Читать книгу Canada - John George Bourinot - Страница 38

The expedition reached the eastern end of Lake Ontario at the beginning of October by the circuitous route I have already mentioned, crossed to the other side somewhere near Sackett's harbour, and soon arrived in the neighbourhood of the Onondaga fort, which is placed by the best authorities a few miles to the south of Lake Oneida. It was on the afternoon of the 10th of October, when the woods wear their brightest foliage, that the allied Indians commenced the attack with all that impetuosity and imprudence peculiar to savages on such occasions. The fort was really a village protected by four concentric rows of palisades, made up of pieces of heavy timber, thirty feet in height, and supporting an inside gallery or parapet where the defenders were relatively safe from guns and arrows. The fort was by the side of a pond from which water was conducted to gutters under the control of the besieged for the purpose of protecting the outer walls from fire. Champlain had nine Frenchmen under his direction—eight of them having accompanied Father Le Caron to the Huron village. It was utterly impossible to give anything like method to the Indian assaults on the strong works of the enemy. Champlain had a high wooden platform built, and placed on it several of his gunners who could fire into the village, but the Iroquois kept well under cover and very little harm was done. The attempts to fire the palisades were fruitless on account of the want of method shown by the attacking parties. At last the allied Indians became disheartened when they saw Champlain himself was wounded and no impression was made on the fort. They returned to the cover of the woods, and awaited for a few days the arrival of Stephen Brulé and the expected reinforcements of Andastes. But when nearly a week had passed, and the scouts brought no news of Indians from the Susquehanna, the Canadians determined to return home without making another attack on the village. And here, I may mention, that Stephen Brulé was not seen at Quebec until three years later. It appeared then, from his account of his wanderings, that he succeeded after some vexatious delay in bringing the Andastes to Oneida Lake only to find that they had left the country of the Iroquois, who tortured him for a while, and then, pleased with his spirit, desisted, and eventually gave him his liberty. He is reported to have reached in his wanderings the neighbourhood of Lake Superior, where he found copper, but we have no satisfactory information on this point.[1]

On their return to Canada, the Indians carried Champlain and other wounded men in baskets made of withes. They reached the Huron villages on the 20th of December after a long and wearisome journey. Champlain remained in their country for four months, making himself acquainted with their customs and the nature of the region, of which he has given a graphic description. Towards the last of April, Champlain left the Huron villages, and arrived at Quebec near the end of June, to the great delight of his little colony, who were in doubt of his ever coming back.

Another important event in the history of those days was the coming into the country of several Jesuit missionaries in 1625, when the Duke of Ventadour, a staunch friend of the order, was made viceroy of the colony in place of the Duke of Montmorency, who had purchased the rights of the Prince of Condé when he was imprisoned in the Bastile for having taken up arms against the King. These Jesuit missionaries, Charles Lalemant, who was the first superior in Canada, Jean de Brebeuf, Ennemond Massé, the priest who had been in Acadia, François Charton, and Gilbert Buret, the two latter lay brothers, were received very coldly by the officials of Quebec, whose business interests were at that time managed by the Huguenots, William and Emeric Caen. They were, however, received by the Recollets, who had removed to a convent, Notre-Dame des Anges, which they had built by the St. Charles, of sufficient strength to resist an attack which, it is reported on sufficiently good authority, the Iroquois made in 1622. The first Jesuit establishment was built in 1625 on the point at the meeting of the Lairet and St. Charles, where Cartier had made his little fort ninety years before.

We come now to a critical point in the fortunes of the poor and struggling colony. The ruling spirit of France, Cardinal Richelieu, at last intervened in Canadian affairs, and formed the Company of New France, generally called the company of the Hundred Associates, who received a perpetual monopoly of the fur-trade, and a control of all other commerce for sixteen years, beside dominion over an immense territory extending from Florida to the Arctic Seas, and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the great Fresh Water Sea, the extent of which was not yet known. Richelieu placed himself at the head of the enterprise. No Huguenot thenceforth was to be allowed to enter the colony under any conditions. The company was bound to send out immediately a number of labourers and mechanics, with all their necessary tools, to the St. Lawrence, and four thousand other colonists in the course of fifteen years, and to support them for three years. Not only was the new association a great commercial corporation, but it was a feudal lord as well. Richelieu introduced in a modified form the old feudal tenure of France, with the object of creating a Canadian noblesse and encouraging men of good birth and means to emigrate and develop the resources of the country. This was the beginning of that seigniorial tenure which lasted for two centuries and a quarter.

Champlain was re-appointed lieutenant-governor and had every reason to believe that at last a new spirit would be infused into the affairs of the colony. Fate, however, was preparing for him a cruel blow. In the spring of 1628, the half-starved men of Quebec were anxiously looking for the provisions and men expected from France, when they were dismayed by the news that an English fleet was off the Saguenay. This disheartening report was immediately followed by a message to surrender the fort of Quebec to the English admiral, David Kirk. War had been declared between England and France, through the scheming chiefly of Buckingham, the rash favourite of Charles the First, and an intense hater of the French King for whose queen, Anne of Austria, he had developed an ardent and unrequited passion. English settlements were by this time established on Massachusetts Bay and England was ambitious of extending her dominion over North America, even in those countries where France had preceded her.

Admiral Kirk, who was the son of a gentleman in Derbyshire, and one of the pioneers of the colonisation of Newfoundland, did not attempt the taking of Quebec in 1628, as he was quite satisfied with the capture off the Saguenay, of a French expedition, consisting of four armed vessels and eighteen transports, under the command of Claude de Roquemont, who had been sent by the new company to relieve Quebec. Next year, however, in July, he brought his fleet again to the Saguenay, and sent three ships to Quebec under his brothers, Lewis and Thomas. Champlain immediately surrendered, as his little garrison were half-starved and incapable of making any resistance, and the English flag floated for the first time on the fort of St. Louis. Champlain and his companions, excepting thirteen who remained with the English, went on board the English ships, and Lewis Kirk was left in charge of Quebec. On the way down the river, the English ships met a French vessel off Malbaie, under the command of Emeric Caen, and after a hot fight she became also an English prize.

When the fleet arrived in the harbour of Plymouth, the English Admiral heard to his amazement that peace had been declared some time before, and that all conquests made by the fleets or armies of either France or England after 24th April, 1629, must be restored. The Kirks and Alexander used every possible exertion to prevent the restoration of Quebec and Port Royal, which was also in the possession of the English. Three years elapsed before Champlain obtained a restitution of his property, which had been illegally seized. The King of England, Charles I., had not only renewed a charter, which his father had given to a favourite, Sir William Alexander, of the present province of Nova Scotia, then a part of Acadia, but had also extended it to the "county and lordship of Canada." Under these circumstances Charles delayed the negotiations for peace by every possible subterfuge. At last the French King, whose sister was married to Charles, agreed to pay the large sum of money which was still owing to the latter as the balance of the dower of his queen. Charles had already commenced that fight with his Commons, which was not to end until his head fell on the block, and was most anxious to get money wherever and as soon as he could. The result was the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, signed on March 29, 1632. Quebec as well as Port Royal—to whose history I shall refer in the following chapter—were restored to France, and Champlain was again in his fort on Cape Diamond in the last week of May, 1633. A number of Jesuits, who were favoured by Richelieu, accompanied him and henceforth took the place of the Recollets in the mission work of the colony. In 1634, there were altogether eight Jesuit priests in the country. They appear to have even borrowed the name of the Recollet convent, Notre Dame des Anges, and given it to their own establishment and seigniory by the St. Charles.

During the last three years of Champlain's life in Canada no events of importance occurred. The Company of the Hundred Associates had been most seriously crippled by the capture of the expedition in 1628, and were not able to do very much for the colony. The indefatigable lieutenant-governor, true to his trust, succeeded in building a little fort in 1634 at the mouth of the St. Maurice, and founded the present city of Three Rivers, as a bulwark against the Iroquois. It had, however, been for years a trading place, where Brother Du Plessis spent some time in instructing the Indian children and people in the Catholic religion, and was instrumental in preventing a rising of the Montagnais Indians who had become discontented and proposed to destroy the French settlements.

On Christmas Day, 1635, Champlain died from a paralytic stroke in the fort, dominating the great river by whose banks he had toiled and struggled for so many years as a faithful servant of his king and country. Father Le Jeune pronounced the eulogy over his grave, the exact site of which is even now a matter of dispute.

What had the patient and courageous Frenchman of Brouage accomplished during the years—nearly three decades—since he landed at the foot of Cape Diamond? On the verge of the heights a little fort of logs and a château of masonry, a few clumsy and wretched buildings on the point below, a cottage and clearing of the first Canadian farmer Hébert, the ruins of the Recollet convent and the mission house of the Jesuits on the St. Charles, the chapel of Notre-Dame de Recouvrance, which he had built close to the fort to commemorate the restoration of Quebec to the French, the stone manor-house of the first seignior of Canada, Robert Giffard of Beauport, a post at Tadousac and another at Three Rivers, perhaps two hundred Frenchmen in the whole valley. These were the only visible signs of French dominion on the banks of the St. Lawrence, when the cold blasts of winter sighed Champlain's requiem on the heights whence his fancy had so often carried him to Cathay. The results look small when we think of the patience and energy shown by the great man whose aspirations took so ambitious and hopeful a range. It is evident by the last map he drew of the country, that he had some idea of the existence of a great lake beyond Lake Huron, and of the Niagara Falls, though he had seen neither. He died, however, ignorant of the magnitude, number, and position of the western lakes, and still deluded by visions, as others after him, of a road to Asia. No one, however, will deny that he was made of the heroic mould from which come founders of states, and the Jesuit historian Charlevoix has, with poetic justice, called him the "Father of New France."

[1] Brulé was murdered by the Hurons in 1634 at Toanché, an Indian village in the West.