Читать книгу Canadian Footprints - Melvin Ormond Hammond - Страница 19

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O towering steeps, that are mirrored

On Saguenay’s darkening breast!

O grim rocky heights sternly frowning,

The thunders have smitten your crest!

—Louis Frechette, translated by James D. Edgar

TADOUSSAC, once the bustling centre of the Canadian fur trade, the port of all visiting ships, the site of the first house erected in Canada, stands in solitary neglect at the mouth of the gloomy Saguenay. An age of universal railway building has passed it by. River steamers with tourist crowds call in summer; after that it is a lonely outpost, visited by “impetuous winds, bringing with them intense cold,” as noted by Champlain.

A little white chapel, scarce thirty feet long, faces the harbour, and is Canada’s oldest wooden church, a relic from the French regime. It was commenced in 1747, roofed in by a donation from the notorious Intendant Bigot, and completed in 1750. Through fat years and lean, populous periods and times of isolation, it has served its people, and visitors may still ring in its steeple the tiny bell sent in 1647 for an earlier chapel by, it is said, Louis XIV himself. Since 1885 a larger stone church has cared for the parish, but the old chapel of St. Croix remains carefully guarded.

Jacques Cartier cast eyes on the mouth of the Saguenay in 1535, but Pierre de Chauvin made the first attempt at settlement in Canada when he dropped a handful of French colonists here in 1600. When he returned a year later several had died and the others were in the care of the Indians. Chauvin had built a house, partly a fort, and soon the name of Tadoussac spread in Western Europe. Jamestown in Virginia was not founded until 1607 and Quebec in 1608. Champlain, already famed for his voyage to the West Indies, came with Pontgravé in 1603. His report with maps so impressed Henry IV that the King agreed to back his future ventures.

Indians, of whom many tribes lived north of the St. Lawrence, swarmed to Tadoussac in summer to barter their furs for trinkets. As many as three thousand camped near the St. Lawrence at one time. Trading over, the port relapsed to death-like quiet, and nature assumed its conquering sway. Jesuit fathers, with the same devotion which marked their generations of labour to the westward, tramped and canoed the wilderness to Labrador and over the height of land, Father Albanel reaching Hudson Bay in 1671. Bishop Laval came here in the energetic performance of his pastoral duties, and confirmed hundreds of Indians. Madame de la Peltrie and Marie de l’Incarnation touched Tadoussac as they came for their heroic services for the colonists and Indians.

Tadoussac ultimately lost its importance. Champlain knew that a colony could be made permanent only by agriculture, and against the advice of his associates he moved on and founded Quebec. The fur trade failed as wild animals lessened, and the commercial centres up the river grew while Tadoussac fell away. A revival may yet be seen as ocean vessels ascend the Saguenay for traffic from the great new industries of the Lake St. John district, and the remote home of “Marie Chapdelaine” at Peribonka will be no longer on the wild frontier.

A beautiful legend persists that Father La Brosse foretold one evening in April, 1782, that he would die at midnight; that at that hour the frightened villagers heard the toll of the chapel bell, and on entering found his prostrate body before the altar, and that, as he also foretold, four sailors braved a violent storm and carried his body in safety to Isle au Coudres.

Such a legend may well retain its fragrance and acceptance in Tadoussac, for, as Parkman says, “centuries of civilization have not tamed the wildness of the place.”

St. Croix Chapel, Tadoussac