Old France in the New World; Quebec in the seventeenth century

Preface

A large library always reminds me painfully of a graveyard, and the rows of neglected books on its shelves of gravestones. They merely, in most instances, perpetuate the names of men and women who have passed as completely out of the world's ken as the multitudes, whose existence on our planet is recorded on the mouldering stone by a name and two dates. Here and there is a book which is occasionally opened, just as here and there in our graveyards is a monument which marks the last resting place of some one famous for a deed which made his life conspicuous among the thousands who lived and died without leaving a sensible impression on their generation. And even these nonentities were in most instances less presumptuous than the unread author; for they would have hesitated to appraise the importance of their own past lives at even the value of a tombstone. It was the dead man's friends who, after he had gone, thus endeavored to perpetuate the fleeting memory of a vanished shadow. But the man who publishes his own book is vain enough to erect his own gravestone, and inscribe on it his own epitaph, and therefore he must not complain if it Hes as neglected on the library shelf as the crumbling stones erected over the graves of insignificant people in our cemeteries.

Nevertheless, men and women will continue to write books, believing that they are adding something to the world's stock of truth. Should the world think otherwise, they can at least derive some solace from the thought (if they have paid their bills) that they have given remunerative occupation to the printer and bookbinder.

Should the above be the fate of my book, it is unkind to bury the names of friends with my own. Yet I cannot refrain from thanking the Abbe Scott, not only for permitting me to copy maps from his interesting- history of the Parish of St. Foy, but even lending me the block of the Portrait of Commander Sillery; Colonel Neilson for supplying more than one of my illustrations from his valuable collection of Jesuit memorabilia, secured by his great-grandfather v^hen the Jesuit Estates were sold in 1800; Mr. George lies and Mr. W. D. Le Sueur for reading my proof sheets; and the Burrows Company for being willing to strike off copies of some of the interesting illustrations made for their edition of the Jesuit Relations. In my book there are doubtless avoidable and unavoidable mistakes, and many of my friends will charge me with errors of judgment and opinion. I cannot claim to have had access to unpublished documents, but I have tried to derive my facts and my inspirations from original published sources.

The history of Canada was, during the period we have reviewed, indissolubly associated with that of Quebec, and it continued so to be during the remaining half century of the French Regime. Such books as Sir Gilbert Parker's " In Old Quebec," and the more critical description of the city, " Quebec Under Two Flags," by Messrs. Doughty and Dionne, blend of necessity the history of the country with that of the old town well into the period when the possession of Canada passed beyond the control of France. These books and others in the English language tell the story concisely and in a small compass, but none of them are written with the grace and literary skill which distinguish the many memoirs and histories written by French and French Canadian writers.

Chapter I

Europe in America, or Old France and Old England in New France and New England*

The undignified scramble in which the great powers of the world are now engaged for the possession of Africa and such islands of the sea as are still occupied by their aboriginal inhabitants, resembles in many of its aspects the race to occupy the New World, in which the maritime nations of the sixteenth century competed. To-day we call conquest "occupation," and the conquered area, with its subjugated people, ''a sphere of influence." Yet the motives are the same — national aggrandizement and private gain — disguise them as we may under the cloak of a disinterested desire to share the blessings of our advanced civilization with our less fortunate fellow men. Our civil methods are less cruel, and the evangelization of the savage is not now generally regarded as a function of the state ; but the actual wishes of the original occupants of the coveted territories, whether they be the blacks of Africa or the tawny children of Hawaii, are as superciliously disregarded by us as were the rights of the Indians of America by the faithful children of Spain, or certain of the Anglo- Saxon colonists of the North Atlantic coast and their descendants.

Columbus' first memorable voyage was promoted by Spain Tinder the spur of rivalry with Portugal. This insignificant power, since the days of Prince Henry, had gradually crept round the African continent, and opened up trade by sea with India and with the mysterious empires of Cathay and Zepango. Marco Polo's strange adventures in these remote regions had remained so long — just two centuries — unconfirmed that his story had come to be regarded as a myth, and the land of the Great Khan a mirage. But Portugal's maritime achievements and subsequent mercantile success had not only converted a geographical illusion into a reality, but had inspired into mediaeval

QUEBEC IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

commerce a new spirit, as irresistibly progressive as that with which the discovery of printing had reanimated the intellectual life of Europe.

Just at this juncture Spain had been fused into a political unit and had sprung into a power of the first magnitude. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had united in national wedlock the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and had thus so combined and concentrated the resources of Spain that she was able to drive the Moors from her borders. This feat accomplished, and a strong patriotic spirit created, national pride could not brook the ignominy of beholding Little Portugal, a tiny strip on the Atlantic seaboard of the Iberian Peninsula, extending her domain beyond the sea. Spain was thus not only prepared but impelled to enter on a career of maritime discovery and foreign commerce. Portugal had sailed to the Orient by an Eastern course. The world is round and therefore the same Orient would be reached by sailing across the sea towards the West. Columbus is supposed to have taken counsel with the Florentine geographer Toscanelli, who had calculated the distance from the Iberian shore westward to the Island of Zepango (Japan) and to Cathay, the domain of the Grand Khan. No suspicion of intervening land seems to have disturbed his confidence or affected his calculations. How curiously wrong these calculations proved to be, and how stubbornly confident he was to the last in maintaining his mistake, are not the least interesting and pathetic incidents of this glorious era of geographical exploration, inaugurated by Portugal and consummated by Spain.

Columbus made land on the Western Hemisphere on the 12th of October, 1492, and returned to Spain with specimens of the productions of his supposed Asiatic discovery. We know that he landed on one of the Windward Islands, and coasted along the shores of Cuba and San Domingo, and that a continent and thousands of miles of ocean lay between him and the object of his search. But the same confidence in his own judgment as has characterized the illustrious men, who have achieved great deeds and exerted profound influence in the world, prevented his correcting his own miscalculations and reading aright the plain facts of

AX AGE OF GREAT NAVIGATORS.

his own and others' observation. Nevertheless, the very persistency of the fallacy stimulated the adventurers who, in vessels no larger than schooners and with mere handfuls of men, penetrated fearlessly into the recesses of a New World, believing that it was the outskirts of that wonderful Asia, and that through it a waterway would be discovered leading directly to the goal.* When it came to be acknowledged that America was not China, and that nature had not cut a canal through its equatorial region, the search for a western passage was shifted northward. Even after Jacques Cartier had told the story of his winter sufferings at the head of a gradually contracting gulf, which receives the waters of the St. Lawrence, the hope was still cherished that this wide inland sea and the mighty river were a channel leading to the tropical climes and treasures' of Asia. The name La Chine, borne by a village a few miles west of Montreal, commemorates the fallacy. After Cartier's time the discovery of the Northwest Passage continued to be the object of search by many an Arctic explorer, from Frobisher to McClintock. All of these sturdy navigators endured hardships from sheer enthusiasm for geographical discovery ; for it was soon recognized that such a route, if discovered, would be commercially valueless.

Cartier's thorough exploration of the St. Lawrence from its gulf to the head of navigation at the Lachine Rapids, and his minute description of the severe climate and scanty products of that remote region, not only quenched the last hope of a navigable ocean highway in the temperate zone direct to Asia, but determined the limit beyond which private adventurers were not likely to be tempted to risk life and property in search of wealth. His second voyage, in 1535-1536, may therefore be considered as closing the first great cycle of American discovery.

Proud as we may be of our nineteenth century exploits, they sink into nothingness before the exuberant activity and magnificent results which rewarded the labors of the explorers of America during these brief forty-two years, which arc without a

* The popular idea that he mistook the Island of Cuba for the main land is disproved by his letters to Saint Angel, and it seems probable that he knew, and acknowledged before he died, that he had discovered a new continent, though he did not appreciate its tme geographical position.

parallel in the history of the world. In our own day, with steam, electricity, and a host of mechanical appliances and means at our command, with a much larger group of commercial nations jostling one another in the race for new markets, and a dozen religious sects competing for the conversion of the miUions of heathen inhabiting the Dark Continent, Africa has not been invaded with the speed and thoroughness with which America was ransacked by those little companies of Spanish cavaliers and other explorers, under the impulse of greed, glory and fanaticism.

Judged by its results, the discovery of America was the most momentous event that the Christian era had witnessed. That it poured wealth into Europe and stimulated commerce, was of trifling importance, compared with the liberating influence which the adjusting of political and social life to the new conditions of a New World was to have on human policy and opinions. Yet it hardly produced a ripple on the contemporaneous thought and speculation of Europe. While the maritime nations whose shores were washed by the Atlantic were exploring America, the adventures of their seamen must have been the prominent topics of talk and speculation in their -seaports. We know that the disturbance of the balance of power which the growth of Spain occasioned engaged the anxious thoughts of European statesmen; but the scanty and ill-preserved records of these daring voyagers are proof suflicient of the lethargy of the scholars and thinkers of Europe, a few geographers alone excepted, on this all-important subject.

It was the period of religious reawakening, a reaction from the decay of faith, which had been the first fleeting consequence of the revival of learning. Men's minds were diverted from physical and philological research to religious and metaphysical discussions. One looks in vain, for instance, through the letters of the freest, broadest, most appreciative thinker of that or almost any other age, Erasmus, for any reflections on the tremendous, worldtransforming events transpiring across the seas ; and one gives up the search with a keener and sadder sense than ever of the shallowness of human thought, and the narrowness of human vision.

THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS.

II

The revival of learning had, in Southern Europe, exalted literature and art to the position religion had previously held, and shaken men's faith in the Christian creed and the code of morals based on it. The \'atican was as devoted to the worship of art as the Court of the Medici in Florence, and with the same results ; for however completely a true theory and love of the beautiful may harmonize with Christianity, unless sestheticism be kept rigidly subordinate to some higher motive, moral degeneration seems to be its speedy and inevitable consequence. The most ardent champions of the Papacy do not deny the need that existed of moral reform during the Pontificates immediately preceding and succeeding that of Leo X. The standard of art was never higher, nor its pursuit more lavishly encouraged. On the other hand the standard of morality was perhaps never lower, or the practice of vice more easily condoned. It was Italian luxury and laxity which shocked Martin Luther, the unsesthetic Erfurt monk, so seriously as to undermine his faith. It was Italian corruption, political, social and religious, which excited Savonarola to sacrifice his life in the cause of reform ; and it was the hollowness, hypocrisy, and undisguised license of the Church, under Italian inspiration and example, which Erasmus, himself a curious example of the contradictory tendencies of the age, essayed to stem by satire and sarcasm. Yet, despite the wide departure of ecclesiastical practice from the simplicity of primitive Christianity, the influence of the Church was never greater on the political and social life of Europe than at this critical juncture.

When Columbus sailed away from Palos in 1492, Alexander VI. of the house of Borgia had just been elevated to the Pontificate (Aug. 2nd, 1492). He embodied the very genius of selfish family aggrandizement. In November, 1503, when Julius II., the warrior Pope, succeeded Alexander, Columbus was nearing the end of his fourth voyage and of his adventurous career, eating away his heart on the island of Jamaica, the victim of princely ingratitude and his own extravagant pretensions. Julius, during his pontificate, succeeded by masterly statescraft in arraying the powers of Europe against each other, with the distinct purpose of advancing the power of the Papacy. But

QUEBEC IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

tudes, were the direct agents of three European powers — Spain, Portugal, and France. The EngHsh colonists who followed were not sent forth by their Government, but they recognized fealty to it in a certain sense. As a consequence, the condition of European politics determined in every case the fate of America.

While the Spanish initiative in the discovery of America was the consequence of her sudden elevation to the rank of one of the Great Powers of Europe, the maintenance and extension of that position, especially when the Spanish King became also Emperor of Germany, involved her in such costly wars that she was compelled to use her American conquests primarily as a source of treasure, partly won from the soil, and partly extorted from the unfortunate natives by cruel and oppressive measures. As the Spanish immigrants were not agriculturists, and therefore not, properly speaking, colonists, official tyranny, bureaucratic pride and political dishonesty became almost of necessity the features of Spanish rule. The vices of Old Spain were transplanted to the soil of America. They at once took deep root and have borne bitter fruit even to our own day.

The supreme control claimed by and accorded to the Church was evinced in the Bull of Alexander VI. promulgated the year after the discovery, which allotted to Spain all lands west of a line drawn from North to South one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. In the following year Spain and Portugal, by the treaty of Tordesillas, agreed that the line of demarcation between their future possessions should be three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, and some years subsequently the Pope confirmed the treaty. Portugal therefore elected of necessity as her field of discovery the ocean to the north and south of the West India Islands; but the southern lands alone were those which she ultimately occupied. Cabral, in 1500, sailed for India, but driven on to the coast of Brazil, planted the flag of Portugal within the limit of Portugal's area, and founded Brazil — the only colony Portugal ever maintained on the American continent. Cabral's discovery was followed by those of other navigators in these southern seas, notably by the explorations described by Amerigo Vespucci, whose letters,

THE AWAKENING OF FRANCE.

if not his seamanship, won for him the honor of conferring his name on the New Continent. These tempting tropical lands, whose luxuriant vegetation fired the imagination with visions of wealth beneath the soil as prolific as the foliage which clothed it, stimulated Portugal to claim her heritage to the north as well as to the south of the equator, for the voyages of the Cabots had proved that, in that direction also, the land bulged eastward, so far as to throw it within the Portuguese sphere of occupation. She therefore sent forth two expeditions, one in 1^00 and another in 1501, under the Cortereals. But fortunately these navigators confirmed the Cabots' account of the repellent aspect of the country, and repressed all further enthusiasm for exploration of a region where blustering winds made the sailor's life irksome, and a sterile coast, clad for many weary months in snow and ice, offered the explorer but scant inducement to land. North America was thus relieved from Portuguese domination. What extent of the shore line of our Northern Continent John and Sebastian Cabot, and Caspar and Miguel Cortereal explored, it is beyond our province to discuss; but it is abundantly clear from the failure of either of such active maritime powers as Portugal and England, in whose interest the navigators sailed, to hold or extend their discoveries, that little or no value was attached to what they had found. It is presumable that neither entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as otherwise England or Portugal would have sought by that channel a route to Cathay, and not have left to France the honor of making, a third of a century later, the most famous of all the great voyages for the discovery of a Northwest Passage.

When the New Workl was revealed, France had only just thrown off the trammels of feudalism. Louis XL had made himself really King of France, which was then territorially almost as we know it to-day. P)y cunning and by force, Burgundy, Franche Comte, Artois, Provence, Anjou, Roussillon had, in whole or in part, been brought under his rule. But France then and for several subsequent reigns had no navy, and but trifling foreign trade and commerce. The duty of the last monarchs of the Valois line was royally fulfilled by maintaining control of contiguous territory, and creating a French nation. Unfortunately, their ambitions phmged them into a succession of ItaHan wars, which strained their resources almost to the breaking point. Nevertheless, one benefit these foreign wars did confer. It was from jealousy and laudable rivalry of his life-long foe in the Italian struggle, Charles V., that Francis 1. was impelled to engage in maritime enterprises, and to seize his share of that New World, which was pouring gold and silver by the shipload into the Spanish treasury. ''Ah, well," this pleasure-loving but shrewd monarch is credited with saying, ''the Kings of Spain and Portugal are dividing coolly the New World between them without offering their poor brother a share. I should like to see the clause of Adam's will which bequeathed to them this vast heritage."

Charles V. used his ships as fighting machines in the Mediterranean, as well as for purposes of commerce in the Spanish Main and the Pacific ; and Francis I. was too acute a soldier and politician not to appreciate the immense advantage which this possession of sea power gave the Emperor in his Italian campaign. The imperative necessity therefore lay on him of providing France with a navy, and of encouraging private maritime enterprises. His hatred of Charles V. induced him to resort to disgraceful shifts ; but it was the commercial treaty and political alliance which he made with the Turks under Soliman IL, in order to thwart the noble efforts of the brilliant and much harassed Emperor, who had just freed the Mediterranean from the scourge of Tunisian and Algerian pirates, that awakened France to the value and possibility of embarking successfully in foreign trade. To the same stimulus must be attributed the sending forth of the three expeditions to America under Verazzano, as well as those under Jacques Carrier and Roberval.

When France attempted to govern in the New World she imitated Spain more or less in form, but not in spirit. The climatic conditions of the territory she occupied, as well as the natural temperament of her colonists and the classes from which they were drawn, produced a distinct type of colony. The home Government designed to engraft the French bureaucratic system

FRENCH AND ENGLISH COLONIES.

on the colonial stock, and even transferred to the forests of Canada all that remained of the feudal customs and land tenure. Her colonial policy was to duplicate as nearly as possible Old France in New France, and to check spontaneous colonial development in strange and untried directions.

The English colonies, on the other hand, having been founded as private enterprises, some of them under the protection of Royal charters, were freer than those of Spain, Portugal, and France to work out, amidst their novel environments, an original system of government, and to form distinct social habits and customs ; and therefore though moulded on ancestral models, they were not direct reflections of European originals. Even the English colonies, notwithstanding their greater independence of European control, were more or less affected by every complication of Old World politics. The successive wars between France, Holland, and England were waged on both sides of the Atlantic, and are referred to in colonial annals as King James' War, King William's War, and Queen Anne's War. Finally it was as a European war measure that France lent her aid to the revolting English colonies, and it was equally through English sympathy and her direct assistance, that the Spanish colonies were enabled to throw ofif the yoke of Spanish control.

Furthermore, American life was from the first inoculated with the ecclesiastical and theological views of Europe in all their absoluteness and their acrimony. The monastic orders carried into New Spain their narrow creed and the Inquisition, though the Dominicans, who used so mercilessly and relentlessly this terrible engine for the suppression of heresy on both sides of the Atlantic, were the staunchcst protectors the poor Indians had against their oppressors. In New France the pretensions of| the Church were as vehemently asserted as in Old ; and the quarrel between Church and State was even more bitterly waged. In New England and in Virginia the contention between Puritan and Prelatist was as rife as in the old home from which the Roundheads and the Cavaliers had fled.

Thus on the warp of European politics was woven the web of American history. And it has so happened that almost as soon as European control was thrown off, and the American communities might have shaped out for themselves even more distinct types of political and social life than they have done, there set in that great revolution in economics, through the agency of steam and electricity, which is so rapidly knitting the world into a commercial whole and creating for it a common civiHzation. This revolution is rubbing down, if not obliterating, idiosyncrasies of national character. Through other causes, therefore, than political control, America is still responding to the impulses of European hfe. On the other hand Europe is and has been vitally moved by America. But so intricate are the direct and reflex waves of influence, sweeping back and fro across the sea, that it will become more and more difficult to trace the origin of that unifying process, now in full progress. The study can, however, best be made where the range of observation is limited. And certainly there is no community on this continent whose history so vividly illustrates as that of the City of Quebec, the passage from feudalism to modernism ; from government by autocracy to government by popular vote; from feudal bureaucracy to English colonial rule, and then colonial independence; from ecclesiastical domination to ecclesiastical subordination. There also can be studied the racial peculiarities of two of the great peoples of the modern world, passing from hostile antagonism into friendly rivalry, but evincing all the persistence of racial habits and institutions.

In the T7th Century, to which the following study will be confined, we shall see how trade monopolies strangled the spontaneous efforts of the colonists towards industrial and commercial enterprise, and drove the more adventurous spirits into illegal pursuits of gain ; what a blighting eft'ect the refusal to the people of all participation in government had upon civic and national growth ; and how vain the attempt must ever be to reconcile ecclesiastical and civil authority, where representatives of each are combined in the administration of government. In the little town of Quebec all these experiments were tried, all these forces were in operation ; and the results can there be seen and studied to better purpose than on a larger field and under more complicated conditions.

Chapter II

The Unsuccessful Attempt to Found the Quebec Colony Under Cartier and RobervaL

Cartier's First Voyage.

Though Cortereal's and Cabot's reports on the sterile north had not attracted colonists or treasure seekers, they did stimulate the fisher folk of Portugal, France and Spain to extend their quest for cod from Iceland to Labrador and Newfoundland across the Great Cod Banks, and even to penetrate the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. Exactly how far they ventured is a subject of dispute. Charlevoix tells us that as early as 1504 Basque, Norman and British sailors fished for cod on the Great Banks along the shores of Canada, and that in 1 507 Jean Denys of Honfleur made a map of the Gulf. He then repeats the stories of exploration of the upper river by Denys, Velasco and Aubert. But these vague traditions are of little value. The actual limits of previous exploration can probably be gathered inferentially, yet with more reliability, from Cartier's narrative. Certain localities on the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador are by him referred to by names already assigned. But when he sails away southward from Port Brest, on the Labrador coast, and makes the northwest coast of Newfoundland ; and subsequently when he explores the Magdalen Islands, and the shore of New Brunswick, he himself assigns names to most of the prominent geographical features. The inference is that the fishermen knew the shores of Newfoundland, the Straits of Belle Isle, and the Labrador coast for a short distance to the west, but that neither curiosity, nor adventure, nor the search for treasure, had induced them to journey further than the abundance of cod and the pursuit of their calling tempted them. From his own hamlet of St. Malo, as well as from all the ports of Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, from the Basque Provinces of Spain, and from Portugal, hardy seamen had year after year, for decades past, struck fearlessly out into the angry Atlantic ; had tossed about while fishing on the banks, and, like their descendants of to-day, made the Newfoundland coast in search of bait and to cure their catch. All they knew he knew by hearsay, and perhaps, as rumor says, from personal experience during two fishing voyages ; consequently he was famiUar with all the known localities ; with the precautions to be taken for securing the ships in winter, and in the breaking up of the ice in the spring ; and knew what stores should be laid in for barter with the natives. On the other hand, the migratory Indians, who had for over a generation traded with the fishermen of the Gulf, had either carried or disseminated by rumor so full a description of the white men and their ways throughout the whole valley of the St. Lawrence that, when Cartier ascended it, he excited neither the fear nor the astonishment with which the Spaniards were received in their early exploratory expeditions. These aboriginal hunters may also have interchanged with the Indians of Stadacona and Hochelaga the seeds of those plants, indigenous to Europe, which Cartier subsequently found cultivated by those more advanced tribes.

There is therefore no substantial reason to rob Cartier of the honor of being the first explorer from across the Atlantic to trace the course of the St. Lawrence from the sea to the head of its navigable waters. On the other hand, he was not, like Columbus or Cabot, steering for unknown, though conjectured land. Thus the landfall made by Cartier on his first voyage, the Cap de Bonne Vue, was a headland as well known to navigators then as it is to-day; as were also the headlands and inlets of the southeast coast of Labrador within the Straits of Belle Isle. But all beyond was mystery and a void which the imagination could fill with demons or with gold, as people's fancy impelled them. Perhaps Cartier thought the expansion of water within the narrow Straits —the Golf des Chateaux of Cartier and the early fishermen— was part of the great sea of Verrazzano, the Mare Indiciim, which a then recent map, that of the Vicomte Maggiolo, 1527, showed as occupying the space which the central part of our northern continent fills, separated from the Atlantic by but a fringe of seaboard. This sea Cartier may have imagined he had already entered, once cartier's first voyage.