & the English, including the happy arrival at Montréal of
hundreds of Indian allies from the Great Lakes, laden with furs, about
the time that Phips's expedition had departed Boston, see Parkman,
2:184-91. Final, vital additions to the defenses at Québec were
supervised by the city's mayor, Prevost, while Frontenac was at
Montréal. See Parkman, 2:190, 192-93.
Lunn says "In 1690 the English raided and
destroyed the fishing establishments at Île Percée." This likely
happened on Phips's approach to the St. Lawrence River via the Gulf of
St. Lawrence. Today, off the southern coast of the Gaspé
peninslua, opposite the town of Percé, lies Île Bonaventure, or
Bonaventure Island, a Canadian park & bird sanctuary. Was this
originally Île Percée? Is it named for Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, whose fishery was
there?
159. See
Arsenault,
History, 63; Baillargeon, "Trouvé," in DCB, 2:638;
Desjardins, "Petit," in DCB, 2:522; Drake, Border Wars, 59-65; Leckie,
Wars of America, 20-22; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:130-31; Parkman, France & England,
1:1408-09, 2:189-92, 195-96, 203-06, chap. 13; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
336.
For a
description of the dilapidated condition of the fort at Québec during
Frontenac's second governorship, see Parkman, 1:1408-09.
The dates
in these sources differ significantly. Drake, 59, says Phips arrived in site of Québec on Oct 5 & that he withdrew soon after
Oct 11. Leckie, 20, says Phips did not arrive until "well into
October" but cites no specific dates; he uses Parkman as his secondary
source. Parkman, 2:189ff, says Frontenac was at Montréal on Oct 10
when he received word of the approach of the English fleet, that he
reached Québec on Oct 14, 2 days before Phips arrived, that
the lights of the English fleet were finally seen from the heights of
Québec by sentinels before dawn of Oct 16, & that Phips sent his envoy
to Frontenac at 10 a.m. on Oct 16. Parkman's times & dates are
followed here. Amazingly, Phips remained 3 weeks at Tadoussac,
within 3 days sail of Québec! See Parkman, 2:192.
Part of
the exchange of words between Phips's subaltern & Frontenac on the
morning of the16th concerned the official French position on the
overthrow of King James II of England by his son-in-law, William of
Orange, & his daughter Mary, a major cause of the present war, as well
as Phips's rough treatment of Meneval at Port-Royal. See Parkman,
2:195-96.
In the fight at the St. Charles ford on Oct 20, the
elder Le Moyne brother, the sieur de Sainte-Hélène, fell mortally
wounded, & the other brother, the sieur de Longueuil, was wounded.
See Parkman, 2:202. One of the prisoners exchanged in late October
was Captain Davis, who had been captured the previous May at Casco Bay.
See Parkman, 2:203.
Parkman, 2:204-05, gives a thorough evaluation
of Québec's condition after Frontenac's victory & makes the case that,
despite Phips's defeat, the campaign was a close thing, that Québec
could have fallen if Phips's timing had been better. On his way
down the St. Lawrence, Phips nearly captured the annual autumn supply
ships from France that Québec still relied so much on. See
Parkman, 2:206.
Captain Mason's exploit is from Arsenault.
Pritchard is
no more impressed with Frontenac's conduct than with Phips's, &
concludes: "Neither side displayed much military talent. A
more enterprising general than Governor Frontenac, who enjoyed the
advantages of defence and superior numbers including trained, regular
infantry, might well have destroyed the 1,200-1,300-man English landing
force had he chosen to; while Sir William Phips, completely without
military experience and a protege of the Puritan divines who had
transformed the expedition into a religious crusade, displayed no
military talents at all."
159a.
Quotations from Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 25. See also
note 156a, above.
For Boudrot, see White,
DGFA-1, 193-94; White, DGFA-1 English, 40; Book Three.
Boudrot was a son-in-law of Port-Royal notable Charles Melanson
dit La Ramée, who was in the second MA-controlled council at
Port-Royal &, according to Melanson, lived on his father-in-law's
habitation at Port-Royal. See note 160, below. Like his
father-in-law & his brother-in-law David Basset of
Boston, Boudrot was fluent in English as well as French
& literate in both languages. See Melanson. For more on
Boudrot, see Melanson, 26; note
164, below; Book Three.
For Martel de Mago, who also was seigneur
of Machias, ME, see Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 512; White,
DGFA-1, 1123-24; White, DGFA-1 English, 242; note
105, above. In 1698, Martel de
Mago, in his late middle-age, would marry a daughter of Joseph Robineau
dit Promville,
160. Quotation
from C. Bruce Fergusson, "Tyng (Ting, Tynge), Edward," in DCB,
1:654, &
online. See also Drake,
Border Wars, 38-42, 66-72; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
101; Leckie, Wars of America, 10-13; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:132; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 25, 41; Parkman, France & England,
2:417; Webster, Acadia, 169.
For Charles Melanson's
treasonous activities later in the war, see note
163b, below.
For Church's role in King Phillip's War, fought in New England from 1675-78, see Leckie;
note
292b, below. King Phillip's Indian name sometimes is given as Metacomet.
See Webster for a brief sketch of Church's career.
Tyng was a native of New England who had
received a grant of land at present-day Portland, ME, served on the ME
council under governors Dudley & Andros, & was a favorite of the
unfortunate Andros. Tyng also commanded at Fort Loyal (Portland),
Pemaquid, & Sagadahoc. He was appointed governor of Acadia after
the fall of Port-Royal in 1690 but did not visit "his" colony until
1691. After his brief stay at Port-Royal, he left for Boston via
Rivière St.-Jean but did not make it. See Fergusson; note 161, below.
Faragher says Church was from RI. Parkman says Church, "the noted Indian fighter of King Philip's War,
was at Tiverton in Rhode Island when he heard of Hertel de Rouville's
attack on Deerfield" in Feb 1704. Parkman also says Church
was a native of Duxbury, which lies on the coast between Boston &
Plymouth, MA, so the old man got around.
161. See Arsenault,
History, 63-64;
Baudy, "Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:183;
Donald F. Chard, "Nelson, John," in DCB, 2:494,
&
online;
Chartand,
Forts of New France: Northeast America, 16-17, 19;
Drake, Border Wars, 72;
Fergusson, "Alden," in DCB, 2:14-15; Fergusson, "Tyng," in
DCB, 1:654;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 153; Higginbotham, Old Mobile,
148ff; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de
Villebon," in DCB, 1:576-78; E. LeBlanc, "Saccardy,"
in DCB, 1:586; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:132-33; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 25; Paul, We
Were Not the Savages, 56-57; Bernard Pothier, "Le Moyne d'Iberville (from a fief held
by his father's family, near Dieppe, in the province of Normandy), et
d'Ardillières (from a property he acquired in the province of Aunis near
Rochefort), Pierre," in DCB, 2:391-92, &
online;
Pritchard, In
Search of Empire, 339, 343-44; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; Webster, Acadia, 11;
White, DGFA-1, 1413-14; note 157,
above.
For Villebon's full name, titles, & other
biographical info., see White, which favors the
surname spelling Robineau & calls him a gouverneur; E.
LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon."
Villebon's mother was Marie-Anne Le Neuf de La Potérie,
which made him a kinsman of former Acadian commandant/govenor Michel
Le Neuf de La Vallière de Beaubassin; he was, in fact,
a nephew of the former governor. See
Comeau, "LeNeuf de la
Vallière de Beaubassin, Michel (the elder)," in DCB,
2:409; Léopold Lamontage, "Leneuf de La Potérie,
Jacques," in DCB, 1:467, ; &
online.
White does not name Villebon's wife & uses the date c1683 to hint at a
marriage. E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," 577, says the
commandant never married but that he had a mistress. According to
LeBlanc, Villebon & his mistress had an illegitimate daughter,
Marie-Anne dit Promville, born in c1684, who married Acadian
seigneur/merchant Jean Martel de Magos of
Machias & Port-Royal in c1698, when Jean was age 48 & she was 14.
See also White.
Villebon was Meneval's second in command in Acadia until Nov 1689, when
Gov.-Gen. Frontenac ordered Villebon back to France. See Baudy; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de
Villebon," 1:576; note
295e, below. Villebon returned to Port-Royal
in Jun 1690 aboard the Union, a month after Phips trashed the
settlement, & was nearly captured at Jemseg on Rivière St.-Jean. See
E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," 1:576; E. LeBlanc, "Saccardy"; note
157a, above. Pritchard, 344, adds that while Villebon was in
France, the King declared to him "that conditions in Europe did not
permit reestablishing Port Royal." The King was referring, of
course, to the reestablishment of French military presence at
Port-Royal, not to the settlement there, which would remain regardless
of who controlled the place. This pronouncement by the royal authority precluded Villebon's returning
to Port-Royal & compelled him to look elsewhere for his headquarters.
On 343, Pritchard implies that Villebon went to Rivière St.-Jean to
protect the Acadian settlements on the Bay of Fundy from anymore English
attacks, but, on 344, he goes on to say that the new Acadian commandant
was no favorite of the settlers, & for good reason: "During the
next three or four years Commandant de Villebon devoted himself to fur
trading, going so far as to appropriate supplies for his own use and
failing to furnish aid to regular troops and war parties from Naxouat.
If Villebon's reputation among Acadians that he was a thug who
terrorised the countryside with the aid of family members in pursuit of
his own interests, was accurate, it reinforced the Indian-centeredness
of French policy." This mitigates any notion that Villebon was
looking out for the interests of the Acadian settlers & makes a strong
case that he was more interested in exploiting than protecting them.
Nevertheless, he went to Rivière St.-Jean because of its strategic position,
especially its defensibility, & because a return to
Port-Royal was militarily unwise.
Drake says
Villebon recaptured Port-Royal in November 1691; Arsenault, 63,
says it happened in Jun. Port-Royal would not be restored as the Acadian capital
until 1700, after Villebon's sudden death at Nashouat.
Pritchard, 339,
calls Villebon a protégé of Frontenac & says Villebon
served as "commandant of Acadia." Others sources, such
as White, cited above, & E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de
Villebon," 1:576, call him
governor. Villebon's younger
brother, François-Alexandre Robinau de Bécancour, would serve in LA under Iberville & Bienville during the early 1700s. See
Higginbotham; Book Seven.
Webster says Villebon
named the new fort at Nashouat Fort St. Joseph (probably after his
patron saint, his first name being Joseph). Nashouat is also
spelled Nashwaak & Naxouat &, according to Pritchard, 344, was
located "about 90 miles upstream on the St. John River at the mouth of
the Nashwaak River," opposite today's Fredericton, the capital of New
Brunswick. The capital is on the west side of the river, opposite
today's St.
Anne's Point. The
town on the east side, opposite the capital, is called Nashwaaksis,
which is Maliseet for "little Nashwaak," & is on the side of the river
where the fort was located. A depiction of Fort Nashouat can be
found in Chartand, 17. A description on
16 reads: "Fort Saint-Joseph, also known as Fort Nashwaak,
1695. Built during March and April 1692 and abandoned in 1698,
this stockade fort built on a square plan of about 100 ft. plus its
bastions was located on the southwestern tip of the meeting of St John
and Nashwaak rivers. The buildings within were the commander's
quarters, the soldiers' barracks ... and the guard house. ... The
bastion on the left had a baking oven." Pritchard, 343, says
that after he went to Port-Royal in 1691 to drive out the English,
Villebon & his 45 soldiers "landed their munitions and stores upriver at
Jemseg," that two English privateers came up the river & seized his
ships, & so he retreated overland to Québec before returning to France
to get more aid. The attack at Jemseg may have motivated the new
commandant to move even farther up river after he returned from France.
Chartrand, 19, says:
"In 1690[sic], Governor de Villbon had it [Fort Jemseg] repaired
but found it unsuitable and moved farther north two years later."
For the founding of Ste.-Anne-du-Pay-Bas, see Arsenault, Généalogie,
1634n8; note 108, above.
Alden's failure to secure a prisoner exchange
proved to be a death sentence for Edward Tyng. From Québec, the
colonel was shipped to La Rochelle as a prisoner of war & died in a
French dungeon. Tyng's son Edward, Jr. became a distinguished
naval officer. In compensation for his father's hardship & death,
the younger Tyng received a grant of land in Massachusetts Bay colony in
1736. See Fergusson, "Tyng."
Nelson's fate was happier, at least in the
long run. Authorities at Québec understood that the merchant
was too knowledgeable to
release during the war, but he managed to smuggle out word of a French
border raid via 2 French deserters. Unfortunately for Nelson, the
deserters were captured in an abortive attempt on the life of
Jean-Vincent
d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin; they were still bearing
Nelson's missive to his fellow New Englanders. Frontenac packed
Nelson off to France, where he spent time in a dungeon at the castle of Angoulême
& then in the Bastille at Paris. The French released him on a
parole of honor in 1694, & he went to London to deliver a proposal of
neutrality for the colonies in America. When the mission fell
thru, Nelson proposed to the English Board of Trade & Plantations a
compromise on the boundaries between New England & Acadia & other
measures perceived as favorable to France. He did not return to
Boston until towards the end of the war, in 1696, after which he resumed
his trade with Acadia, where he befriended Jacques Bourgeois &
other Acadian notables. See
Chard;
note 163a, below; Book Two.
Alden, son of the famous Mayflower Plymouth gov. & his wife
Priscilla Mullens, was a successful ship captain who had traded with the
Acadians at Port-Royal & Minas on numerous occasions, hence his
association with Nelson. Alden was with Phips in 1690 &, with his
sloop Mary, overawed the Acadian settlements on the Bay of Fundy
while Southack attacked La Hève & Chédabouctou & Phips & his New
Englanders trashed Port-Royal. Alden's mission from Villebon was
not only to free his son, Nelson, & Tyng, but also 60 French soldiers
captured at Port-Royal the year before & held by Phips at Boston.
Alden returned to Rivière St.-Jean in May 1692, accompanied by only 6
French soldiers. Villebon sent 2 men to meet Alden on an island in
the river & retrieve the French prisoners. Alden landed the
prisoners but seized the 2 Frenchmen who had come to fetch them &
hurried back to Boston. Villebon protested Alden's conduct, & it
was this treachery that led Frontenac to send Nelson, Tyng, & William
Alden to prisons in France. Meanwhile, Alden had been accused of
witchcraft at Salem & was jailed for 15 weeks. He escaped in 1693
& was cleared of the charges. He was back on the St.-Jean in 1696
in a failed attempt to take Villebon's fort at Nashouat & helped
negotiate a post-war treaty with the Abenaki in late 1698. Alden's
biographer does not reveal the fate of Alden's son William, by his
second wife, who was sent to France. See Fergusson, "Alden"; Griffiths; notes
157, above, &
171, below.
161a.
Quotations from E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:576. See also
E. LeBlanc, 1:577.
Villebon also gained other Native allies in
his fight against the English. Mi'kmaq historian Dan Paul notes: "The Mi'kmaq
were involved in fighting between the French and the English in Saint
John Harbour in 1691. Sixy Mi'kmaq Warriors were part of the crew
of a French warship [Denys de Bonaventure's?] joined in
the battle. This increased involvement in European military
confrontations by the Mi'kmaq," after decades of careful neutrality, "signified a deepening concern for cultural
survial." Paul reminds us that Phips's expedition to
Port-Royal in 1690 included attacks not only against the Acadians there,
but also against nearby Mi'kmaq. "This raid," Paul asserts, "was
probably the incident that ensured that New Englanders would
henceforth be considered mortal enemies by the Mi'kmaq. In
addition to destroying Acadian settlements, the New Englanders pillaged
Mi'kmaq villages near Port-Royal, burnt their mission church and seized
the missionaries, imprisoning them at Boston." See Paul, We
Were Not the Savages, 56-57 (italics in original on p. 57); note
157, above. One suspects that
the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy of the lower St.-Jean/Ste.-Croix valleys
also had embraced the French by then.
161b.
Quotation from Squires, "Maissonat," in DCB, 2:449. See
also E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577;
White, DGFA-1, 223, 252, 993-94, 1114-15; note
230, below.
In c1693, Maissonat "remarried" to
Madeleine, daughter of François Bourg & Marguerite Boudrot;
she gave him a daughter, Marie-Madeleine dit Baptiste, born in
c1695, who married English merchant William, called Guillaume,
Winniett, at Annapolis Royal in c1711. Maissonat's
second marriage was annulled, doubtlessly because his first wife, Judith
Soubran, was still alive in c1693 (she did not die until Oct
1703) & was still giving him children in the late 1690s, so the
accusation of having many wives was accurate. (Madeleine married
Pierre, son of Daniel LeBlanc and widower of Marie Thériot,
probably at Port-Royal in c1697. She gave him 8 children.)
In Jan 1707, Maissonat remarried again, this time legally, as a
widower, to Madeleine, daughter of Jacques Bourgeois &
Jeanne Trahan; Madeleine was twice married herself; she gave
Baptiste another daughter. His only sons--Pierre, fils,
Jean, & Martin, born in c1698, 1699, & ?, respectively--were by his
first wife, but their fate is unknown. See Squires;
White; Book Two.
162.
Quotation from Webster, Acadia, 12. See also Baudry, "Thury,"
in DCB, 1:649; Drake,
Border Wars, 73-76; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon,"
in DCB, 1:577; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:133; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 344;
Webster, 11; White, DGFA-1 English, 247;
Zoltvany,
"Laumet," in
DCB, 2:352.
Phips, remember, had not left a garrison at
Port-Royal when he seized the place in May 1690. Evidently he
needed all the men he could spare for the offensive against Québec,
which proved to be a disaster that autumn. See notes
157 & 159,
above.
According to White, Antoine Laumet dit
La Mothe, seiur de Cadillac, future founder of Détroit & gov. of LA, was in Boston in 1692, where he saw
the 90-year-old widow of Pierre Melanson dit La Verdure,
père, whose older sons had settled in Acadia. Cadillac had
been granted a large seigneurie along the ME coast, centering on Mount
Desert Island, in Jul 1688, which was trashed by the Phips expedition of
1690. See notes 105 &
156a, above; Book Four. Was Cadillac at Boston as a prisoner
of war, having been taken during Phips's expedition?
Zoltvany says nothing of
Cadillac's being held by the New English, only that in May 1690 "his
Acadia habitation had been destroyed," meaning his home at Port-Royal.
So how was the wily Gascon able to visit Boston during the middle of a
war? Zoltvany details a "reconnaissance" trip he took to the New
England coast in 1692, but surely the New English would not have allowed
such a Frenchman to roam freely thru their principal city.
163. See
Arsenault,
History, 63-64; Crouse, LeMoyne
d'Iberville, 73-79, chaps. 3 & 4; Drake
Border Wars, 76-85, 92n; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:133; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
337, 339, 344-45; Squires, "Maissonat,"
in DCB, 2:449; Taylor, A.,
American Colonies, 184-85; Webster, Acadia,
12-13; White, DGFA-1, 486; White, DGFA-1 English, 229.
According to White, DGFA-1, 486,
Jacques de La Broquerie, son of Simon Denys de
La Trinité and his second wife and Simon-Pierre Denys
de La Bonventure's step-uncle, was a newly-promoted ensign in
his late 20s when he died at "Pemiquid, Acadie," in 1692. Since
Iberville did not attack the fort at Pemiquid that fall, one wonders if
Jacques de La Broquerie died in the attack against Fort
William Henry led by Jean-Vincent
d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin.
White says
in 1692 "D'Iberville distinguished himself in the attack against
Pemaquid in Acadia." Perhaps White means 1696, when Iberville
did attack & defeat the New English at Pemaquid. Iberville, despite his youth (he was only 31 in 1692), was an old hand at
fighting the English, having several times attacked the English
fur-trading posts on Hudson Bay. He also had participated in the
bloody 1690 raid against Schenectady, which had been led by his older
brother, Jacques Le Moyne, sieur de Sainte-Hélène. See Crouse, chaps. 3 & 4. Pritchard, 339, asserts that
Frontenac "was no supporter of Iberville or his ambitions in the
Bay...."
The Fort William Henry at Pemaquid, ME,
should not be confused with the more famous fort of the same name, built
in a later war on the
southern end of Lake George, which the French called
Lac-du-St.-Sacrament, south of Lake Champlain.
It was in the spring and summer of 1692 that
the witchcraft hysteria hit Salem & other communities in
Massachusetts Bay, a state of mind aided no doubt by the bloody warfare
on the New English frontier. Pritchard, 337,
concludes, sardonically: "Capturing New France was more difficult
than the Protestant preachers had imagined, and they soon turned to
conducting witch trials back home in Salem." See also A. Taylor.
163a.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 276, 307-08; D'Entremont,
"Serreau," in DCB, 2:605. See also
Chard, "Nelson," in DCB, 2:494;
D'Entremont, 2:604; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; White,
DGFA-1, 276, 307, 1299, 1463, 1465; White, DGFA-1 English,
276, 307.
D'Entremont, 2:605, says the old seigneur
& his family had been captured by Maj. Benjamin Church in Aug.
"Having set off in the direction of Penobscot Bay, Church seized
Saint-Aubin and his son-in-law Jacques Petitpas, with their
families, and took them to Boston." Did Church do this in
conformity with the strengthening of the New English fort at Pemiquid?
D'Entremont also implies that it was father Jean who accompanied Jacques
Petitpas on the dubious mission. White, DGFA-1 English,
276, 307, followed here, says it was Charles.
Geneviève Serreau de Saint-Aubin
remarried to French soldier Barthélémy Bergeron dit
d'Amboise, in c1695, probably at Port-Royal, a year after Jacques died.
See White, DGFA-1, 1299, 1463.
In possession of the 2 executed French
deserters was a message from New English merchant John Nelson, being
held as a prisoner of war in Québec, to the authorities in Boston
alerting them to plans of a French raid against New England. The
French, who had treated Nelson with courtesy after his 1691 capture in
the Bay of Fundy, did not allow him return to Boston until after the war, which ended in 1697. See
Chard; note 161,
above.
163b. Quotations from Webster,
Acadia, 13; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 26 (italics in
the original). See also Melanson, 25; White, DGFA-1 English, 40, 296;
notes 159a &
160, above.
White, 40, says "Abraham Boudrot from Port-Royal was one of those who, during the
War of the League of Augsburg (1689-1697), obtained passes from
Commander Villebon. Boudrot had traded regularly with
Boston since the 1680's and had gained the friendship and respect of
many Massachusetts merchants.... " See also Melanson,
25-26; Book
Three.
Ironically, while his son-in-law was spying on the New Englanders for
Commandant Villebon, Charles Melanson was communicating
with Boston authorities about the activities of French privateers, such
as Baptiste Maissonat, operating out of Port-Royal.
According to a family historian/genealogist, at least 3 of the signed
letters between Charles & acting MA Gov. William Stoughton, who
succeeded Phips, still exist. They are dated 2 & 15 Aug 1695, & 5
Feb 1696. See Melanson, 26-27, 41. This excerpt from the Feb letter
is especially ironic: Complaining of the privateers,
Melanson noted that they"...doe pretend to take possession
of this Country against our wills for they Expect more forse this spring
... if I doe know any news more I shall informe your honeur by abraham
boudrot & my brother in law
(Germain Bourgeois) for they doe hope to goe to
Boston this spring with two vessell the one loden with wheat & ye other
with Colls [coal?] & will inform your honneur how all doth pas."
Melanson concluded his 5 Feb 1696 letter:
"Sir I darst not Right more at present for if it should be known it is
death for me Sir I pray your honneur that I may not be discovered Sir I
hope to se your honneur this summer in Boston. Sir I shall Escribe
my self to your honneur your Most treu & faithfull Servant Charles
Mellanson."
See Melanson, 26-27 (italics in the original). Were
Melanson, Boudrot, & Bourgeois
acting as double agents? Or, perhaps more typically Acadian, they
were simply going about their business, doing what they could to feed &
clothe their families during a troublesome time in the colony's history.
One is reminded of the later rivalry between Britain & France over possession of peninsula
NS & the insistence among a majority of Acadians
there that they were "neutrals" in the imperial struggle. See Book Two.
164.
Quotation from Webster,
Acadia, 13.
One
wonders why Villebon was so tolerant of this illicit trading. Was
it to confiscate the goods from the Chignecto Acadians after the New
Englanders went on their way?
165. See
Baudry, "Thury," in DCB, 1:649; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 88-89;
Drake, Border Wars, 93-95; Pritchard,
In Search of Empire, 344-45; Squires, "Maissonat," in DCB,
2:449-450; Webster, Acadia, 13-14.
Pritchard, a balanced view of the Abenaki
settlement, says: "The combination of Villebon's trading,
including his inability to supply sufficient trade goods to meet Abenaki
demand, Iberville's failure to carry out an assault from the sea in
conjunction with the Abenaki, and renewed Massachusetts diplomacy
weakened French influence among the natives, who agreed to make peace
with Massachusetts in August of 1693." Abbé Thury, however, threw
his influence with the tribe into the French effort to break the treaty.
According to Baudry, Thury was entirely successful in his efforts, & the
Abenaki returned to the French.
Drake's is a francophobe view of this phase of the war, so his assertions here should
be approached with caution.
King William III had granted Massachusetts Bay
colony a
new charter in 1691, which superseded the old corporate charter that
James II's Dominion of New England had essentially abolished, and
created a single royal colony under Phips that included Massachusetts,
Plymouth, Maine, and Nova Scotia, which the English still claimed.
Frontenac notified the Minister of Marine in Oct 1693
that Maissonat was on his way to Paris. The privateer
returned to Acadia in 1694, in command of the corvette Bonne &
resumed his depredations against New English shipping, so that phase of
the war still plagued the region. In May 1695, 2 English
vessels, including a frigate, trapped him in Musquash Bay on the
Atlantic coast of the peninsula. After a long fight, Baptiste &
his crew abandoned their sinking ship & escaped overland. This
forced Baptiste to return to France to explain the loss of the vessel.
He was back in Acadia by mid-July 1696, when he helped Iberville &
Bonaventure capture an English frigate near the mouth of the St.-Jean.
See Squires.
166. See
<acadian-home.org>; Brebner, Canada, 62; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 124-28; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon,"
in DCB, 1:578.
For
the 1686 & 1693 censuses, see <acadian-home.org>;
Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 472-521.
Clark, A. H., 124, provides the figure
900 for 1686. On 124-25, he details a census taken by ____ Gargas, the colony's secretary, or écrivain principal, at the
behest of Gov. Meneval, during the winter of 1687-88, which counts more
settlements than the 1686 census. On pp. 125-27, he also details a
census taken in 1689. Neither the 1687-88 or 1689 censuses are in
<acadian-home.org>
or <acadian-cajun.com>.
Clark's figures are, for 1687-88: Port-Royal, 450; Beaubassin,
122; Minas, "roughly doubled" that of 1786 (which has been 57);
Cap-Sable area, 24; Port Rochelois (not counted in 1686), 20; La Hève &
Mirliguèche, 22; Rivière St.-Jean & Maine coast, 86, including 24 women
& girls; Chebouctou, Chédabouctou (perhaps also including Canso
fishermen), 51; Cape Breton Island, 6. For 1689: Port-Royal,
461 individuals & 80 heads of household, plus 2 priest; Minas, 164
individuals & 1 priest; Beaubassin, 83 individuals & 1 priest;
Cap-Sable, 24; La Hève, 20; Chebouctou, 3; Passamaquoddy, 21; Rivière
St.-Jean, 17; Magais (probably Machias), 2; Pentagöuet, 4; Lincour, 5;
Petit Plaisance, 3; Larigimagnan, 2. A separate count in 1689
found 103 at Nepisiguit, which probably included other communities along
the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore from Île Percé to Cape Breton Island &
perhaps even Chédabouctou & Canso. Clark's figures for the census
of 1692 are on p. 128, & his totals are different: Port-Royal, 80
families with 499 individuals; Minas, 55 families with 305 individuals;
Beaubassin, 20 families with 119 individuals; Cap-Sable, probably
including Pubnico, 6 families, 32 individuals; Port Rochelois, 2
families with 12 individuals; La Hève, 4 families with only 6
individuals; overall population on the peninsula, "approaching 1,200."
Figures for Canada & the English colonies
are from Brebner. See also note
45, above.
E. LeBlanc says
the total in 1693 was "apparently 1,009," up from 885 counted by de
Meulles in 1686.
167. See
Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chap. 5; Drake,
Border Wars,
94-109.
167a.
See Desjardins, "Petit," in DCB, 2:522; Martin, F.X., Louisiana, 1:133-34; Melanson,
Melanson-Melançon, 26, 41; Pritchard,
In Search of Empire, 345.
For the oath takers at Port-Royal (their names
included on a list of signers, dated August 1695 & held at the
Massachusetts Archives in Boston),
see the individual bios in White, DGFA-1 English, 4, 15, 16-17,
20, 32, 33, 49, 50, 52, 64, 73, 78, 84-86, 92, 114, 121, 126, 129, 140,
150, 155, 157, 159, 166, 196, 187, 204, 210, 219, 222, 237, 243-44, 247,
272, 275-76, 291, 295-96, 306, 308, 319, 327. Based on a careful
reading of the actual document, Karen Theriot Reader & Roberta Estes provided
additions & corrections to my original list.
Port-Royal seigneur Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle died sometime between
1689 & 10 May 1692, probably of natural causes, hence his not being
on a list dated Aug 1695. See White,
DGFA-1, 1027; note 44b, above.
One must ask, why is the
Abbé Petit's name on a list dated Aug 1695 when, according to his
biographer, Gérard Desjardins, "In 1693 he retired to the seminary of
Quebec..."? This makes one wonder
if the oath was actually taken in May 1690, after Phipps & his New
Englanders captured Port-Royal & when the abbé was still
there, rather than in Aug 1695, when the abbé may have been in retirement at
Québec. See note 157, above.
Desjardins notes that after Phipps failed to take Québec in Oct 1690,
"there was an exchange of prisoners, including Abbés Petit and Trouvé.
Abbé Petit returned to Port-Royal to rebuild the church and presbytery
there," Desjardins adds, but he gives no date for the abbé's
return. See note 159, above.
If the abbé returned to Port-Royal after 1693 it wasn't much of a retirement, hence the question
about when the oath with these signatures was actually taken.
Pritchard calls the Jul 1694 raid on Oyster River
(today's Durham), NH, "the bloodiest raid of the war."
It was motivated by the efforts of Abbé Thury from his
mission among the Abenaki at Pentagouët. Thury's Abenaki were
accompanied by French Lt. Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villeu, former
Acadian governor La Vallière's son-in-law, & Villieu's troupes de la marine. The Saint-Castins
no doubt had a hand in it, too. About 100 English settlers died, &
60 were captured, compared to about 60 killed at Schenectady, NY,
early in the war.
168. See
Arsenault, History, 64; René Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan,
Jacques-François de," in DCB, 2:479, &
online; Baudry, "Thury,"
in DCB, 1:649; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chap. 5,
144-46;
Drake,
Border Wars,
109-12; Gayarré, Louisiana, 1:30-36; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:134-35; Pothier, ; Pritchard, In
Search of Empire, 345-46; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; Squires, "Maissonat,"
in DCB, 2:449; White, DGFA-1 English,
155, 229, 311; note 172, below.
F.-X. Martin, 1:135, says Iberville picked up
50 Indians at Beaubassin on his way to Pemaquid, so Villebon still may
have been headquartered there. See note
164, above. Judge Martin also says
"the Baron of St. Castin ... marched with twenty-five
soldiers and two hundred and fifty Indians" to Pemaquid & "raised two
batteries" there, & paraphrases Chubb's defiant words: "... that
if the sea was covered with French ships, and the country around with
French soldiers, he would not think of surrendering the fort, as long as
he had a gun to fire." Evidently the bombardment, coupled with
Saint-Castin's threat of loosing his Indians on the New
English garrison, was enough to make Chubb eat his words.
Squires names the English frigate Iberville
captured in the lower Bay of Fundy. The poetic description of an
undated sea battle off "the hostile shore of New England," found in
Gayarré, 1:30, probably was not Iberville's fight with the Newport. Gayarré calls
Iberville's ship the Pelican, mentions no other French vessel in
the fray, places younger brother Bienville at one of the Pelican's guns, sinks
the largest of the 3 unnamed British vessels, which he calls a 52-gun
ship of the line, & awards the young Bienville a bloody wound.
This action occurred in Hudson Bay on 5 Sep 1697, not off the New
England coast on 14 Jul 1696. See Crouse, 144-46; O'Neill, 3:380.
Arsenault says
the fort fell on August 14, but Drake, 111, says the afternoon of the
15th.
White, 155, says in Aug 1696 de Goutin, whose post was at Port-Royal, "took part
in the attack by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville against the English fort at
Pemaquid." White, p. 311, says Jacques Testard was Iberville's second-in-command at Pemaquid & also in
the subsequent campaign in Newfoundland. Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," 2:3, says Louis D'Amours de
Chauffors et de Jemseg, whose daughter Charlotte later married
Jean-Vincent de Saint-Castin's son Bernard-Anselme, also was part
of the attack on Pemaquid, most likely with Villebon's contingent.
169. See
Arsenault, History, 64; Drake,
Border Wars,
112-13; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 115-16; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:135-36; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 346;
Webster, Acadia, 17.
Church's numbers come from Arsenault &
Judge Martin.
170.
Quotations from Webster, Acadia, 17; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:136; Drake, Border Wars,
113. See also
Noël Baillargeon, "Trouvé, Claude," in DCB,
2:637-38, &
online; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 112; Comeau, "LeNeuf de la Vallière de Beaubassin, Michel (the
elder)," in DCB, 2:410; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 100-01, 133, 191;
Grenier, Far Reaches of Empire, 12; Martin, F.-X., 1:135;
Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 343; White, DGFA-1 English, 57.
Clark, A. H.,
says "Church wreaked heavy damage in
Chignecto...." Ironically, the Chignecto seigneur, Michel
Le Neuf de La Vallière, and two of his sons had been preying on English
shipping off the coast of Acadia since Jun. Evidently their ship,
the Bouffonne, was out of position in Sep to prevent Church's
foray against their own seigneurie. See Comeau.
Grenier concludes that, after Phips's attack on Port-Royal in 1690, "New
Englanders bemoaned their fate" over their subsequent defeats "and,
short of Major Benjamin Church's sacking of Beaubassin in 1696,
virtually ignored Acadia."
Again, Pritchard cuts to the chase: "The French returned [to Port-Royal in 1691], and
little was heard from New England until 1696 when Benjamin Church led a
force of Christian Indians from southern Massachusetts and militiamen on
a revenge attack against the Acadian settlement of Chignecto.
Raised to scalp Abenaki for bounties of 100 pounds per adult male and 50
pounds for each woman and child, it had no strategic purpose.
Moreover, no Indians lived at Chignecto. Murder and plunder were
its
raison d'etre."
The priest at Chignecto in Sep 1696 was
Sulpician Fr. Claude Trouvé, whom his Beaubassin congregation had run
off in 1688 because of his handling of a scandal there. Reposted
to Port-Royal, Trouvé was captured by Phips in May 1690, taken to Québec, exchanged
there, remained in Canada for 4 years, & then returned to Beaubassin in
c1694, evidently forgiven. See
Baillargeon. For Trouvé's fate, see note
190, below.
171. See
Drake,
Border Wars, 114;
Fergusson, "Alden," in DCB, 2:14; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in
DCB, 1:577; MacBeath, "Damours (d'Amours),
Mathieu," in DCB, 1:246;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:136; Pritchard, In
Search of Empire, 346; Squires, "Maissonat," in
DCB, 2:450; Webster, Acadia,
17-18, 169; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 206-08; White, DGFA-1, 223; note 168, above.
The "new" fort at the mouth of the St.-Jean
may have been Villebon's reconstruction of La Tour's old fort
there. According to Villebon's biographer, the King "allowed
Joseph Robinau to proceed with the rebuilding of Fort Saint-Jean," which
was a name used for La Tour's lower river fort; it originally was
called Fort Ste.-Marie & was built in 1631-32. It was at Fort
Ste.-Marie that La Tour's second wife, Françoise-Marie Jacquelin,
& some of La Tour's men, were overwhelmed by d'Aulnay in Apr
1645. See E. LeBlanc; notes
19a & 30,
above.
Maissonat's second "wife" was Madeleine
Bourg. See White; notes
161b, above, &
230, below.
Hathorne is sometimes spelled
Hawthorne.
John Alden, Jr., captured & released by
Villebon 5 years before, was part of the failed Church/Hathorne
expedition. See
Fergusson.
According to
Mathieu
D'Amours, fils's biographer, the family suffered in more ways than one from Hathorne's attack.
George MacBeath asserts that "When Hathorne and his men withdrew, they burned
[Mathieu] Damours's home
and killed his cattle. Damours himself fell ill from
exposure suffered during the attack and died soon afterwards." See
MacBeath, 246; note
221, below. Weidensaul says
Mathieu's older brother Louis
was in France at the time of Hathorne's attack & details the young
Englishman Gyles's protection of the seigneur's family &
property at Jemseg. In old age, John Gyles, at the urging of his
family, published an account of adventures among the Maliseet & the
family D'Amours.
172.
Quotations from Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 120, 126. See
also Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:479;
Crouse, 118, 123-25, chap. 6; Drake,
Border Wars, 114-15; Hauck, Bienville, 7; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:136; Pothier, "d'Iberville," in DCB, 2:394-95; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
346-51;
George F. G. Stanley, "Daneau de Muy, Nicolas," in DCB,
2:168-69,
&
online;
Étienne Taillemite, "Saint-Clair, Pierre de," in DCB, 2:590, &
online;
online Wikipedia, "Avalon Peninsula Campaign"; note 179f, below.
Crouse, 118, includes a map of the Avalon
Peninsula.
The 2 French commanders who failed to take St.
John's in 1692 & 1694 were Jacques Gouin de Beauchesne, a privateer, & Pierre de Saint-Clair,
a naval officer. See Baudry; Pritchard, 349; Taillemite.
Crouse, 120, says Brouillan & Rocher
had "over 1,000 sailors and soldiers" when they left Plaisance on Sep 9.
As any military person will tell you, in the
1696 offensive against St. John's, the French violated one of the most
important principles of war, unity of command. In the autumn of
1696, Brouillan was age 45, & Iberville was 35. Stanley,
1:169, asserts that during the campaign, "Not only did Nicolas [Daneau de Muy]
acquit himself creditably in the military operations which followed, but
he also displayed his political talents by helping to reconcile the
rival commanders, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and Jacques-François de
Mombeton de Brouillan, governor of Placentia." Crouse, 123-26,
says otherwise & places Daneau de Muy squarely on the side of Brouillan in the
struggle with Iberville. Eleven years later, in 1707, the year
after Iberville's death at Havana, Daneau de Muy would be appointed governor of
LA & charged with investigating Iberville's younger brother, Bienville,
then the colony's commander. However, Daneau de Muy would die at Havana
on 28 Jan 1708 on his way to LA, probably not mourned by Bienville.
See Stanley, 1:169; Book Four.
Crouse, 124, spells the priest's surname
Beaudoin. See note 179d, below,
for Baudouin & Villebon.
Bienville, along with older brother
Iberville, would go on to fame, if
not fortune, in the founding & development of French LA. See Book Four.
173. See
Drake,
Border Wars,
115-16.
174. See
Drake,
Border Wars,
117-34; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:136; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
351-55; Squires, "Maissonat," in DCB, 2:450.
Prtichard provides
much detail from the French perspective, including a summary of
Iberville's exploits in Hudson Bay, &, p. 352, calls Nesmond's fleet "the largest
[French] force yet destined for the Americas." Although Nesmond's
part of the 1797 grand offensive was an utter failure, Iberville
succeeded grandly in Hudson Bay. Two years later, he was in the
Gulf of Mexico founding the colony of LA.
The raid on Haverhill is what led to the
remarkable savagery of an English captive, Mrs. Hannah Dunstan, who
proved more than a match for her Indian captors. See Drake,
121-28.
In Mar 1697, Maissonat
captured 6 fishing smacks along the ME coast south of Casco Bay.
He returned to his base at Minas for supplies & set out on another raid
in May. "This time he was captured and taken to Boston, where he
was held for some time after news was received that the treaty of
Ryswick had been signed. A letter from Frontenac to the Earl of
Bellomont," governor of Massachusetts Bay, "written 8 June 1698,
demanded the release of Baptiste; Villebon reported him back on the
Saint John on 21 June." See Squires.
175.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 296. See also Drake,
Border Wars,
134, 137-38; E.
LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577; Martin,
F.-X., Louisiana, 1:136-37; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon,
27; Pritchard, In
Search of Empire, 346; White, DGFA-1, 1123, 1413-14.
History has yet
to identify the name of Villebon's mistresses, one of whom was the
mother of his natural daughter, Marie-Anne dit Promville, who,
age 14 in the year of the celebration, married 48-year-old Jean Martel de Magos, the fellow
mentioned in de Goutin's complaint. After her father's
death at Nashouat in 1700, Marie-Anne & Jean settled in Canada,
where she gave him 8 sons, the youngest one born while Jean was in his
early 70s. See White, DGFA-1, 1123-24.
De Goutin, who was not above spreading
gossip, especially about the Robineaus, whom he did not care for,
complained that in 1698 Villebon's brother, Daniel Robineau de
Neuvillette, held "commerce with 'an Indian girl named Margot,'"
probably on Rivière St.-Jean. See White, DGFA-1, 1414; White, DGFA-1 English,
296. Was the "Indian girl named Margot" an illegitimate daughter
of Joseph Villebon's middle-aged son-in-law Jean Martel de Magos?
Drake,
134, 137, estimates that between 500 and 700 New Englanders died in the
war and that hundreds more were taken into captivity. The loss of
life in the Acadian settlements was negligible. The Acadians'
greatest loss was in property and peace of mind. The worst loss,
of course, was among the Indians, especially the "victorious" Abenaki of
Maine. See Drake, 137-38, for a poignant summation of their loss.
Pritchard offers this balanced conclusion: "Far
from seeing the capture of Port Royal in 1690 as one more conquest of
Acadia, it may be argued that during the Nine Years' War fewer than
1,000 Indians and a handful of Frenchmen strongly supported from seaward
defeated Massachusetts. Entering the war on a wave of
self-confident aggression, the commonwealth ended it with its economy in
disarray, with hundreds killed or taken captive, frontier settlements
pushed back, and pleading with King William for support from the
metropolis."
175a.
See <acadian-home.org>; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 128-29; Faragher, A
Great & Noble Scheme, 112; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:137; Milling, Exile Without End, 4; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
255, 342; F. J. Thorpe, "L'Hermitte (Lhermitte, L'Hermite, Lhermite),
Jacques," in
DCB, 2:433-34, &
online;
White, DGFA-1 English, 235-36.
Pritchard notes: "Acadians, who
did not live along the disputed coast or fish along Nova Scotia's
southeast coast or at Chédabouctou, were largely isolated from the
growing conflict [of the Nine Years' War], becoming caught in its
entanglements only twice, in 1690 and again in 1696." He is
referring to the great majority of the Acadian families who lived in the
Port-Royal valley & in the Fundy communities at Minas & Chignecto.
But a few Acadian families lived at Cap-Sable, which faced the Atlantic,
at other Atlantic-side communities such as La Hève & Mirliguèche, & on
Rivière St.-Jean near Villebon's fort, all closer to the fighting.
Pentagouët also was a part of greater Acadia.
Another factor in the war's limited impact on
the Acadians was their relatively small population. Though Judge
Martin, writing in 1827, insists there were 3,000 Acadians at the end of
King William's War, other sources indicate there were less than half
that number in greater Acadia at the time.
Compare this to the much larger number in Canada--Judge Martin says
13,000 at the end of the war--& the exponentially
larger numbers in the English Atlantic colonies--260,000, says Judge
Martin--especially in New England.
See note
166, above, which also references the
Acadian censuses of 1686, 1687-88, 1689, & 1693, & compares the results
with Canada & the English provinces. For the 1698 census, the
closest to war's end, see <acadian-home.org>.
One must keep in mind, however, that this census counts inhabitants only at Port-Royal (575 persons, 982 cattle, 1,136
sheep, 568 hogs, 1,275 arpents cultivated, 1,584 fruit trees, 82 guns, 8
servants), Beaubassin (178 persons, 352 cattle, 176 sheep, 160 hogs, 298
arpents cultivated), & on Rivière St.-Jean (10 families & 1 bachelor);
missing is Minas, where a substantial number of Acadians were living. Clark,
A. H., 128, says "another limited count," in 1701, shows
456 at Port-Royal, 299 at Minas, 188 at Pigiguit, & 188 at Beaubassin.
On 129, Table 5.2, Clark, citing Rameau's 1889 study, includes the
following distribution of population on peninsula Acadia in 1701, on the
eve of Queen Anne's War: 1,153 at Port-Royal, Beaubassin, & Minas;
75 (including métis) at La Hève; 40, at Pubnico [Pobomcoup] & the Cap-Sable
area; 182 scattered along the Atlantic coast; total 1,450. Clark,
A. H., 129, says a census in 1703 counted 504 at Port-Royal; 440 at
Minas, including Pigiguit; & 87 at Cobeguit; total, 1,277 for these 3
settlement areas. Clark adds: "An estimate of 1,400 to 1,450
for the isthmus and the peninsula would seem reasonable for the turn of
the century." See also <acadian-home.org>.
Pritchard, 342, notes that "Acadian
settlements were indefensible ...." This was sadly true, with only Nashouat
perhaps the exception. White, 235, mentions that Jacques
L'Hermite, former town mayor of Plaisance, Newfoundland, & "Commandant
in the governor's absence" there in Feb 1696, "was sent into Acadia" in
1698 "to prepare an account of its harbours, as well as an inventory of
its natural resources." Was there a military aspect to L'Hermite's
mission? See also Thorpe; White, 236; note
179a, below.
Pritchard, 255, remind us: "Acadians
[during French control of the colony] learned to coexist with both
English and French so well that they referred to their New England
neighbours as 'our friends, the enemy.'" See also Faragher, who renders the phrase in French:
nos amis les ennemis; Book Two.
Milling makes much use of Édouard Richard's multi-volume Acadia:
Missing Links of a Lost Chapter in American History, published at NY
in 1895.
176. See Drake, Border Wars,
134-36; Fergusson, "Alden,"
in DCB, 2:14; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 168.
Griffiths's Map 5, entitled "Expansion of Acadian settlements, 1605-1710," is
helpful in visualizing Acadian settlement patterns.
In Jan 1699, the Abenaki signed a peace treaty with
the New Englanders at Casco, and the raids in the region ended ... for
now. One of the treaty
negotiators was John Alden, Jr., of Rivière St.-Jean fame. See
Fergusson; notes 157,
161, &
171, above.
177.
Quotation from E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577. See also Drake,
Border Wars,
153n2; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 14-16; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:158.
Erskine points out
that 5 fortifications stood on the coasts of the Acadian peninsula in
1700--at Port-Royal on the Bay of Fundy, Mirliguèche on the eastern
Atlantic coast, Mouscoudabouet further up that coast, Rivière St.-Marie
above that, & the ancient fishing post at Canso. It was Villebon's
intention to use the fees from New English fishing permits to finance
the maintenance of these French forts--a delicious irony if French
officials had allowed it. Erskine, 15-16, details the
results of archaeological & botanical surveys at these fort sites as of
1975. The survey at Mirliguèche, recounted on 15, is especially
detailed. For details on the founding of the "fortified house" at
Rivière St.-Marie, just south of present-day Sherbrooke, NS, in c1660,
see note 38, above.
178. See
Drake,
Border Wars,
141-42; Fortier, Louisiana, 1:31.
179. See
Allain, "In Search of a Policy," 86-87; Drake, Border Wars,
142; Leckie, Wars of America, 24-25; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:157-58; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
358-59.
Leckie adds: "... when Louis
followed up his justifiable claim [to the Spanish throne] by a series of
unwarranted aggressions, and then excluded English merchants from the
Spanish colonial trade, the war began. It was a commercial war to
the death." Allain
emphasizes the role of the Caribbean slave trade, or asiento, as
a cause of the war. Pritchard agrees that these were important causal factors & adds, p. 359, that
"The War of the Spanish Succession differed from all previous French
wars in the New World chiefly because Spain was an ally rather than an
enemy." Portugal started the war as a French ally but became an
enemy in 1703.
179a.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 235. See also Baudry,
"Thury," in DCB, 1:649; Thorpe, "L'Hermitte," in
DCB, 2:433-34; note 175a,
above.
In 1713, "L'Hermite played an important part in the founding of the new
colony of Île Royal" & was serving as "Deputy King's representative on
Île Royale" in Jan 1715 before moving on to Trois-Rivières in Canada.
L'Hermite died in the shipwreck of
Le Chambeau off the coast of Île Royale, near Louisbourg, in late
Oct 1725. No one, in fact, survived the mishap. See Thorpe.
Fr. Thury's vision of a large Mi'kmaq mission
at Shubenacadie, in the middle of the Acadian peninsula, was not
realized until the early 1710s, either just before or soon after the
British had taken over French Acadia & were transforming it into the
colony of Nova Scotia. The mission was named after Ste.-Anne.
See Baudry; Book Two.
179b.
Quotation from Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:480. See also Baudry, 2:479; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 113, 150; Griffiths, From Migrant
to Acadian, 100; Provost, "Lefebvre," in DCB. 2:382; White, DGFA-1 English,
220, 257; note 172, above;
Book Two.
Lefebvre, a native of Rouen in Normandy, had lived
in Canada as a voyageur & fur trader & served as interpreter for the
Abenaki, whom he befriended at the reservation at Sillery. He
received the seigneurie at Koessanouskek in May 1703, after his
imprisonment in Boston, so he was held at Boston for a number of months.
See Provost; White, 220; notes
187, below.
179c.
See E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577; note
171, above.
179d.
Quotations from E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577-78.
See also MacBeath, "Damours (d'Amours)," in DCB, 1:246;
White,
DGFA-1, 1413; notes
175, above, &
221, below.
E. LeBlanc, 1:577, says Villebon died at
"Fort Saint-Jean," likely the lower fort, on 5 Jul 1700. White also uses that date & says the commander died at "Fort
St-Jean en Acadie." For a thorough evaluation of Joseph Robinau de
Villebon's character & contributions, see E. LeBlanc.
179e.
See Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:479-80;
Taillemite, "de Villieu," in DCB, 2:654.
Villebon, remember, was a nephew of La Vallière de Beaubassin, so he was not blood kin to
de Villieu.
They nonetheless were part of the Le Neuf extended family.
De Villeu's biographer says he "exercised temporary command of the
colony from July 1700 to December 1701, after Robinau de Villebon's
death." See Taillemite; note 299, below. For Brouillan's arrival at Port-Royal, see note
179b, above.
179f.
Quotation from Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:479. See
also Baudry, 2:478;
Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 120; David M. Hayne,
"Lom d'Arce de Lahonton, Louis-Armand de," in DCB, 2:442,
&
online;
Thorpe, "L'Hermitte," in DCB, 2:434; F. J. Thorpe, "Monic, Joseph de,"
in DCB, 2:482, &
online; White, DGFA-1,
1212-14; White, DGFA-1 English, 257-58; note
172, above.
White, DGFA-1, 1212-14, & DGFA-1
English, 257-58, along with Baudry, prefer the spelling Mombeton for
Brouillon's surname, but
later volumes of the DCB
spell it Monbeton.
For the name of the fort at Plaisance--St.-Louis--see Crouse.
After the French lost Plaisance to the British
in 1713, first Costabelle (1714-17) & then Saint-Ovide (1717-39) would govern the new French
colony of Île Royale, which included today's Cape Breton & Prince Edward
islands (Île St-Jean), headquartered at the the fortress of Louisbourg. See Book Two.
In Dec 1691, years before his posting at
Plaisance, Monic married the widow of Iberville's older brother, Jacques
Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, who died from a leg wound suffered in the defense of
Québec in 1690. See Thorpe, "Monic."
179g.
Quotations from Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:480. See
also Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure, Simon-Pierre," in
DCB, 2:177; White, DGFA-1 English,
257.
For the new fort at the mouth of Rivière
St.-Jean, see note 171, above.
An enciente, Latin for "girdled" or
"surrounded," "is a French term used technically in fortification for
the inner ring of fortifications surrounding a town or a concentric
castle. Strictly, the term was applied to the continuous line of
bastions and curtain walls forming the body of the place, this last
expression being often used as synonymous with enciente."
See online Wikipedia, "Enciente."
179h.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1
English, 220. See also Honorius Provost, "Lefebvre, Thomas,"
in DCB, 2:382, &
online; note
179, above.
179i.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 1264; Dale Miquelon, "Le Poupet de La Boularderie,
Louis-Simon," in DCB, 2:417-18, &
online;
Parkman, France & England, 2:641; White, DGFA-1,
1073-75, 1148-49; White, DGFA-1 English, 231; note
194c, below.
Louis-Simon would become a seigneur
on Île Royale during the 1720s-30s. See Book Two. Son
Antoine, born at Port-Royal in Aug 1705, also became an army officer &
was captured at the seige of Louisbourg in May 1745. See Dale
Miquelon, "Le Poupet de La Boularderie, Antoine," in
DCB,
online;
White, DGFA-1, 1074; Parkman; Book Two.
180.
Quotations from Grenier, Far Reaches of Empire, 224n6; White, DGFA-1 English,
187. See also Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in
DCB, 2:480.
For the chronic failure of the French navy to
protest France's colonies, see Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
chaps. 6 & 7.
Labat signed himself as "an engineer under the
King's command and lieutenant of a company ... of the Marine," that is,
the troupes de la marine. See White, DGFA-1 English, 187.
See note
192, below, for further renovation of
the Port-Rlyal fort in 1704-05, during Brouillan's final months as
governor.
Baudry calls de Goutin "that
incorrigible haggler," a sentiment that Brouillan's predecessors,
Meneval & Villebon, would have echoed.
180a.
See Drake,
Border Wars, 142, 149-50, 153-54; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:137, 158.
Frontenac had died in 1698, at the end of King
William's War, & Callière served as governor-general until his own death
in May 1703. See online Wikipedia, "Governor General of New
France."
Martin, F.-X., 1:158, contends that after war
was declared "hostilities began immediately, by irruptions of the French
of Canada and their Indian allies, on the frontier settlements of
Massachsetts and New Hampshire."
181.
Quotation from Drake,
Border Wars, 152n1. See also Baudry, "Mombeton de
Brouillan," in DCB, 2:481; Drake, 150-51;
Arsenault, History, 66.
Brouillan died at Chédabouctou on 22 Sep 1705
following a voyage back from France.
See Baudry, who does not mention the 2 Acadian "assassins" at Casco but adds: "His body
was committed to the sea, like that of a sailor, and his heart was taken
to Port-Royal, where [Simon-Pierre Denys de] Bonaventure, the acting
commandant, had it buried near the cross on the cape." Evidently
the New Englanders dug up the former governor's heart during their
failed attempted to capture the Acadian capital in Mar 1707. See
note 196, below.
182. See
Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:480; Drake,
Border Wars, 154-70; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 394.
After the especially bloody rain on Wells,
ME, the New Englanders placed a bounty on the head of Fr. Sébastien Râle, the Jesuit priest who ran
the Abenaki mission at Norridgewock on the Kennebec. See Book Two.
183. See
Arsenault, History, 65; Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan,"
in DCB, 2:480; Drake,
Border Wars,
172-86; Pritchard, In Search of Empire,
394.
184.
Quotation from Drake, Border Wars, 193. See also Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
112; Leckie,
Wars of America, 25; Parkman,
France & England, 2:417.
Faragher says that Church was still a major in 1704. Parkman, followed here, says that Gov. Dudley
promoted him to colonel before the 1704 expedition.
185.
Quotation from Drake,
Border Wars, 194. See also Arsenault,
History, 65; Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan,"
in DCB, 2:480; online Wikipedia, "United States Army Rangers.
Arsenault claims that Church's force numbered 1,300.
U.S. Army Rangers today celebrate Church as
"the father of American ranging."
186.
Quotations from Drake,
Border Wars, 195-96, 201; Arsenault, History, 65.
Drake, 201, critiques Gov. Dudley's
orders to Church..
187.
Quotations from Parkman, France & England, 2:418. See
also Arsenault, History, 65; Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan,"
in DCB, 2:480-81; Drake,
Border Wars, 196-200; Ganong, Champlain's Island, 24;
Provost, "Lefebvre," in
DCB, 2:382; Salagnac, Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:7; White, DGFA-1, 1035-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 220; online
Wikipedia, "Machias, Maine."
Arsenault says "Church easily took Pentagoet (Penobscot, Maine) while Vincent de Saint-Castain was in
France and Saint-Castain's son, Anselme, was away with the Abenakis.
Church took prisoner or killed everyone in the place." Arsenault
probably follows Parkman, who says nothing of the whereabouts of the Saint-Castins.
Baudry, 2:481, who mentions the capture of "a daughter of Saint-Castin,"
does not say which daughter it may have been. The elder Saint-Castin
had gone to France in late 1701 on commercial & family business & never
returned to Acadia. See Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent." The younger Saint-Castin,
however, was not likely "away with the Abenakis." Bernard-Anselme,
only 15 years old in May 1704, was, according to his biographer, "a
pupil at the Petit Séminaire of Québec" at the time. See Salagnac, Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme."
It may have been at Passamaquoddy that Church
captured Port-Royal merchant Barthélemy Bergeron
dit d'Amboise & his family. Bergeron's wife,
Geneviève, was a daughter of Jacques Serreau de Saint-Aubin,
seigneur of Ste.-Croix and Passamaquoddy, so the family may
have been visiting relatives when the New English raiders appeared.
See note 252, below.
Lefebvre, age 59 in 1704, & his sons were held
at Boston until a prisoner exchange at Port-Royal during the autumn of
1706, in which the Bergerons also were released. Thomas, fils was his father's third son & fourth
child (of 12), had been born at Québec, was still single in May 1704.
Timothée, Thomas's eighth child, had been born at Basse-Ville, near
Québec; he, too, was single. See Provost; White, DGFA-1, 1035-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 220; notes
179a, above,
193, below.
Ganong says Church burned the residence of the Sieur de Chartier near the
mouth of the Ste.-Croix, now the site of Calais, ME/St. Stephen, NB.
188.
Quotations from Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:481; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
111. See also Arsenault, History, 65; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 112;
Drake,
Border Wars, 201; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 209; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Parkman, France & England, 2:417-19; Pritchard,
In Search of Empire, 398.
Lunn says during Church's 1704 raid against
Acadia, "Bonaventure was absent at Les Mines (Minas)," which may explain
the Acadians' aggressive action there.
Parkman, 2:419, in typical New English fashion, goes
out of his way to contrast Church's actions at Grand-Pré with the French
& Indians at Deerfield, but he does admit that the raid at Grand-Pré was "a miserable
retaliation for a barbarous outrage; as the guilty were out of reach,
the invaders turned their ire on the innocent."
Arsenault's and Drake's sequence of events, as well
as some details, are different. For instance, Arsenault has Church
attacking Port-Royal before he descended on Minas, and he claims that
the Acadians themselves destroyed the dykes at Minas. Drake's
sequence of events, a reflection of Parkman, are
followed here.
Griffiths points out how quickly the Minas Acadians
repaired their broken dykes & restored the fertility of their reclaimed
fields & pastures.
189. See
Arsenault, History, 65-66; Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan,"
in DCB, 2:481; Drake,
Border Wars, 201-02; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
111; Pritchard,
In Search of Empire, 398; note 170,
above.
Arsenault, 65, using French accounts,
insists that Church assaulted the Acadian capital and that the
Port-Royal defenders offered a fierce resistance. Drake, who
follows English accounts, says otherwise. Baudry says "...
the main body of the fleet, which had stayed at Port-Royal, attempted
some landing operations. But Brouillan had sent parties of
soldiers, settlers, and Indians to maintain firing along the banks.
Church, after 18 days of waiting, unsure of his militiamen, and having
no precise orders to attack Port-Royal, called a council of war, which
decided on returning to Boston." One must keep in mind Brouillan's
success in defending the hard-pressed post at Plaisance the decade
before. See note 179f, above.
Arsenault claims that Church burned and pillaged many houses along the
Port-Royal basin and took 30 prisoners from among the inhabitants, which
is probably true.
Baudry adds that, although Church did
not capture Port-Royal, it did not get off lightly, that "the ravaged
colony suffered from famine the following winter."
190.
See
Arsenault, History, 65-66; Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan,"
2:481;
Baillargeon, "Trouvé," in
DCB, 2:638; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 112; Drake,
Border Wars, 193, 202-04; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
111-12; Milner, "Chignecto"; Pitre, Windows into
Yesteryears, 29-30; Surette, Tintamarre & Le Lac, 14; White, DGFA-1, 513, 519, 843; White DGFA-1 English,
111.
Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," says that, which Church was laying before Port-Royal, "Another party
went to Beaubassin, where it burned some 20 houses." This implies
that the colonel himself did not to go the scene of his earlier triumph.
Drake is followed here.
Arsenault insists the Chignecto Acadians drove Church's force away.
No other source supports this ludicrous claim.
Milner says Church's raid
against the Acadian settlement was in retaliation for the atrocities
committed in New England the year before by Sébastien de La Vallière de Beaubassin & his Indians.
"Beaubassin," as Milner calls
Sébastien, was a son of the original seigneur of Beaubassin, Michel
Le
Neuf de
La Vallière, whose home was on present-day Tonge's Island near
Beaubassin. Michel Le Neuf de la Vallière had served as commandant & royal
governor of Acadia from 1678 to 1684 & was still alive in 1704.
Among the prisoners Church took to Boston may have been French Sgt. Jean Clémençeau dit
Beaulieu of Bordeaux, who had been serving at Port-Royal in 1703 when he
ran afoul of Governor Brouillan. Two years later, in c1705,
Clémenceau married Acadian métisse Anne
Roy at Boston, evidently one of the hostages.
Also among the hostages was Noël
Doiron and his soon-to-be-wife Marie
Henry, who married in Boston in c1705 Noël was the aged Acadian patriarch aboard the English
transport Duke William, which, while carrying Acadian exiles from
the Maritimes to St.-Malo, France, in late 1758, was crippled in a
mid-Atlantic storm. The ship's captain averred that the aged
patriarch was "a hundred and ten years old," but in truth Noël was
"only" 74. After all efforts had failed to save the vessel, and no
other ship would come to their rescue, Noël embraced the captain and
insisted that he & his crew take to the boats & save themselves,
knowing full well that the ship, with all its passengers, including
Noël's entire family, soon would plummet to the bottom of the ocean.
Jean-Denis Pitre also was taken prisoner at Chignecto
and held at Boston. See Pitre; White, DGFA-1, 362; 513, 519, 843; White DGFA-1 English, 111;
Clémenceau,
Doiron,
&
Pitre
family pages; Books Two & Three.
At Norridgewock, if he had gone there, Church
might have found the notorious Jesuit Father Sébastien Râle, who had
long encouraged his Abenaki there to raid New England settlements in the
region & on whose head New England authorities had laid a price the year
before, after the raid on Wells, MI. See Drake, 193, 203;
note 182, below; Book Two.
Drake, 203-04, sums up Church's raid with
a typical insult for the Acadians & Indians: "Thus ended Church's
fifth and last expedition. A wide extent of territory had been
traversed, a few insignificant villages destroyed, and a number
of prisoners, equal to those taken at Deerfield, brought way. The
expedition was looked upon in the main as a failure, and if the
adaptation of means to ends be looked to, it was one. So far from
suffering loss, the Indians had been merely frightened away from their
old haunts, like birds of prey before the fowler. When he had
passed on they came back again. Nothing was more true or certain
than that the geographical position of Port Royal was a constant menace
to the New England fisheries. And as its reduction had been the
professed object of the expedition, the failure to attack it easily
provoked suspicion all was not as it should be." Italics added.
I would dare say that my Acadian ancestors in the "insignificant
villages" at Minas & Chignecto would have expressed a different view of
Church's punitive expedition, not to mention the Native "birds of prey"
driven from "their old haunts." Church's raid against
the trois-rivières settlements was so severe that all 3 of the
villages were abandoned & took years to resurrect. See Surette.
Faragher, 112, offers a conclusion from the
Acadian perspective: "With much of the annual grain crop
destroyed, the inhabitants suffered famine the following winter.
Church's destruction of the Acadian settlements could not have been
better calculated to turn neutrals into implacable enemies. They
were 'a nest of hornets provoked to fly upon us,' wrote Cotton Mather,
and he worried that Church's expedition would be 'a shame cast upon us
that will never be forgotten.' It marked a significant turn in Acadian
history, for not only did Church destroy the settlements at Minas and
Chignecto but also much of the former friendly feeling for nos amis
les ennemis [our friends the enemy]. Indeed, Acadians would
long remember Major[sic] Benjamin Church's assault."
Faragher
gives an example from the late 1740s of Acadian anxiety about the
destruction of their dykes, as Church had done 4 decades earlier.
191. See
Drake,
Border Wars, 205-08.
191a.
Quotations from Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:481.
192.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 130. See
also Drake,
Border Wars,
208-15; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Bernard Pothier & Donald J.
Horton, "Denys de La Ronde, Louis," in
DCB, 3:176-80, &
online;
Pritchard, In Search
of Empire, 397;
White, DGFA-1 English, 4, 32, 81, 106, 114, 120, 140, 145, 149,
187, 191, 208-09, 267, 273, 295, 302, 324.
For Brouillan's fate, see notes
181, above, &
194a, below.
Evidence of the fort's extension during the
winter of 1705-06, can be found in White, DGFA-1 English, 4, 32, 106, 114, 120, 140, 145, 187, 208-09. Brouillan had begun
renovation on the fort in 1702. See notes
179g &
180, above. Notations such as An "abridged statement
of the expenditures made during the year 1704 for work on the fort at
Port-Royal; Coyeux dit Menseau [Pierre Chouteau dit
Manceau] a carpenter, received a salary of 40 livres per month," dated 4
Nov 1704; "Sir [Jean-François] Flan is mentioned in a letter from Sr
de Labat to the Minister as having been employed by M. de Brouillan for
three years in overseeing the work involved in rebuilding of the fort at
Port-Royal; he had been hired for 600 livres per year and a ration and a
half per day"; contracts with masons François Gauthier & Charles
Orillon dit Champagne in Nov 1704 &
joiner Sr. Marc Gauthier dit Bachan in 1705, as well as others, show that
work on the fort was continuous. Quotations from White, DGFA-1
English, 81, 130. See also White, DGFA-1 English,
144, 149, 187, 191, 267, 273, 295, 302, 324.
It was in 1705, perhaps during the hiatus in the fighting,
that the young naval officer, Louis Denys de La Ronde, raided New
England shipping from his base at Port-Royal. Governor Brouillan
had built an 18-20-gun frigate, the Biche, at Port-Royal for the
defense of the colony, but the frigate was unfinished when Denys de La Ronde
arrived at Port-Royal. Denys de La Ronde used, instead, a smaller ship, a brig,
to prey on the New Englanders--only strengthening their resolve to take
Port-Royal; the Biche was not ready to leave Port-Royal until the
spring of 1707. Denys de La Ronde, at the head of a company of Canadians,
helped successfully defend Port-Royal under Brouillan's successor,
Subercase. Interestingly, Denys de La Ronde also had been an associate of
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville in LA a few years earlier.
See Pothier & Horton, for
Denys de la Ronde's impressive career; Pritchard; note 215, below;
Books Two & Four.
193. See
Drake,
Border Wars, 216-23; Provost, "Lefebvre," in DCB,
2:382; White, DGFA-1, 122-24, 1035-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 27,
179, 220; note
187, above.
Most of the 51 prisoners exchanged at
Port-Royal, like the Lefebvres, probably had been captured by Benjamin
Church during the spring of 1704. See note
186, above.
Bergeron took his family to "Villebon's
fort" at Nashuat on Rivière St.-Jean probably soon after his exchange.
See White, DGFA-1 English, 27.
White, DGFA-1 English, 179, refers to
the 22 Aug 1706 "Testimony of François Hérault de Saint-Michel
concerning Louis Allain's conduct at Boston. Why else would
Allain have been at Boston at that time if he was not being held
as a prisoner like the Bergerons? Hérault de Saint-Michel
was a French officer. Perhaps he, too, was a prisoner of war in
Boston.
White, DGFA-1, 1036, says Thomas
Lefebvre, père "privately baptized" Marie-Anne Denis on 11
May 1704, "while in captivity" & that Marie-Anne was "only formally
baptized at church on September 16, 1706," which gives an idea of when
the prisoner exchange occurred. White, DGFA-1, 1035-36,
show no Denis among Thomas's many children's marriages, so one wonders
who were the parents of Marie-Anne. As to Thomas's fate after his
return to Port-Royal, his biographer, Provost, says: "The
buildings put up by Lefebvre and his sons [at Koessanouskek] had been
burned down, and the war that followed prevented them from enjoying
further use of their seigneury. The seigneury was, moreover, lost
through the Anglo-Abenaki peace treat of 1727." Thomas, père
was dead by then having passed between 1713-15.
194. See
Arsenault, History, 66; Drake,
Border Wars,
224-28; Bernard Pothier, "Morpain,
[Louis-]Pierre," in DCB,
3:474, &
online.
Arsenault calls him Colonel Marsh.
Pothier says March had 1,600 men. Drake, 227, followed here,
says "the whole number [was] up to 1,150 officers and men."
194a.
Quotation from Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure, Simon-Pierre," in
DCB, 2:177.
See also Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:481;
Lunn, 2:178; Taillemite, "Villieu," in DCB, 2:652,
264; White, DGFA-1 English, 106.
Reaching France in early winter 1704-05,
Brouillan remained in the mother country the rest of the winter & into
the spring & summer to improve his health, which he failed to do, &
spent time at Paris & Versailles to resurrect his popularity at court,
which he pretty much succeeded in doing. Despite the charges
against him for cruelty & malfeasance, all of which were true, his
reputation as a solid soldier with demonstrable successes at Plaisance &
Port-Royal stood him in good stead. He remained in the good graces
of the King & the Minister, who allowed him to retain the governorship &
to return to Acadia aboard the Profond with more men & munitions
for the colony. His illness delayed his sailing several times, &
the voyage over finished him. He died at the former fishing center
at Chédabouctou on 22 Sep 1705. After the removal of his heart,
his remains were buried at sea. His heart was taken to Port-Royal,
where Denys de Bonaventure "had it buried near the cross on the cape,"
probably Point Prim, which lies west of the entrance to the Gut.
Brouillan never married. See Baudry; note 181, above; Book Two.
See note 221,
below, for the business with the widow D'Amours that damaged
Denys de Bonaventure's reputation Nevertheless, according
to his son, Claude-Élisabeth, Denys de Bonaventure was named
a Chevalier de St.-Louis. See Lunn, 2:178; White.
According to his biographer, de Villieu
"received temporary command of it [French Acadia] on 30 Aug. 1705,"
which would have been on the eve of Brouillan's passing. See
Taillemite, 2:652. Does this mean Denys de
Bonaventure was removed from the position of King's lieutenant even
before Brouillan's death? See also note
179e, above. Taillemite, 2:654,
says de Villieu returned to France soon after his short assignment as
commander in the colony "and sold his house at Port-Royal ... for 4,000
livres to the Recollets, who turned it into a parish church,"
which would have been St.-Jean-Baptiste. Taillemite also insists
that de Villieu was "popular in the colony; on 15 July 1705 the notary
Loppinot wrote: 'His piety, his valour, his capacity have made him
very well liked by the settlers, who entreat you to send him back to
them.'" One suspects that Mathieu de Goutin & his numerous
Thibodeau kin, as well as many of the settlers at Chignecto &
Chepoudy, would have roundly disagreed with the notary's assessment.
See note 96 , above.
194b.
Quotations from René Baudry, "Auger de Subercase, Daniel d'," in DCB,
2:36, &
online. See also Baudry, 2:35, 37; Thorpe, "Monic,"
in DCB, 2:482; White, DGFA-1, 55-56; White, DGFA-1
English, 12; note 152, above.
194c.
Quotations from Baudry, "Mombeton de Brouillan," in DCB, 2:481; Baudry,
"Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:37. See also Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Michelon, "Le Poupet de La Boularderie,"
in DCB, 2:417; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent," in DCB,
2:7; White, DGFA-1, 6-8.
Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin
was 54 years old in 1706, still in France, & died there the following year. See Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent"; White, 6; note 297,
below. Son
Bernard-Anselme was only 18 years old in 1707 but was every bit a
warrior as his father. He married Charlotte, daughter of Louis
D'Amours de Chauffors of Rivière St.-Jean, in Oct 1707, soon after
he became fourth Baron de Saint-Castin. Bernard-Anselme,
remember, was half French & half Penobscot. His wife was French
Canadian. See Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme"; White, 6-8.
De La Boularderie was French,
but his wife was Acadian. He had come to Port-Royal with Brouillon
in 1701 & married a Melanson the following year.
See Michelon; note 179i, above.
Evidently he had been reposted to Canada during Queen Anne's War.
195. See Arsenault,
History, 66; Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:37; Drake,
Border Wars, 228; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
214-15; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure, Simon-Pierre,"
in DCB, 2:177; Pothier & Horton, "Denys de La Ronde, Louis," in
DCB, 3:176-77; White, DGFA-1 English, 106-07.
Arsenault; & Griffiths, 214, say the New Englanders arrived in front of Port-Royal on
June 6, which is the New Style date. One must remember that this
was the time of the transition between the Old Style and New Style
English calendars. Drake uses the Old Style for consistency, which
is used here. Drake, a New Englander himself, claims, citing French sources, that the sudden
appearance of the New Englanders in such force unnerved the Port-Royal
garrison but that Subercase was able to restore morale before the New
Englanders attacked in earnest.
Lunn insists that March
withdrew from before Port-Royal in Jun when the young Saint-Castin
arrived with his Abenaki. Arsenault; & Griffiths, 215,
imply that Saint-Castin and the Indians already were in the fort when the New Englanders arrived.
Louis Denys de La Ronde "was given command of
a small frigate to harass English shipping in the waters of Acadia and
New England" in 1705. On 10 Jul 1707, de La Ronde "replaced
La
Boulardarie as commander of a company of infantry in Acadia." See
White, 106-07. This probably was the
reinforcement from Québec. Subercase & Louis Denys de La Ronde had a
falling out later in the war when the naval officer turned to
privateering & attacked the British post at St. John's,
Newfoundland, instead of returning to Port-Royal, as he had promised.
See Pothier & Horton.
196. See
Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in
DCB, 2:37; Drake,
Border Wars,
228-29; Arsenault, History, 66.
Baudry says March's force numbered 20 ships & 1,600 men. Baudry adds that
Subercase himself led some of the skirmishers who attacked the New
Englanders outside of the walls & that the governor's horse was "killed
under him."
197.
Quotations from Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:37. See also Drake,
Border Wars, 229-33;
Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:169; Taillemite, "Villieu," in
DCB, 2:654; White, DGFA-1 English, 211.
A detailed map of Annapolis Royal in
1710, found in
Historical Atlas of Canada, shows near the fort the
site of a "Church burned in 1707." Did Marsh & his men burn the
church--St.-Jean-Baptiste--during their aborted siege in May, or was it
burned a few months later, in August, during a second unsuccessful
attack on Port-Royal? This likely was the edifice that former
King's lieutenant Claude-Sébastien Le Bassier de Villieu sold to the
Récollet fathers for 4,000
livres
in 1705 & which the friars transformed into a parish church; it had been
de Villieu's home. See Taillemite; note 194a, above. In a confrontation between members of the
British garrison at Annapolis Royal, formerly Port-Royal, &
haute rivière
Acadians in Jan 1711, British Gov. Samuel Vetch arrested Fr.
Justinien Durand, pastor of St.-Jean-Baptiste parish, at the St.-Laurent
chapel, so the church at Port-Royal may not have been rebuilt by then. See note
213a, below.
Among
the many houses destroyed by marauding New Englanders was Denys de
Bonaventure's, who was "ill in bed in the fort" during much of the
siege. See Lunn.
197a.
Quotation from Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38. See also Arsenault, History,
66; Baudry, 2:37; White, DGFA-1, 96-97; White, DGFA-1 English, 211.
Arsenault claims that
Marsh may have lost "about 100 dead and a many wounded," which,
considering the limited time & scope of the siege, seems much too high. One assumes that March took
most, if not all, of his wounded
with him when he retreated to Casco. New English casualty figures
used here are from Baudry, 2:38.
According to White, Jean le jeune,
oldest son of Jean Belliveau of Port-Royal, died the
following Sep 13 of "blessures graves," serious injuries,
perhaps wounds suffered in the fight with Marsh on Jun 6.
Belleveau, husband of Madeleine, daughter of Charles
Melanson and Marie Dugas, was age 33 at the
time of his death, a father of four, including a son, Pierre dit
Pau, only 13 months old. Quotation from White, DGFA-1 ,
97. See also Book Three. Jean le jeune's oldest son
Charles le jeune, who would have been age 10 at time of his
father's death, became a hero of Le Grand Dérangement when he
masterminded the seizure of the British transport Pembroke,
bound for North Carolina in Dec 1755, &, after a month of hiding in Baie
Ste-Marie, sailed it safely across to Rivière St.-Jean. See Book
Five.
198.
Quotation from Pothier, "Morpain," in DCB, 3:474. See also Arsenault,
History, 66; Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38; Drake,
Border Wars,
233-34; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 397; White, DGFA-1,
456, 1233; White, DGFA-1 English, 261.
Arsenault claims March was replaced by
COL Wainwright, one of his subordinates in the first venture, on the
eve of the second expedition and that Wainwright took 2,000 men and 20
ships to Port-Royal in Aug. He also claims that a "coastal
buccaneer" warned Subercase of Wainwright's approach and that Subercase
had time to ask for help from Jemseg and other far-flung Acadian
settlements, including La Hève. This "coastal buccaneer"
likely was Louis-Pierre Morpain, who did more than just warn the
governor. Drake, 234, says that March still commanded the second expedition
against Port-Royal, though "Three prominent citizens," colonels
Hutchinson & Townsend, & John Leverett, "were sent to act as a council
to Marsh, with authority to overrule him, if they saw fit"--a most
precarious command arrangement, more political than military in its
nature & a certain road to disaster.
Baudry says Dudley persuaded the MA
council to send a reinforcement of 600 men to Marsh for the second go at
Port-Royal & that Marsh arrived at Port-Royal on Aug 20. Again,
this is the difference between the Old Style & New Style calendars.
Pritchard concludes that the "bravery and gallant service" of the garrison at
Port-Royal in the summer of 1707 "could not hide the fact that the
northern colonies had been abandoned [by France] in their hour of need.
Port Royal had been rescued in June by Canadians and in August by
buccaneers from Saint-Domingue." Pritchard offers no details on
how the St.-Domingue buccaneers helped drive March & Wainwright away
other than, "One week before the second New England attack, Pierre
Morpain, captain of L'Intrépide, sailed into Port Royal with
several prizes and carrying more than 600 barrels of flour, which he
delivered to Governor Subercase." Certainly Morpain's
crews helped man Port-Royal's guns, & their flour helped sustain the
garrison, but this is hardly a "rescue."
Morpain would marry a daughter of
Rivière St.-Jean seigneur Louis d'Amours de Chauffours et de
Jemseg at Port-Royal in Aug 1709; she would give him no children.
At age 60, in late spring of 1745, Morpain would serve gallantly
in the siege of Louisbourg. See White, DGFA-1, 456, 1233; Book
Two.
199.
Quotation from Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38. See also Arsenault, History, 66-67; Drake,
Border Wars,
234-35; Leckie,
Wars of America, 25; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure, Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177;
Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 42-43; Michelon, "Le Poupet de La Boularderie,"
in DCB, 2:417; Pothier, "Morpain," in
DCB, 3:474; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3; White,
DGFA-1 English, 261.
Arsenault says the siege was
lifted on September 4 (New Style calendar). Drake says that while
Wainwright's force fell back to their boats, Subercase sent out
reinforcements to help Saint-Castin, & that the Frenchmen were roughly
handled.
After the second failed New English attack,
Morpain returned to St.-Domingue with his prizes, leaving 700 barrels of
flour at Port-Royal. See Pothier; White. Before leaving,
Morpain awarded Madeleine Melanson,
widow of the mortally wounded Jean Belliveau, whose
house had been burned, a boat he had captured off New England. See
Melanson.
The year 1707 was a significant one for
Bernard-Anselme de Saint-Castin. One of his biographers--Salagnac--says Subercase was so
impressed with Bernard-Anselme's performance at Port-Royal that he "had
no hesitation in recommending him for the rank of ensign," likely in the
troupes de la marine; giving second thought to the matter,
Subercase recommended the young Métis for the rank of lieutenant
"with command of the Indians in Acadia," which the French court granted
the following Jun. Two months after the New English retreated to
Boston, Bernard-Anselme, only 18, married the 12-year-old daughter of a
Rivière St.-Jean seigneur at Port-Royal in Oct 1707.
Sometime that year, his father died in France, making Bernard-Anselme
the fourth baron de Saint-Castin. See also Book Two.
Leckie dismisses the 1707 ventures at Port-Royal as
"a brief exchange of shots that can best be described as a token fight."
Louis XIV thought otherwise. For his performance at Port-Royal in
1707, the King rewarded Gov. Subercase "a gratuity of 2,000 livres,
which was later changed into a pension of 600 livres." See
Baudry.
199a.
Quotations from Clark, A. H., Acadia, 129, 130. See also <acadian-home.org>;
Michelon, "Le Poupet de La Boularderie," in DCB,
2:417.
For the censuses
of 1707 & 1708, see <acadian-home.org>.
The family of Captain
Louis-Simon Le Poupet de La Boularderie probably was not in
either census. His wound at Port-Royal in Aug 1707 compelled him
to take his family to France as soon as he could get away. See
Michelon.
199b.
Quotations from Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38.
200. See
Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," 2:38; Drake,
Border Wars, 236-49.
200a.
Quotations from Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38.
Purpura is a skin condition resulting from,
among other things, a lack of Vitamin C--that is, scurvy--or the
presence of typhus or meningitis. See online Wikipedia, "Purpura."
201.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 261. See also
Arsenault, History, 67-68; Baudry, "Auger de Subercase,"
in DCB, 2:38; Drake,
Border Wars,
251; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 112; Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure, Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177; Pothier, "Morpain,"
in DCB, 3:474-75; Pothier & Horton, "Denys de
La Ronde, Louis," in DCB, 3:177; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3; White, DGFA-1, 456,
578, 1233-34; White, DGFA-1 English, 124, 261.
Pothier & Horton say Denys de La Ronde, aboard the
Biche, took the news of Port-Royal's successful defense to the
French Court, exchanged the Biche for a larger ship, the Venus,
returned to Acadian waters, &, beginning in Aug 1707, engaged in
privateering, but was persuaded to participate in a campaign in
Newfoundland in late 1708, leaving "Port-Royal to its fate." Faragher says trade between the Fundy Acadians & the New Englanders continued after
Church's raid in 1704, "but there was less tolerance for it by both
sides."
For Morpain's adventure at Port-Royal in 1707,
see note 198, above. One wonders how much his alienation from his
patron in St.-Domingue played in his taking a wife in Acadia.
Pierre & Marie-Josèphe settled at Plaisance, Newfoundland, by 1711.
Though she lived until Sep 1726, she gave Pierre no children. See
Pothier, 3:474; White, DGFA-1 English, 261.
For François Dugas, see White,
DGFA-1, 578; White, DGFA-1 English, 124.
202. See
Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38; Drake,
Border Wars,
250-51; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 230, 233; Leckie, Wars of America, 25.
Drake promotes Vetch
to the rank of colonel; Leckie calls him a captain. Griffiths,
230, says Vetch received his promotion from
captain to colonel in London in Feb 1709, 2 months before he returned to
Boston. When the expedition against Port-Royal finally got
underway in the fall of 1710, Nicholson had been promoted from colonel
to "General and Commander-in-Chief." See Griffiths, 233.
203. See
Drake,
Border Wars, 250-51; Bruce T. McCully, "Nicholson, Francis," in DCB, 2:496-99,
&
online; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme,
112, 117-19; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:170; G. M.
Waller, "Vetch, Samuel," in DCB, 2:650-52, &
online; note 149b,
above.
Faragher says Vetch, who not only was a trader but a smuggler, had traded
for "several hundred pounds in furs" in 1706 while on a diplomat mission
to Port-Royal & that Vetch's chief customer had been Acadian
Gov. Subercase.
204.
Quotation from Drake,
Border Wars, 251. See also Drake, 252; Leckie, Wars of America, 25-26;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:170; McCully, "Nicholson," in DCB, 2:497; Waller, "Vetch," in DCB,
2:651,.
Leckie says Vetch's plan also included an English offensive against
Spanish FL. Leckie's numbers are slightly different from Drake's:
200 from NJ instead of 300. Leckie provides the figures for the
regulars and includes NH militiamen in the seaborne operation.
Drake states that Vetch went to NY with Nicholson. Leckie's
version of events keeps Vetch in Boston, as does McCully. Waller implies that Vetch remained in
Boston to await "the arrival of the promised British ships and sailors"
that did not come. It went to Portugal instead.
205.
See Anderson, Crucible of War, 20; Drake, Border Wars, 252-53; Leckie, Wars of America,
26; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:170; McCully, "Nicholson," in DCB, 2:497.
NJ and PA provided money instead
of men.
Anderson says the Iroquois "cooperated
minimally" with the venture "and delayed a planned invasion of Canada
until it had to be aborted."
206.
See Drake, Border Wars, 253; Leckie, Wars of America, 26;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:170.
207.
Quotation from Drake, Border Wars, 254. See also Drake,
256-59; Leckie,
Wars of America, 26-27.
The Moody whom Drake mentions probably
was William Moody, a New Englander from Exeter who later fell into the
hands of the Abenaki and was burnt alive at the stake. See Drake,
256-59.
208.
Quotation from Leckie, Wars of America, 26-27. See also
Arsenault, History, 69, 70; Baudry,
"Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38; Drake,
Border Wars, 254-56, 259; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:171; Alison Olson, "Hobby, Sir Charles," in DCB,
2:289,
&
online.
Drake, 254, says that after the debacle of 1709, Nicholson
went back to England to solicit help for the 1710 venture against
Port-Royal. Also going to England to elicit support for the
venture was Peter Schuyler, a prominent New Yorker, who took several
Mohawk chiefs along. The Indians proved to be a sensation in
London. They even received an audience with the Queen. See
Drake, 254-56. For the specifics of the New England force, see
Drake, 259. Leckie, 27, puts it at 400
British marines and 1,500 militia. Baudry says Nicholson's fleet "appeared before Port-Royal" on Oct 5, that
his troops numbered 2,000, but that Subercase insisted they numbered
3,400. Arsenault insists the English
fleet arrived at the Port-Royal basin on Sep 18 and did not land in
front of the fort until Oct 6.
209.
Quotations from Drake, Border Wars, 260. See also Arsenault, History,
67; Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in
DCB, 2:38; Grenier,
J.,
Far Reaches of Empire, 12; Leckie,
Wars of America, 27; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 398.
Arsenault dates
Subercase's letter to Count Pontchartrain, Minister of Marine, as October 1, 1709, a year
before Nicholson's attack.
Baudry says
Subercase "had fewer than 300 men to set against [the New Englanders]:
about 150 soldiers of the garrison, some 100 militiamen, a few
Canadians, and some privateers." The Indians, unhappy with French
pay & their prices for fur, "kept their distance." Salagnac says Subercase "had only 158
regular soldiers [troupes de la marine] and 127 militiamen...."
Pritchard offers the usual grand perspective for the plight of Subercase as well
as his Acadian charges: "Military defeats in Europe--Blenheim
(1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenarde (1708)--shattered the prestige
of French arms, and the collapse of the navy increasingly left the
northern colonies on their own. Pontchartrain [Jérome Phélypeaux, the minister of
marine and chief minister for colonial affairs] had never considered
them very valuable and had no resources to succor them even had he
thought otherwise. In 1708, the thoroughly beaten New Englanders,
on the other hand, appealed to England for aid. It finally arrived
off Port Royal two years later in the form of a fleet of 34 vessels
including seven warships and a landing force of 1,500 troops." In
other words, France already was defeated, & French Acadia was doomed.
210.
Quotations from Leckie, Wars of America, 27; Baudry, "Auger
de Subercase," in DCB, 2:38-39. See also Arsenault, History,
69-71; Drake, Border Wars, 260-61; Grenier, J., Far Reaches of Empire,
12, 224n6; MacBeath, "La Tour,
Charles [fils]," in DCB, 2:592; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
198.
Leckie's dates follow
Drake.
Arsenault says the fort held out for 19 days and surrendered on Oct 12. Baudry, 2:39, says
that at the surrender the French garrison numbered 156; the rest were
militia, Canadians, & privateers.
Grenier, J., 224n6,
provides a concise history of the Port-Royal fort up to its 1710
capture: "Fort Anne [its British named] sits around nine miles
upstream from the entrance of the Annapolis River (rivière Dauphin to
the French) at the Bay of Fundy. The Fort Anne site has existed
since 1629, when Scottish settlers constructed Charles Fort. The
French built four successive forts on the same site. In 1702, the
French began the fort that the English captured in 1710. It was an
earthwork star-shaped Vauban fort with four bastions and a ravelin."
See also Grenier, 12.
The younger La Tour survived his wound
& was stationed on Île Royale in 1714. See MacBeath; Book Two.
MacDonald says Charles, fils "was
cited for bravery by Frontenac, and decorated."
211.
Quotation from Grenier, Far Reaches of Empire, 12. See also Arsenault,
History, 71; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 113; Drake, Border Wars,
261; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 33; Leckie, Wars of America, 27;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:171; Olson, "Hobby," in DCB,
2:289;
note 07, above.
The name "Nova Scotia" was used by the English
as far back as the 1620s, when King James I had awarded French Acadia to
his good Scots friend, Sir William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling. See
note 18a, above.
211a.
Quotation from Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:39. See also Lunn,
"Denys de Bonaventure, Simon-Pierre," in DCB. 2:177;
Pothier, "Goutin, Mathieu de," in DCB,
2:257-58;
White, DGFA-1 English, 155.
After his acquittal, Subercase remained the
titular governor of French Acadia. The Minister of Marine proposed
to send him to Québec to serve under Vaudreuil while retaining not only
his title, but also his salary. Subercase, who had his pride,
"refused in disgust." He remained in France & was still there in
1713 when the Treaty of Utrecht awarded peninsula Acadia to Britain.
Subercase then retired from the service & returned to his estate at
Béarn. In 1716, the Minister of Marine, still Jérôme Phélypeaux,
Comte de Pontchartrain, perhaps using a plan submitted in 1711 by the
now-dead Denys de Bonaventure, proposed the retaking of Acadia from the
British. The Minister consulted Subercase on the matter, but
nothing came of it. By 1719, Subercase had moved to Jurançon, near
Pau. He died at Cannes, now Cannes-L'Écluse, in Nov 1732 & was
buried in the village church, age 71. He was survived by his wife
& a son. His biographer calls him not only the last, but also
"probably the most remarkable governor of French Acadia." See Baudry,
2:35, 39; Lunn.
For Mathieu de Goutin's fate, see
Pothier;
White, DGFA-1 English, 155; note
106, above;
Book Two;
De
Goutin de Ville family page.
211b.
Quotation from Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:3-4.
212.
Quotations from Drake, Border Wars, 261-62. See also
Akins, ed., Papers Relating to the Forcible Removal of
the Acadian French from Nova Scotia, 263-64n; Arsenault, History,
71, 73;
Baudry, "Auger de Subercase," in DCB, 2:39;
Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 130; Micheline D. Johnson, "Durand, Justinien" in DCB, 3:207,
&
online;
Milling, Exile Without End, 5; Olson, "Hobby," in DCB,
2:289; Parkman, France & England, 2:463.
Parkman says Vetch's
title was "General and Commander-in-Chief of all his Majesty's troops in
these parts, and Governor of the fort of Annapolis Royal, country of l'Accady and Nova Scotia." And he was only the second in command!
Akins, ed., says, in the context
of a discussion on Acadian oaths of allegiance, that the oath
administered to the residents of the Port-Royal banlieue in 1710
was unconditional, & that Sir Charles Hobby was in command of the
garrison at the time.
Vaudreuil replied to Nicholson's threat with
a threat of his own: to retaliate in kind if the English mistreated the
Acadians.
Baudry &
Milling say the agreement between the British
& the French after the fall of Port-Royal in 1710 gave the inhabitants
of the Port-Royal area 2 years to remove themselves beyond the 3-mile
limit of British control. Placing Nicholson's 3 miles of protection in perspective,
A. H. Clark
says: "... we are safe in assuming at least 1,500
and perhaps as many as 2,000 Acadians ..." were living in Acadia "when
the British assumed permanent control of the peninsula in 1710.
And these, now almost all second-to-fourth generation settlers, were
thoroughly 'Acadian' in feeling, habit, and economy."
213.
Quotation from Arsenault,
History, 73.
213a.
Quotations from Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 133-34.
See also Cormier, "Brossard, Jean-François,"
in DCB, 2:105; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29;
M. D. Johnson, "Durand," 3:207-08;
Marshall, Acadian Resistance, 10-11;
Perrin, W. A., Acadian Redemption, 4; White, DGFA-1, 252, 254,
284-85, 1485.
Faragher, 134, continues: "A few months later, Christophe Cahouet, an Acadian merchant and officer in the Port Royal militia, told
French authorities that the group who seized Capon had been led by
Abraham Gaudet of Beaubassin, and included 'three mulattoes from
the coast' (métis living in Míkmaw communities), as well as two
Irish deserters from the British garrison." Broussard died
in Dec 1716, in his early 60s; his sons Alexandre & Joseph dit
Beausoleil, the future resistance fighters, were ages 12 & 10, respectively,
when their father was held hostage, the incident no doubt having a
profound effect on them. See White.
Interestingly, François Broussard's biographer does not mention
the 1711 incident. See Cormier. For a detailed map of the haute rivière, c1707, including the location
of Pierre LeBlanc's habitant, see Historical Atlas of Canada. See also Marshall;
W. A. Perrin, who incorrectly places the
incident in 1713.
M. D.
Johnson says Fr. Durand's offense was seeking
"to reunite the settlers 'in the upper region of the river (Annapolis
River),' in order to shield them from the terms of the capitulation,
which required an oath of allegiance on the part of the Acadians from
'the outskirts of Port-Royal.' His conduct was considered
seditious by Samuel Vetch; he was taken prisoner in January 1711 and
escorted to Boston. Louis Denys de La Ronde
succeeded in bringing him back at the end of the year in an exchange of
prisoners." After the war ended in 1713, Durand was among the
priests in British NS who encouraged Acadians to emigrate to the new French colony
of Île Royale. He, along with his ecclesiastical colleagues,
failed in their efforts. See Book Four. In 1720, Durand, still at Annapolis
Royal, was the liaison between the Acadian population & the new British
governor, Richard Philipps, who, like his predecessors, failed to secure
an unconditional oath from the Acadians, the settlers' resistance to the
unconditional oath no doubt encouraged by Fr. Durand. That same
year, Fr. Durand, leaving "his parishioners 'entirely free to take
whatever decision they considered advantageous,'" thought it prudent to
remove himself to Île Royale, "in order,' he said, 'that any troubles
that arise will not be imputed to me.'"
A note in the Port-Royal church register made by Fr. Durand probably on
his return to Annapolis Royal in late 1711 says that Germain
Bourgeois, along with
Pierre and Joseph, sons of Claude Thériot
of Annapolis Royal, ages 27 and 25, respectively, died in his
absence. See White, 254, 1485. White simply says they died "... durant la captivité du Père
Durand à Boston"--that is, during the captivity of Fr. Durand in
Boston--in 1711. This does not mean the Thériot
brothers were part of the conspiracy & accompanied the priest to Boston
but more likely likely died at Annapolis Royal after the priest had been sent away.
The church register notation says also that Angélique Comeau,
wife of Jacques Laure (Lord), also died, between Sep
and Dec 1711, during Fr. Durand's absence. See White, 376, 1104.
Surely she had not been part of the 1711 conspiracy & died at
her home near Annapolis Royal, not as a prisoner at St. Anne or in
Boston. It seems clear that the only conspirator who was sent to
Boston was Fr. Durand & that the other conspirators were held at Fort
Anne.
Longfellow's Evangeline, Part the
First, III, says that a character in the poem, Grand-Pré notary René
LeBlanc, "Four
long years in the time of the war had he languished a captive, /
Suffering much in an old French fort as the friend of the English."
Longfellow may have confused René with his uncle Pierre, whose stay in
the "old French fort" in 1711 lasted for several weeks, not "Four long
years." This researcher has found no Acadian who spent that
much time in British custody before Le Grand Dérangement, though
the notary, more an advocate of neutrality than a "friend of the
English," was kidnapped by Mi'kmaq minions of Abbé Le Loutre on
Christmas Day 1749 early in the petite guerre that raged
thruout Acadia on the eve of deportation & held for a time at the
Beausoleil Broussards' compound on the upper
Petitcoudiac, but not for 4 years. See Hodson, Acadian
Diaspora, 66; White, DGFA-1 English, 214-15; Book Two.
214.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 142, 261. See also
<acadian-cajun.com/acadia4.htm>;
<acadian-home.org>; Akins, ed., Papers Relating to the Forcible Removal of
the Acadian French from Nova Scotia, 264n; Arsenault,
History, 73-74; Drake
Border Wars, 284-85; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
246-47, 531; Olson, "Hobby," in DCB,
2:289; Parkman,
France & England, 2:463;
Pothier, "Morpain," in DCB, 3:475; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Bernard-Anselme," in DCB, 2:4; online Wikipedia, "Battle of
Bloody Creek (1711)."
Abraham
Gaudet moved to Île Royale in 1714, 3 years after his "ambush" of
the English messenger, & by the late 1720s he & his family had moved on
to Canada. One wonders if Abraham's movement away from Chignecto
was because of his actions during Queen Anne's War.
Arsenault says there were 80 Britons at Bloody Creek.
Olson says 70. Drake does not mention the fight at Bloody Creek,
only that the garrison at "Annapolis" was much reduced & that the
Acadians were ripe for open rebellion once reinforcements arrived from
Canada. Griffiths, 246, argues
that it cannot be proved if there were any Acadians in the fight at
Bloody Creek because Saint-Castin had arrived in the area only days
before the skirmish & had no time to recruit any of the locals before he
fell upon the British force. She says "at least" 15 Britons
were killed in the fight, including the detachment's commander, a
Captain Pidgeon, who commanded 70 men, not 80. Olson says "some 30
soldiers were killed." Griffiths, 247,
says immediately after the fight at Bloody Creek, the Abenaki &
Mi'kmaq with Saint-Castin, as well as the Acadians in & around Annapolis
Royal, imposed a "semi-siege" on the British garrison & even killed some
of the soldiers who went amongst them for supplies. Parkman paints a darker picture, writing that,
after the fight at Bloody Creek, "This completely changed the attitude
of the Acadians [living in the banlieue]. They broke their oath,
rose against their new master, and with their Indian friends, invested
the fort to the number of five or six hundred." Parkman says that
by then the New English garrison had been reduced by disease or
desertion "to about two hundred effective men...." Parkman says
the leader of the besieging Acadians was the priest, Gaulin,
"missionary of the Micmacs and prime mover in the rising," & that
it was Fr. Gaulin who went to Placentia to seek munitions but failed.
On the eve of the fight at Bloody Creek, Vetch
had been recalled to Boston to lead the New English troops in the
impending Walker expedition against Québec. Sir Charles Hobby was
left in charge of the fort, & it was he who was besieged by the Indians
& the local Acadians. See Olson; note 212,
above.
If anyone doubts that the Acadians of this
time were capable of an armed insurrection against the British ... or
against any abusive authority ... one has only to consult the Acadian
censuses of 1686, 1693, 1698, 1700, 1701, and 1703, which detail the
number of "guns" in each household and reveal that these peaceful
farmers were a well-armed population. The Census of 1703, taken by
the French at the beginning of Queen Anne's War, is especially revealing
as it details how many "arms bearers" each Acadian household could
provide. See <acadian-cajun.com/acadia4.htm>;
<acadian-home.org>;
Griffiths, 531n141.
A battle between Acadian resistance fighters,
led by Guillaume Jeanson, a younger son of former
British soldier William Johnson, & Mi'kmaq was fought
at Bloody Creek in early Dec 1757 during the Great Upheaval. The
creek was given its nickname, one source says, after the 1757 battle.
See online Wikipedia, "Battle of Bloody Creek (1757)"; Book Five.
White, 261, says of the
privateer: According to historian Couillard-Despré, "Morpain was
the most remarkable of all the privateers. He played an important
rôle in the defences of Acadia. It is even said that in less than
two months, he sank four enemy ships and brought nine others loaded with
provisions to Port-Royal, often risking his own life in unequal
battles...." After his release from St. John's in 1712, he
placed his business affairs at Plaisance in order & returned to his
hometown, Blaye, where he remained for a year. After peace came in
1713, he sought a regular naval appointment (heaven knows he deserved
one!), but, in Jun 1715, he was named, instead, port captain of
Louisbourg, which in 1718 became the capital of the new French colony of
Île Royale. He lived & worked at Louisbourg from 1716, though an
incident in the fall of 1717 led not only to the questioning of his
navigational skills, but also to his arrest by former privateering
colleague, Louis Denys de La Ronde. By the early 1720s, Morpain
had resurrected his reputation & was still gainfully employed at
Louisbourg in the early 1740s. He had become a widower in 1726, &
he & his wife had no children, yet he did not remarry. He was age
58 when the War of the Austrian Succession became King George's War in
Mar 1744. As a fire-ship captain, he returned to preying on New
English shipping, again with considerable success; frightened New
Englanders called him the dreaded "Morepang." He helped capture
Canso in May 1744, & he was at Louisbourg when the New English
besieged the citadel in late spring 1745. Despite the jealousy of
the regular officers, "Morepang's" performance was masterful, though it
did not save the citadel from capture. See Pothier; Book Two.
Akins, ed., says: "The right to
remain on their lands, thus reserved to those inhabitants in the
neighborhood of Port Royal who had taken the Oath [in 1710], terminated
in Oct. 1712. As however, in the year1711, while under the
obligation of their Oath, they united with the Indians in an attack on
the Fort, they were considered to have forfeited both their lives and
property by that act of Treason." This gives an idea of how
seriously the British, or any other imperialist power, regarded an oath
of allegiance. The Acadians outside of the banlieu had taken no
oath, so they would have been treated as belligerents, not traitors.
For the possible involvement of the widow of a
former Rivière St.-Jean seigneur in the action at Bloody Creek, see note
221, below.
215.
Quotations from Leckie, Wars of America, 28. See also
Anderson,
Crucible of War,
20; Arsenault,
History, 72;
Drake, Border Wars, 267-83; Charles Bruce Fergusson,
"Caulfeild, Thomas," in DCB,
2:122, &
online; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 248;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:172; McCully, "Nicholson," in DCB, 2:497; Olson, "Hobby," in
DCB,
2:289;
Parkman, France & England, 2:440-57;
Pothier
& Horton, "Denys de La Ronde, Louis,"
in DCB, 3:177-78;
Pritchard, In Search of
Empire, 399-400;
Salagnac, "Pastour de Costabelle," in DCB,
2:511;
Waller, "Vetch,"
in DCB, 2:651.
Judge Martin says Hill's force consisted of
"six thousand five hundred European and Provincial troops...."
Leckie's 12,000 refers to the entire force, naval as well as land-based.
Parkman & Drake devote entire chapters to the 1711 (misad)venture.
Parkman's account is the most detailed.
Interestingly, Canadian officer Louis Denys de
La Ronde, who was fluent in English, was sent by Plaisance Gov. Costabelle on a mission to Boston in late spring
1711, ostensibly to arrange a prisoner exchange. Denys de La Ronde
found the city abuzz with activity as New England forces prepared for
another invasion of Canada. Hovenden Walker's fleet arrived from
England while the Frenchman was in the city. The admiral treated
him with due respect. Unfortunately for the Canadian, Boston
authorities thought less of him; they found in his possession
incriminating papers that portrayed his mission more as espionage than
diplomacy. But for the timely intervention of Gov. Dudley, who, after hearing word
of Walker's disaster in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, allowed Denys de La Ronde
to escape the city, the failed espionage agent would have been duly
hanged on orders from the MA Assembly. See
Parkman, 2:442-43;
Pothier
& Horton, who place the incident in the spring of 1711;
Salagnac, who mistakenly says it
was in 1710.
Anderson assigns a prominent role to the Iroquois in aborting Nicholson's
expedition: "In 1711 they [the Iroquois] showed ostensible
enthusiasm for another expedition [against Canada], while quietly
sending word of what was afoot to the French; thus they thwarted the
second invasion [of Canada] as effectively as the first."
In
English, the Île-aux-Oeufs would be translated as Egg Island or the Isle
of Eggs. See the map in Drake, 278, entitled
"Place of the Wreck," for the
approximate location of the disaster. Parkman & Pritchard offer the usual wide perspective.
Waller says Vetch reinforced the Annapolis
Royal garrison on his way back from Walker's failed expedition, leaving
there George Vane, a military engineer, & Thomas Caulfeild as a
replacement for Charles Hobby. Vetch then continued on to Boston to
spend the winter of 1711-12 there. Caulfeild would later serve as
lieutenant-governor of NS. See Book Two.
216.
Quotation from Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 400. See
also Allain, "In Search of a Policy," 88-89; Arsenault, History, 74-75;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:173;
Pritchard, 421-22.
See Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, &
online Wikipedia, "Treaty of Utrecht," for details of the Peace of
Utrecht, which actually was a series of treaties negotiated between the
war's many belligerents and signed from 11 Apr 1713 to 5 Nov 1715.
One of the rewards Britain received from the
Peace of Utrecht was a monopoly on transporting slaves from West Africa
to the Spanish colonies in the New World--the
asiento de negros. See Pritchard, 400.
Pritchard, 400, makes the sobering
observation that, on the eve of the Peace of Utrecht, "Though Port Royal
was lost, Acadia was not...," implying that France was not compelled by
military circumstances to give up the Acadian peninsula. After
pointing out that the successful defense of the northern colonies was
due not to French arms but to the colonists themselves, Pritchard goes
on: "From a colonial viewpoint nothing accounted for the huge
surrenders of French territory in the Americas that arose from the
Treaty of Utrecht that France signed with her European enemies on 12
April 1713. French colonists would learn that the Americas were to
be won or lost on the battlefields of Europe rather than at sea or in
the New World." See 421 for a summation of France's obsession with
"continentalism" & its affect on the nation's overseas empire, including the
observation: "Colonial possessions were not so tied to the Crown
as ever to place colonialism above continentalism." And, on 422: "Colonists and their leaders were shaped by circumstances far
more than might be expected in light of absolutism's image of itself and
attempts to regulate and control development. During the decades
between 1670 and 1730, France was always too preoccupied with dynastic
(i.e., continental) interests and conflict to expend time, manpower, and
wealth on colonies."
Allain, 88, notes ominously:
"The prize territorial plum England picked up at Utrecht was Acadia, the
cession of which began the encirclement of New France." She adds:
"The loss of Acadia made imperative French development of new lines of
defense. Their response, the erection of a chain of forts from Louisbourg to Mobile, produced constant friction between the French and
English colonies for the next half century." And, on 89: "...
the changes wrought in the colonial map carried the seeds of future
conflict ..." a circumstance that would prove dire to the peace-loving
Acadians.
217.
Quotation from Parkman, France & England, 2:477. See
also Clark, A. H., Acadia, 186; Drake,
Border Wars, 285; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 19; Parkman,
2:928-29; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 401; Taylor, A., American Colonies,
293-94.
Drake,
in the conclusion of his study of King
William's & Queen Anne's wars, hints darkly at the fate of the
Acadians. See also A. H. Clark.
The transition here in terminology from
"English" to "British" is deliberate. From her accession to the
throne in 1702 until 1707, Queen Anne's official title was Queen of
England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1707, upon the Act of Union
that joined Scotland to England and Wales, she was proclaimed Queen of
Great Britain and Ireland, so "Britain" & "British," not
"England" & "English," will be the
descriptors normally used here in subsequent narrative. For a summary of the circumstances that led Scotland to unite, finally, with
England, see A. Taylor.
Even though after 1713 the name "Acadia" no
longer applied to the peninsula east of the Bay of Fundy, & "Nova
Scotia" now was its proper name, the French settlers living in
British Nova Scotia still called themselves, and were called by
others, Acadians.
For the boundary question, see Parkman,
2:928-29, who reminds us that the question
plagued the British & the French for decades to come & that the question
was, in fact, a major cause of 2 more wars between Britain & France in
North America. Pritchard points out the contrast between British & French
claims over Acadian boundaries: "Acadia's 'ancient boundaries'
were never agreed upon. British claims extended the new
territory to the St. Lawrence River, while French claims successfully
confined British sovereignty to peninsular Nova Scotia and conserved all
the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including Cape Breton Island,
and the mainland from the Chignecto isthmus as far south as the Kennebec
River." Italics added. Pritchard adds: "This territory
continued to be occupied by the people of the Abenaki Confederacy," a
fact that would plague New Englanders for many years to come. Parkman, 2:477, says of the boundary
"discussions" after 1713: "This and other disputed questions of
boundary were to be settled by commissioners of the two powers; but
their meetings were put off for forty years, and then their discussions
ended in the Seven Years' War," which began in North America in 1754
(one might even say 1750; see Book Two) &
in Europe in 1756. See also Erskine.
218. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1322-29; Arsenault, History,
39-30; White, DGFA-1, 76-77; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Barrilleaux family page.
219. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 733-36; White, DGFA-1, 1351-52;
White, DGFA-1 English, 286; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Préjean
family page.
220. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 391-93; Arsenault, History,
39; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 476, 488 (p. 11 of the
written census); White, DGFA-1, 17-19;
White, DGFA-1 English, 5; Book Three.
221.
Quotations from
F. Grenier, "Damours (d'Amours) de Chauffours,
Mathieu," in DCB, 1:245,
&
online. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 1626-32; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 204, 220, 242; E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon,"
in DCB, 1:577; White, DGFA-1, 453-66;
Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 205-07; White, DGFA-1 English, 100-01; note 171,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Louvière/Damour family page.
Evidently Mathieu D'Amours de Chauffours,
père did not live on Rivière St.-Jean with his sons but remained
at Québec or Matane, where his power & influence lay. See
F.
Grenier.
222.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 76-77. See
also Arsenault, Généalogie, 524; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 131, 161, 188; White, DGFA-1, 339-41;
note 106, above; Book Three.
Arsenault, 482, seems to confuse Pierre Chênet,
sieur Dubreuil, with Louis Chênet or Chesnay dit
La Garenne, a Canadian who did not come to the colony until the late
1690s & never bore the name Dubreuil. See note
256, below. Pierre, born in
c1646, was a native of Paris who lived in Canada, & Louis, born in Aug
1678, son of Bertrand Chênet or Chesnay, sieur de
Lothainville, was a native of Canada. They likely were not kin.
Arsenault, pp. 482-83, in fact, attributes a son named Pierre to Louis,
but Pierre was a son of Pierre Chênet Dubreuil & his
second wife, Louise dite Jeanne Doucet.
223. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 401-05; White, DGFA-1, 80-82;
White, DGFA-1 English, 17; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bastarache family page.
224. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 430; White, DGFA-1, 140-41;
Book Three.
225. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 429-30; White, DGFA-1, 138-39;
White, DGFA-1 English, 30-31; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Bertrand family page.
Arsenault, 429, says Claude was a son
of Clément Bertrand. White says otherwise. See also
note 59, above.
226. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1421-22; White, DGFA-1,
1182-83;
White, DGFA-1 English, 253; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Michel
family page.
227. See
White, DGFA-1,
910;
White, DGFA-1 English, 193; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Lambert
family page.
228. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 701-02; White, DGFA-1,
1241-44, 1348;
White, DGFA-1 English, 263-64; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Moïse family
page.
229. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1285-88; White, DGFA-1,
1446-51;
White, DGFA-1 English, 304-05; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Sonnier
family page.
230.
Quotation from Hector J. Hébert, "Maissonat, Marie-Madeleine (Winniett),"
in DCB, 3:421, &
online. See also Arsenault, Généalogie,
671-72; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 290, 328; Squires, "Maissonat," 2:449-50; White, DGFA-1,
223, 1114-15;
White, DGFA-1 English, 240; note
161b, above; Books Two & Three.
Squires, 2:449, repeats the "many wives"
accusation.
231. See
<acadian-home.org>; Arsenault, Généalogie, 785-89;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 126; Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves,
29, 31; White, DGFA-1, 1425-28;
White, DGFA-1 English, 298; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Roy family page.
Trudel, 29, states: "It was not until the year 1686 that the next black person appeared in
New France, a man named La Liberté whose presence was duly recorded in
the census of Acadia." See <acadian-home.org>,
for the census. Trudel also mentions La Liberté on p. 31, but in
neither place does he give the surname Le Roy or Roy. Is it possible
that 2 people with the name "La Liberté" lived at Cap-Sable in 1686, one
of African descent called "La Liberte Le Neigre," the other a European
from St.-Malo named Jean Le Roy or Roy dit La
Liberté? Probably not.
Note
that White, DGFA-1, 1426, places Jean Roy dit
La Liberté at Cap-Sable in 1686 and calls him "Laliberte Le Neigre,
seul," or alone, hinting that he did not marry until soon after de
Meulles's counting. White places him again at
Cap-Sable in 1693 but gives him no name. In the 1693 census, he is called not Jean Roy dit
La Liberté but simply "La Liberté," & is listed with "Cristine his
wife," who also is given no surname, & 4 unnamed children. See <acadian-home.org>. According to a Canadian descendant:
"The first document where our ancestor is mentioned is when he testified
July 30 1684 against a Bostonian, James Taylor, guiding a dozen of
buccaneers that had stolen the fishing boats and fishes from the
Acadians in September 1683. Jean
LeRoy
dit
La Liberté said that he was shoremaster and fisherman for Charles
St-Étienne
[de La Tour, fils]
Jacques
Mius
and other associates. By that document we know that La Liberté was
the nickname of Jean
LeRoy(Roy)
our ancestor. He might have arrived in Acadia as a soldier having
the nickname La Liberté." Ulysse Roy to author via email, 24
Sep 2014. Note that the appearance of La Liberté in this
court document predates the Acadian census of 1686 by 2 years. La
Liberté had either made his deposition from Cap-Sable or had moved there
from Port-Royal before
Intendant
de Meulles made his census.
232.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 306. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 793-94; White, DGFA-1, 1454-56;
White, DGFA-1 English, 305; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Savary
family page.
233. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 395-401; White, DGFA-1, 65-69;
White, DGFA-1 English, 14-15; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Babineaux family page.
233a.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 718-21; White, DGFA-1, 1292-94;
White, DGFA-1 English, 275; Book Three.
234. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 391; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 180, 342; White, DGFA-1, 12-14;
White, DGFA-1 English, 3-4; notes 193 &
213a, above; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Allain
family page.
235. See
Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval, Louis-Alexandre," in DCB,
2:182; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 148, 156, 179, 186-87, 189, 1192-93, 209, 211-12, 218,
220-01, 236, 512n76;
Bernard Pothier, "Goutin (Degoutin, Degoutins, Desgoutins,
De Goutin), Mathieu de," in DCB, 2:257-58, &
online; White, DGFA-1,
756-59;
White, DGFA-1 English, 155-56; notes 106,
157, 168,
above, 295a, below; Books Two, Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
De
Goutin de Ville family page.
236. See White, DGFA-1,
1059;
White, DGFA-1 English, 228; Book Three.
237. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 846-58; White, DGFA-1, 126-29;
White, DGFA-1 English, 29; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bernard
family page.
Arsenault, 428, 846, insists that René was a son
of mason André Bernard, brought to Acadia by Charles Le Tour
in 1641 to work at his St.-Jean fort,
but White says otherwise. White shows that René was kin
to none of the other Bernards, including Nicolas & Claude dit
Léveillé, who came to French Acadia, nor to the Bernard
sisters who, like André, were early arrivals. See
note 30a, above, for more on André.
René's descendants are, in
fact, the only Acadian Bernards who emigrated to LA. See
Book Six; Bernard
family page.
238. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 695-700; White, DGFA-1, 1183-85;
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Michel
family page.
239. See White, DGFA-1,
327-28;
White, DGFA-1 English, 73; Book Three.
240. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1133-34; White, DGFA-1, 325-26;
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bellemère family page.
241. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1132-33; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 555n4; Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 40; White, DGFA-1, 301;
White, DGFA-1 English, 67; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bijeaux/Bujole family page.
242. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 785; White, DGFA-1, 1412-13;
White, DGFA-1 English, 296; note 77,
above.
243. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1347; White, DGFA-1, 267-68;
White, DGFA-1 English, 59; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Brasseaux/Brasset family page.
244. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 587; White, DGFA-1, 770-71;
White, DGFA-1 English, 157; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Gravois
family page.
Arsenault says Joseph was born in c1670 but
gives no birthplace, calls his wife Marie-Reine Huleton,
says they married in c1693 at Port-Royal, & that son Joseph, fils
was born in c1695. White, as usual, is followed here.
245. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1505-06; White, DGFA-1, 1098-99;
White, DGFA-1 English, 236; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Longuépée family page.
246. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 686; White, DGFA-1, 1144-45;
White, DGFA-1 English, 247; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Mazerolle family page.
247. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1278-79; White, DGFA-1, 1353; Books Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Précieux family page.
248. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1051-54; White, DGFA-1, 1329-31;
White, DGFA-1 English, 283; note 65,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Poirier
family page.
249. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 643-45; White, DGFA-1, 978; Books Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Lavergne family page.
250. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 947-52; White, DGFA-1, 508; Book
Three.
252.
Quotations from Arsenault, Généalogie, 428; White, DGFA-1 English, 27. See also
Arsenault, 427; White, DGFA-1, 122-24;
White, DGFA-1 English, 26; note 193,
above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bergeron family page.
253. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 660-62; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 180; White, DGFA-1, 1043-44;
White, DGFA-1 English, 221-22; note
134, above; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Léger
family page.
254. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 495-99; White, DGFA-1, 418-20;
White, DGFA-1 English, 94; Book Three.
255. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 729-30; White, DGFA-1, 1338-40;
White, DGFA-1 English, 284; Book Three.
256. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 482; White, DGFA-1, 341;
White, DGFA-1 English, 76; note 222,
above; Book Three.
257. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1608-09; White, DGFA-1, 1565-67;
White, DGFA-1 English, 331; Book Three.
258. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1150-51; White, DGFA-1, 469-71;
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Darois
family page.
259. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 702-03; White, DGFA-1, 1247-48;
White, DGFA-1 English, 265; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Naquin
family page.
260. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1054-57; White, DGFA-1, 1346-48;
White, DGFA-1 English, 285-86; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Potier
family page.
261. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 815, 1308; White, DGFA-1, 1527;
White, DGFA-1 English, 323; Book Three.
262. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1346-47; White, DGFA-1, 264-65;
White, DGFA-1 English, 58; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Boutin
family page.
263. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 437-41; White, DGFA-1, 178-79;
White, DGFA-1 English, 37; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Bonnevie family page.
264. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 818; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 279; Plank, Unsettled Conquest, 23, 64; White, DGFA-1, 1567-72;
White, DGFA-1 English, 332; Book Three.
Maurice's mother, Françoise Bourgeois,
was not an Acadian Bourgeois. Her parents were
Antoine Bourgeois and Marie Piedmont
of St.-Paul de Paris who emigrated to Canada, not to Acadia.
However, Jacques dit Jacob Bourgeois, the
progenitor of the Acadian branch of that family, was born
"perhaps at La Ferté-Gaucher, on Rivière Le
Grand-Morin, east of Paris," so he & Françoise may have been kin. Quotation
from
Bourgeois family page.
See also White, DGFA-1, 251; note 64,
above.
265. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1121-25; White, DGFA-1, 268-70;
note 243, above; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Brasseaux/Brasset family page.
266.
Quotation from White, DGFA-1 English, 71-72. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 895-96; White, DGFA-1, 319-21;
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Carret
family page.
267. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1607-08; White, DGFA-1, 1236-38;
White, DGFA-1 English, 262; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Molaison family page.
268. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 567; White, DGFA-1, 713, 791;
White, DGFA-1 English, 149; Book Three.
269.
Quotations from White, DGFA-1 English, 82. See also
Arsenault, Généalogie, 483; White, DGFA-1, 362-64; Books Three,
Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Clémenceau family page.
269a.
See Arsenault, Généalogie,
672; White, DGFA-1, 1143; Book Three.
270. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 703-07; White, DGFA-1, 1254-56;
White, DGFA-1 English, 267; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Orillion family page.
271. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 702; <heritage.tantramar.com/HS18_1D.html>; White, DGFA-1, 720, 1238-40;
White, DGFA-1 English, 263;
online Wikipedia, "François Adhémar Monteil, Comte de Grignan";
Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Mouton
family page.
Jean also is called Jean-Jacques. See <heritage.tantramar.com/HS18_1D.html>.
Was he an apprentice to a ship's surgeon when he came to the colony at
such a young age, or did he apprentice to a surgeon at Port-Royal before
his marriage in 1711?
271a.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 551-54; White, DGFA-1,
664-65; Book Three.
272. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 813-15; White, DGFA-1, 1483; Book
Three.
273. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 606-07; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 447-48, 450; Étienne Taillemite, "Jacau
(Jacault, Jacob) de Fiedmont," Louis-Thomas," in
DCB,
online; White, DGFA-1,
867-68;
White, DGFA-1 English, 183; Books Two & Three.
274. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 542-43; White, DGFA-1, 619-20;
White, DGFA-1 English, 130; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Flan family
page.
275. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 792-93; Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 270; White, DGFA-1, 1443-45;
White, DGFA-1 English, 304; Book Three.
276. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 672-73; White, DGFA-1, 1118-19;
White, DGFA-1 English, 241; Book Three.
277. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 725-26; White, DGFA-1, 1306; Book
Three.
278. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 803-04; White, DGFA-1, 1480-82;
White, DGFA-1 English, 312; Book Three.
279. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 708-10; White, DGFA-1, 1268-70;
White, DGFA-1 English, 269-70; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Part/Apart
family page.
279a.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 750-52; White, DGFA-1, 1367-68;
Book Three.
279b.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 732-33; White, DGFA-1, 1348-50;
White, DGFA-1 English, 286; Book Three.
279c.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 626-28; White, DGFA-1, 953-55;
Book Three.
280. See White, DGFA-1,
157;
White, DGFA-1 English, 34.
281. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 817; White, DGFA-1, 1552-53;
White, DGFA-1 English, 328; Book Three.
283. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 802-03; White, DGFA-1, 1476-78;
White, DGFA-1 English, 309-10; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, &
Ten;
Surette
family page.
284. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1335;
De La Roque "Tour of Inspection," Canadian Archives
1905,
2A:59;
White, DGFA-1, 161-62;
White, DGFA-1 English, 35.
284a.
See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 535-37; White, DGFA-1, 581-84;
White, DGFA-1 English, 125; Books Three, Five, Six,
Eight, & Ten;
Duhon family page.
284b.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 561-66;
Pothier, "Gautier dit Bellair," in DCB, 3:255,
&
online;
White, DGFA-1, 901; Book Three.
284c.
See Arsenault, Généalogie, 534-35, 2090;
White, DGFA-1, 554-55;
White, DGFA-1 English, 117; Books Three, Five, Six, Eight, & Ten;
Dumont
family page.
285.
Quotations from Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France, 1; Costain, The White & the Gold,
3. See
also Biggar, 2; Canny & Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World,
30; Clark, A. H.,
Acadia, 5, 7, 74; Costain, 1-2, 4-13; Erskine, Nova Scotia, 3-4; Historical Atlas of Canada,
1: plate 19; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 6-25, 41-42, 65-66, 68-69, 72-75,
102-04, 187, 197;
Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:2; <Micmac
History>; David B. Quinn, "Eliot (Elyot, Eliott, Ellyot), Hugh," in DCB, 1:302, &
online;
Sylvia Seeley, "Gonsales (Gonsalves, Gonçalves), Joao," in DCB,
1:343, &
online;
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 3; Weidensaul, The First
Frontier, 19-21, 78-79; online Wikipedia, "Joao Fernandes Lavrador," "Newfoundland
(island)."
Weidensaul offers an entertaining, as well as
enlightening, account of Viking efforts in North America.
Canny & Morgan, 6, notes: "The
northern route [across the Atlantic] brought Bristol fishermen to the
Newfoundland Banks perhaps before Columbus crossed the Atlantic ...."
See also 29. This implies that Columbus's feat in 1492-93
compelled the English to organize a voyage of exploration to what that
kingdom's fishermen already had "discovered."
Cabot's other sons were Lewis, the oldest, & Sanctius,
the youngest.
See Costain, 2, 8.
Costain, 3-4, has Cabot on his first voyage
reaching Cape Breton Island on 24 Jun 1497, going ashore, noting signs
of habitation, & raising a wooden cross. Hoffman, Biggar, & other
sources say that Cabot, on his fist voyage, reached Labrador or
Newfoundland before sailing down to Cape Breton. Historical
Atlas of Canada, based on Samuel Eliot Morison, has Cabot on his
1497 voyage going
only to Newfoundland, first to its northern end, sailing down along
the rocky shore to its southern end, & sailing back up the coast before returning to Bristol the way he
came. The Norsemen or Vikings explored & settled
present-day Labrador & Newfoundland, & perhaps even Nova Scotia, during
the early 1000s, 400 years before Cabot's voyages, but nothing came of
the Norse discoveries other than temporary settlements in the region.
The rest of Europe did not hear of these ventures other than as
"legends," nor did they benefit from them economically. See Clark,
A. H., 7, 74; Costain, 10-13; Erskine; Hoffman, 6. Clark,
A. H., 5, uses the term Ultima Thule, "an end of the world,"
for the Norse perspective of present-day NS. F. X. Martin, first published in 1827, says Cabot named today's Newfoundland Prima vista,
has him sailing all the way down to Chesapeake Bay, & notes that he
likely never made land fall.
<Micmac
History> asserts: "The first known contact [between Mi'kmaq &
Europeans] was made in 1497 by John Cabot who took three Micmac with him
when he returned to England. The Micmac may not have appreciated
this, since Cabot disappeared in the same area during his second voyage
a few years later." Hoffman's detailed analysis substantiates neither of
these claims. If Cabot was lost, it would have been on his third
voyage to the region in 1501. The Bristol adventurers who accompanied
Fernandes on his second voyage in 1501 were Richard Warde, Thomas
Ashehurst, & John Thomas. Also with "John" Fernandes were Francis
Fernandes, John Gonzales, & John Cabot, "probably acting as Captain."
The 1503 voyage out of Bristol included Francis Fernandes, its
organizer; John Gonzales; Hugh Eliot; & Thomas Ashehurst. See
Costain, 13; Hoffman, 14, 16-17; Quinn;
Seeley.
Bristol would play another role in Acadian
history: 266 years after Cabot's arrival in the bustling port,
Bristol would become a prison of sorts, with terrible consequences, for
Acadian exiles from Minas sent there from VA in 1756. See Book
Five.
Hoffman, 72-74, says the name
Labrador was not applied to its present location until after c1508.
England's new king, of course, was Henry VIII,
who, after his ascendancy to the throne in 1509, turned his imperial
attention eastward to Europe instead of westward to the New World.
According to Biggar, 2: "Whether in deference to the protest of
the Spanish ambassador at the English Court, or on account of the saving
proclivities of the then occupant of the English throne, or for some
other reason, English exploration in these regions [the North Atlantic]
ceased for a quarter of a century." Sebastian Cabot, no doubt dispirited by the policies of the new king,
did not remain in Bristol but moved to Spain, where
he was named Pilot Major. See Hoffman, 21. In 1516,
Englishman John Rastell "attempted an abortive Newfoundland voyage..."
but returned with descriptions of the abundant fishing there, which he
expressed the following year in poetry. See Hoffman, 187, 197 (quotation from 187); notes
05j, above, & 287,
below.
286. See
Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France, 2; Costain, The White & the Gold,
13-14; Historical Atlas of Canada,
1: plate 19; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 26-30, 41, 51-52, 169,
214; Gustave Lanctot, "La Roche de Mesgouez, Troilus de, Marquis de La
Roche-Mesgouez," in DCB, 1:422, &
online; Trudel, Canada's Forgotten Slaves, 11; online Wikipedia,
"Greenland," "Saint Pierre and Miquelon."
King Manuel I
ruled Portugal from Oct 1495 until Dec 1521, so that nation's official
explorations from da Gama to Fagundes occurred with his blessing.
The English called him King Emmanuel. He was a first cousin of his
predecessor, Joao, or John, II, grand-nephew of Prince
Henry the Navigator. Manuel wisely continued Joao's policy of
pushing exploration, north & west as well as south & east.
Manuel was succeeded by his son Joao, who became John III & ruled until
Jun 1557. See
online Wikipedia, "John II of Portugal," "John III of
Portugal," "Manuel I of Portugal."
For Gaspar Corte Real's naming today's
Newfoundland Terra Verde, which he found "lying under 50o N. latitude,"
see Hoffman, 27.
The map in Historical Atlas of Canada tracks the "Principal Explorations" of the North American
coast from 1497 to 1632 & includes the voyages of the Corte Reals
& Fagundes.
An account of the Newfoundland/Cape Breton
region made by French pilot/explorer Alfonse de Saintonge, who was in the area
in 1542, hints at the fate of Fagundes's short-lived
settlement: "Formerly the Portuguese sought to settle the island
which lies the lowest, but the natives of the country put an end to the
attempt, & killed all of those who came there...." See Hoffman, 169,
214; note 02t, above.
286a.
Quotation from Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 101. See also
Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France, 3-4; Hoffman, 102-04.
286b.
Quotations from Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France,
2-3. See also online Wikipedia, "Ferdinand Magellan"; note
01, above.
Biggar does not name the caravel or its
captain who reached Cape Charles in 1520. In late 1524 or early 1525, Portuguese mariner Estevan
Gômez, in the employ of Spain, would sail past Cape Charles from the
north, not the south. See note 02v,
above.
Cape Charles lies on the northern shore of the
entrance to/or the exit from today's Chesapeake Bay. At the cape
is the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which crosses
to the southern shore of the Bay near Cape Henry, Virginia Beach.
286c.
Quotation from Biggar, Early Trading Companies of New France, 3.
See also Biggar, 2; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 19; <grandcolombier.com/2013/01/02/an-english-history-of-saint-pierre-and-miquelon>; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 33-35, 56-57,
77, 86-87, 97-101, 169, 188-96.
Hoffman, published in 1961, does not place Fagundes any deeper
into the Gulf of St. Lawrence than the eastern & southern coasts of
Newfoundland, the latter lying east & west of îles St.-Pierre & Miquelon--the
Islands of the 11,000 Virgins. Biggar, 3, adds, in
contradiction to Hoffman: "On his [Fagundes's] return [to
Portugal] he received a grant of these lands, yet he seems to have made
no further attempt to explore them." Biggar published in
1901.
The map in Historical Atlas of Canada agrees with Hoffman about the limited extent of Fagundes's
exploration in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1520 &, following
Hoffman & contradicting Biggar, shows clearly that Fagundes
"discovered" the mouth of the Bay of Fundy in 1521 but did not
venture into the bay.
287.
Quotations from Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:47; Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 200; Erskine,
Nova Scotia, 5. See also Canny & Morgan, eds., The Atlantic World,
29, 64-65; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 5, 7,
8-9, 56-70, 75; Davis, S. A., Mi'kmaq; Dickinson & Young,
Quebec, chap. 1; Erskine, 1, 3, 6-7;
Fischer, Champlain's Dream, 110-12, 609-13; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 28-29;
Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:48, plates 20-22, 28; Hoffman, 30-32,
76-77, 187, 197-99, 201-03, 215; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour, 1; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:3; Richard, Acadia, 26; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country,
42-43; Ross & Deveau, The Acadians of Nova Scotia,
4-6, 22; Trudel, Beginnings of New France,
55-57, 150, 161-62; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, 21-23, 70,
73, 78; note 285, above.
Weidensaul, 21, contends that "Basque
fishermen may have been making trips to the northeastern coast of North
America as early as the thirteenth or fourteenth century, reaping the
unimaginable bounty of the cod-rich fishing banks off Newfoundland and
the Maritimes. Certainly by the fifteenth century, they were
regularly crossing the North Atlantic for the summer fishing season,
landing to salt and dry their catch, then bringing it back to Catholic
Europe, required to eat fish half the days of the ecclesiastical year."
If so, the Basques were paragons of secrecy, their "monopoly" not broken
until the 1480s, by fishermen from Bristol, England. Weidensaul,
23, notes that by the late 1500s, a lingua franca of pidgin
Basque had developed among the Natives & European fishermen along the
northeastern coast, evidence that the Basques were the first to exploit
the regional fisheries. Erskine, 4, insists that "The tombs of
French fishermen tell of voyages that would have preceded that of
Columbus," but he does not specify the location of these "tombs" or
describe them in any detail. Hoffman, 30, says: "From all
indications, commercial fishing in the new waters [of the North
Atlantic] was almost certainly in progress by 1502," 5 years after
Cabot's first voyage & a year after Gaspard Corte Real's second voyage
there, "and shortly reached considerable proportions."
Hoffman, 31,
notes the existence of "A royal ordinance of the Portuguese Crown, dated October 14,
1506, levying a tax on cod fish brought from Newfoundland...."
Hoffman, 97, quotes a poem written by English explorer John Rastell in
1517 that proclaims: "Nowe Frenchemen and others have found the
trade / That yearly of fyshe there they lade / Above an C. sayle."
Hoffman, 32, relates that, in 1522, "Vice Admiral Fitzwilliam reports the return of the English fishing fleet from Newfoundland to Cardinal
[Thomas] Wolsey," King Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor.
Hoffman, 32, provides a detailed evaluation
of the size of the French cod fishing fleets from 1523-56.
According to Hoffman's list, the
ports out of which the fishermen sailed included Croisic, Beny (Binie),
Pornic, St.-Brieue, Blavet (Port-Louis), Pleomur, La Rochelle, St.-Jean-de-Luz,
Ascaing, Bayonne, Ré, Barfleur, D'Olonne, De Jard, Rouen, St.-Pol-de-Léon,
De La Flotte, Arvert, St.-Just-en-Marennes, Erquey, & Talmont-sur-Jard. Ross & Deveau, 4, citing a study of the cod
fishery published in 1954 & reflecting Hoffman, 32, maintain that "Throughout the first half of
the sixteenth century, the fishing fleets in the New World belonged
mainly to France." They list the French Atlantic ports from which
fishermen & whalers sailed--Rouen & Dieppe in Normandy, St.-Malo in
Brittany, & La Rochelle in Aunis--& mention St.-Jean-de-Luz in the
country of the Basques, who "had pioneered whaling." They add, on
p. 22n5, that, "Until the early 1800s, the Basques negotiated as a
separate nation." Dickinson & Young, 14, 16, say of another
seagoing industry: "Whaling also was an important activity off the
coast of Labrador and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the mid-sixteenth
century on. It required more capital than cod fishing, because it
needed to equip larger vessels of 200 to 300 tonnes with crews of fifty
sailors. Whalers also needed shore bases with lodgings and
elaborate equipment, such as ovens to render oil from blubber.
These bases offered native people both employment and the opportunity of
scavenging for discarded metalware." Weidensaul, 21, says "In 1412
a [Basque] fleet of 20 whaling ships passed Iceland, heading west."
See also note 10,
above.
Hoffman, 197-98, offers these details of
the development of the North Atlantic fisheries: "The importance
of various fishing grounds undoubtedly varied greatly from year to year,
and changed as new fields were discovered. The cartographical
sources seem to indicate that the fishing grounds first exploited were
those around Fogo Island [off the northeast coast of Newfoundland]--it
is in this region that the name 'peseharias' first appears on the
Grazisoso Bencase Chart of c.1502.... Other scattered references
seem to indicate exploration of the fishing resources east of Nova
Scotia by Portuguese and Breton fishermen before 1510, but numerous
independent statements also seem to signify that the rich fishing area
of the 'Bacallos' was not discovered until the occasion of the
[Sebastian] Cabot expedition of 1508. In the years preceding 1520
both the east and south coasts of Newfoundland were re-explored by
Fagundes and more new fishing grounds were opened up. The fishing
banks to the south of Newfoundland also seem to have been first
discovered and exploited during this period, although their full
utilization probably hinged upon the development of large fishing
vessels equipped to operate at considerable distances from land, and
upon the establishment of economic institutions to finance them in the
port cities of Europe. By 1534 [the year of Cartier's first voyage
to the Gulf of St. Lawrence], judging from the indications of ports,
harbours, watering places, and islands given upon the portolanos
[sailing charts], the fisheries extended along the entire Atlantic
coastline from southeastern Labrador to southern Nova Scotia. With
the advent of Cartier's discovery the industry rapidly expanded into the
Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the river." See also Historical Atlas of Canada,
1: plates 21, 28; note 286, above.
Hoffman, 198-200, details the differences
between the "wet" & "dry" fisheries, including nuances of geography,
climate, availability of salt, & consumer tastes, as well as the
destructive results of the "dry" fishing process to coastal flora,
fauna, & native peoples. Hoffman, 199, notes: "In general ... the English engaged largely in 'dry'
fishery activities on the east coast of Newfoundland and 'on the
Labrador,' while the French, Spanish, and Portuguese largely engaged in
'wet' fishery operations off the northern coast of Newfoundland and the
eastern coast of Nova Scotia, although they could also extend their
activities further to the north." See also Griffiths, 28-29; Trudel, 57.
Dickinson & Young, 15, offers a contemporary illustration of the green &
dry fisheries. Dickinson & Young, 14, also add: "In the
green fishery, the cod was cleaned and salted on board ship. Ships
engaged in this fishery landed only briefly in Newfoundland and on the
continent to replenish water and firewood supplies. With its huge
salt requirements, the green fishery was dominated by ports in
southwestern France, where salt was cheap and plentiful. Cod
processed this way was worth less on European markets, but the ships
could make two transatlantic trips a year." And: "In the dry
fishery, fishermen established coastal bases from which they fished the
inshore waters in small boats. They brought the cod ashore,
cleaned and laid it out on drying flakes, and saved the livers
separately in barrels. Although the dry fishery was more labour
intensive and required spending two to three months a year in
Newfoundland, it produced a higher-quality and higher-priced cod.
Cod was caught not only for food but also for oil that could be
extracted from the livers. Cod oil and whale oil were the main
machine lubricant and lamp fuel used at that time." Exploitation of the northern ocean fishery was motivated,
of course, by religious practices throughout Europe during the late medieval & early modern periods,
Protestant as well as Catholic. When
meat, even meat products, could not be consumed because of religious
proscriptions, fish, which Europeans did not consider to be "meat," was
a healthy & convenient substitute.
The first "northern ocean" Natives to make contact with European
explorers & fishermen were the Béothuk of Newfoundland, who were
driven to extinction; Thule Inuits from Labrador who moved to the
northern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; Montagnais on the lower St. Lawrence; Mi'kmaq,
sometimes called the Gaspésie, on the Gaspé peninsula, Cape Breton Island,
& peninsula Nova Scotia; & the Laurentian or St. Lawrence Iroquois, who ventured from the upper river
all the way down to the Strait of Belle-Isle to fish & hunt for seal &
walrus. See Historical
Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 20; Hoffman, 215; <Micmac
History>; notes
02f & 02h,
above. For histories of the Natives of
French Acadia, from Paleolithic to historical times, see Clark, A. H., 5,
8-9, 56-70; S. A. Davis; Dickinson & Young, chap. 1; <Micmac
History>. For descriptions of the impact of European
contact on Native peoples in general, see Clark, A. H., 9; Dickinson &
Young, chap. 1; Erskine, 5-6.
For a detailed evaluation of European-Native interaction, see Hoffman, 198-202. For the many names & locations of Indian nations in what
became New France, see Dickinson & Young, 5, figure 2; Fischer, 609-13.
Hoffman, 199, makes this observation, viz. contact
between European fishermen & the Natives of NS--that is, the
Mi'kmaq: "The distinction between the 'wet' and 'dry' fishery, and
the differing geography of the fishing area, had important implications
for the contact existing between Indians and Europeans. South of
Newfoundland and east of Nova Scotia the fishing grounds were great
distances from land, and the 'wet' cure was dominant. Fishermen
operating in these regions located the fishing areas by taking
soundings, observing the bird life, and watching the surface of the
water, instead of employing shore features and landmarks, as was done
further to the north. Under these circumstances, a voyage to the
coasts of Cape Breton or Nova Scotia was unnecessary, and wasted
precious time and supplies. The restocking of the boats with fresh
water and meat, if these were in short supply, was apparently done at
St. John's and the 'Baccallaos' before the ships proceeded westward to
the scene of their operations. The cartographical documents for
the period in question reflects this round of activity, showing the
harbours, ports, and watering places of Newfoundland in considerable
detail, but almost completely neglecting the more southerly and westerly
shores."
Hoffman, 201-03, says the trade for furs
between Natives & fishermen in the northern region began as early as
1503/04, that is, from the beginning of European exploitation of the
cod-fishing grounds off Newfoundland & Labrador, & speculates that the
trade may have transformed some of the regional nations into turning from "a
maritime culture to a hunting culture" to accommodate the trade by 1600.
Quotation from 203. Trudel, 150, adds: "In the
sixteenth century, European presence in North America can hardly
be said to have been anything more that occasional and fleeting.
When Europeans came to spend the winter, they lived on the fringe of the
native society; those engaged in the drying of fish came only in summer.
This presence had already brought about certain changes in the way of
life of some groups of natives, but its influence had as yet touched
only the coastal regions. Europe was still only on the threshold
of the new continent." See also Dickinson & Young, 17. Griffith, 28,
notes: "In sum, the European exploitation of the
Atlantic fisheries of the seventeenth century was not a passive
background to exploration and settlement efforts but something without
which the latter would never have occurred." Dickinson &
Young, 14, add: "The development of the Newfoundland fishery
signalled the beginning of North America's integration into European
merchant capitalism."
288. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 800-02; White, DGFA-1, 1469-72;
White, DGFA-1 English, 309; Book Two;
Boucher
family page.
Arsenault, 801, attempts to link François
Simoneaux of LA to this family, but François was not a Simon,
nor was the surname Simoneau/Simoneaux a dit.
François was a native of Lorraine in France & married an Acadian deportee in
MD, having never lived in greater Acadia himself. This researcher has found no descendant of André Simon
dit Boucher who emigrated to LA. The Simons of the
Bayou State are either French Creole, French Canadian, Foreign French, or Hispanic.
289. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1364-65, 2080;
Faragher, A Great &
Noble Scheme, 359; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 436;
<islandregister.com/1752.html.>;
White, DGFA-1,
336-37; White, DGFA-1 English, 74-75;
Book Two.
So who was the Baptiste, likely Jean-Baptiste, Galerne serving as a
delegate from Pigiguit in Sep 1754? See Faragher; Griffiths; Book Two. Was Baptiste a La Gerne? If so,
this researcher has not found him in Arsenault or White.
290.
Quotations from Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," in DCB, 1:62;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 108. See
also Baudry, 1:61, 63; Cormier, "Mius
(Muis) d'Entremont," in DCB, 1:510;
Fischer,
Champlain's Dream,
368, 375-76, 700n7;
Griffiths, 118, 134;
André Vachon,
"Talon, Jean," in
DCB,
1:615,
&
online;
online Wikipedia, "Governor General of New France," "Intendant of New France";
notes 39b,
40, 40a,
44a, 100, above.
Griffiths, 108, translates d'Entremont's
position, procureur du roi, as "attorney general."
Other sources, including Fr. Cormier's biography of d'Entremont,
prefer the translation "King's attorney." Philippe held the
position for 18 years, until he was succeeded by a much younger Pierre
Chênet Dubrueil in 1688. See note
295a, below.
It must be remembered that Acadian royal
governors were essentially military commanders with administrative
powers, who were granted little or no power over finances & justice,
which generally was the purview of intendants or commissaire-ordonnateurs,
the latter office translated as
authorizing commissioners or financial commissaries. Fischer,
368, 700n7, notes that the office of royal
intendant,
part of "the developing institutions of royal absolutism in France,"
existed in France, & also in New France, before Richelieu came to power.
The first royal
intendant
of New France was appointed in 1620, during the governorship of Samuel
de Champlain; he was Jean-Jacques Dolu, one of the King Louis XIII's
advisors & chief usher at court. This was 4 years before Richelieu
became Louis XIII's chief minister. See Fischer, 368, 375-76. Vachon
relates: "In 1665 Louis XIV and Colbert were looking for an
intendant
for Canada. Louis Robert de Fortel had been appointed to the
office on 21 March 1663; but, for reasons that have remained unknown, he
never went to New France," so Talon received the post. As a
result, New
France/Canada had
intendants
from 1665 until the fall of New France in 1763. Acadia, France's
oldest North American colony, was never given an
intendant
or even an
ordonnateur,
unlike later colonies of French North America
(Louisiana, created in 1699, eventually was given an
ordonnateur,
& Île Royale, created in 1713, had an
ordonnateur
from the beginning; see Books Two & Four). In French Acadia, financial & judicial
matters fell to the King's attorney or the
lieutenant général civil et criminal,
translated as general representative for justice, both of whom answered
to the
intendant in Québec, as Acadia's governors answered to that
officer as well as the governor-general, also seated at Québec.
This gave Acadia a lower status, in mind as well as matter, during the
40 years of its existence as a French royal colony. See Griffiths,
134.
290a.
Quotation from Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," in DCB, 1:62-63.
See also Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 108, 111-12, 126;
Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,
Jean-Vincent, d'," in DCB, 2:4-7; notes
42 & 141, above.
Griffiths, 108, says Granfontaine had little success "in terms of enticing and
establishing settlers."
For Pentagouët's founding in 1613 & some its
early history, see notes 13,
15a, & 18,
above. Griffiths, 111-12, says of the post during the 1670s:
"... those French regimes that were based at Pentagöuet or Jemseg [on
Rivière St.-Jean] were always in a much more difficult position than
those based at Port-Royal, because neither fort could rely upon local
agriculture for adequate supplies of cereals, fruits, and vegetables.
The area around Pentagöuet had been farmed during d'Aulnay's tenure, and
there had been a mill and an orchard at that time. But the 1671
census reported neither cleared land nor animals at Pentagöuet.
The correspondence between Quebec and Versailles gives contradictory
information about the food supply there. On 11 November 1671 Talon
informed Colbert that the garrison was 'the more easily provisioned
because of the fish and shellfish that the proximity to sea made
abundant.' In the same letter, Talon also remarked on the quantity
of meat sent annually to Boston from the colony, in exchange for cloth.
Yet, in November 1672, Frontenac--who had arrived in Quebec as the
governor of Canada in April of that year--wrote to Colbert about the
miserable situation of Grandfontaine. Frontenac reported that he
had dispatched provisions for the relief of the fort but it is not known
what these were. It in unlikely that the garrison was in danger of
starvation, given the hunting possibilities. What was probably
lacking was flour and peas, beans and lentils, particularly necessary in
an age before the potato for any balanced diet, and perhaps reasonable
clothing for the winter. At any rate, no reports have survived of
either death or serious illness among the soldiers, such as scurvy,
which would result from any serious lack of food." Professor
Griffiths does not mention what Baudry, cited above, claimed, that
Grandfontaine was compelled to winter some of his soldiers at
Port-Royal. She does go on to say that, during the
early 1670s, French officials, that is, Colbert, neglected Canada as
well as Acadia, the latter especially. See 112.
For more on Saint-Castin & his family
in Acadia, see Salagnac; note 297, below; Book
Two.
290b.
Quotations from Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," in DCB, 1:63;
Webster, Acadia, 214-15; MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges,"
in DCB, 1:399.
See also Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 109-10, 127, 137-38; Léopold Lamontagne,
"Daumont, de Saint-Lusson, Simon-François," in DCB, 1:249, &
online; MacDonald, Fortune & La Tour,
38-39; notes 13,
19b, 105;
Book Two.
The
exploration team that discovered the Kennebec-Chaudière route was led by
Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson, who departed Québec in the
summer of 1671 & returned to Québec on Nov 11, "half-dead" from his
exertions. Talon reported to Minister Colbert in France:
"... the sieur de Saint-Lusson returns from Pentagouet ... but so broken
down by the fatigue of his journey, and so enfeebled by the hunger he
suffered, that I doubt his ability to go to France, whither I should be
very glad he would repair to have the honor to inform you, in person,
what he saw at the Rivers Pemcuit and Kiniliki.'" Saint-Lausson
did recover his health & sailed to France. It was Saint-Lusson who
had led an expedition from the Lawrence valley to Sault-Ste.-Marie, at
the junction of lakes Superior & Huron, in 1670 & had claimed much of
the pays d'en haut for France. See Lamontagne;
Book
Seven.
Meductic, also called Madawamkeetook,
Medoctec, Medogtec, Medogteh, Medocktach, was Maliseet for "a fall or
rapid" & was one of the few fortified Indian villages in the region.
See Webster; online Wikipedia, "Meductic Indian Village/Fort
Meductic."
The
Kennebec-Chaudière
portage, another one via the headwaters of the Penobscot to a tributary
of the St. Lawrence, & of course the St.-Jean/Rivière-du-Loup portage,
had been known to the French since the early 1600s with the explorations of
Samuel de Champlain. See MacDonald, 38; notes
07 & 08b,
above. Seaborne communication between Acadia &
Canada, when possible, could be faster of course, but it required a long,
roundabout voyage from the Fundy settlements to the Atlantic side of the
peninsula & then through the narrow Strait of Canso to the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, which one followed along its southern & western shores around
the Gaspé peninsula to the lower St. Lawrence. One also could take a
shortcut up the Bay of Fundy to the Baie de Chignecto, follow Rivière
Missaguash by canoe or flatboat to its upper reaches, & then portage to
Baie-Verte, which lay on the southern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence
& from which one could continue on to the lower St. Lawrence. The
lower stretches of the St. Lawrence were dozens of miles wide, but rocky
islands & hidden shoals made the passage up or down the great river
treacherous to anyone but skilled navigators & experienced pilots.
Worse yet, the mouth of the St. Lawrence & its lower reaches lay at such a northern latitude
that it was blocked by ice for half of the year. Although the
St.-Jean/Rivière-du-Loupe portage in winter, especially upriver to Canada,
was a long, tedious haul & thus no easy venture, the ice in the river &
lakes, if not broken up, could be an enhancement to travel, not a hindrance. If one was forced to travel from Québec to
Acadia during the dead of winter, the Kennebec, Penobscot, & St.-Jean portages,
especially the latter, were
the only feasible routes to take. For
the military importance of the St.-Jean portage during the final days of
French power in North America, see Book Two.
Exactly where was Kidiscuit? What is it
called today?
For the establishment of a post-dispersal
Acadian community on the upper St.-Jean in the Madawaka/Témiscouata
region of present-day ME, NB, QC, see Joseph Donald Cyr, "Madawaska
Settlement in Maine and New Brunswick," in Perrin et al., eds.,
Acadie Then & Now, 370-79; Book Five.
290c.
Quotations from Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," in DCB, 1:63.
See also Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 105-08, 137-38.
290d.
Quotation from MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges," in DCB, 1:399. See
also Baudry, "Andigné de Grandfontaine," in DCB, 1:63; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 110, 112.
Joybert's wife was Marie-Françoise, daughter of
New French attorney general Louis-Théandre Chartier de Lotbenière.
See Griffiths, 110. His previous service in Canada, as well as
his family connections, secured for him not only grants along Rivière
St.-Jean & "command" of the lower river, but also appointments as
commander & then governor of the entire colony later in the decade.
See note 292, below.
Griffiths, 112, says Grandfontaine
left Acadia in May 1673, which would have been months before his
replacement reached Pentagouët. Baudry says Grandfontaine was recalled on 5 May 1673
but did not return to France until the following Dec, after
Chambly reached Pentagouët.
291. See
René Baudry, "Chambly, Jacques de," in DCB, 1:185,
&
online;
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 112; Martin, F.-X.,
Louisiana, 1:73; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent,"
in DCB, 2:4; online
Wikipedia, "Chambly, Quebec."
One of the young officers in Chambly's company
of the Carignan-Salières Regiment in Canada was Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie
de Saint-Castin, who was only 13 years old in 1665 while serving as
an ensign. See Salagnac; notes 141 &
290a, above.
291a.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 113; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent,"
in DCB, 2:5. See also Baudry, "Chambly," in DCB, 1:185;
Griffiths, 112; MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges,"
in DCB, 1:399; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:80; William I. Roberts, 3rd, "Aernoutsz (Arentson,
Aernoutson), Jurriaen," in DCB, 1:39-40,
&
online; William I. Roberts, 3rd,
"Rhoades (Rhode), John," in DCB, 1:573,
&
online; online Wikipedia,
"Franco-Dutch War," "Anglo-Dutch Wars"; note 144, above.
Judge Martin says Chambly "was surprised in
the fort at Pentagoet, by an English adventurer, who had lurked in the
garrison for several days" & calls Aernoutsz "a Flemish privateer" with
a crew of "about one hundred in number." The Dutchmen claimed they captured the
stone fort at Pentagouët after only 2 hours of fighting. See
Roberts, "Aernoutsz," 1:40. This is impressive
considering that, the year before, Pentagouët could boast "a minimum of
eight iron guns and two small culverines within the walls of the fort,
and two guns outside the walls," which was a heavier armament than the 8
cannon aboard the Flying Horse. Griffiths adds: "The amount of powder and shot that the fort held is not
known. The exact strength of the garrison is also a matter of
dispute, the figures ranging from twenty-three to thirty men." See
Griffiths, 112-13 (quotation from 112).
Griffiths, 113, says Aernoutsz formally lay
claim for Holland to the territory from Rivière St.-Jean down to
Pentagouët "by burying bottles with copies of his commission in
them...." Online Wikipedia, "Franco-Dutch War," says that, despite
Aernoutsz's capture of Pentagouët & his naming Cornelius Van Steenwyk as
governor of New Holland, the French retained actual control of the
colony after Aernoutsz sailed on to Boston. Judge Martin insists
that, with the fall of Pentagouët & Rivière St.-Jean, "the whole country
fell into the power of the invaders."
After his release from prison, Rhoades left MA & evidently went to DE, where he was reported to be
in 1678. See Griffiths, 113.
291b.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 113. See
also Baudry, "Chambly," in DCB, 1:185; Griffiths, 115; MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges,"
in DCB, 1:399; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:80; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent,"
in DCB, 2:5.
Griffiths, 113, 115, points out that Colbert
believed Chambly was negligent in his confrontation with the
Dutchmen at Pentagöuet.
Judge Martin insists King Charles II
"disavowed this act of hostility, committed in a period of profound
peace," & that "It had been planned, and the means of its execution had
been procured, in Boston."
291c.
See Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 113-14.
Griffiths, 113, says the Dutch raid "was no more than a minor irritant for the
Acadian communities" on the Bay of Fundy. "The Treaty of Nimwegen
in 1678, which ended the war between France and Holland, did not even
mention the matter." She does conclude, however, that, from
another perspective, "the raid was much more significant: it ended
official French occupation of Pentagöuet and greatly weakened any claim
for placing the boundary of Acadia much farther south than the St. Croix
River. The success of the pirate[sic]'s assault exposed the total
inadequacy of the French military presence in Acadia, as well as the
extent to which French forces along the St. Lawrence were barely
sufficient for the defence of Canada itself." See 113-14.
(Technically, Aernoutsz was a privateer, not a pirate, since in 1674
Holland was officially at war with France & the Dutchman sailed no doubt
with letters of marque issued by the governor of the Dutch West Indies.
See note 291a, above.)
See note 45a, etc., above, for short
biographies of new settlers who came to greater Acadia during the
mid-1670s.
292.
Quotation from MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges," in DCB, 1:399.
See also MacBeath, 1:398-99; note
40, above.
292a.
Quotation from MacBeath, "Joybert de Soulanges," in DCB, 1:399. See
also Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 113-16; MacBeath, 1:400;
Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent,"
in DCB, 2:5;
White, DGFA-1, 878;
note
105, above.
Pentagouët was not completely abandoned after
Joybert became governor.
Saint-Castin, having married the daughter of a Penobscot chief in
c1670 & left active service after 1674, made Pentagouët his
headquarters, building his fortified home/trading post at or near his old post. See notes
141,
290a, above. Saint-Castin's presence there, along with
future seigneurial grants along the Maine coast north of the old
headquarters, perpetuated, more or less, French claims to the area, but
the French would no longer maintain any sort of military presence
south of the forts along the lower St.-Jean, only a military
alliance with the new Wabanaki Confederacy, which served as a kind of
mobile defense force. See Griffiths, 114; Salagnac; note 292c, below.
According Griffiths, 116, Joybert's authority
as royal governor "does not seem to have extended even as far as Port
Royal, let alone to the Atlantic coast." Ironically, his chief
source of supply for many items remained at Boston.
Joybert's son,
Pierre-Jacques de Soulanges, followed in his father's footsteps and
became a soldier. He married Marie-Anne, daughter of Canadian
aristocrat Pierre Bécard de Granville, at Québec in Nov 1702 but died of
smallpox at the Canadian capital the following Jan. Joybert's
daughter, Louise-Élisabeth, married Philippe
de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil, future governor-general of New
France, at Québec in Nov 1690. Louise-Élisabeth became the mother of
Pierre-François de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, who
served as governor of LA and was the first native-born
governor-general of New France. See White.
By the early 1700s, the Widow Joybert forfeited
her dead husband's grants on Rivière St.-Jean "due to non-fulfillment of
conditions." She died at Paris in 1732, never having remarried.
See MacBeath, 1:400.
292b.
See Deans, The River Where America Began, 140-50; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 114; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country,
90-109, 130, 140-50; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, chap. 5; note 291a,
above.
Metacom's name also is rendered by the English
as Metacomet & Pometacom. Deans, 145, says King Philip's War took the lives of some 2,500 colonists
& 5,000 Indians. Online Wikipedia, "King Philip's War," says 600
colonists & 3,000 Natives perished in the struggle.
Weidensaul, 166, says, "In terms of the proportion of the population
killed, King Philip's War still ranks as the bloodiest conflict ever
waged on American soil, and one of the nastiest." Weidensaul, 174,
says Metacom's killer was "a Christian Pocasset named John Alderman,"
was had joined the English, that he "shot Philip himself, & that "The
sachem's body was quartered, and Alderman was given the head and one of
Philip's hands, which bore distinctive scars. Alderman turned in
the head for the standard bounty of thirty shillings, and Philip's
bleached skull was displayed on a pole in Plymouth for decades
thereafter." Captain Benjamin Church of Plymouth was Alderman's
commander during the Puritan assault in the Assawomsett Swamp--the Great
Swamp Fight--& is often given credit for killing King Philip. See
Weidensaul, 407n174.
That the Pequots were allies of the Puritans
in their fight against Metacom & his Wampanoag is ironic considering
that the first major war between whites & Indians in New England was the
Pequot War of 1634-38, fought in the Connecticut River valley only a few
years after the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony & during the
infancy of the CN colony. In that war, the Mohegan, traditional enemies
of the Pequot, & the Narragansett allied with the Puritans. See
online Wikipedia, "Pequot War"; note
21b, above. For decades before
Metacom's War, the Narragansett had been enemies of the Wampanoag but
found a common enemy in the pushy New-English colonists. See
Richter, 101-02.
For Bacon's Rebellion, see Deans; Richter,
105-09. For Andros's motives in coaxing the Mohawk to attack
Metacom's allies, see Richter, 140-50.
292c.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 115, 138. See
also Griffiths, 114, 139; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:96; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent,"
in DCB, 2:6; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, chap. 5,
especially 176-78; Wikipedia, "King
Philip's War"; note 140, above.
In late 1675 & early 1676, John
Laverdure of Boston, younger brother of Acadian settlers Pierre
Melanson, fils and Charles Melanson
of Port-Royal, was part of an unauthorized slave raid at Machias and
Cap-Sable that helped precipitate war with the Abenaki. See
Melanson, Melanson-Melançon, 22; note
44c, above.
292d.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 115. See
also Faulkner & Faulkner, The
French at Pentagoet, 29, 38; Griffiths, 138-39; Melanson,
Melanson-Melançon, 22; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent,"
in DCB, 2:5-6; note 292c, above.
According to Faulkner & Faulkner, 29, Saint-Castin's trading
post lay "within a village of 160 Etchemins [Abenaki] Indians ... about
a mile and a half up the Bagaduce River from Fort Pentagoet," now in
ruin, & "consisted of two simple European structures within a settlement
of 32 wigwams." See also Faulkner & Faulkner, 38.
293.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 117.
The site of La Vallière's Chignecto seat is
today's Tonge's Island, near Amherst, NS. For this & Nicolas
Denys's protest against the 1676 grant to his son-in-law, which
Denys
claimed violated a grant made to him in 1654, see note
90, above.
293a.
See Comeau, "LeNeuf de la Vallière de
Beaubassin, Michel (the elder)," in DCB, 2:409; Griffiths,
From Migrant to Acadian, 116; White, DGFA-1, 1067-71; Book
Three.
293b.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 121, 123; Fergusson, "Bergier,"
in DCB, 1:89; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 157.
See also
Donald F. Chard, "Nelson, John," in
DCB, 2:494,
&
online; Clark, A. H., 156; Comeau, "LeNeuf de la Vallière de
Beaubassin, Michel (the elder)," in DCB, 2:410;
Eccles, "Meulles," in DCB, 2:473; Fergusson, "Bergier," 1:90; C.
Bruce Fergusson, "Duret de Chevry de La Boulaye, Charles," in DCB,
1:298-99, &
online; Griffiths, 119-20, 122, 124,
137, 141-42; Haynes, The Forgotten Battle;
White, DGFA-1, 1067; notes 290c, above,
& 295, below; Book Two.
For a temporary resolution in 1682 of the
dispute between New France & New England over fishing rights, see
Chard.
According to Griffiths, 122, the chief
critic of Huguenot activity in the Acadia before the issuance of the
fishing company's charter was Jean Dudouyt, vicar general of the
Canadian church, who complained to the Minister of Marine, the Marquis
de Seignelay, son of the recently deceased Colbert, that "to allow
Bergier to proceed would be contrary to the interests of France, of the
King, and of God himself." Bishop Laval of Québec also sought to
keep Protestants out of Canada as well as Acadia. Griffiths
concludes: "Such hostility meant that when the company ran into
difficulties, which it did, officials were hesitant to come to its aid."
One would suspect that this was especially true after the King's
revocation of the Edicts of Nantes in 1685. See also Griffiths, 123.
Also in La Vallière's corner during the
struggle with Bergier was Richard Denys de Fronsac, Nicolas
Denys's only surviving son & La Vallière's
brother-in-law. Nicolas did not die until 1688, in his mid-80s, so
Richard represented his father's interests in the region.
See Fergusson, "Bergier," 1:90; Griffiths, 123; note 38,
above.
From the autumn of 1685
to the spring of 1686, while conducting a census of Acadia, New
French intendant Jacques de Meulles spent 5 months at La Vallière's Beaubassin estate. See
Comeau; Eccles; note
45, above.
According to Griffiths, 123, Bergier's appointment as King's lieutenant in
Acadia was dated 10 Apr 1684, the same day La Vallière was dismissed
from his offices. Bergier's biographer dates the appointment
Apr 14. See Fergusson, "Bergier," 1:90. Bergier's star fell as quickly as it had
risen. Later in 1684, though he had been appointed earlier that
year as King's lieutenant in Acadia for 3 years, he was replaced in that
office by Charles Duret de Chevry de La Boulaye, nephew of the Marquis
de Neuville & kinsman of the Marquis de Villeneuve. The Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685, which revoked the
Edict of Nantes of 1598, sealed the fate of Huguenots like Bergier in
France & its colonies. See Griffiths, 123-24; note
147, above. Meanwhile, merchant Antoine Héron replaced Bergier as
director of the
Compagnie d'Acadie. In Apr 1687, despite his
Protestantism, Bergier was awarded the fishing concession
for Cape Breton Island, which once belonged to Nicolas Denys.
See Fergusson, "Bergier," 1:90.
Griffiths, 137, shows that even the Treaty of Neutrality signed
by the French & English at Whitehall in Nov 1686 did little or
nothing to end the squabble between French Acadia & New England over
fishing rights in Acadian waters. It simply was unenforceable. See also note
147, above.
293c.
Quotation from Comeau, "LeNeuf de la Vallière de Beaubassin, Michel (the
elder)," in DCB, 2:410.
293d.
Quotation from Comeau, "LeNeuf de la Vallière de Beaubassin, Michel (the
elder)," in DCB, 2:410. See also note 96,
above; Book Four.
293e.
Quotations from Comeau, "LeNeuf de la Vallière de Beaubassin, Michel (the
elder)," in DCB, 2:410; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 117, 119.
See also Léopold Lamontagne, "Duchesneau de La Doussinière et D'Ambault,
Jacques," in DCB, 1:287-90, &
online; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:96.
Judge Martin, in
the context of 1680, insists that "The English, being so far successful"
in their fight against the Abenaki of Maine following King Philip's War,
"invaded Acadie and took the forts at Pentagoet and the river St. John.
Valliere, who commanded at Port Royal, could not
prevent the inhabitants from surrendering that place. Thus were
the French once more driven from the country." No other source
supports this assertion, & Judge Martin offers no citation to support
it.
293f.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 119. See
also note
90, above.
294.
Quotation from
W. J. Eccles, "Perrot, François-Marie," in DCB, 1:541,
&
online.
See also Eccles, 1:540; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 135; Martin, F.-X., Louisiana,
1:80-81.
Griffiths calls Perrot Talon's son-in-law, but Eccles, 1:540,
followed here, says Perrot's wife was Talon's niece.
294a.
See Eccles, "Perrot," in DCB, 1:541; Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 135, 499.
Griffiths, 499n6, calls Perrot an "engaging
scamp."
294b.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 131, 136. See
also Eccles, "Perrot," in DCB, 1:541; note
290, above.
294c.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 127-31; Alfred Rambaud, "La
Croix de Chevrières de Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de," in DCB, 2:328-34, &
online.
See also Griffiths, 124, 131-32; Rambaud, 2:328; Surette, Mésagouche & LaButte,
334; Vachon, "Laval," in DCB, 2:358, 362,
365, 370-71; note
290b, above.
De Saint-Vallier, a native of Grenoble, France,
was, according to Rambaud, only 32 years old at the time of his visit to Acadia.
Griffiths, 128, says he was age 36 in 1686, but this would have been his
age during his second visit to Acadia, in 1689. (Rambaud, 2:328,
followed here, gives De Saint-Vallier's birthday as 14 Nov 1653.) His predecessor Laval
was age 62 in 1685 when he resigned as Bishop of Québec due to failing health & had been age 35 when he had been consecrated the vicar apostolic, or
temporary bishop, of Canada in
Dec 1658. See Vachon. Because of the
usual delays in communication between Paris & Rome, De Saint-Vallier was
not consecrated as the second Bishop of Québec until Jan 1688.
When he made his first visit to Acadia, then, his title was vicar general, but he
was acting as bishop in New France nonetheless while Laval lingered in
France. See Rambaud, 2:328; Vachon, 2:358, 362,
370-71.
Laval had taken his seat as Bishop of
Québec in Jun 1659; more accurately, he served as vicar apostolic of the church in Canada; the
Diocese of Québec was not created by Rome until 1675, so he could not
have been an ordinary, or bishop, until then. Acadia had fallen
under English control in 1654, so it would have been unwise for Laval to
have made a pastoral visit to that part of New France until restoration
of French control there in 1670. Meanwhile, he completed his first
apostolic visit to the other New French settlements in 1660, having
"begun at Gaspé, where he had stopped off at the time of his crossing to
Canada" the year before. Laval, as bishop, made another visit to "his diocese" in 1681, but his
biographer does not say if Acadia was part of the tour. If
it was not (& Griffiths makes no mention if it), then De Saint-Vallier's
first visit in 1686 would have been the first time
Acadian habitants laid eyes on their bishop, over a quarter century
after the office was created. See Vachon, 2:365, 370;
note 39b, above.
294d.
Quotations from Eccles, "Perrot," in DCB, 1:542.
Villebon, a nephew of
La Vallière
of Beaubassin, assumed the role of colonial commander earlier that year
and oversaw the colony from Nashouat on lower Rivière St.-Jean.
See note 295e, below.
294e.
Quotations from Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 127-32; Hodson, Acadian Diaspora, 24-25. See also
Acadiensia Nova, 1:85-124; W. J. Eccles, "Meulles,
Jacques de," in DCB, 2:473,
&
online;
Griffiths, 134; A. J. E. Lunn, "Denys de Bonaventure,
Simon-Pierre," in DCB, 2:177, &
online;
notes 38, above, &
293b, below.
Eccles
says de Meulles left Québec in a
barque but gives no details of his Acadian tour. For that, see
Acadiensia Nova; Griffiths; note 45, above.
294f.
Quotations from Eccles, "Perrot," in DCB, 1:541-42,
Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 135. See also Fergusson, "Bergier,"
in DCB, 1:90; Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,"
Jean-Vincent," in DCB, 2:6; note 293b, above.
294g.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 128. See
also Eccles, "Meulles," in DCB, 2:470-73.
295.
Quotations from Griffiths, From Migrant to
Acadian, 140; Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval,"
in DCB, 2:182. See also
Acadiensia Nova, 1:165-67, 171; Chiasson, Island of Seven Cities,
120; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 124-25; Griffiths, 139, 141-46, 501;
E. LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon," in DCB, 1:577; notes
40, 149b,
&
293b, above.
For Gargas, see Chiasson; Griffiths, 143-44; E. LeBlanc. For Gargas's census of 1687-88, see
Acadiensia Nova, 1:140-41, 143-99; Clark, A. H., 124-25;
Griffiths, 142, 144-46, 501n50. As Clark, A. H., 124,
points out, Gargas's first name has been lost to history. Even the
reports in Gargas's own hands to the Ministry of Marine, found in
Acadiensia Nova, cited above, do not reveal it. At the
end of his lengthy report of his sojourns in Acadia, he signs simply "de
Gargas, écrivain principal." See
Acadiensia Nova, 1:199.
295a.
See
Acadiensia Nova, 1:174; Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:182; notes
222 & 235,
above.
295b.
Quotation from Pothier, "Goutin," in DCB, 2:257. See also
White, DGFA-1, 1508-09; White, DGFA-1 English,
319; note
72, above.
Pierre Thibodeau's younger daughters
would marry into the Le Borgne de Bélisle, D'Amours de
Louvières, & Bourgeois families. His seven sons would
marry girls from the Bourg, Hébert, Préjean,
Aucoin, Dugas, & Comeau families, also early &
established. Every one of his 16 children, in fact, not only
survived childhood, but also created families of their own!
See White, DGFA-1; Book Two. Personal note:
the author is proud to say that
he is a direct descendant of Pierre Thibodeau through 3 of his
sons, Jean, Michel, & Charles (the youngest).
295c.
Quotations from
Yves F.
Zoltvany, "Laumet, Antoine, dit de Lamothe Cadillac," in
DCB, 2:352,
&
online;
Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," in
DCB, 2:183.
See
also
Mathé Allain, "Cadillac, Antoine Laumet,
dit Antoine de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac," in DLB,
139-40;
Griffiths, From
Migrant to Acadian, 143-45;
Zoltvany, "Laumet," 2:351; Books Two & Four.
For details of Meneval's frequent clashes with
Gargas, who remained in the colony only a year, see Griffiths, 143-44. Griffiths notes that Gargas also
was an enemy of future Acadian commander Joseph Robinau de Villebon, a
Canadian & kinsman of La Vallière of Beaubassin, who, at the time
of Gargas's stay in the colony, was Meneval's chief lieutenant.
See
Acadiensia Nova, 1:167ff; Griffiths, 145; note 179d,
above.
295d.
Quotations from Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:182.
295e. Quotations from Baudry, "Des Friches
de Meneval," in DCB, 2:182. See also Baudry, 2:183; Émery LeBlanc, "Pasquine (Paquine)," in DCB,
1:533; Émery LeBlanc, "Robinau de Villebon, Joseph," in
DCB, 1:576, &
online; Émery LeBlanc, "Saccardy (de Saccardy, Saccardie), Vincent," in
DCB, 1:586-87, &
online;
White, DGFA-1, 1413; notes
149b, 150,
157,
161, above, 293b, below.
According E. LeBlanc, Saccardy," 1:586, "The
Marquis de Seignelay," Minister of Marine, "scolded him for having left
open the palisade he had begun and adopting a project even more
elaborate than Pacquine's. Nevertheless, Seignelay sent Saccardy
back the following spring [of 1690], after reducing the plan by half."
Saccardy returned to Port-Royal aboard the Union with Villebon on
14 Jun 1690, a month after Phips had attacked the place. See
E. LeBlanc, Saccardy," 1:586; note 157,
above. One can imagine what the settlers at Port-Royal thought of the engineer who had left them so vulnerable
to Phips's marauding New Englishmen.
Villebon's mother was Marie-Anne Le Neuf de La
Poterie, a sister of La Vallière de Beaubassin. Villebon was born at
Québec on 22 Aug 1655, son of René Robinau de Bécancour, baron de
Portneuf, a prominent Canadian seigneur. See E. LeBlanc, "Robinau
de Villebon"; White.
295f.
Quotation from Baudry, "Des Friches de Meneval," in DCB, 2:183.
For Baudry's evaluation
of Meneval's tenure as governor, see Baudry, 2:184; note
157, above.
295g.
Quotation from Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 142. See
also Griffiths, 143.
295h.
Quotatons from Acadiensia Nova, 1:140-41 (italics in the
original), 167-70. See also Acadiensia Nova, 1:144-66,
171-99; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
143-46.
For Antoine Bourg & his
numerous clan, see note 51, above; Book
Three;
Bourg/Bourque family page. Antoine's habitation lay
directly across the river from Port-Royal. He was still alive in 1687, in his late 70s or early 80s, but the oldest of his 5
son, François, who would have been age 44 that year, had died a year or 2 before de Meulles's census of 1686.
Who was the canoe owner named Peyrière?
No one with that name appears in de Meulles's census of 1686 for
Port-Royal. See <acadian-home.org>.
For de Meulle's numbers, see note
45, above. Acadiensia Nova
contains not only details of Gargas's census, but also his lengthy
account of his tour of the colony, translated in English.
296. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 668; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian,
210; White, DGFA-1, 1099-1100;
White, DGFA-1 English, 237; note 106,
above; Book Three.
297. See
Arsenault, Généalogie, 1646-47; Fischer, Champlain's Dream,
48, 509; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 139; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile,
460; Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac, "Abbadie de Saint-Castin,"
Jean-Vincent, d'," in DCB, 2:4-7, &
online; White, DGFA-1,
1-9; Weidensaul, The First Frontier, chap. 6; notes
149a, 294f,
& 295, above; Book Three.
Fr. Molin counted 25 soldiers & 1 family at Pentagouët in 1671, but
he does not identify the family. See D. Hébert. If this was
not Jean-Vincent, Mathilde, & their infant daughter Claire, who could it
have been? See White, 6, who does not list them as part of the
census.
Fischer, 48, offers
an enlightening view of Béarnais culture in the context of its most
famous son, King Henri IV of France. One suspects that the
Saint-Castins also possessed this mountain peoples' fierce sense of
independence.
Salagnac, 2:4, says Jean-Vincent was only age
13 when he came to Canada & that he served in the company of Jacques de
Chambly, who succeeded Grandfontaine as royal gov. of Acadia.
See note 291, above. Jean-Vincent
seems to have discontinued active military service after 1674 and
concentrated, instead, on commerce at his home at Pentagouët.
See note 292d, above. There, through his father-in-law, he wielded much influence with the
Penobscot and their kindred nations. By 1686, Jean-Vincent had
become such a prominent figure in the colony that
the gov.-gen. of
New France recommended him for the governorship of
Acadia to replace François-Marie Perrot, but the King appointed
someone else.
White, 6, calls Jean-Vincent's
father-in-law Madakawando, ched fes Abénaquis, but the portion of
that nation living at Pentagouët were the Penobscot. Salagnac,
2:5, says the Penobscot adopted the young French officer but gives no
date & says he married his first wife "before 1678." White, 6,
followed here, says v1670 (réhab [that is, sanctioned by
the church] 1684). Salagnac, 2:5-6, adds that, despite the claims
by his enemies that Saint-Castin had never married his Penobscot
bride & that he had taken up with other Indian women as well, "it is
certain that in the last quarter of 1684, at Pentagouet, Father Jacques
Bigot, the Jesuit missionary to the Abenakis, acting on the express
order of Bishop Laval of Quebec, received the consent of the couple
according to Catholic rite." By then, Mathilde had given
Jean-Vincent at least 10 children.
It is not surprising that after his first wife
died Jean-Vincent remarried to another daughter of Madakwando. See
Salagnac, 2:6, & note
141, above, for description of the military relationship
between Jean-Vincent & his father-in-law.
After his father-in-law
died in 1698, Jean-Vincent succeeded him as principal chief of the
Penobscot. However, commercial and family business compelled
him to return to France in 1701, and he never saw Acadia again.
298.
Quotations from Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 21, 23; Trudel, "Donnacona," in DCB,
1:275. See also Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier, 181-83, 209;
Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country, 29-31; Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 22, 24; Trudel, "Cartier,"
in DCB, 1:167; online Wikipedia,
"St. Lawrence Iroquoians."
Richter, 29-30, places Cartier's anchorage on
present-day Île d'Orléans. Hoffman & Trudel are followed here.
Trudel, Beginnings of New France, 22-23, offers a
detailed description of the differences between the Iroquois at
Stadacona & their compatriots at Hochelaga. In short, Trudel,
says, the Stadacona Iroquois likely descended from Mohawk immigrants &
that in the three centuries of their time on the St. Lawrence, were
influenced by the Montagnais from downriver. The Hocheloga
Iroquois, on the other hand, were descendants of immigrants from
Onondaga. Trudel points out that, in Cartier's time, "It was
Hochelaga that had supremacy among the occupants of the St Lawrence
Valley, holding Stadacona and eight of the nine other nations living on
the banks of the river in a state of dependence." With this in
mind, one readily understands Donnacona's eagerness to control Indian
trade with the French.
Hoffman, 181-82, following a Spanish text, describes
in detail the Laurentian Iroquois' ruse at Stadacona on Sep 18 to prevent Cartier &
his men from going up to Hochelaga. Hoffman, 182-83, details
several encounters with natives on the voyage upriver. For the
names of the Iroquois towns along the St. Lawrence, see Hoffman, 209, Fig. 58.
299. See Surette, Tintamarre & Le Lac,
13; Taillemite, "Villieu,
Claude-Sébastien de," in DCB, 2:653-54; Étienne
Taillemite, "Villieu, Sébastien, de," in DCB, 2:654-55,
&
online;
White, DGFA-1, 980-81; notes 96 &
179e, above.
Surette calls de Villieu "Michel
Le Neuf's Italian son-in-law...." Taillemite &
White, followed here, say nothing of an Italian origin for de
Villieu.
300. Quotation from
Pothier, "Gannes de Falaise (Falaize), Louis de," in
DCB, 2:236. See also Arsenault, Généalogie,
1865-67; H. Paul Thibault, "Gannes de Falaise, Michel
de," in
DCB, 3:236, &
online;
White, DGFA-1, 650-64; note 106,
above; Book Three.
301. See Arsenault,
Généalogie, 2123-24; White, DGFA-1, 977; Book Three.
302. See
T. C. Crowley & Bernard Pothier, "Du Pont
Duvivier, Joseph," in DCB,
online;
Bernard Pothier, "Du
Pont Duvivier," Joseph [actually François]," in DCB, 3:205-06, &
online;
White, DGFA-1, 588-91; White, DGFA-1 English, 125;
note 211a, above; Books Two, Three, &
Four.
303. See T. A.
Crowley & Bernard Pothier, "Du Pont Duchambon, Louis,"
in DCB,
online;
White, DGFA-1, 588, 592-94; White, DGFA-1 English,
125-26; Books Two & Three.
304. See Arsenault, Généalogie,
543-44; White, DGFA-1, 411, 620-21; White, DGFA-1 English,
93, 130; Book Three.