Читать книгу Pioneers in Canada - Harry Johnston - Страница 10

When Cartier was on his way home he sailed in a north-easterly direction in such a way as to overlook the broad channel between the Gaspé Peninsula and Anticosti Island, but having rounded the easternmost extremity of that large island, he coasted along its northern shores until he caught sight of the opening of the Canadian channel to the west. He believed then that he had discovered the long-looked-for opening of the trans-continental passage, and sailed for France with his wonderful news.

On the 19th of May, 1535, Cartier started again from St. Malo with three ships, the biggest of which was only 120 tons, while the others were respectively 60 and 40 tons capacity. The crew consisted of about 112 persons, and in addition there were the two Indian youths who had been kidnapped on the previous voyage, and were now returning as interpreters. Instead, however, of reaching Newfoundland in twenty days, he spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic before he reached his rendezvous with the other ships at Blanc Sablon, on the south coast of Labrador; for the easy access to the Gulf of St. Lawrence through Cabot Strait (between Newfoundland and Cape Breton) was not yet realized. Once past Anticosti Island, the two Huron interpreters began to recognize the scenery.[4] They now explained to Cartier that he had entered the estuary of a vast river. This they said he had only to pursue in ships and boats and he would reach "Canada" (which was the name they gave to the district round about Quebec), and that beyond "Canada" no man had ever been known to reach the end of this great water; but, they added, it was fresh water, not salt, and this last piece of information much disheartened Cartier, who feared that he had not, after all, discovered the water route across North America to the Pacific Ocean. He therefore turned about and once more searched the opposite coast of Labrador most minutely, displaying, as he did so, a seamanship which was little else than marvellous, for it is a very dangerous coast, the seas are very stormy, and the look-out often hampered by a sudden rising of dense fog; there are islands and rocks (some of them almost hidden by the water) and sandbanks; but Cartier made this survey of southern Labrador without an accident.

At this period, some three hundred and seventy-five years ago, the northern coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and of Anticosti Island swarmed with huge walruses, which were described by Cartier as sea horses that spent the night on land and the day in the water. They have long since been exterminated by the English and French seamen and settlers.

At last Cartier set sail for the south-west, intending to explore this wonderful river and to reach the kingdom of Canada. According to his understanding of the Amerindian interpreters, the waters of the St. Lawrence flowed through three great states: Saguenay, which was the mountainous Gaspé Peninsula and the opposite coast; Canada, Quebec and its neighbourhood; and Hochelaga, the region between Montreal and Lake Ontario. At the mouth of the Saguenay River, where Tadoussac is now situated, he encountered large numbers of white whales—the Beluga. These are really huge porpoises, allied to the narwhals, but without the narwhal's exaggerated tusk. When he reached the vicinity of the modern Quebec,[5] and his Amerindian interpreters found themselves at their actual home (for they were far away from home on a fishing expedition when he caught them in Gaspé Bay) there was great rejoicing; for they were able to tell their relations of the wonderful country to which they had been across the ocean. Cartier was delighted with the surroundings of "Canada" (Quebec), near which at that time was a large settlement (Stadacona) of Huron Indians under a chief named Donnacona. He decided to lay up his ships here for the winter, and to pursue the rest of his western explorations in his boats.

But the Amerindians for some reason were not willing that he should go any farther, and attempted to scare him from his projects by arranging for three of their number to come down river in a canoe, dressed in dogs' skins, with their faces blackened, and with bisons' horns fastened to their heads. These devils pretended to take no notice of the French, but to die suddenly as they reached the shore, while the rest of the natives gave vent to howlings of despair and consternation. The three devils were pretending to have brought a message from a god to these Hurons of "Canada" that the country up river (Hochelaga) was so full of ice and snow that it would be death for anyone to go there.

However, this made little or no impression on Cartier; but he consented to leave a proportion of his party behind with the chief Donnacona as hostages, and then started up country in his boats with about seventy picked officers and men. On the 2nd of October, 1535, they reached the vicinity of the modern Montreal, the chief settlement of Hochelaga. The Huron town at the foot of the hills was circular in outline, surrounded by a stockade of three rows of upright tree trunks, which rose to its highest point in the middle, where the timbers of the inner and outward sides sloped to meet one another, the height of the central row being about 8 feet above the ground. All round the inside there was a platform or rampart on which were stored heavy stones to be hurled at any enemy who should attempt to scale the fence. The town was entered by only one doorway, and contained about fifty houses surrounding an open space whereon the towns-people made their bonfires. Each house was about 50 feet long by 12 to 15 feet wide. They were roofed with bark, and usually had attics which were storerooms for food. In the centre of each of these long houses there was a fireplace where the cooking for the whole of the house inhabitants was done. Each family had its own room, but each house probably contained five families. Almost the only furniture, except cooking pots, was mats on which the people sat and slept. The food of the people consisted, besides fish and the flesh of beavers and deer, of maize and beans. Cartier at once recognized the maize or Indian corn as the same grain ("a large millet") as that which he had seen in Brazil.

He gives a description of how they made the maize into bread (or rather "dampers", "ashcakes"); but as this is not altogether clear, it is better to combine it with Champlain's description, written a good many years later, but still at a time when the Hurons were unaffected by the white man's civilization. According to both Cartier and Champlain, the women pounded the corn to meal in a wooden mortar, and removed the bran by means of fans made of the bark of trees. From this meal they made bread, sometimes mixing with the meal the beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), which had been boiled and mashed. Or they would boil both Indian corn and beans into a thick soup, adding to the soup blueberries,[6] dried raspberries, or pieces of deer's fat. The meal derived from the corn and beans they would make into bread, baking it in the ashes.

Or they would take the pounded Indian corn without removing the bran, and put two or three handfuls of it into an earthen pot full of water, stirring it from time to time, when it boiled, so that it might not adhere to the pot. To this was added a small quantity of fish, fresh or dry, according to the season, to give a flavour to the migane or porridge. When the dried fish was used the porridge smelt very badly in the nostrils of Europeans, but worst of all when the porridge was mixed with dried venison, which was sometimes nearly putrid! If fish was put into this porridge it was boiled whole in the mealy water, then taken out without any attempt to remove the fins, scales, or entrails, and the whole of the boiled fish was pounded up and put back into the porridge. Sometimes a great birch-bark "kettle" would be filled with water, fish, and meat, and red-hot stones be dropped in till it boiled. Then with a spoon they would collect from the surface the fat and oil arising from the fish or meat. This they afterwards mixed with the meal of roasted Indian corn, stirring it with this fat till they had made a thick soup. Sometimes, however, they were content to eat the young corn-cobs freshly roasted, which as a matter of fact (with a little salt) is one of the most delicious things in the world. Or they would take ears of Indian corn and bury them in wet mud, leaving them thus for two or three months; then the cobs would be removed and the rotted grain eaten with meat and fish, though it was all muddy and smelt horribly. Cartier also noticed that these Huron Indians had melons and pumpkins, and described their wampum or shell money.[7]

From the eminence on which the Huron city stood, Cartier obtained a splendid view of rivers and mountains and magnificent forests, and called the place then and there, in his Norman French, Mont Real, or Royal Eminence, a name which it will probably bear for all time, though the actual city of Montreal lies a few miles below.

Montreal was the limit of Cartier's explorations on this journey. He returned thence to "Canada" or Stadacona, where his men built a fort armed with artillery, and where his ships were anchored. Here he had to stay from the middle of November, 1535, to the middle of April, 1536, his ships being shut in by the ice. The experiences of the French during these five months were mostly unhappy. At first Cartier gave himself up to the collecting of information. He noticed for the first time the smoking of tobacco,[8] and collected information about the products and features of "Canada". The Indians told him of great lakes in the far west, one of which was so vast that no man had seen the end of it. They told him that anyone travelling up the Richelieu River (as it was called sixty years later) would eventually reach a land in the south where in the winter there was no ice or snow, and where fruit and nut trees grew in abundance. Cartier thought that they were talking to him of Florida, but their geographical information can scarcely have stretched so far; they probably referred to the milder regions of New Jersey and Virginia, which would be reached by following southwards the valley of the Hudson and keeping to the lowlands of the eastern United States.

As the winter set in with its customary Canadian severity the real trouble of the French began. They did not suffer from the cold, but they were dying of scurvy. This disease, from which the natives also suffered to some extent, was due to their eating nothing but salt or smoked provisions—forms of meat or fish. They lived, of course, shut up in the fort, and Cartier's fixed idea was to keep the Hurons from the knowledge of his misfortune, fearing lest, if they realized how the garrison was reduced, they might treacherously attack and massacre the rest; for in spite of the extravagant joy with which their arrival had been greeted, the Amerindians—notably the two interpreters who had been to France and returned—showed at intervals signs of disquiet and a longing to be rid of these mysterious white men, whose coming might involve the country in unknown misfortunes. In January and February, also, Donnacona and these two interpreters and many of the Huron men had been absent hunting in the forests, so that there was no one among the Amerindians to whom the French could turn for information regarding this strange disease. At last 25 out of the 112 who had left France were dead, and of the remainder only 10 men, including Cartier, were not grievously ill. Those who were living found it sometimes beyond their strength to bury the dead in the frozen ground, and simply placed their bodies in deep snow. Once or twice, when Cartier left the fort to go out to the ships, he met Domagaya, one of the two interpreters, and found that he also was suffering from this mysterious disease, though not nearly so badly as the French people. On the body of one young man who died of scurvy Cartier and his officers, shuddering, made investigations, opening the corpse and examining the organs to try and find the cause of death. This was on the afternoon of a day on which they had held a solemn service before a statue erected to the Virgin Mary on the shore opposite to the ships. All who were fit to walk went in procession from the fort to the statue, singing penitential psalms and the Litany and celebrating Mass.

Some days after this religious service Cartier met the interpreter, Domagaya, and to his surprise found him perfectly well and strong. He asked him for an explanation, and was told that the medicine which cured this disease was made from the leaves and bark of a tree called ameda.[9] Cartier then ventured to say that one of his servants was sick of this unknown disease, and Domagaya sent for two women, who taught the French people how to make an extract from the balsam fir for drinking, and how to apply the same liquid to the inflamed skin. The effect on the crews was miraculous. In six days all the sick were well and strong.

Then came the sudden spring. Between April 15th and May 1st the ice on the river was all melted, and on the 6th May, 1536, Cartier started from the vicinity of Quebec to return to France. But before leaving he had managed to kidnap Donnacona, the chief of the Huron settlement, and six or seven other Amerindians, amongst them Tainyoanyi, one of the two interpreters who had already been to France. He seized these men, it appears, partly because he wanted hostages and had good reason to fear that the Indians meditated a treacherous attack on his ships before they could get away. He also wished for native witnesses at Court, when he reached France, to testify to the truth of his discoveries, and even more to convince the King of France that there was great profit to be obtained from giving effect to Cartier's explorations. The chief, Donnacona, was full of wonderful stories of the Saguenay region, and of the great lakes to the northwards of Quebec. Probably he was only alluding to the wealth of copper now known to exist in northern Canada, but to Cartier and the other Frenchmen it seemed as though he spoke of gold and silver, rubies, and other precious stones.

Donnacona's people howled and wept when their chief was seized; but Cartier obliged the chief to reassure them, and to say that the French had promised to bring him back after he had paid a visit to their great king, who would return him to his country with great presents. As a matter of fact, not one of these Indians rapt away by Cartier ever saw Canada again. But this was not the fault of Cartier, but of the distractions of the times which turned away the thoughts of King Francis I from American adventures. The Indians were well and kindly treated in France, but all of them died there before Cartier left St. Malo to return to Canada in 1541.

One advantage he derived from sailing away with these hostages was (no doubt) that they could give him geographical information of importance which materially shortened the return journey. For the first time he made use of the broad strait between Anticosti Island and Gaspé Peninsula, and, better still, entered the Atlantic, not by the dangerous northern route through the straits of Belle Isle, but by means of Cabot Strait, between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. Of these discoveries he availed himself on his third and last voyage in 1541.

When in that year he once more anchored his ships near Quebec he found the attitude of the Hurons changed. They enquired about their friends and relations who had been carried off five years before, and although they pretended to be reconciled to their fate when they heard (not altogether truly) that one or two were dead, and the others had become great lords in France and had married French women, they really felt a disappointment so bitter and a hostility so great that Cartier guessed their expressions of welcome to be false. However, he sent back to France two of the ships under his command and beached the other three, landed his stores, built two forts at Cap Rouge, above and below, and then started off with a few of his men and two boats to revisit the country of Hochelaga. Here he intended to examine the three rapids or "saults"—interruptions to the navigation of the St. Lawrence—which he had observed on his previous journey, and which were later named the La Chine Rapids (in the belief that they were obstacles on the river route to China). But these falls proved insuperable obstacles to his boats, and he gave up any further idea of westward exploration, returned to his forts and ships near Quebec, and there laid the foundations of a fortified town, which he called Charlesbourg Royal. Here he spent a very difficult winter, the Hurons in the neighbourhood becoming increasingly hostile, and at last, when the spring came, as he had received no relief from France, he took to his three ships, abandoned Charlesbourg Royal (having probably to do some fighting before he could get safely away) and thence sailed for France. Off the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland he met the other ships of the expedition which was to have occupied Canada for France. These were under the command of the Sieur de Roberval, a French nobleman, who had really been made head of the whole enterprise, with Cartier as a subordinate officer, but who, the year before, had allowed Cartier to go off to Canada and prepare the way, promising to follow immediately. The interview between Cartier and Roberval, near where the capital of Newfoundland (St. John's) now stands, was a stormy one. Roberval ordered Cartier to return at once to Charlesbourg and await his arrival. However, in the middle of the night which followed this interview, Cartier took advantage of a favourable wind and set sail for France, arriving soon afterwards at St. Malo.

But Roberval arrived at Charlesbourg (going the roundabout way through the straits of Belle Isle, for Cartier had told him nothing of the convenient passage through Cabot Strait), and there spent the winter of 1542–3, sending his ships back to France. This winter was one of horrors. Roberval was a headstrong, passionate man, perfectly reckless of human life. He maintained discipline by ferocious sentences, putting many of his men in irons, whipping others cruelly, women as well as men, and shooting those who seemed the most rebellious. Even the Indians were moved to pity, and wept at the sight of the woes of these unhappy French men and women under the control of a bloodthirsty tyrant, and many of them dying of scurvy, or miserably weak from that disease.[10]

However, when the weather was warm again, in June, 1543, Roberval started up the St. Lawrence River in boats to reach the wonderful country of Saguenay. Apparently he met with little success, and, being relieved by French ships in the late summer of 1543, he returned to France.

Thus the splendid work achieved by Cartier seemed to have come to nothing, for neither he nor Roberval revisited America. The French settlement near Quebec was abandoned, so far as the officers of the French king were concerned, and between 1545 and about 1583, if any other Frenchman or European visited Canada it was some private adventurer who traded with the natives in furs, or Basques from France and Spain who frequented the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on account of the abundance of whales, walruses, and seals. In fact, at the close of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Basques had established themselves on shore at Tadoussac and other places, and seemed likely to colonize the country.

1 Funk Island—called by Cartier "the Island of Birds"—is only about 3 miles round, and 46 feet above the sea level. It is 3 miles distant from the coast.

2 The Great Auk (Alca impennis), extinct since about 1844 in Europe and 1870 in Labrador, once had in ancient times a geographical range from Massachusetts and Newfoundland to Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, N.E. England, and Denmark. Perhaps nowhere was it found so abundantly as on the coasts of Eastern Newfoundland and on Funk Island hard by. The Great Auk was in such numbers on the north-east coast of Newfoundland that the Amerindians of that country and of southern Labrador used it as fuel in the winter time, its body being very full of oil and burning with a splendid flame. The French seamen called it pingouin ("penguin") from its fatness, and this name was much later transferred to the real penguins of the southern seas which are quite unrelated to the auks.

3 On the shores of these islands they noticed "several great beasts like oxen, which have two tusks in the mouth similar to those of the elephant". These were walruses.

4 Anticosti Island received from Cartier the name of "the Island of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin", in consequence of his having discovered it to be an island on the feast day of that name. It did not receive its present title until the late seventeenth century.

5 Then called "Canada". The word Quebec (pronounced Kebek) means the narrow part of a river.

6 The Canada Blueberry (Vaccinium canadense), called by the French bluës or bluëts. These bluës were collected and dried by the Amerindians, and made a sweet nutriment for eating in the winter.

7 Cartier, in Hakluyt's translation, is made to say (I modernize the spelling): "They dig their grounds with certain pieces of wood as big as half a sword, on which ground groweth their corn, which they call 'offici'; it is as big as our small peason. … They have also great store of musk melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers, peas, and beans of every colour, yet differing from ours." Wampum, or shell money (which recalls the shell money of the Pacific Islands), consisted either of beads made from the interior parts of sea shells or land shells, or of strings of perforated sea shells. The most elaborate kind of wampum was that of the Amerindians of Canada and the eastern United States, the shell beads of which were generally white. The commoner wampum beads were black and violet. Wampum belts were made which illustrated events, dates, treaties of peace, &c, by a rude symbolism (figures of men and animals, upright lines, &c), and these were worked neatly on string by employing different-coloured beads.

8 "There groweth also a certain kind of herb whereof in summer they make a great provision for all the year, making great account of it, and only men use it; and first they cause it to be dried in the sun, then wear it about their necks wrapped in a little beast's skin made like a bag, together with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe. Then when they please they make powder of it and put it in one of the ends of the said cornet or pipe, and laying a coal of fire upon it at the other end, suck so long that they fill their bodies full of smoke, till that it cometh out of their mouth and nostrils, even as out of the tunnel of a chimney. They say that this doth keep them warm and in health: they never go without some of it about them. We ourselves have tried the same smoke, and having put it in our mouths, it seemed almost as hot as pepper." The foregoing is one of the earliest descriptions of tobacco smoking in any European language, the original words being in Cartier's Norman French.

9 This tree was the balsam fir, Abies balsamea.

10 A story was subsequently told of Roberval's stern treatment which had a germ of truth in it, though it has since been the foundation of many a romance. On the journey out from France it is said that Roberval took with him his niece Marguerite, a high-born lady, who was accompanied by an old companion or nurse. Marguerite was travelling with her uncle because, unknown to him, she had a lover who had sailed with him on this expedition and whom she hoped to marry. As they crossed the Atlantic these facts leaked out, and Roberval resolved to bide his time and punish his niece for her deception. As they passed the coast of Southern Labrador Marguerite and her old nurse were seized and put into a boat, Roberval ordering his sailors to row them ashore to an island, and leave them to their fate. They were given four guns with ammunition and a small supply of provisions. But, as the boat was leaving the ship, Marguerite's lover threw himself into the sea and swam to the island. Here, according to the story which Marguerite is supposed to have told afterwards, they endeavoured to live by killing the wild animals and eating their flesh; but her lover-husband died, so also did her child soon after it was born, and then the old nurse, and the unhappy Marguerite was left alone with the wild beasts, especially the white Polar bears, who thronged round her hut. Nevertheless she kept them at bay with her arquebus, and managed somehow to support an existence, until after nineteen months' isolation the ascending smoke of her fire was seen by people on one of the many fishing vessels which, by this time, frequented the coasts of Newfoundland. She was taken off the island and restored to her home in France. The island to which this tradition more especially relates is now called Grand Meccatina.

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