Читать книгу Canadian Footprints - Melvin Ormond Hammond - Страница 20

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Like some grey warder who with mien sedate

And smile of welcome greets the throngs who pour

Between the portals of a wide-thrown door,

Quebec stands guardian at our water gate,

And watches from her battlemented state

The great ships passing with their living store

Of human myriads coming to our shore

Expectant, joyous, resolute, elate.

—Frederick George Scott

THE courtly figure of Samuel de Champlain which graces Dufferin Terrace at Quebec brings back the times of Henry of Navarre, by whom he was despatched to explore the St. Lawrence and found Canada. The stately bronze is the link and symbol between a hurrying twentieth century and the age of religious wars and New World exploration, when eager Europe devoured tales of American adventure as modern boys read of the Black Forest or the South Sea Islands.

Champlain and his men landed July 3, 1608, on the shore between Cape Diamond and the St. Lawrence, and there, by laying their axes to the trunks of the walnut trees, cut a home for themselves in New France. Thus began the long war against the Canadian forest, a war which has developed vast wealth and built millions of homes in succeeding centuries.

Today the cradle of Quebec is the heart of Lower Town. Visitors stand agape at this bit of medieval Europe set down in the New World. Children scramble for safety as caleches dash through narrow streets and “sight-seeing” trolley cars traverse thoroughfares built for horses and carioles. Almost every corner has its association with some personage or incident of Canada’s early days.

Notre Dame des Victoires, one of the oldest churches in Canada, raises its spire almost on the site of the “Habitation” of Champlain, who died but a half century before it was erected in 1688. Wolfe’s guns sadly battered it in 1759, but it was restored, and now preserves some of the quaintness and daintiness of the age from which it comes. The square in front was the market place during the French regime, and around it stood the residences of the principal merchants. Captain Horatio Nelson, later the victor at Trafalgar, was in Canada with the “Albemarle” in 1782, and, according to the romantic pages of “A Diana of Quebec,” by Jean N. McIlwraith, passed through these streets as he enjoyed the company of Mary Simpson, belle of Quebec.

Champlain came in the swirling westward movement of the early seventeenth century, when even Shakespeare based his “Tempest” on tales from the transatlantic world. The chivalrous Frenchman was a soldier and explorer first, a loyal servant of Henry IV in his ambitions for an expanding France. Abandoning the stern and inhospitable Tadoussac, Champlain favoured the upper St. Lawrence because he found it “beautiful and agreeable, and it brings all sorts of grain and seed to maturity.” His lone voyage ended, his twenty-seven men were at once employed in cutting trees, sawing planks, and erecting the buildings and defences of the first permanent settlement in the Canada to be.

To Quebec Champlain brought Louis Hébert, the first Canadian farmer; the fair Hélène, his wife; the blackrobes who were to carry religion to the red men he hoped to save from their own ignorance and vices. With the true spirit of the nation-builder he travelled the rivers and lakes beyond, making maps which reflect his own restless and constructive mind. At the end of twenty years there were but one hundred Europeans in New France, but his labours paved the way for the opening up of the lusty and not forgetful nation of today.

Church of Notre Dame des Victoires, and Site of Champlain’s “Habitation,” Quebec