Читать книгу The White and the Gold - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 27

Table of Contents

The Sieur de Roberval in the meantime was getting ready for a delayed but quite spectacular start. He had gathered together a company exceeding two hundred in number. Some of them were gentlemen eager for adventure and fame, some were artisans, some of course were reprieved malefactors. There were a number of women and a few children. With three ships of relatively large tonnage Roberval set sail on April 16, 1542, from the port of La Rochelle. The pirate Bidoux does not appear to have been of the company.

It took them a long time to cross the Atlantic, and it was June 8 before the fleet pulled into the harbor of St. John’s in Newfoundland. None of the party had been in the New World before and great was their amazement to find no fewer than seventeen fishing vessels thereabouts, some French, some English, some Portuguese. They were still more amazed a few days later when Jacques Cartier came sailing into the harbor with his three ships intact but his company very much depleted.

The absence of notes from Cartier’s pen becomes now a signal loss. Nothing is known of what happened when the two leaders came face to face save a brief reference in a chronicle set down by one of Roberval’s men. According to this narrator, the brusque and haughty viceroy charged Cartier with deserting his post. The man from St. Malo, equally angry, accused Roberval of negligence in leaving him, Cartier, to winter alone with insufficient men and supplies, surrounded by hostile natives. Undoubtedly there was a long and bitter debate between them, the viceroy attempting to carry things off with a high hand, the sea captain standing up to him and refusing to accept any blame. This much is known, that at the end Roberval ordered Cartier to return with him to Stadacona and that the captain refused to do so. His men were so reduced in number and in such poor physical condition as a result of the hardships they had endured that he did not intend to subject them to more suffering. From the course he took, it seems clear that Cartier now doubted the possibility of establishing a permanent colony.

The outcome of the dispute was that Cartier stole away during the night. There was no trace of his sails the next morning when the sun came up over the horizon. He was on his way back to France. Refusing to be daunted by this desertion, Roberval took his three large ships on to Stadacona.

A story must be told at this point which gives some insight into the character of the man who had been appointed viceroy of Canada. His niece was among the women in the party, a handsome and high-spirited girl named Marguerite. A young gentleman had enlisted with the expedition who was either in love with her to begin with and went along to be near her or who fell into an infatuated state during the voyage. The affair reached a stage where there was much talk about them, and Roberval decided on a drastic form of punishment for his niece. Off the eastern coast of Newfoundland lay the Isle of Demons, which, according to report, was inhabited solely by evil spirits and which all ships avoided. Roberval gave the girl four muskets and a supply of gunpowder and marooned her on this evil island with no one for company save an old nurse who went by the name of Bastienne. Her lover, who apparently was not being punished for his share in the amour, cast himself overboard and swam ashore to join her. The frightened crew saw the devoted couple meet on the shore while all about them could be heard the howling of the expectant demons.

The three victims of this harsh retribution watched the sails vanish over the horizon and then set to work with sinking hearts to build a crude cabin. It is not clear whether the demons possessed any actual physical form or were mere phantoms of the spirit. It is said, however, that they hovered over the unhappy trio, flapping their foul wings and filling the air with their incantations. The hut was finished finally and there in due course a child was born to the lovers. The faithful Bastienne died soon after. The child died also, then the lover, and the unfortunate Marguerite was left alone. It becomes clear at this point that the niece of the granite viceroy had high qualities of courage and resolution. She continued on alone. One day she went out hunting and shot three polar bears, which alone is sufficient evidence of the spirit she possessed. Through everything she refused to be disturbed by the demons, although they gibbered at her through the hole in the roof which served as a chimney.

The denouement of the grim story came two years later, when a fishing vessel, seeing a column of smoke rising from the beach, had the courage to sail in closer. Seeing a woman, clad in the most grotesque garb, signaling frantically to them, they decided to risk the hostility of the evil spirits and went in to rescue her. Marguerite, gaunt and ill but still filled with firm resolution, was taken off the island and sent back to France. She told there the story of her experience, and it seems to have been believed generally. There is one detail which lends some slight degree of authority to this incredible tale. Roberval’s pilot, one Jean Alphonse, calls the scene Les Isles de la Demoiselle, a reference, no doubt, to the brave Marguerite.

In the meantime the viceroy and his party reached Charlesbourg Royal and took possession of what was left of Cartier’s two forts. Roberval’s first thought apparently was to establish suitable quarters for the ladies and gentlemen of his party. He decided to elaborate the upper fort, and the result was a fair imitation of a feudal castle. It had an additional tower, two great halls (one for the gentry, no doubt, and one for the men of low degree), a huge kitchen, a series of storerooms and bedrooms and workshops. The effect of all this magnificence on the watching savages seems to have been a salutary one, for the redskins did nothing to interfere with the white men. It would have been much more sensible, however, if the commander had taken steps to provide something to fill the storerooms. Ground should have been prepared for summer planting in order to supplement the supplies of food. He sent back two of the ships in the fall with a report of Cartier’s desertion and of his own intention to winter at Cap Rouge.

The winter proved almost as hard to withstand as the experiences of the probably mythical Marguerite. The stores of food proved inadequate. Scurvy made its appearance early, and the newcomers were at a loss as to what to do to check it. Before the arrival of spring one third of the whole company had died of it.

The Sieur de Roberval quickly demonstrated that he possessed in full degree a stern sense of discipline but no gifts as an administrator. He sat over his people with a grimness of judgment which lends some small credibility to the story of the marooning of his niece. A man named Gailler, one of the malefactors, was detected in theft and promptly hanged. One Jean de Nantes was placed in irons for an infringement of the laws of decency. Women as well as men were sentenced to the whipping post for minor offenses. One member of the party, who later wrote an account of what had happened, asserts that six men were shot in one day and that the situation became bad enough to win the sympathy of the savages at Stadacona.

The balance of the story is largely a matter of conjecture. Spring came and the ice broke on the St. Lawrence and began to grind its way out to sea. Green showed under the fast-melting snow. A land of magic beauty was awakening; but there was no capacity left for joy at the prospect in the hearts of the men and women who had survived that dreadful winter. The Sieur de Roberval reached the same conclusion that Cartier had come to the preceding spring: that the odds were too heavy to overcome and that their mission was doomed to failure. He decided to take what was left of his company back to France.

One version has it that King Francis sent Cartier to assist in bringing them home and that the man from St. Malo performed this duty. The only definite evidence bearing on the winding up of this ill-fated adventure was the holding of a court of inquiry before which both Cartier and Roberval appeared to settle their accounts. The King seems to have been in a forgiving mood and willing to wash his hands of all such expensive ambitions. His strength exhausted by the excesses in which he had indulged all his life, he had only a few more years to live, and this may have been responsible for the apathy with which he passed over the obvious faults and mistakes of the two commanders.