Читать книгу Canada - Jean Newton McIlwraith - Страница 11

T. MALO on the northern coast of France is famed for its sailors, and there was born on December 31, 1494, one called Jacques Cartier. He went to sea when only a boy, but he was a man of forty ere he set out upon the voyage which has handed down his name. Before that he had been a "corsair," roaming the high seas in search of weaker vessels to capture, generally, though not always, those of the nation with which his own chanced to be at war. Cartier's ideas of right and wrong were never very clear, but he was a brave sailor. Picture one going to sea in a vessel smaller than most modern yachts, and sailing in it not over a well-known route where thousands of ships have been before him, but over a pathless waste of waters, at a time of the world's history when men peopled the unknown with all sorts of terrible creatures.

1534. Francis the First, the same king who had sent out Verrazano, ten years before, gave Cartier leave to go, and he took with him one hundred and sixty-two men on his two little vessels, sailing from St. Malo on the 20th of April. Three weeks later he sighted Newfoundland about Bonavista Bay, and put into a harbour close by to have his ships repaired. Then he sailed northward near to an island completely covered with birds, or so it seemed, and swimming towards it, to feast upon them, was a huge bear "as white as any swan."

Cartier and his company went onwards to the coast of Labrador, which looked so dreary, even in the month of June, they were sure it must be the land, told of in the Bible, that was set apart for Cain; and the natives were unfriendly enough to have been his descendants. Through the Straits of Belleisle went the two little ships, sailing southwards, across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, till the end of Prince Edward Island came into view; thence into the Miramichi Bay, where so many savages paddled out in their canoes to see the wonderful strangers in boats moving with wings, that Cartier had to fire his cannon to scare them away; but the next day he went on shore and made friends with the chief of the Indians by giving him a red hat.

The next bay they entered was much larger, and as it was now the 8th of July and very warm, Cartier called it the Bay of Chaleur (heat). Landing on the Gaspé peninsula, he carried off a couple of Indians, then crossed to Anticosti, where he was actually at the entrance of the opening he sought to the westward, had he only known it. But the summer was passing, and there was not enough food to supply his company much longer, so he sailed once more through the Straits of Belleisle, and was back at St. Malo by the 1st of September.

He set out again the next year with three ships and a mixed company, consisting of gentlemen rovers who wanted to go, criminals from the jails who did not want to go, and the two Indians kidnapped at Gaspé. Once more they reached the wonderful Bird Island, at the north of Newfoundland, and sailed through the Straits of Belleisle onwards to the passage between the island of Anticosti and the mainland. There they saw a lot of whales, and on the 10th of August—the festival of St. Lawrence—they entered a small bay to which was given the name that afterwards extended both to gulf and river.

The two captive Indians told Cartier that he was at the mouth of a mighty stream that flowed from Kanata, a Huron-Iroquois word, meaning village, but he would not believe them, though he kept on to the westward, in the hope that this time he had really found the sea passage through to the Indies. But the water began to get fresh and presently land on either side of the river could be seen. Near the mouth of the Saguenay were some natives in canoes who paddled off in terror at sight of the strangers, till the two Indians on board shouted to them to come back, which they did, and greeted the Frenchmen very gladly. Further on, past the island of Hazel-nuts, still called Ile-aux-Coudres, they met more savages, and among them the great chief Donnacona, who lived at Stadacona, an Indian town where Quebec now stands. Cartier's ships came to anchor at last beside a beautiful island which was covered with the vines of wild grapes; and therefore he called it the Isle of Bacchus, but now it is named Orleans. On September 14th a better anchorage was found at the mouth of the little river running into the St. Lawrence below the heights of Stadacona, and now called the St. Charles.

Cartier left some of his company there, but he was bound to sail further on up the great river with the rest, though the travelled Indians who had gone back to their friends were shy of coming near the ships again to act as guides. Donnacona, likewise, was none too sure of what these strangers meant to do in his country, and would rather have seen them turning back down the river than going farther on; but Cartier only laughed at the childish way the chief tried to frighten him out of his purpose—dressing Indians up as demons, and so on.

1535. It took the Frenchmen about two weeks to make the journey between what are now Quebec and Montreal, and it was the first week of October before they reached the site of the latter, where then stood the Indian town of Hochelaga. It consisted of about fifty wooden lodges, surrounded by a fence, or palisade, for defence, which had only one gate. Just above this entrance was a platform, or gallery, to which the warriors could climb up and throw down stones or shoot their arrows at an enemy trying to get in. The people were probably of the Huron-Iroquois family, for they were not simply hunters but grew a little corn about their village, and they gave Cartier and his men some bread made out of it. Fish was also set before the strangers, who presented beads, knives, and hatchets in exchange.

The whole village went wild with delight over the bearded visitors clad in armour, and, looking upon their leader as a divine person, they brought him their sick to heal with his touch. At his request they led him by a steep path to the very top of the high wooded hill at the back of the town, and he called it Mount Royal. Jacques Cartier was the first of Europeans to look out upon that wide prospect of river, forest, and mountain, and the only one to see the Indian town of Hochelaga. Sixty-eight years afterwards, when the next visitors from France came to Mount Royal, village and people had both disappeared. The Iroquois could probably have told what had become of them.

Cartier and his companions stayed on the island for three days, and being quite convinced that no outlet through the continent was to be found in that direction, they returned to Stadacona, where Cartier resolved to spend the winter. He might have chosen a warmer place. Those travellers from the sunny land of France were not prepared to find, in a latitude lower than that of Paris, ice-bound rivers, keen, biting winds, and snowdrifts as high as their heads. They built a rude fort, at the mouth of the Lairet, a tiny stream running into the St. Charles. Soon the scurvy appeared, a loathsome disease caused by "exposure to a moist, cold, foul atmosphere, with long use of one kind of food and of stagnant water." All but ten of the men took it, and twenty-five had died before a friendly Indian told them how to make a drink from the spruce-tree that cured the remainder.

When the month of May came round, and the ice broke up in the great river, the survivors sighed to go home, so Cartier set up a cross with the arms of France upon it, as a sign that he had taken possession of the country for his king, and departed. So many of his men had died, he needed only two ships for the return trip, and he therefore destroyed the smallest, leaving it behind. Its remains were discovered in the river St. Charles, three hundred and seven years afterwards.

That Jacques Cartier was a bit of a pirate is seen from the fact that he coaxed the Indian chief, Donnacona, and nine of his principal men on board one of his vessels when he was ready to sail and would not let them go again, though the Indian people begged him to do so. They followed him in their canoes as far as the island of Hazel-nuts (Coudres), and were not satisfied till Donnacona himself came on deck and told them that he was all right and would be back again the next year. He never did come back, for he died in France, and so did all the rest of the kidnapped party, except one little girl.

1541. No wonder, then, that when Jacques Cartier returned to the river St. Lawrence upon his third voyage he did not find the savages so friendly as before. Indians do not forget. Cartier told them Donnacona was dead, and that news was pleasing to the chief who ruled in his stead, but of the other nine he said they were all married to Frenchwomen, and so happy and rich they had refused to return to their own country. The two Indians who had been to France were not likely to believe that story, and they stirred up their friends against the kidnappers, so that they thought it safer to go a little farther from Stadacona than the St. Charles, and they built another fort at Cap Rouge.

Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence once more, and tried in vain to get farther west than Hochelaga. The rapids barred the way. Upon this voyage he was supposed to be acting under the orders of a nobleman called Roberval, whom King Francis was sending out with colonists to plant a settlement of which he would be governor. Jacques Cartier was not the kind of man who cared to take orders from another, and whether he did it purposely or not, certain it is that he had spent his second winter in Canada and had left for home again before Roberval and his settlers arrived.

The fort at Cap Rouge was there, however, and in a large house they built close by, the new-comers spent a wretched winter. Scurvy was not the only foe they had to fight. Most of the colonists were jail-birds, sent out against their will, who, instead of doing their best to begin a new life in a new country, quarrelled among themselves and were so bad in every way that Roberval had to punish them by lashing, imprisonment, and even by hanging. He, too, tried to explore the great river, but lost eight of his men in the attempt, and the news he sent back to France was so hopeless that Cartier was told to go and bring both colonists and governor home.

Nothing daunted that brave mariner. He came out in the autumn and spent a third winter in Canada, sailing home with Roberval and company in the spring. France was much taken up with her wars of religion with Spain, but when another breathing spell came she made another attempt to colonise Canada. Roberval and his brother were sent out with settlers, but the ship went down and all on board were lost.

1549. The voyages of Cartier had made it plain that a short cut to India was not to be found through the middle of America, but the brave sailors of that time still had hope of finding it to the northward. Martin Frobisher, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, made three voyages with that object in view, and after him John Davis made three more, but no result followed except the naming of Frobisher's Bay and Davis Strait. Both men left it on record that a north-west passage to the Indies was possible, and thus they inspired the later band of gallant Arctic explorers. "I think it might be done, and England should do it," was the line Millais, the artist, wrote below his picture of an old sea captain, even in the nineteenth century.

1578. Sir Francis Drake, who sailed all round the world in Elizabeth's time, was one of the first visitors to the Pacific Coast of what is now called Canada. He went northward as far as Alaska, some say, but it was near San Francisco that he stayed on shore for five weeks and took possession of the whole coast for England.

1583. Sir Humphrey Gilbert did more. His was the first English attempt at founding a colony, and the place he chose was the island of Newfoundland. Ill-fortune met him from the first. So many men took sick in one of the ships that she had to turn back. Another was lost in an exploring trip from the island, and fearing famine for his colonists, Sir Humphrey decided to take them home to England. He himself was on board the Squirrel, a tiny craft of only ten tons burden, when it was lost in a storm. Some of his last words have come down to us—"Courage, my lads! Heaven is as near by sea as by land."

1592. A Greek pilot, called Juan de Fuca, was sent by the Spanish viceroy of Mexico to sail northward along the Pacific coast and see if he could not find a passage through to the Atlantic Ocean. He thought he had found it at the south of Vancouver Island, when he sailed into the wide channel which is now named after him; but his discovery was scoffed at by the sailors of his own and a later day, who declared that the Straits of Juan de Fuca did not exist.