HISTORY OF CANADA

PART I
(NEW FRANCE)

C. P. LUCAS

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

A

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY

OF THE

BRITISH COLONIES

VOL. V
CANADA—PART I
HISTORICAL

BY
C. P. LUCAS, C.B.
OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
AND THE COLONIAL OFFICE

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MDCCCCI

OXFORD
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS

HISTORY OF CANADA

CHAPTER I

EUROPEAN DISCOVERERS IN NORTH AMERICA TO THE END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The British possessions in North America consist of Newfoundland and the Dominion of Canada. Under the Government of Newfoundland is a section of the mainland coast which forms part of Labrador, extending from the straits of Belle Isle on the south to Cape Chudleigh on the north.

The area of these possessions, together with the date and mode of their acquisition, is as follows:—

In the Introduction to a previous volume,¹ it was pointed out that all the British possessions in the New World have one common feature; viz. that they have been, in the main, fields of European settlement, and not merely trading stations or conquered dependencies; but that, in other respects—in climate, in geography, and in what may be called the strata of colonization—the West Indian and North American provinces of the Empire stand at opposite poles to each other. It may be added that, in North America, European colonization was later in time and slower in development than in the central and southern parts of the continent; and, in order to understand why this was the case, some reference must be made to the geography of North America, more especially in its relation to Europe, and also to its first explorers, their motives, and their methods.

¹ Vol. ii, West Indies, pp. 3, 4.

The Old World lies west and east. In the New World the line of length is from north to south. The geographical outline of America, as compared with that of Europe and Asia, is very simple. There is a long stretch of continent, with a continuous backbone of mountains, running from the far north to the far south. The mountains line the western coast; on the eastern side are great plains, great rivers, broken shores, and islands. Midway in the line of length, where the Gulf of Mexico runs into the land, and where, further south, the Isthmus of Darien holds together North and South America by a narrow link, the semicircle of West Indian islands stand out as stepping-stones in the ocean for wayfarers from the old continent to the new.

The two divisions of the American continent are curiously alike. They have each two great river-basins on the eastern side. The basin of the St. Lawrence is roughly parallel to that of the Amazon; the basin of the Mississippi to that of La Plata. The North American coast, however, between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and that of the Mississippi, is more varied and broken, more easy of access, than the South American shores between the Amazon and La Plata. On the other hand, South America has an attractive and accessible northern coast, in strong contrast to the icebound Arctic regions; and the Gulf of Venezuela, the delta of the Orinoco, and the rivers of Guiana, have called in traders and settlers from beyond the seas.

The history of colonization in North America has been, in the main, one of movement from east to west. In South America, on the other hand, the western side played almost from the first at least as important a part as the eastern. The story of Peru and its Inca rulers shows that in old times, in South America, there was a civilization to be found upon the western side of the Andes, and the shores of the Pacific Ocean. European explorers penetrated into and crossed the continent rather from the north and west than from the east; and Spanish colonization on the Pacific coast was, outwardly at least, more imposing and effective than Portuguese colonization on the Atlantic seaboard. The great mass of land on the earth's surface is in the northern hemisphere; and in the extreme north the shores of the Old and New Worlds are closest to each other. Here, where the Arctic Sea narrows into the Behring Straits, it is easier to reach America from the west than from the east, from Asia than from Europe; but to pass from the extremity of one continent to the extremity of another is of little avail for making history; and the history of North America has been made from the opposite side, which lies over against Europe, where the shores are indented by plenteous bays and estuaries, and where there are great waterways leading into the heart of the interior.

The main outlets of North America are, as has been said, the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi; while, on the long stretch of coast between them, the most important river is the Hudson, whose valley is a direct and comparatively easy highroad from the Atlantic to Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence basin; and here it may be noticed that, though a Bristol ship first discovered North America, and though, from the time of Ralegh onwards, North America became the main scene of British colonization, the English allowed other nations to secure the keys of the continent, and ran the risk of being cut off from the interior. The French forestalled them on the St. Lawrence, and later took possession of the mouth of the Mississippi. The Dutch planted themselves on the Hudson between New England and the southern colonies, and New York, the present chief city of English-speaking America, was once New Amsterdam. Of all colonizing nations the English have perhaps been the least scientific in their methods; and in no part of the world were their mistakes greater than in North America, where their success was eventually most complete. There was, however, one principle in colonization to which they instinctively and consistently held. While they often neglected to safeguard the obvious means of access into new-found countries, and, as compared with other nations, made comparatively little use of the great rivers in any part of the world, they laid hold on coasts, peninsulas, and islands, and kept their population more or less concentrated near to the sea. Thus, when the time of struggle came, they could be supported from home, and were stronger at given points than their more scientific rivals. If the French laid their plans to keep in their own hands the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the St. Lawrence, and thereby to shut off the colonies of the Atlantic seaboard from the continent behind, those colonies had the advantage of close contact with the sea, of comparatively continuous settlement, and of yearly growing power to break through the weak and unduly extended line with which the competing race tried to hem them in.

But this contest between French and English, based though it was on geographical position, belongs to the Middle Ages of European colonization in America: let us look a little further back, and see how the Old and the New Worlds first came into touch with each other.

In his history of King Henry VII, Bacon refers to the 'memorable accident' of the Cabots' great discovery, in the following passage:—'There was one Sebastian Gabato, a Venetian living in Bristow, a man seen and expert in cosmography and navigation. This man, seeing the success and emulating perhaps the enterprise of Christopherus Columbus in that fortunate discovery towards the south-west, which had been by him made some six years before, conceited with himself that lands might likewise be discovered towards the north-west. And surely it may be he had more firm and pregnant conjectures of it than Columbus had of his at the first. For the two great islands of the Old and New World, being in the shape and making of them broad towards the north and pointed towards the south, it is likely that the discovery first began where the lands did nearest meet. And there had been before that time a discovery of some lands which they took to be islands, and were indeed the continent of America towards the north-west.'² Bacon goes on to surmise that Columbus had knowledge of this prior discovery, and was guided by it in forming his own conjectures as to the existence of land in the far west; and it is at least not unlikely that, when he visited Iceland in 1477, he would have heard tales of the Norsemen's voyages to America.³

² Spedding's edition of Bacon's works, 1870, vol. vi, p. 196.

³ For this visit, see Washington Irving's Life and Voyages of Columbus, bk. i, ch. vi.

It would be out of place in this book to make more than a passing reference to the much-vexed question, how far the New World was known to Europeans before the days of Columbus and the Cabots. Indeed, if all the stories on the subject were proved, the fact would yet remain that, for all practical purposes, America was first revealed to the nations of Europe, when Columbus took his way across the Atlantic. It was likely that, when his discovery had been made, men would rise up to assert that it was not so great and not so new as had been at first imagined. The French claimed priority for a countryman of their own;⁴ stories of Welsh and Irish settlement in America passed into circulation; the romance of the brothers Zeni was published, a tale of supposed Venetian adventure in the fourteenth century to the islands of the far north; and it was contended, more prosaically and with greater show of reason, that Basque fishermen had frequented the banks of Newfoundland, before that island was discovered for England and thereby earned its present name.

⁴ Cousin of Dieppe, who claimed to have discovered America in 1488, four years before Columbus reached the West Indies.

The story of the Norsemen's voyages has a sounder foundation than any other of these early traditions and tales. Iceland is nearer to Greenland than to Norway: it has been abundantly proved that colonies were established and fully organized in Greenland in the Middle Ages; and it seems on the face of it unlikely that the enterprise and adventure of the seafaring sons of the north would have stopped short at this point, instead of carrying them on to the mainland of America.

The Norse are said to have come to Iceland about 875 A.D., where Christian Irish had already preceded them; and, in the following year, rocks far to the west were sighted by Gunnbiorn. A century later, in 984, Eric the Red came back from a visit to Gunnbiorn's land, calling it by the attractive name of Greenland. About 986, Bjarni Herjulfson, sailing from Iceland to Greenland, sighted land to the south-west; and, a few years later, about the year 1000, Leif, the son of Eric, who had brought the Christian religion to Greenland, sailed in search of the south-western land which Bjarni had seen. The record of his voyage claims to be the record of the discovery of America. He found the rocky barren shores of Labrador and Newfoundland, and called them from their appearance Helluland, or 'slateland.' He passed on to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and to Nova Scotia, calling it Markland, or the 'land of woods.' Then sailing still further south, he came to a land where vines grew wild, and which he called Vinland. This last was, it would seem, the New England coast, between Boston and New York; and here in after times, for a like reason, English settlers gave the name of Martha's or Martin's Vineyard to an island, which lies close to the shore south of Cape Cod.⁵ In Vinland, it is stated, a Norse colony was founded a few years after Leif's visit; and trade—mainly a timber trade—was carried on with Greenland down to the year 1347, after which all is a blank.

⁵ A little further to the south on the coast of New Jersey, or Maryland, Verrazano 'saw in this country many vines growing naturally' (Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 360, 1810 ed.).

No authentic inscriptions or remains, indicating Scandinavian discovery or settlement in America, have, it is said, been found anywhere outside Greenland, except at one point in the very far north;⁶ and in their absence these northern tales cannot be absolutely verified. It can only be said that, in all probability, America was known to the Northmen in the Middle Ages, but that what happened in these dark days in the extreme north of Europe and the extreme north of America has no direct bearing upon the history of European colonization.

⁶ See Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, (vol. i, chap. ii) on 'Pre-Columbian Explorations.' The writer says, 'Nowhere in America, except on an island on the east shore of Baffin's Bay, has any authentic runic inscription been found outside of Greenland.' Reference should be made to the first chapter of Mr. Raymond Beazley's John and Sebastian Cabot ('Builders of Greater Britain' series, 1898), in which the dates and particulars of the Norse discovery of America, as given above, are somewhat modified.

At the time when modern history opens, there were two parts of the world which were—to use the Greek philosopher's phrase—'ends in themselves.' One was Europe or rather Southern Europe, the other was the East Indies; and the great problem was to find the best and shortest way from the one point to the other.

The overland trade routes through Syria and Egypt—by which Genoa, Venice, and the other city states of the Middle Ages had grown rich—had fallen in the main under Moslem control; and, accordingly, the growing nations of Europe began to take to the open sea. On the ocean, India can be reached from Europe either by going east or by going west. In the former case Africa comes in the way, in the latter America; and the position of these two continents in the modern history of the world is, in their earliest stage, that of having been places on the road, not final goals.

The Portuguese tried the way by Africa and succeeded. Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape, sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, and crossed to India. The Spaniards set sail in the opposite direction, and, failing in their original design, found instead a New World.

Let us suppose that the conditions had been reversed, that Southern Africa, when reached, had proved as attractive as the West Indies; that its shores had been fertile and easy of access; that its rivers had been navigable, and that its turning-point had been as distant as Cape Horn; that, on the contrary, Columbus had discovered a channel through America, where he sought for it at the Isthmus of Darien, had found the American coasts and islands as little inviting as Africa, and behind them an expanse of sea no wider than the Indian Ocean. In that case America would have remained the Dark Continent, to be passed by, as Africa was passed by, on the way to the East; and hinging on this one central fact, that the Indies were the goal of discovery, the whole history of colonization would have been changed. As it was, the Spaniards, in the first place, found their way barred by America; and, in the second place, found America too good to be passed by, even if a thoroughfare had been found. Thus they assumed that they had really reached the Indies on their furthest side; and, by the time that the mistake had been finally cleared up, the riches and wonders of the New World had given it a position and standing of its own, over and above all considerations respecting the best way to the East.

America then was discovered by being taken on the way to some other part of the world; it could not be passed by like Africa; and it was more attractive than Africa. Thus it was early colonized, while the great mass of the African continent was left, almost down to our own day, unexplored and unknown.

This statement, however, only holds true of that part of America which the Spaniards made their own; and the further question arises—Why was the discovery and settlement of North America a much slower process than the Spanish conquest and colonization of Central America and the West Indies? The north of Newfoundland is in the same latitude as the south of England; the mouth of the St. Lawrence lies directly over against the ports of Brittany; a line drawn due east from New York would almost pass through Madrid: therefore it seems as though sailors going westward from Europe would naturally make their way in the first instance to the North American coast; and, as a matter of fact, Cabot probably sighted the shores of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Labrador before Columbus set foot upon the mainland of South America.

There are, however, ample historical and geographical reasons for the fact that, at the beginning of modern history, the stream of European discovery and colonization took a south-westerly rather than a westerly direction. The main course of European civilization has on the whole been from south-east to north-west. Its centre gradually shifted from Asia Minor and Phoenicia to Greece, from Greece to Rome, and finally from the shores of the Mediterranean to those of the Atlantic. The peninsula of Spain and Portugal stands half-way between the inner and the outer sea, and accordingly geography marked out this country to be the birthplace of the new and wider history of the world. Further, at the time when modern history begins, the Spaniards and Portuguese were better trained, more consolidated, more nearly come to their prime, more full of expansive force than the peoples of Northern Europe; so that their history combined with their geographical position to place them in the front rank among the movers of the world. But Spain and Portugal look south-west: both countries are hot, sunny lands, and, while adventurers to the unknown would in any case be more attracted to regions where they would expect light and heat and tropical growth and colour, than to the bare, bleak stretches of the north, most of all would a southern race set out to find a new world in a southerly or south-westerly direction. Again, as has been seen, the early explorers were seeking for a sea-road to the Indies; and, as the tales of the Indies were glowing tales of glowing lands, men were more likely at first to start in search of them by way of the Equator than by way of the Pole.

And they had guidance in their course. The Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, lying away in the ocean to the south-west, were the half-mythical goals of ancient navigation. The Spaniards would naturally make for them in the first instance, and so far help themselves on their westward way. Wind and tide would prescribe the same line of discovery. The way to the West Indies is made easy by the north-easterly trade winds, whereas the passage to North America is in the teeth of the prevailing wind from the west. Those who take ship from Europe to North America meet the opposing force of the Gulf Stream; voyagers to the south-west, on the contrary, are borne by the Equatorial Current from the African coast to the Caribbean Sea.

Easier to reach than North America, the West Indies and Central America were also more attractive when reached. The Spaniards found riches beyond their hopes, pearls in the sea, gold and silver in the land, and a race of natives who could be forced to fish for the one and to mine for the other. When they had discovered the New World, there was every inducement to make them forthwith conquer and colonize in countries where living promised to be more luxurious than in their own land. Adventurers to North America, on the contrary, found greater cold than they had left behind them in the same latitudes in Europe, desolate shores, little trace of precious metal, and natives whom it was dangerous to offend and impossible to enslave. In the far north the cod fisheries were discovered, and furs were to be obtained by barter from the North American Indians; but such trade was not likely to lead to permanent settlement in the near future. Its natural outcome was not the founding of colonies, the building of cities, and the subjugation of continents, but, at the most, repeated visits in the summer time to the Newfoundland banks, or spasmodic excursions up the course of the St. Lawrence. Thus, for a century after Columbus first sailed to the west, while Central and South America became organized into a collection of Spanish provinces, the extreme north was left to Basque, Breton, and English fishermen; and the coast between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, where the English race was eventually to make its greatest effort and achieve its greatest success—this, the present territory of the United States, was, with the exception of Florida, little visited and scarcely known.

The discovery of minerals in a district brings about dense population and a hurried settlement. Men come to fisheries or hunting-grounds at stated times, and leave to come again. The progress of agricultural colonization, if steady and continuous, is usually very slow. Thus, where Central America gave gold and silver, there adventurers from Europe hurried in and stayed. The fisheries of Newfoundland saw men come and go; the sea was there the attraction, not the land. The agricultural resources of Virginia and New England were left undeveloped by Europeans, until the time came when business-like companies were formed by men who could afford to wait, and when enthusiasts went over the Atlantic not so much to make money as to live patiently and in the fear of God.

But, though the sixteenth century passed away before men's eyes, which were dazzled with the splendour of the tropics, had given more than passing glances to the sober landscape of North America, discoverers from Cabot onwards were not idle; and from the first, the ever powerful hope of finding a new road to the Indies took adventurers to the north-west in spite of cold and wind and tide. Because North America was unattractive in itself, therefore men seem to have imagined that it must be on the way to something better; and also, because it was unattractive in itself, they did not wait to see what could be made out of it, but kept perpetually pushing on to a further goal. They argued, as Bacon shows in the passage already quoted, and argued rightly, that in the north the Old and New Worlds were nearest together, and that here therefore was the point at which to cross from one to the other. They found sea channels evidently leading towards the west; they saw the great river of Canada⁷ come widening down from the same quarter; and thus, long after the quest of the Indies had in Central America been swallowed up in the riches found on the way, in North America it remained the one great object of the men who went out from Europe, and of the Kings who sent them out.

⁷ The idea that there was a way to the Indies by the St. Lawrence long continued. Thus Lescarbot writes (Nova Francia, Erondelle's translation, 1609, chap. xiii, p. 87) of the great river of Canada as 'taking her beginning from one of the lakes which do meet at the stream of her course (and so I think), so that it hath two courses, the one from the east towards France, the other from the west towards the south sea.'

As the first discoverer, Cabot, set sail to find the passage to Cathay, 'having great desire to traffic for the spices as the Portingals did,'⁸ so all who came after during the century of exploration kept the same end firmly in view. Francis I of France dispatched Verrazano to find the passage to the East; Cartier, the Breton sailor, came back from the St. Lawrence with tales which savoured of the Indies, of 'a river that goeth south-west, from whence there is a whole month's sailing to go to a certain land where there is neither ice nor snow seen'⁹—of a 'country of Saguenay, in which are infinite rubies, gold and other riches'¹⁰—of 'a land where cinnamon and cloves are gathered';¹¹ and his third voyage was, in his King's words, 'to the lands of Canada and Hochelaga, which form the extremity of Asia towards the west.'¹² Frobisher's voyage in 1576 led to the formation of a company of Cathay. As early as 1527, Master Robert Thorne wrote 'an information of the parts of the world' discovered by the Spaniards and Portuguese, and 'of the way to the Moluccas by the north.' Sir Humphrey Gilbert published 'a discourse' 'to prove a passage by the north-west to Cathaia and the East Indies'; and Richard Hakluyt himself, in the 'epistle dedicatory' to Philip Sydney, which forms the preface to his collection of Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America,¹³ sums up the arguments for the existence of 'that short and easy passage by the north-west which we have hitherto so long desired.' In short, the record of the sixteenth century in North America was, in the main, a record of successive voyagers seeking after a way to the East, supplemented by the fishing trade which was attracted to the shores of Newfoundland.

⁸ Gomara, quoted by Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 30 (1810 ed.).

⁹ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 278.

¹⁰ Ibid. p. 281.

¹¹ Ibid. p. 285.

¹² See Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World (25th ed., 1888), p. 217.

¹³ Published in 1582; edited by the Hakluyt Society in 1850.

The two men who opened America to Europe were of Italian parentage—Columbus the Genoese, and Cabot, born at Genoa, domiciled at Venice.¹⁴ The two great trading republics of the Middle Ages at once crowned their work in the world, and signed their own death warrant, in providing Spain and England with the sailors whose discoveries transferred the centre of life and movement from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The King of France too turned to Italy for a discoverer to rival Columbus and Cabot, and sent Verrazano the Florentine, at the end of 1523, to search out the coasts of North America.

¹⁴ As to Cabot's parentage see [below]. If the voyages of the Zeni were genuine, the Venetians could have claimed a yet older share in the record of European connexion with America.

At the first dawn of discovery those coasts were not wholly given over to French or English adventurers. Though Florida was the northern limit of Spanish conquest and settlement, Spanish claims extended indefinitely over the whole continent; and the French King's scheme for the colonization of Canada, in 1541, under the leadership of Cartier and Roberval, roused the suspicion of the Spanish court as an attempt to infringe an acknowledged monopoly. The Portuguese at the very first took part in north-western discovery, and with good reason; for it was their own Indies which were the final goal, and they could not afford to leave to other nations to find a shorter way thither than their own route round the Cape. Thus it was that Corte Real set out from Lisbon for the north-west in the year 1500, having 'craved a general license of the King Emmanuel to discover the Newfoundland,' and 'sailed unto that climate which standeth under the north in 50 degrees of latitude.'¹⁵ We find, too, records of Portuguese working in the same direction under foreign flags. In 1501 two patents were granted by Henry VII of England to English and Portuguese conjointly to explore, trade, and settle in America;¹⁶ and, in 1525, Gomez, who had served under Magellan, and who, like Magellan, was a Portuguese in the service of Spain, set out from the Spanish port of Corunna to search for the North-West Passage.¹⁷

¹⁵ See Purchas' Pilgrims, pt. 2, bk. x, chap. i. A brief 'collection of voyages, chiefly of Spaniards and Portugals, taken out of Antoine Galvano's Book of the Discoveries of the World.'

¹⁶ See Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. iv.

¹⁷ See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, p. 10.

Basque fishermen were among the very first visitors to Newfoundland, and, even after the North American continent was becoming a sphere of French and English colonization, to the exclusion of the southern nations of Europe, the Spaniards and Portuguese still held their own in the fisheries. The record of almost every voyage to Newfoundland notices Spanish or Portuguese ships plying their trade on the banks.¹⁸ A writer¹⁹ in the year 1578, on 'the true state and commodities of Newfoundland,' tells us that, according to his information, there were at that date above one hundred Spanish ships engaged in the cod fisheries, in addition to twenty or thirty whalers from Biscay; that the Portuguese ships did not exceed fifty, and that those owned by French and Bretons numbered about one hundred and fifty. Edward Hayes, the chronicler of Gilbert's last voyage in 1583, relates how the Portuguese at Newfoundland provisioned the English admiral's ships for their return voyage, and adds that 'the Portugals and French chiefly have a notable trade of fishing upon this bank.'²⁰

¹⁸ See Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World (25th ed., 1888), pp. 189, 190, and notes.

¹⁹ Anthony Parkhurst. The letter was written to Hakluyt, and published in his collection, vol. iii, p. 171.

²⁰ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 190.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Government still claimed for its subjects the right to fish on the Newfoundland coast, among other grounds on that of prior discovery, a claim which was only finally relinquished under the provisions of the Peace of Paris in 1763;²¹ and, writing about the same date, the author of the European Settlements in America noted that the Spaniards still shared in the fishery.²²

²¹ As to the question whether Basque fishermen had found their way to Newfoundland before Cabot, see the note to p. 189 of Mr. Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World. The reasons for thinking that these fishermen forestalled Cabot seem to be—(1) the argument of probability; (2) assertions of old writers to that effect; (3) the application of the Basque name 'Baccalaos' to Newfoundland, and the statement of Peter Martyr that Cabot found that word in use for codfish among the natives; (4) the claim advanced by the Spanish Government to right of fishing at Newfoundland on the ground of prior discovery by Biscayan fishermen. As to this last point, see Papers relative to the rupture with Spain, 1762. One source of friction at this time between Great Britain and Spain was what Pitt styles in a dispatch (p. 3) 'the stale and inadmissible pretensions of the Biscayans and Guipuscoans to fish at Newfoundland.' As to this claim, the Earl of Bristol, British minister at Madrid, writes (p. 53), 'With regard to the Newfoundland fishery, Mr. Wall urged, what I have also conveyed in some former despatches, that the Spaniards indeed pleaded, in favour of their claim to a share of the Bacallao trade, the first discovery of that island.'

²² European Settlements in America, pt. 6, chap. xxviii, 'Newfoundland.' The author (? Burke) says, 'The French and Spaniards, especially the former, have a large share (in the fishery).'

Hayes, who has just been quoted, tells us that more than thirty years before he wrote, i.e. about 1550, the Portuguese had touched at Sable Island and left there 'both neat and swine to breed.' In the same way they left live stock at Mauritius on their way to and from the East; and in like manner the Spaniards landed pigs at the Bermudas²³ on their early voyages to the West Indies.

²³ See vol. i of this series, p. 163, and vol. ii, p. 6 and note. Lescarbot states that the French Baron de Léry, who attempted to found a colony in North America in 1518, left cattle on Sable Island. See Parkman's Pioneers of France, p. 193, and Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. v, p. 111.

If evidence were wanted that, in the oldest days of movement from Europe to the West, southern sailors did not go only to tropical America, it would be found in the naming of the North American coasts and islands. The first point on the coast of North America, sighted by the first discoverer—the Italian Cabot—was spoken of under the Italian name of Prima Terra Vista. The name Baccalaos²⁴ tells of voyages of the Basques, as Cape Breton of visitors from Brittany; and, after Corte Real's voyages, the east coast of Newfoundland was, as old maps testify, christened for a while Terra de Corte Reall.²⁵ Soon, however, the Spaniards found Mexico, Peru, and Central America enough and more than enough to absorb their whole attention; the Portuguese were over-weighted by their eastern empire and Brazil: and North America was given over, first to be explored and then to be settled, by the peoples of the north of Europe; who gathered strength as their southern rivals declined, and whose work was more lasting because more slow.

²⁴ 'Baccalaos' is the Spanish name for codfish. It is of Basque origin. Cabot, it is stated, gave the name generally to the lands which he found. The name was subsequently applied more especially to Newfoundland. Thus Edward Hayes in his account of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's last voyage, under the heading 'a brief relation of the Newfoundland and the commodities thereof' (Hakluyt, iii, 193), speaks of 'that which we do call the Newfoundland and the Frenchmen Bacalaos.' Various small islands, however, in these parts were also given this name by different writers. At the present day, on the maps of Newfoundland, an islet off the east coast, at the extreme north of the peninsula of Avalon, bears the name of Baccalieu. See Parkman, p. 189 note as above, and the chapter on the voyages of the Cabots in Justin Winsor's history, vol. iii.

²⁵ The name 'Labrador' is supposed to have been derived from the fact that some North American natives, brought back in one of the ships which accompanied Corte Real on this second voyage, were said to be 'admirably calculated for labour and the best slaves I have ever seen.' Hence the name 'Laboratoris terra,' or Labrador. On Thorne's map (1527) printed in the Divers Voyages to America, there appears 'Nova terra Laboratorum dicta.' Sir Clements Markham, in his edition of the Journal of Columbus, Cabot, and Corte Real (Hakluyt Society, 1893, Int. p. 51, note), says: 'There is no reference to Labrador in any of the authorities for the voyages of Corte Real. The King of Portugal is said to have hoped to derive good slave labour from the lands discovered by Corte Real. That is all. The name Labrador is not Portuguese; and Corte Real was never on the Labrador coast.' Another derivation given is: 'This land was discovered by the English from Bristol, and named Labrador because the one who saw it first was a labourer from the Azores.' One more derivation is that Labrador was the name of the Basque captain of a fishing-vessel. See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, pp. 2, 46, and Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World, p. 216, note.

On March 5, 1496, King Henry VII of England granted a patent to 'John Cabot, citizen of Venice,' and to his three sons—Lewis, Sebastian, and Sancius—empowering them 'to discover unknown lands under the king's banner.'²⁶ Under this patent—'the earliest surviving document which connects England with the New World'²⁷—North America was discovered.

²⁶ Quoted from the marginal note to the patent. See Hakluyt's Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America, published by the Hakluyt Society, 1850, p. 21.

²⁷ From Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. iv.

Almost every point connected with the voyages of the Cabots is dark and doubtful. What the father did and what the son, whence they came, and whither they went, is all uncertain. The tale of Columbus and his voyages is known to all the world; but readers are left to grope after the Cabots, as the latter groped after the strange wild regions of the north-west.

John Cabot, it would seem, was a Genoese who settled in Venice. There he was admitted to the rights of citizenship. He married a Venetian lady, and in Venice probably his three sons were born and passed their childhood. He travelled on the sea, visiting the coasts of Arabia, and forming, it may be, schemes to discover a new route to the far East. He came to England, having previously attempted to gain support for his projected voyages in Spain and Portugal, and he took up his residence in either London or Bristol. The exact date of his arrival in this country is unknown; but, either shortly before or shortly after he came, Columbus crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1492. The news gave a stimulus to other would-be discoverers, and encouraged the Kings of Europe to further their plans. Hence Cabot and his sons obtained their patent in 1496. It was little that King Henry VII gave to the Italian sailors. Their voyages were to be made 'upon their own proper costs and charges,' and in return for his licence, the King was to receive a fifth of the profits. The enterprise was countenanced but not supported by the state, and the English Government in these early days, as in the times which came after, left the work of discovery and colonization in the hands of private adventurers. Bristol was the port of departure, and a Bristol book contains the following notice of the voyage:—'In the year 1497, the 24th of June, on St. John's day, was Newfoundland found by Bristol men in a ship called the Matthew.'²⁸ John Cabot and Sebastian his son probably both sailed in the Matthew, and they commanded a crew of English sailors. The voyage was a short summer venture, beginning in May and ending with the close of July or the beginning of August. America was seen and touched, the land-fall being either the northern end of Cape Breton island, or the coast of Labrador, or Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland. The English flag was planted on American soil, but no exploration took place; nothing was achieved but the one great fact of discovery. In the following February, new letters patent were issued—on this occasion to John Cabot alone; and a second time, in the summer of 1498, the ships started from Bristol. Again, it is conjectured, both father and son were on board; and this time the North American coast seems to have been skirted from the region of icebergs and the banks of Newfoundland as far south as the Carolinas. In reference to this second voyage, Sebastian Cabot wrote that he sailed 'unto the latitude of sixty-seven degrees and a half under the North Pole,' and 'finding still the open sea without any manner of impediment, he thought verily by that way to have passed on still the way to Cathaio which is in the East.'²⁹ The way to the East, however, was left unopened, to tantalize after-comers, and to be a kind of 'will o' the wisp,' leading men on to barren shores and Arctic seas, though the continent which they had already found was worth all the riches of the Indies.

²⁸ Barrett's History and Antiquities of Bristol (Bristol, 1789), p. 172.

²⁹ From Ramusio, quoted in 'a note of Sebastian Cabot's voyage of discovery' (Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, p. 25). For the much-vexed question of the Cabots and their voyages, reference should be made to John Cabot the Discoverer of North America and Sebastian his son, by Henry Harrisse, London, 1896; to the Journal of Columbus, Cabot, and Corte Real, edited for the Hakluyt Society by Sir Clements Markham, 1893; to Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, Appendix B, 'The Cabots and their Voyages'; and to Mr. Raymond Beazley's John and Sebastian Cabot ('Builders of Greater Britain' series, 1898). The result of a great deal of learning is after all little but conjecture.

The next great voyager to North America was Gaspar Corte Real, a Portuguese. Twice he sailed to the north-west, in 1500 and 1501, on the earlier voyage sighting Greenland and the east coast of Newfoundland, and on the later working north from Chesapeake Bay. He was lost on the second voyage; and his brother Miguel, who went in search of him in 1502, after finding 'many entrances of rivers and havens,' was lost also.³⁰

³⁰ The voyages of the Corte Reals are given in Purchas' Pilgrims, pt. 2, bk. x. See Justin Winsor, vol. iv, chap. i, on Cortereal, Verrazano, &c. See also the volume of the Hakluyt Society referred to in the previous note.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, if not earlier, Frenchmen took their place among the explorers of the world, and the Norman and Breton seaports began to send their ships across the Atlantic. Denys of Honfleur is said to have reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1506; in 1508, Aubert of Dieppe brought American Indians back to France; and in 1518 Baron de Léry made the first, a stillborn, attempt to found a French colony in North America.³¹

³¹ See above, [note 23].

At the end of the fifteenth century, the consolidation of France had been completed by the marriage of Charles VIII with Anne of Brittany, and from this time France began to compete with Spain. Francis I came to the throne in 1515, and his personal rivalry with Charles V, German Emperor and Spanish King in one, quickened the competition between the French and Spanish peoples. Thus it was that the French court turned its attention to the work of exploration, and Francis sent forth the Italian Verrazano with four ships from Dieppe 'to discover new lands by the ocean.'³² Sailing at the end of 1523, Verrazano was driven back by tempest; but, starting again, he left Madeira to cross the Atlantic on January 17, 1524. He reached the shores of Carolina; then coasted northward, landing at various points; and, having sailed as far north as Newfoundland—'the land that in times past was discovered by the Britons (Bretons), which is in fifty degrees'—he 'concluded to return into France.'

³² From 'The relation of John Verarzanus,' given in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, p. 55, and there also headed 'The Discovery of Morum Bega' (Norumbega). It is given too in the ordinary collection, vol. iii, p. 357.

He brought home to his King a sober and systematic report of the North American coast—a report which meant business, and was not tricked out with vague surmises and impossible tales; but, within a year from his return, the strength of France was for a while broken at the battle of Pavia. He himself died soon afterwards, hanged, it is said, by the Spaniards as a pirate; and for ten years there is no record of any French explorer following in his steps, though French ships found their way over the ocean to the cod-fisheries of Newfoundland.

The year 1534 is a memorable one in the annals alike of France and of North America. It is the year from which must be dated the first beginnings of New France on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The discoverer of Canada was Jacques Cartier, a Breton sailor of St. Malo. He went out to explore the unknown world, not at his own risk, but as the agent of Brian Chabot, High Admiral of France. Sailing from St. Malo, on April 20, 1534, he came to Newfoundland, passed through the straits of Belle Isle, and entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He sailed into Chaleurs Bay under the July sun, describing the country as 'hotter than the country of Spain, and the fairest that can possibly be found';³³ and, having set up a cross on Gaspé Peninsula, he reached St. Malo again on September 5, bringing with him two Indian children as living memorials of his voyage.

³³ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 257.

He had discovered a hot, fair land, widely different from the bleak and rock-bound coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador; and the good report which he brought of his discoveries was more than enough to find him backing for a second venture. Accordingly, in the following year, on May 19, 1535, he sailed again from St. Malo, and, reaching the straits of Belle Isle after storm and tempest, took his way, the first of European explorers, up the great river of Canada. He moored his three ships below the rock of Quebec—then the site of Stadaconé, a native Indian village, and the dwelling-place of a chief Donnaconna, who is styled in the narrative the Lord of Canada. There he left his two larger vessels, and pushed on in his pinnace and boats to the town of Hochelaga. That town, the Indians had told him, was the capital of the land; and he found it, palisaded and fortified in native fashion, where Montreal now stands.³⁴ The Frenchmen were received as gods by the Indians; they were asked, like the Apostles of old, to touch and heal the sick; and, ever mindful of the duty of spreading the Christian religion, they read the gospel to their savage admirers in the strange French tongue, to cure their souls if they could not mend their bodies.

³⁴ As Mr. Parkman points out (Pioneers of France, p. 212), Quebec and Montreal were in old days, as now, the centres of population in Lower Canada. 'Stadaconé and Hochelaga, Quebec and Montreal, in the sixteenth century, as in the nineteenth, were the centres of Canadian population.'

Returning down stream to their ships, they passed the winter underneath Quebec, amid ice and snow, stricken with scurvy, and distrustful of their Indian neighbours; and at length, on the return of summer, they set sail for France, carrying away the Indian chief Donnaconna and some of his companions, to die in a far-off land. They reached St. Malo in the middle of July, 1536, and so ended Cartier's second voyage to 'the New found lands by him named New France.'³⁵

³⁵ End of the narrative of Cartier's second voyage in Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 285.

Between four and five years passed, and then the Breton sailor set out again. This time a definite scheme of settlement was projected, the instructions were more elaborate than before, the preparations were on a larger scale. The money was found by the crown, and the King was to receive one-third of the profits. A French nobleman, De Roberval, was to go out as the King's lieutenant in the New World, and was given the title of Lord of Norumbega,³⁶ while Cartier was appointed Captain-General. The objects of the expedition were to explore, to colonize, and to convert the heathen; and its leaders were, like Columbus, empowered to recruit colonists from the prisons at home. Cartier set out in advance of Roberval, in May, 1541. Again he sailed up the St. Lawrence, reached in his boats a point above Montreal, and, as before, wintered on the river; but this time at the mouth of the Cap Rouge, some way higher up than Quebec. His leader, Roberval, did not start till April, 1542; and, when in June he reached St. John's harbour in Newfoundland, he was met by Cartier, who had broken up his colony in disgust, and was on his way home to France. In spite of Roberval's remonstrances, Cartier left by night on his return voyage, and the Lord of Norumbega went on alone to the St. Lawrence. He planted his settlement at Cap Rouge, where Cartier had last sojourned, but it proved a miserable failure. The supplies were insufficient, the Governor turned out a savage despot, and after about a year the colony came to an end.

³⁶ As to Norumbega, see Parkman's Pioneers of France, pp. 216 and 253, notes, and Justin Winsor, vol. iii, chap. vi, on 'Norumbega and its English explorers.' The writer of this latter chapter (p. 185) says the territory of Norumbega never included Baccalaos, 'though Baccalaos, an old name of Newfoundland, sometimes included New England.' Norumbega, an Indian name, covered the district now included in the state of Maine, and was sometimes extended to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on the north, and part of New England on the south. Michael Loki's map (1582) makes Norumbega the whole district between the river and gulf of St. Lawrence and the Hudson. The river of Norumbega was the Penobscot, and on it a city of Norumbega was given a fabulous existence. Lescarbot (Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 1609, bk. i, chap. i) speaks of 'pais qu'on a appellé d'un nom Alleman Norumbega, lequel est par les quarante cinq degrez.'

With this disappointing and disastrous failure, the curtain fell on the prologue of the great drama of New France, and did not rise again for more than fifty years. For the French, as for the English, the sixteenth century was a time of exploring, of training, of making experiments; and it was not till the seventeenth century dawned that permanent colonization began. Then in the Bourbons the French had rulers who, with all their faults, were abler and stronger than the princes of the house of Valois; and in Champlain they had a leader as daring as, and more statesmanlike than, Cartier. But it was by Cartier that the ground had been broken and the seed first sown. His voyages made Canada³⁷ in some sort familiar to Europeans. He opened the St. Lawrence to be the highway into North America,³⁸ and he gave to the hill above the native town of Hochelaga the name of the Royal Mount, which is still perpetuated in Montreal. He brought the French into Canada, and, though his settlement failed, the French connexion remained. Fishermen and fur-traders followed in his steps, and in fullness of time the New France, which his discoveries conceived, was brought to birth and grew to greatness.

³⁷ For the meaning of the name 'Canada,' see Parkman's Pioneers of France, p. 202, note. It is of Indian origin, probably meaning 'town.' Cartier called the country about Quebec Canada, having Saguenay below and Hochelaga above. Donnaconna, the native chief at Quebec, was called Lord of Canada.

³⁸ On his second voyage Cartier sailed into a bay at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, where he stayed from the eighth to the twelfth of August, and 'named the said gulf St. Lawrence his bay' (Hakluyt, iii, 263), St. Lawrence's Day being the 10th of August. Hence the river, which he called the river of Hochelaga or the great river of Canada, derived its name. See Parkman, p. 202.

A Bristol ship³⁹ having first discovered North America, it might have been expected that the years succeeding Cabot's voyages would have been fruitful in English adventure to the West; but, as far as records show, little was done by Englishmen during the first half of the sixteenth century to open up the New World; and even Cartier's bold exploits roused little or no spirit of rivalry in Great Britain. Indeed, all through this century no English voyager seems to have turned his mind to Canada and its river. The explorers went to the Arctic seas, the would-be colonizers to Newfoundland or Virginia. Between 1500 and 1550 two voyages alone have been actually chronicled, though passing reference is made to others. Of these two, the first was in 1527, when Albert de Prado, a canon of St. Paul's, sailed with two ships in search of the Indies, reaching Newfoundland and the North American coast. The second was in 1536, under a leader named Hore—a voyage of which a graphic account is given in Hakluyt. On the coast of Newfoundland the adventurers suffered the last extremes of starvation, until at length even cannibalism began among them; and the survivors owed their safety to the coming of a French ship, which they seized and in which they returned home. It is clear, however, that before the middle of the century the Newfoundland fisheries had become a recognized branch of English trade, for the traffic was safeguarded by two Acts of Parliament, one passed in 1540, in Henry VIII's reign, the other in 1548, in the reign of King Edward VI. The object of the second Act was to prohibit the exaction of any dues by way of licence from men engaged in the Iceland or Newfoundland fishing trade, and Hakluyt's note upon it is that 'by this Act it appeareth that the trade out of England to Newfoundland was common and frequented about the beginning of the reign of Edward VI, namely, in the year 1548.'⁴⁰

³⁹ For this passage, see Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. iv.

⁴⁰ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 170.

About this date Sebastian Cabot again appears upon the scene. In 1512 he had entered the Spanish service; and, after a visit to England, had returned to Spain, where, from 1518 to 1547, he held the appointment of Pilot-Major to the King and Emperor Charles V.⁴¹ At the end of 1547 or the beginning of 1548, he was induced in his old age to come back to the land, for and from which, more than half a century before, his or his father's great discovery had been made; and King Edward VI rewarded his services by appointing him Grand Pilot in England. His mind was still set on finding a way to the Indies by the Northern Sea. He became governor of 'the mystery and company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands, and places unknown'; and in Hakluyt's pages⁴² may be found his instructions 'for the direction of the intended voyage for Cathay.'

⁴¹ See The Dictionary of National Biography, s. v.

⁴² Vol. i, p. 251.

The company was not finally incorporated by royal charter till 1554-5, but in the preceding year, 1553, they sent out an expedition of three ships to try for a North-East Passage. The leader of the expedition, Sir Hugh Willoughby, was, with the crews of two ships, frozen to death on the coast of Lapland; but Richard Chancellor, the captain of the third ship, reached the port on which the town of Archangel now stands, and made his way overland to Moscow. This was the beginning of British trade with Russia. The Merchant Adventurers became known as the Muscovy Company, and their efforts were directed to the overland traffic between Asia and Europe, which came by Bokhara, Astrakhan, and the Volga, to the meeting of the east and west at Novgorod.

But, important as was this new development of trade, the British explorers, whose names have lived, still took their way for the most part over the Atlantic, making ever for the West. In June, 1576, Martin Frobisher sailed from Blackwall to the north-west 'for the search of the straight or passage to China.'⁴³ He sighted Greenland; and, sailing west, came to the inlet in the American coast, north of the Hudson Straits, which, after him, was called Frobisher Bay. This arm of the sea he took to be a passage between the two continents, the right-hand coast, as he went west, seeming to be Asia, the left-hand coast America. He came back to Harwich in October, bringing with him a sample of black stone supposed to contain gold; and thus, to the vain hope of a short passage to the Indies, he added the more dangerous attraction of possible mineral wealth in the Arctic regions. Men's hopes were raised; a company of Cathay was formed, with Michael Lok for governor; and, as their Captain-General, Frobisher sailed again in May, 1577, 'for the further discovering of the passage to Cathay.'⁴⁴ Again he sighted Greenland. Again he reached the bay which had been the turning-point of his former voyage. He took possession of the barren northern land in his Queen's name; and, when he came back in September, 'Her Majesty named it very properly Meta Incognita, as a mark and bound utterly hitherto unknown.'⁴⁵ The voyage was fruitless, but the stones brought home were still thought to promise gold, and so, in the following May, Frobisher started once more on a third voyage to the north. Fifteen ships went with him from Harwich, bearing 'a strong fort or house of timber'⁴⁶ to be set up on arrival in the Arctic regions, and intended to shelter one hundred men through the coming winter. The hundred men included miners, goldfiners, gentlemen, artisans, 'and all necessary persons'⁴⁶—as though this desolate region were to become the scene of a thriving colony. They set sail, reached the coast of Greenland, and claimed it in the Queen's name. They fell in with the Esquimaux; they crossed the channel now known as Davis Strait to the Meta Incognita; and they came back in the autumn with no result beyond the report of a new imaginary island. This was the end of Frobisher's enterprise, but in the next forty years other English sailors followed where he had gone before, and opened up to geographical knowledge fresh stretches of icebound coast and wintry sea. Davis, Hudson, Baffin, and others, gave their names to straits and bays, but it is impossible here to trace the record of their courage and endurance. No quest has ever been so fruitful of daring, patient seamanship, none has ever been so barren of practical results, as that for the North-West Passage. What Frobisher went to find in the sixteenth century, Franklin still sought in the nineteenth: and through all the ages of British exploration has run the ever receding hope of finding a short way through ice and snow to the sunny lands of the East.

⁴³ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 52.

⁴⁴ Ibid. p. 56.

⁴⁵ Ibid. p. 104.

⁴⁶ Ibid. p. 105.

In Great Britain the sixteenth century was the age of adventurers, casting about for ways to other worlds, or freebooting where Spain and Portugal claimed ownership of land and sea; but in that time two men stand out as having had definite views of settlement, and as having been colonizers in advance of their age. They are Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh. Edward Hayes, the author of a narrative of Gilbert's attempt to found a colony in Newfoundland, speaks of him as 'the first of our nation that carried people to erect an habitation and government in those northerly countries of America,'⁴⁷ and no nobler Englishman could well be found to head the list of English colonizers of the New World. Chivalrous in nature, bold in action, he was at the same time 'famous for his knowledge both by sea and land';⁴⁸ and it was his Discourse to prove a passage by the north-west to Cathaia and the East Indies, which is said to have determined Frobisher to explore the north.

⁴⁷ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 185.

⁴⁸ From Fuller's Worthies of Devonshire.

In June, 1578, Gilbert obtained from Queen Elizabeth his celebrated patent 'for the inhabiting and planting of our people in America.'⁴⁹ The grant was a wide one. It gave him full liberty to explore and settle in any 'remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people'; and it constituted him full owner of the land where he settled, within a radius of two hundred leagues from the place of settlement. It was subject only to a reservation to the Crown of one-fifth of the gold and silver found, and to a condition that advantage should be taken of the grant within six years. For three or four years Gilbert's efforts to colonize under this patent were fruitless; he organized an expedition which came to nothing, and other men, to whom he temporarily resigned his rights, were equally unsuccessful.

⁴⁹ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 174.

At length, on June 11, 1583, he set sail from Cawsand Bay, near Plymouth, to try his luck for the last time in the western world. There were five ships, one of which was fitted out by Ralegh,⁵⁰ and one, the Golden Hind, had for its captain and owner, Edward Hayes, the chronicler of the voyage. The company numbered 260 men all told, including shipwrights, carpenters, and other artisans, 'mineral men and refiners,' 'morris dancers' and other caterers of amusement 'for solace of our people and allurement of the savages.'⁵¹ These last were evidence that more was projected than mere temporary exploration. It was intended, writes Hayes, 'to win' the savages 'by all fair means possible'; and with this end in view the freight of the ships included 'petty haberdashery wares to barter with those simple people.' On the third of August the little fleet entered the harbour of St. John's in Newfoundland, where they found thirty-six ships of all nations. They came expecting resistance, but met with none. When Gilbert made known his intention to proclaim British sovereignty over the island, the sailors and fishermen present seem to have willingly acquiesced; and when he wanted to revictual and refit his ships, the necessary supplies were readily forthcoming.⁵²

⁵⁰ This ship deserted soon after starting.

⁵¹ Hakluyt, vol. iii, pp. 189, 190.

⁵² Hayes says, 'The Portugals (above other nations) did most willingly and liberally contribute' (Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 192). See [above].

The want of a settled authority, of some guarantee for law and order, in the harbours and on the coasts of Newfoundland, was no doubt felt by those who came year by year to the fisheries, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert's name and high repute may well have been known to others than his own countrymen. Two days after his arrival he took formal possession of the land, with ceremony of rod and turf, in the name of his sovereign; the arms of England were set up; three simple laws were enacted—providing that the recognized religion should be in accordance with the forms of the Church of England, safeguarding the sovereign rights of the Queen of England, and enjoining due respect for her name; and then Gilbert issued land grants as proprietor of the soil. In the words of one of the accounts which Hakluyt has preserved,⁵³ 'he did let, set, give, and dispose of many things as absolute Governor there, by virtue of Her Majesty's letters patents.'

⁵³ Peckham's account, Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 209.

Thus was Newfoundland declared to be a British possession, and such are its claims to be our oldest colony. The annexation was complete in form and substance; no protest was entered against it by those whom it concerned; land was granted by the recognized proprietor, and nothing was wanting to constitute a claim which should last, and has lasted, to all time. Frobisher proclaimed the sovereignty of England over Arctic lands, but his proclamation was as barren as the shores over which it extended. Gilbert, on the contrary, went to a place where European sailors had long foregathered; he went there as an English Governor; his authority was unquestioned, his grants were accepted, and when he read his commission and set up the arms of England at the harbour of St. John, he took the first step, and a very long step, towards British dominion in the New World.

Gilbert had great hopes of finding precious metal in Newfoundland; and his principal mining expert, a Saxon, promised him a rich yield of silver from the ore which was collected in the island. That ore, however, was lost early on the voyage home, and the miner himself was lost with it in the wreck of the largest ship—the Delight. A far greater loss, however, was in store for the ill-fated expedition. They left St. John's on August 20, making for Sable Island, which had been stocked years before by the Portuguese.⁵⁴ In a few days the Delight foundered on a rock; and the weather became so bad that, at the end of the month, Gilbert consented to make for home. He was in the smallest ship, the Squirrel, a little ten-ton vessel, as being the best suited to explore the creeks and inlets of the American coast; and, in spite of the remonstrances of his companions, he would not leave her on the return voyage. 'We are as near heaven by sea as by land,' were his last words, before the ship went down in the middle of the Atlantic with all on board; and thus, fearless and faithful unto death, he found his resting-place in the sea. The story is one which stands out to all time in the annals of English adventure and English colonization. It was meet and right that the founder of the first English colony should be a Devonshire sailor of high repute, of stainless name, chivalrous, unselfish, strong in the fear of God. It was no less meet that his grave should be in the stormy Atlantic, midway between the Old World and the New. Thus those who came after had a forerunner of the noblest type; and the ships, which from that time to this have carried Englishmen to America, may ever have been passing by where Humphrey Gilbert went to his rest.

⁵⁴ See [above].

Gilbert's half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, was cast in the same mould, but the record of his doings lies in the main beyond the range of this book. Virginia and Guiana were the scenes of his attempts at colonization, not Newfoundland or the coasts and rivers of Canada. In 1584, the year after Gilbert had been lost at sea, Ralegh obtained from Queen Elizabeth a patent which was practically the same as Gilbert's grant of 1578; and, at the end of April, he sent out two ships, commanded by two captains named Amidas and Barlow, to explore and report upon a likely place for an English settlement.⁵⁵

⁵⁵ Accounts of this and the following voyages are given in the third volume of Hakluyt. See also the first book of John Smith's general history of Virginia, The English Voyages to the Old Virginia, in Mr. Arber's edition, The English Scholar's Library.

They sailed more towards the south than previous English explorers, and eventually reached the island of Roanoke, which is now within the limits of North Carolina. Everything seemed bright and sweet and healthful, and the natives of the country were friendly and hospitable, 'such as live after the manner of the golden age.'⁵⁶ So they came back in the autumn with a story full of hope for the future, and the virgin Queen christened the land of promise Virginia.

⁵⁶ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 304.

Ralegh lost no time in sending out settlers. In the next year, 1585, seven ships started with 108 colonists on board. The expedition was commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, and among other captains with him was Thomas Cavendish, afterwards celebrated, like Drake, for sailing round the world. Ralph Lane, a soldier of fortune, was chosen to remain in charge of the colony, and with him was Amidas, the explorer of the previous year, who was styled 'Admiral of the country.' They went by the West Indies, touching at the Spanish islands of Porto Rico and Hispaniola, and, at the end of June, they reached Roanoke. Here they formed their settlement, and, when Grenville and his ships left in August and September, they brought back as bright a report as Amidas and Barlow had given the year before.

Already, however, before Grenville's departure, there had been friction between the Indians and the new-comers; and, as months went on, the new-born colony became in constant danger of extermination. Still Lane contrived to hold his own, exploring north and west, gleaning reports of pearls and mines, and a possible passage to the south sea, until the winter and spring were past and the month of June had come again. A fleet of twenty-three ships was then seen out at sea, and, to the joy of the settlers, proved to be an English expedition under Sir Francis Drake, who was returning home laden with spoils from the Spanish main. Drake, at Lane's request, placed one of his ships with seamen and supplies at the disposal of the colony; but a storm arose, and the ship was blown out to sea. Daunted by this fresh trouble, the settlers determined to give up their enterprise and return home. They asked for passages on board Drake's vessels: the request was granted; and they abandoned Roanoke only a fortnight before Grenville arrived with relief, long expected and long delayed. Finding the island deserted, Grenville left fifteen men in possession and himself came home.

So far, Ralegh's scheme had failed; but the failure was due to untoward circumstances, not to the nature of the country, and he still persevered in his efforts. The very next year, in 1587, he sent out a fresh band of settlers, 150 in number; giving them for a leader John White, who had taken part in the former expedition. The arrangements for forming a colony were more fully organized than before; and to White and twelve Assistants Ralegh 'gave a charter and incorporated them by the name of Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia.'⁵⁷ When the colonists reached Roanoke, they found that the fifteen men left by Grenville had disappeared, driven out, as they learnt, by the Indians. Notwithstanding, they renewed the old settlement; and, in the face of native enmity, began again the work of colonizing America. Before the end of the summer, White sailed for England, to give an account of what had been done; and, on his return home, Ralegh prepared to send relief to the colony. But war with Spain was now on hand, freebooting was more attractive than colonizing, one attempt and another to send ships to Virginia miscarried; and when at length, late in 1589, White reached the scene of his settlement, he found it dismantled and deserted. So ended the first attempt to colonize Virginia. Success was not to come for a few more years, until the sixteenth century had passed and gone.

⁵⁷ Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 341.

Before 1600, Newfoundland had been annexed by Great Britain, but not one single English or French colony had as yet taken root in America. Nevertheless the century was far from barren of results. The way had been made plain, the ground had been cleared, the wild oats of adventure and knight-errantry had been sown, and the peoples were sobering down to steadier and more prudent enterprise. Beaten on the sea, raided and plundered in their own tropical domain, the Spaniards were ceasing to be a terror and a hindrance to the nations of Northern Europe; and, as the latter grew from youth to lusty manhood, the map of the great North American continent unfolded itself before their eyes. Then Champlain went to work in Canada, and John Smith in Virginia; Jesuits on the St. Lawrence, and Puritans in the New England states; and so the grain of mustard-seed, cast into American soil, grew into a great tree, which already, before three centuries have ended, bids fair to overshadow the earth.

N.B.—The references to Hakluyt made in the notes above are to the 1810 edition.

Among modern books most use has been made in this chapter of:—
PARKMAN'S Pioneers of France in the New World;
DOYLE'S History of the English in America, vol. i; and
JUSTIN WINSOR'S Narrative and Critical History of America.

Reference should also be made to Sir J. BOURINOT'S monograph on 'Cape Breton,' first published in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, vol. ix, 1891, and since published separately.

CHAPTER II

SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN AND THE FOUNDING OF QUEBEC

The history of Canada has been so often and so well told, that an attempt simply to reproduce the narrative would be worse than superfluous. The scheme of the present series is, in the field of colonization and within the present limits of the British Empire, to trace the connexion between history and geography; and from this point of view more especially the story of New France will be recorded.

Various parts of the world, now British possessions, were once owned by other European nations, notably by the Dutch or French. The last volume of the series dealt with what was in past times a dependency of the Netherlands, the Cape Colony, the mother colony of South Africa. The present volume deals with a land which the French made peculiarly their own; where, as hardly anywhere else, they settled, though not in large numbers; not merely conquering or ruling the conquered, not only leaving a permanent impress of manners, law, and religion, but slowly and partially colonizing a country and forming a nation.

Lower Canada, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was rightly included under the wider name of New France, for here France and the French were reproduced in weakness and in strength. It was a land well suited to the French character and physique. Much depended on tactful dealings with the North American Indians, a species of diplomacy in which Frenchmen excelled. The commercial value of Canada consisted mainly in the fur trade, an adventurous kind of traffic more attractive to the Frenchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than plodding agriculture or the life of a counting-house. On the rivers and lakes, coming and going was comparatively easy; the short bright summers and the long winters made the country one of strong contrasts. To a bold, imaginative, somewhat restless people there was much to charm in Canada.

But Canada meant far less in earlier days than now it means. It meant the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and of the lakes from which it flows. The Maritime Provinces of the present Dominion, or at any rate Nova Scotia, were not in Canada properly so called, but bore the name of La Cadie or Acadia,¹ and the great North-West was an unknown land.

¹ For the derivation of the name 'Acadia,' see Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World, p. 243, note. Cadie is an Indian word meaning place or region. 'It is obviously a Micmac or Souriquois affix used in connexion with other words to describe the natural characteristics of a place or locality' (Bourinot's monograph on 'Cape Breton,' Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, vol. ix, sec. 2, p. 185). For the name 'Canada,' see above, [note 37].

By the end of the seventeenth century the French had three spheres of influence and colonization in North America—the country of the St. Lawrence, the seaboard between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the New England colonies, and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi. To join them and encircle the English colonies was the aim of French statesmanship. It was an impossible aim, inevitably frustrated by geographical conditions and by want of colonists; but the conception was a great one, large as the new continent in which it was framed, and able men tried to work it out, but tried in vain.

Much has been written of French methods of colonization; writers have been at pains to enumerate the shortcomings of the French, and have carefully explained whence those mistakes arose. But there is less to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes to be credited to France. Being part of the continent of Europe, and ever embroiled in continental politics, when she competed with England as a colonizing power, she competed with one hand tied.² Changeable, it is said, were the French and their policy; their kings and courtiers may have been changeable, but the charge does not lie against the French nation.

² This is pointed out in Professor Seeley's Expansion of England, course i, lecture 5.

They were trading up the Senegal early in the seventeenth century, and there they are at the present day. From the dawn of their colonial enterprise they tried to obtain possession of Madagascar; they have their object now. Nearly four centuries ago they fished off the coasts of Newfoundland, and England has good cause to know that they fish there still. To the St. Lawrence went Cartier from St. Malo, and by the same route generations of Frenchmen entered steadily into America, until Quebec had fallen and the St. Lawrence was theirs no more. The French were versatile in their colonial dealings; they were quickly moving and constantly moving; but they saw clearly and they followed tenaciously; they were strong and staunch, and they proved themselves to be a wonderful people.

Yet there must have been some element of weakness in the French character, in that they bred and obeyed bad rulers who did not live for France, but for whom France was sacrificed; who crushed liberty, political and religious, who drove out industry with the Huguenots, and squandered the heritage of the nation. Englishmen, comparatively early in their history, reckoned with priests first and with kings afterwards. They did most of their work at home before they made their colonial empire; they colonized new worlds as a reformed people; the French tried to colonize under absolutism and priestcraft. It might not have been so, it probably would not have been so, if the religious policy of the French Government had been other than it was. The Huguenots, if not persecuted and eventually in great measure driven out, would have given France the one thing wanting to make her colonization successful, the spirit of private enterprise independent of court favour, the child and the parent of freedom, the determined foe of a deadening religious despotism.

In the sixteenth century, after Cartier's voyages to the St. Lawrence, we hear little of the French in North America. The Breton fishermen followed their calling, crossed the Atlantic year after year, and came back with cargoes of fish and with furs procured by barter with the Indians; but no French settlement was founded either in Canada or in Acadia. In France itself the last half of the century was a time of civil war; the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place, the house of Valois came to an end, and in 1589 Henry of Navarre became King of France. Before his accession to the Crown, two attempts at French colonization were made, in Brazil and in Florida. The colonists were mainly Huguenots, and their enterprise was backed by the great Protestant leader Coligny. The earlier attempt, designed to plant a settlement on the harbour of Rio Janeiro, was short-lived, because ill led by a violent tyrannical man, Villegagnon. The first settlers arrived in 1555; by the end of 1558 they had all disappeared. Still more tragical was the outcome of the venture in Florida. In 1562 a band of would-be colonists sailed from Dieppe, under the command of Jean Ribault. They reached Florida in safety, and built a small fort towards the northern end of the peninsula, in which thirty men were left behind while Ribault returned to France. In the following year, the survivors of the thirty came back to Europe, having abandoned the fort and experienced every extremity of thirst and hunger while crossing the Atlantic in a ship of their own making. Again in 1564, a Huguenot expedition, under René de Laudonnière, sailed for Florida, and the settlers planted themselves on the St. John's river, then known as the river of May. In 1565 Ribault joined them with reinforcements and supplies. Well known from its surpassing horror is the story of the French settlement. A Spanish force under Menendez, a fanatic as treacherous and as savage as Philip II himself, took up a position to the south where the town of St. Augustine now stands, and overpowering the Frenchmen in detachments, butchered them with every accompaniment of cruelty and guile. The French fort passed into Spanish hands, but within three years time an avenging freebooter came from France, Domenic de Gourgues; the Spaniards in their turn were shot and hung, and the banks of the St. John's river were left desolate.

Ill managed, badly supported were these French ventures to Brazil and Florida. Had they been well led and given some little encouragement and assistance, the result might have been far different. Protestants might have gained a firm foothold in Central and Southern America. France might have won from Spain and Portugal a great domain. As it was, the attempts resulted in utter failure, and great opportunities were lost never to be regained.

As the sixteenth century drew to a close, a patent was issued by the French King to a Breton nobleman, the Marquis de la Roche, to colonize in North America. The terms of the patent were preposterously wide, conferring sovereignty over Canada, together with a monopoly of trade. The results were proportionately small. La Roche set sail in 1598, in a single ship with a cargo of convicts. He landed them at Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and sailed back to France, leaving them to their fate. Five years later, in 1603, eleven of the number, who had survived, were rescued and brought home again.

About a year after La Roche's fruitless voyage, in 1599 or 1600, two other Frenchmen, Chauvin, a sea captain, and Pontgravé, a St. Malo merchant, also obtained a patent to colonize in Canada. Their object was to monopolize the fur trade, and they attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, where the Saguenay river flows into the St. Lawrence. During a whole winter a small party was left at the station, but no permanent colony was formed; and a second and third voyage had no lasting results. Chauvin died, and in 1602 or 1603 a new patent was granted to De Chastes, a man of rank and station, who associated with himself Pontgravé, and secured the services of Samuel Champlain.

In order of time, Champlain's name stands second in the list of the men to whom New France in America was due. It stands second in time to the name of Cartier; in order of merit it heads the list. Cartier was a great explorer, but his work ended with discovery; Champlain founded a colony. The history of Canada as a French possession has gained in attractiveness, in that it began and ended with a high-minded, chivalrous leader. It began with Champlain, it ended with Montcalm. Born on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, the adventurous son of a seafaring father, Champlain fought for the King in Brittany, and was given by him a retainer in the shape of a small pension. The war over, he travelled for two years in the Spanish Indies, and, visiting Panama, conceived the idea of a ship canal across the isthmus. After his return home, he took service under De Chastes' company, and in 1603 sailed with Pontgravé for the St. Lawrence. The voyage was one of exploration only. Champlain ascended the river as far as Montreal, gathering geographical information from the Indians, but attempting no settlement; and when he returned to France in a few months' time, he found that his employer, De Chastes, was dead.

Yet another royal patent was granted, in 1603, to De Monts, a Huguenot gentleman of the French court, its object being the colonization of Acadia, and Acadia being defined as extending from the fortieth degree of north latitude, which runs through³ Philadelphia, to the forty-sixth degree, which is north of Montreal. De Monts took into partnership the members of De Chastes' company, and in 1604 two vessels sailed for America. They carried a mixed freight, Huguenots and Roman Catholics, gentlemen of fortune, and vagrants impressed under the King's commission. De Monts and Champlain were on board the first ship, Pontgravé followed in the second, with supplies for the future colony. They steered not for the St. Lawrence, but for the coast of Nova Scotia; and entering the Bay of Fundy they discovered Annapolis harbour, which was given the name of Port Royal. The first settlement, however, was made on an islet off the mouth of the St. Croix river, which now forms the boundary between New Brunswick and the state of Maine; and there through the winter De Monts and Champlain stayed with a scurvy-stricken company, numbering seventy-nine in all, of whom nearly half died. On the return of spring and the advent of relief from France, the leaders coasted south along the shores of Maine, and of what were in after years the New England states; and coming back to their station in August, they moved the settlement across the Bay of Fundy, and established themselves on the inlet of Annapolis harbour. De Monts then returned to France, leaving Pontgravé and Champlain to hold the post through the winter of 1605.

³ For De Monts' patent see the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1574-1660, p. 4, entry 10, Nov. 8, 1603. It was a patent 'for inhabiting Acadia, Canada, and other places in New France,' and De Monts was appointed the French King's Lieutenant-General 'for to represent our person in the countries, territories, coasts, and confines of La Cadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degree.'

In the following summer, ships came back from France just in time to prevent the settlement at Port Royal from being broken up in despair. They brought with them the advocate Lescarbot, the historian of New France. Again there was exploring down the American coast, and again Champlain and his associates held their own through the winter. The outlook of the little colony was promising. The season was mild, the natives were friendly, supplies were plentiful, gardens were laid out and corn was sown. But in the late spring of 1607 news came from home that the patent had been cancelled, and before the summer ended Port Royal was abandoned.

For nearly three years the place was left desolate, and then, in 1610, one of De Monts' associates came back again. It was the Baron de Poutrincourt, to whom the harbour, when first discovered, had been granted by De Monts. The Jesuits were at the time strong at the French court, stronger still after the assassination of King Henry IV in this same year. They, or the ladies of the court, who were their tools, bought shares in the venture, and Jesuit priests went out to Acadia, thwarting and quarrelling with Poutrincourt and his son. Both the two great dangers which always threatened and finally ruined the French power in North America came into being at this date, the exclusive influence of the Jesuits and English competition.

In 1606 the Virginia company was incorporated, and in the following year British colonization on the mainland of North America began with the founding of Jamestown. There are many miles of coast between Acadia and Virginia, between the Bay of Fundy and Chesapeake Bay, but French and English soon crossed each other's paths. In 1613 a ship sailed from France, sent out under Jesuit influence, with a view to founding a settlement on the North American coast. After touching at Port Royal, the party sailed southwards to the coast of Maine, and landed in the region of the Penobscot river. Hardly had their tents been set up on the shore, when an English ship came in sight, captured the French vessel, which was lying at anchor, uprooted the would-be colony, and took all the Frenchmen prisoners. The invaders hailed from Jamestown; they were commanded by Samuel Argall, an unscrupulous freebooter. His pretext was that the Frenchmen were taking up ground within the limits of the patents granted by the English King to his subjects, but his act was little more than piracy. Some of the Frenchmen were set adrift in an open boat, and eventually reached France in safety; the rest were carried prisoners to Jamestown, whence Argall set sail again, commissioned by the governor of Virginia to attack Port Royal. He reached, plundered, and burnt the fort, its commander, Biencourt, with the rest of the settlers, being absent in the fields, for it was harvest time; but the colony was not finally blotted out, and the French still kept a foothold in Acadia.

Champlain's first voyage to North America in 1603 had taken him to the St. Lawrence. From 1604-7 Acadia had been the scene of his labours, until De Monts' patent had been revoked. In 1608 he returned to the river of Canada. On the line of the St. Lawrence he carried out the work of his life, and by its banks he died. In the course which French colonization in America and its first great leader took, may be traced the influence on history of geography and race.

In English colonial history, as writers on the subject have pointed out,⁴ the age of adventure was distinct from the age of settlement. Ralegh was the latest product of the times of romance, an his attempts at colonization were premature and unsuccessful. To some extent a similar distinction may be made in French colonial history: Cartier may be taken as a representative of the earlier age, Champlain of the later; but the line of demarcation is much fainter, much less real, in the case of the French than in that of the English. To English and French alike adventure had meant private enterprise, usually but not always countenanced by kings, generally carried out under cover of royal licences or patents, so vague as to be almost meaningless, granted one day, liable to be cancelled the next. When the age of romance passed away in England with the passing of the sixteenth century, adventurers in the ordinary sense in great measure disappeared, with the exception of the Arctic explorers, who, like Hudson and Baffin, still sailed to the desolate North. Private enterprise, on the other hand, not only survived, but it grew stronger, more business-like, more independent of court favour. It was private enterprise still, but under new forms, the enterprise not of individual freebooters, or of knights errant, but of associations of citizens, some of the associations being chartered commercial companies, while others were bands of colonizers and colonists united by a common antagonism and a common creed. Their objects were not in the air, they did not live in dreamland, they went out or sent out others, not so much to discover new lands, as to occupy and appropriate lands which had already been found, to make new English homes on the other side of the Atlantic.

⁴ See e.g. Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i, chap. vi.

In theory the commercial companies were, like the individual patentees of the former generation, working under the authority of the Crown. Indeed that authority was far more strongly proclaimed than before, and for vague generalities were substituted very definite restrictions; but this was only a sign of a new time. It indicated that a stage had been reached when more was known, when practical business was being taken in hand, and when, therefore, the slipshod patents, which had hitherto sufficed, would no longer avail. Because private enterprise really meant more, therefore the Government said more, and the very defining of the work and circumscribing of its sphere made the results sounder, more lasting, and more substantial. It was not the lust of conquest, it was not the glamour of adventure, it was not a wish to proselytize in religion or to add new provinces to the domain of a European kingdom which made the English colonize North America. There were two main motives at work. One was the desire to find or to do something which would pay, the other was a longing to live under more independent conditions than existed in the mother country. The settlers went to lands where natives dwelt, and, therefore, dealings with the North American Indians in war and peace ensued; but the English did not go to the New World in the main to conquer or to convert the Indians, they went to live and to make their living pay. Instinct was at work in English colonization, the instinct of self-preservation, of extension, of always moving a little further and winning a little more; but there was no high scheme of universal dominion for the English King or the English creed. Against any such views the New England colonies were a living protest, and in Virginia, Maryland, or Carolina they found no place. All of these colonies were prosaic, unromantic communities: they were groups of Englishmen, living, grumbling, working and squabbling, with varieties of opinions and differences of outward forms, half protected, half worried by the home Government, building up unconsciously, illogically, amid much that was mean and small, what was to be in the end a mighty nation. Instinct, too, kept the colonists for the most part near to the sea. They fringed the Atlantic over which they had come, and ever renewed their strength as more emigrants came in; they strayed no doubt to some extent as years went on, taking up farms inland and clearing the backwoods; but, on the whole, there was continuity of colonization, a gradual widening of the belt of settlement, expansion on the part of the settlers themselves, as opposed to planting in the heart of the continent military outposts, or isolated mission stations.

With the French in Canada the case was different. Except in Acadia and Cape Breton Island, and to a limited extent in Newfoundland, they had no hold on the sea coast: and Acadia had for many years little connexion with the land of the St. Lawrence. Canada, as a sphere of colonization, began when the open sea had been left far behind. It was an inland territory with a great river and great lakes. No two parts of the world are more unlike than Canada and South Africa. Canada has a river highway into it, excellent water communication by lake and stream, and, until the Rocky mountains are reached, no mountain barriers are interposed to cut off the interior from the coast regions or one district from another. South Africa is almost devoid of natural harbours, its rivers are valueless for purposes of navigation. Its ranges of hills or mountains rise one behind the other, barring the way from the coast to the interior, severing one section of the territory from another. Yet, curiously enough, somewhat similar results followed from diametrically opposite geographical conditions. No two races in the world were and are more unlike each other than the Dutch and the French, unlike in character, in tradition, in political and religious training. But the Dutch in South Africa and the French in Canada resembled each other in this, that they were and remained very few in number, planted in an unlimited area, and that men lived in either case under a rigid system. The restrictive rule of the Netherlands East India Company in South Africa led to trekking, to wandering in the wilderness, and the difficulties of communication increased the wandering tendency, because the wanderers, who wished no longer to be controlled by the government at Cape Town, could not easily be followed up. The French rule in Canada was restrictive too, restrictive in matters of politics, of commerce, and of religion. It was a despotism which allowed no vestige of freedom or self-government; but it was a far stronger and more active despotism than that of the Netherlands Company. The Dutch sought a trade monopoly, the French a territorial dominion. The Dutch were at pains to minimize their responsibilities. The French policy was one of conquest and conversion; they looked to holding in subjection the lands and the peoples of the New World. They worked under a government which was absolute, but whose absolutism, in the main, encouraged perpetual moving forward, and they worked in a land where moving forward was comparatively easy. Thus dispersion ensued on a greater scale than in South Africa. The negative force which promoted trekking in the Cape Colony was present also in Canada—antipathy to a rigid system, to hard and fast rules; and the counterpart of the Dutch voortrekkers, though under very different conditions, was to be found in the Canadian fur-traders and coureurs de bois. But in South Africa the positive force was wanting which shaped Canadian history, the forward policy of an ambitious state. The agents of the French Government in Canada, military and religious, went far afield—adventurous and enterprising, intriguing with savage races, establishing outposts in the interior, strong to carry out a preconceived plan of a great French dominion. The malcontent Dutchmen in South Africa moved slowly and sleepily away in their wagons to be out of reach; the country aided their intent by being difficult of access. Along the rivers and the lakes of Canada the Frenchmen lightly passed, those who worked the will of the Government as well as those who were impatient of control.

The rivalry then between the two European nations who colonized North America, the English and the French, was rivalry at every point. It was a conflict of race, of religion, of geographical conditions, of new and old, of European government and American colonists. On the one side were seaboard settlements, comparatively continuous, in which there was much instinct and little policy, much freedom and little system; where the population steadily grew by natural causes and by immigration, democratic communities in which the real work was done from below, the products of a wholly different era from that which preceded it, and in which picturesque adventurers had failed to colonize. On the other side were the beginnings of continental colonization along the natural lines of communication. The dispersion was great, the settlers were few, the settlements were weak. All was done from above, except where unlicensed adventurers roamed the woods. The elements of an older day were preserved and stereotyped, attractive but unprogressive. Old forms transplanted to a New World did not lose their life, but renewed it. Feudal customs took root in the soil. Despotism, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, did not survive merely, but grew stronger. The adventurer remained an adventurer, and did not turn into a businesslike colonist. There was much that was great, there was more that was uniform, but there was little or no growth.

The ultimate outcome of such a contest must necessarily have been, in the course of generations, the triumph of the side on which were the forces and the views of the coming time. But, while the struggle lasted, the French gained not a little from being less vulnerable than the English, as being more dispersed; from being better situated for purposes of attack; from being organized, so far as there was organization, under one government and one system instead of many; from the extraordinary energy and quickness of some of the French leaders in Canada; from the strong military element in the population; from the fanatical devotion of the French missionaries; and last, but not least, from the Frenchmen's better handling of the natives.

The sources of the Mississippi are close to the western end of Lake Superior, and the eastern half of North America is therefore nearly an island, created by the Mississippi, the great lakes, the St. Lawrence, and the sea. An inner circle is formed by the Mississippi, the Ohio, Lakes Erie, Ontario, and the St. Lawrence, the head waters of the Ohio river being within easy distance of Lake Erie. The course of the Ohio is from north-east to north-west. It flows, very roughly, parallel to the Alleghany mountains, and drains their western sides. The Alleghanies in their turn are parallel to the Atlantic, and between them and the sea is a coast belt from north to south. Here was the scene of the English settlements. Here, cut off by mountain ranges from the Mississippi valley and from the inland plains, the Virginians and the New Englanders made their home. 'The New England man,' writes Parkman, 'had very little forest experience. His geographical position cut him off completely from the great wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action.'⁵

⁵ The Old Régime in Canada, chap. xxi, p. 399 (14th ed., 1885).

But there is one direct route, with nearly continuous waterways, from the Atlantic seaboard to the St. Lawrence. It runs due north up the Hudson river, is continued by Lakes George and Champlain between the Adirondack mountains on the west, and on the east the Green mountains of Vermont; and from the northern end of Lake Champlain it follows the outlet of that lake, the Richelieu river, for seventy to eighty miles into the St. Lawrence. The head waters of the Hudson are hard by Lake George, but at the present day navigation ceases at Troy, 151 miles from the sea, where is the confluence of the Mohawk river, and from whence the Champlain canal runs direct to Lake Champlain. The distance from Troy to Lake George is in straight line about fifty miles. This route was all-important for attack and defence in the wars between England and France, and it was well for Great Britain that, at a comparatively early stage in the colonization of America, she took over the Dutch settlements in the valley of the Hudson, gaining control of that river and linking New England to the southern colonies.

From the mouth of the Hudson at New York to where the Richelieu joins the St. Lawrence, a straight line drawn on the map from south to north measures rather under 400 miles. It is much the same distance, on a very rough estimate, from the confluence of the Richelieu and the St. Lawrence to the point where the St. Lawrence opens into the sea. This point is generally taken to be the Point de Monts, which is on the northern bank of the river, in north latitude 49° 15', and west longitude 67° 30', though the Gaspé peninsula, on the southern side of the estuary, extends much further to the east. Thus the centre of the St. Lawrence basin is equidistant from the mouth of that river and from the mouth of the Hudson,⁶ and between these two points, before the days of railways, there was no easily accessible route from the sea to Montreal.

⁶ Hennepin in A New Discovery of a vast Country in America (English ed., London, 1698, pt. 2, p. 129), speaking of the St. Lawrence, says: 'The middle of the river is nearer to New York than to Quebec, the capital town of Canada.' This is of course incorrect, but it shows appreciation of the directness of the route to the St. Lawrence by the Hudson river.

Following up the St. Lawrence from the Point de Monts, at about a distance of 140 miles, the mouth of the Saguenay is reached on the northern side. There stood and stands Tadoussac, in old days a great centre of the fur trade, and the earliest foothold of the French in Canada. From the mouth of the Saguenay to Quebec is about 120 miles, and from Quebec to Montreal is rather over 160. Nearly halfway between Quebec and Montreal, over seventy miles from the former and over ninety from the latter, is the town of Three Rivers, situated on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, at its confluence with the St. Maurice river, one of the oldest and one of the most important French settlements in Canada. Here is the limit of the tideway, and above this point the St. Lawrence expands for some thirty miles into Lake St. Peter. At the upper end of this lake or expanse of river, on the southern side, the Richelieu joins the St. Lawrence, with the town of Sorel at its mouth, and forty-five miles higher up is Montreal. From Montreal to Kingston, where the St. Lawrence issues from Lake Ontario, is a distance of 180 to 190 miles by river, past rapids well known to readers and to tourists, and past the Thousand islands. Thus the total length of the St. Lawrence, from the lakes to the opening into the gulf, is rather over 600 miles.

The great lakes of the St. Lawrence basin cover a surface of nearly 100,000 square miles—an area larger than that of Great Britain. Lakes Ontario and Erie, connected by the Niagara river, continue the direct line of the St. Lawrence, Lake Erie more especially lying due south-west and north-east; but from the extreme end of this last-named lake the channel of communication takes a sharp curve to the north in the Detroit river, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair river, which link together Lakes Erie and Huron. Lake Huron, the centre of the whole group, stretches back towards the east and south-east in Georgian Bay, while on the north-west it is connected with Lake Michigan by the straits of Michillimackinac or Mackinac, and with Lake Superior by St. Mary's straits and rapids, the Sault St. Marie. The rivers which feed Lake Superior are the head waters of the St. Lawrence, and one of them, the St. Louis, which enters the lake at its extreme western end, has its source hard by the source of the Mississippi. The total length of lake and river on the line of the St. Lawrence is over 2,000 miles.

It has been said that Lakes Ontario and Erie continue the main course of the St. Lawrence in its south-westerly and north-easterly direction, that the channel which feeds Lake Erie at its western end comes down from the north, and that the central lake which is then reached—Lake Huron—breaks back towards the east. Thus the direct line from Montreal to the centre of the lake system is not up the St. Lawrence, but along one of its largest tributaries, which enters the main river at Montreal. This tributary is the Ottawa, flowing from the north-west in a course broken by falls and rapids. One hundred and thirty miles from its confluence with the St. Lawrence, just below the Chaudière falls, now stands the city of Ottawa, the capital of the Canadian Dominion, connected with Lake Ontario by the Rideau canal; and rather under 200 miles above Ottawa, where the Mattawa river enters from the west, there is nearly continuous water communication in a due westerly direction with Lake Nipissing, which lake is in turn connected by the French river with the great inlet of Lake Huron known as Georgian Bay. Champlain early explored this route—the direct route to the west, and along it as far as Lake Nipissing now runs the Canadian Pacific Railway. French river flows into the northern end of Georgian Bay. At its south-easternmost end, that bay runs into the land in the direction of Lake Ontario; and in the middle of the broad isthmus between the two lakes lies Lake Simcoe.

Such in rough outline is the basin of the St. Lawrence. It is a network of lakes and rivers which finds no parallel, unless it be in Central Africa. The present Dominion of Canada is not merely a political federation; it is a federation of regions which are geographically separate from each other. There is the eastern seaboard, the old Acadia; there is the basin of the St. Lawrence; there are the plains of the North-West and the regions of the Hudson Bay; and there are the lands of the Pacific coast. Only one of these four regions, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was the main scene of early Canadian history. Acadia comes into the story, it is true, but until the eighteenth century only indirectly, in connexion with the English colonies on the Atlantic coast rather than with the French in Canada. English and French collided on the shores of Hudson Bay; they collided also in Newfoundland; but Hudson Bay and Newfoundland alike were outside the sphere of Canada. The great prairies of the North-West were a possibility of the distant future; but not till the days of railways did the western half of the present Dominion come within the range of practical politics. Along the St. Lawrence and its tributaries the drama of Canadian history was played; the furthest horizon was the Mississippi and the whole line of the lakes; a nearer view was bounded by the Ohio valley; while the immediate foreground was formed by the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Lake Ontario, the centremost point being the confluence of the Richelieu with the main river.

Movement, constant movement, these waterways suggested; exploration, adventure, and ultimately conquest; pressing onward by strength or skill through a boundless area, with something unknown always beyond; making portages round impossible rapids, forcing paths through interminable forests, dealing with half-hidden foes. The land was one for the traveller, the explorer, the missionary, the soldier, the hunter, the fur-trader, but not so much for the settler and the agriculturist. Thus it was that the age of adventurers was perpetuated along the St. Lawrence, while the English colonists between the Alleghanies and the sea were living steady lives attached to the soil.

The great motive force of modern adventure was, as has been seen, the search for a direct route to the East. Engaged in this search Henry Hudson, in 1609, piloted the Dutch into the Hudson river.⁷ Champlain's first expedition up the Ottawa was due to a lying tale that along that river had been found a way to the sea. La Salle, the explorer of the Mississippi, had his mind ever set on the East, and his Seigniory above Montreal was named La Chine; for, 'like Champlain and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the south sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and Japan.'⁸ Many long years passed before the geography of North America was known with any accuracy, and in the meantime the recesses of the continent, from which the rivers flowed, seemed to hide the secret of a thoroughfare by the West to the East. Similarly, from the time when Columbus sought for and thought he had found the Indies in the New World, down to our own day, the natives of America have been known as Indians.

⁷ Hudson in 1609 sought for a North-West Passage about the fortieth degree of latitude. 'This idea had been suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the western ocean by the north of Virginia.' See A Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam, Frederick Müller, 1868), Introd. pp. xxv, xxvi.

⁸ Parkman's La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1885 ed.), p. 8.

The two native races, with which the history of Canada is mainly concerned, are the Algonquins and the Huron Iroquois. The former were far the more numerous of the two, and were spread over a much larger area. They included under different names the Indians of the lower St. Lawrence, of Acadia, New England, and the Atlantic states as far as the Carolinas—the Montagnais, the Abenakis, the Micmacs, the Narragansetts, the Pequods, and others. The Delawares, too, were members of the race, and Algonquin tribes were to be found on the Ottawa, at Lake Nipissing, on the further shores of the great lakes, in Michigan and Illinois. From the day when Champlain joined forces with them against their hereditary foes the Iroquois, they ranged themselves for the most part on the side of the French.

The Hurons or Wyandots and the Iroquois were distinct from the Algonquins and akin to each other. When Cartier visited the St. Lawrence, the native towns which he found on the sites of Quebec and Montreal seem to have been inhabited by Indians of this race; but by Champlain's time the towns had disappeared, and those who dwelt in them had sought other strongholds. Though related in blood and speech, these two groups of tribes were deadly foes of each other. The Hurons, like the Algonquins, were allied to the French; the Iroquois, guided partly by policy and partly by antipathy to the European intruders into Canada and their Indian friends, were as a rule to be found in amity with the English. The region of the upper St. Lawrence and of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, was the home of the Huron Iroquois race. The Huron country lay between Georgian Bay of Lake Huron and Lake Simcoe. South of the Hurons, the northern shore of Lake Erie and both sides of the Niagara river were held by the Neutral Nation, neutral as between the Iroquois and the Hurons, and akin to both. The Eries on the southern side of Lake Erie, and the Andastes on the lower Susquehanna, were also of Huron Iroquois stock; but the foremost group of the race, the strongest by far, though not the most numerous, of all the North American Indians, were the Iroquois themselves, the celebrated Five Nations of Canadian story.

The Erie canal, which, in its 352 miles of length, connects Lake Erie at Buffalo with the Hudson river at West Troy and Albany, runs through the country of the Five Nations. That country extended along the southern side of Lake Ontario from the Genesee river on the west to the Hudson on the east, while due north of the Hudson, the outlet of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, the Richelieu river, was in old days known as the river of the Iroquois. The Mohawk river, along which the Erie canal is now carried, was, on the Atlantic side, the highway to the land of the Iroquois, and it bore the name of the best known of the Five Nations, the whole confederacy being sometimes spoken or written of as Mohawks.⁹ The route up the river provided nearly continuous communication by water between the Hudson and Lake Ontario. From its confluence with the Hudson the Mohawk was followed to the head of its navigation, whence there was a short portage of about four miles to Wood Creek, a stream running into the Oneida lake, and the Oneida lake was linked to Lake Ontario by the Oswego river. All this line was under Iroquois control; and the westernmost of the Five Nations, the Senecas, commanded also the trade route to Lake Erie.

⁹ The Mohawks, however, were not the strongest of the five in number. They were outnumbered by the Senecas.

The name 'Iroquois' is said to be of French origin: the true title of the Five Nations was an Indian word,¹⁰ signifying 'people of the long house.' Their dwellings were oblong in form, often of great length; and, as were their dwellings, so also was their dwelling-place. Side by side the Five Nations stretched in line from west to east, as may be told by lakes and rivers in New York State, which to this day bear their names. Farthest to the west were the Senecas; next came the Cayugas, the people of the marsh. The third in line, the central people of the league, within whose borders was the federal Council house, were the Onondagas, the mountaineers; the Oneidas followed; and easternmost of all were the Mohawks.¹¹

¹⁰ Hodenosaunee.

¹¹ In a report of a committee of the Council held at New York, Nov. 6, 1724, on the subject of a petition of the London merchants against the Act of 1720, given in Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (3rd ed., London, 1755), p. 226, the Five Nations are placed as follows: the Mohawks but 40 miles due west of Albany, and within the English settlements; the Oneidas about 100 miles west of Albany, and near the head of the Mohawk river; the Onondagas about 130 miles west of Albany; the Cayugas 160; and the Senecas 240.

In all the history of European colonization no group of savages, perhaps, ever played so prominent a part as the Iroquois; none were so courted and feared; none made themselves felt so heavily for a long period of years together. This fact was not due to their numbers, for they were comparatively few, and Parkman estimates that 'In the days of their greatest triumphs their united cantons could not have mustered four thousand warriors.'¹² Yet they attacked and blotted out other Indian races equal to or outnumbering themselves. They nearly destroyed the French settlements in Canada; and all through the contest between Great Britain and France in America, they were a force to be reckoned with by either side. Their alliance was sought, their enmity was dreaded. Their strength was due to the geographical position which they held, and to their national characteristics; while their policy was influenced by the differing conditions of the white people with whom they had to deal. Their home has been described. It was the southern frontier of central Canada, the borderland between the French and English spheres of trade and settlement. Here they lived, in a position where a weak race would have been ground in pieces between opposing forces, but where a strong race, conscious of its advantages and able to use them, could more than hold its own. 'Nothing,' wrote Charlevoix, 'has contributed more to render them formidable than the advantage of their situation, which they soon discovered, and know very well how to take advantage of it. Placed between us and the English, they soon conceived that both nations would be obliged to court them; and it is certain that the principal attention of both colonies, since their settlement, has been to gain them or at least to engage them to remain neuter.'¹³

¹² Conspiracy of Pontiac (1885 ed.), vol. i, chap. i, p. 21. Charlevoix says: 'All their forces joined together have never amounted to more than 5,000 or 6,000 fighting men' (Letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguières, Engl. tr., London, 1763, p. 185). On the other hand, in A Concise Account of North America, by Major Robert Rogers (London, 1765), p. 206, it is stated that 'when the English first settled in America they (the Iroquois) could raise 15,000 fighting men.'

¹³ Charlevoix, as above, pp. 184-5.

A strong race the Iroquois were. In cruelty and endurance, in bold conception and swift execution, they had few, if any, rivals among the natives of North America, and in their grasp of something like state policy they had no equals. As savages, pure and simple, they reached the highest level; they might indeed have had a greater and more lasting future, if their level had not been so high. The Kaffir races of South Africa in our own time have produced good fighting material; some of their leaders have shown skilful generalship and no small statecraft; but they have been loosely knit together, little bound as a whole by the ties of country or of kin; and from this very weakness has come their salvation, in that they could and can be recast in a new mould. It was not so with the North American Indians, least of all with the Iroquois. They were stereotyped in savagery, and, when the white men came among them, it was too late for them to change; but, as savages of the most ferocious type, as ruthless murdering hunters of men, they developed an organization which was evidence at once of intellectual and physical strength, and of a wild kind of moral discipline.

It is rare to find among savages a confederacy which will outlive a single expedition or one season's war. When there is cohesion, it is usually under savage despots like the Zulu Kings, who habituate their followers to military discipline, and keep them attached partly by fear and partly by the memory or hope of successful bloodshed; but among the Five Nations the rule of one man had no place, and, though warring was their normal condition, the federation lasted in peace as well. They were doubly federated. Not only were there five nations or tribes, but there were also eight clans which included the whole of the Five Nations, members of each clan being found in each nation. The five nations had in fact originally been one, composed of eight clans. Each clan was named after some beast or bird, which formed its totem or coat of arms, the three leading clans bearing those of the tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.¹⁴ The clan tie was a family tie; the members of each clan, to whichever nation they belonged, were as brothers and sisters, and there was no intermarrying between them. Inheritance ran in the female line, and the children belonged to the mother's clan. The clans gave the chieftains to the separate nations and to the confederacy. The highest chiefs were known as sachems, a civil rather than a military title, and the Council of fifty sachems formed the principal governing body of the league, the place of honour being given to the head sachem of the Onondagas. There was also a Council of subordinate chiefs, and a wider body, a Senate—in whose deliberations men of age and experience took part, irrespective of hereditary rank. The form of government was the same for each of the five nations as for the whole confederacy. There was no law but much custom, despotism was unknown, and so was anarchy. There was something Homeric about the Iroquois. Like the Greeks of the legendary age, they were perpetually fighting in spasmodic fashion, with great cruelty, with every form of guile as well as force; and when not fighting they held innumerable councils, making many and long-winded speeches. Apart from personal bravery, the one sound element in their system and character was, strange as it may appear, some measure of what the early Greeks valued under the term [Greek: aidos] or reverence. The Iroquois reverenced long-standing customs, social position, and the voice of age. War was their trade, but the highest dignities attached to the civil chieftain more than to the successful warrior. They dealt out shameless violence to all beyond their pale, but within the ranks of their own people they recognized much more than mere physical strength or skill in butchery.

¹⁴ These three leading clans so put into the shade all the others that in some old writers these alone are recognized. Thus Colden says (vol. i, p. 1): 'Each of these nations is again divided into three tribes or families, who distinguish themselves by three different arms or ensigns, the tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.' A full account of the Iroquois organization is given by Parkman in the first chapter of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, and in the introduction to The Jesuits in North America. See also the chapter on Canadian and Iroquois Indians in Sir J. G. Bourinot's Canada, in the 'Story of the Nations' series. It will be seen from the note to the Introduction, p. lv, of The Jesuits in North America (1885 ed.), that the number of the clans as given above, and their presence in each tribe, is not absolutely certain.

In their organization they had advanced beyond the stage which is outlined in the Iliad. They were far more democratic than the Greeks of Homeric time. In savage sort they framed and kept a polity of the kind which Aristotle tells us is the most perfect type of constitution, being a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. The hereditary principle was strong, but chieftainship did not pass from father to son owing to the rule of female succession. The councils of the nation found place for all whose qualifications were for the public good. High standing, age, experience, eloquence, strength of arm, all were recognized in this strange community. To Sparta Colden likens the confederacy of the Five Nations, in that, in either case, the national customs trained the minds and the bodies of the people for war;¹⁵ but the likeness extends to other points as well. As far as a Greek state and a band of North American savages can be compared, in their social and political training, in their inflexible rules, in their recognition of merit combined with unswerving adherence to the principle of priority of families and clans, no less than in their heartless indifference to pain whether inflicted on themselves or others, the Iroquois Indians resembled the citizens of the famous Greek state. But whatever comparison may be made with either ancient or modern communities, the story of the Five Nations presents the curious problem of a group of savages of the very worst type, who yet in some sort solved the difficulties which the most civilized peoples find so great—those of reconciling democracy with hereditary privileges, and federal union with local independence.

¹⁵ P. 14., 'On these occasions the state of Lacedaemon ever occurs to my mind, which that of the Five Nations in many respects resembles, their laws and customs being in both framed to render the minds and bodies of the people fit for war.' Parkman, too, says of them, 'Never since the days of Sparta were individual life and national life more completely fused into one'; see The Jesuits in North America (1885 ed.), Introduction, p. lx.

Constantly weakened by the strain of war, to some extent they renewed their strength by the principle of adoption.¹⁶ Of the prisoners whom they took, most were put to death with nameless tortures, but many were admitted to their tribes; and in one instance they incorporated a whole people. This was the Tuscaroras, a kindred tribe from the Carolinas, driven north by war with the colonists early in the eighteenth century. About 1715, they were admitted into the league as a sixth nation, though not on equal terms, and were assigned a dwelling-place among the Oneidas and Onondagas.

¹⁶ 'They strictly follow one maxim, formerly used by the Romans to increase their strength, that they encourage the people of other nations to incorporate with them' (Colden, p. 5).

The tribes of the Huron Iroquois stock were agriculturists to a greater extent than the Algonquins. In other words, they had passed out of the nomad stage and made permanent homes. Still, they lived in great measure by the chase; they were born hunters as they were born warriors, and furs and beaver skins were the products which they bartered for the white man's goods. The Five Nations hunted and raided far beyond the limits of their cantons. In 1687, Dongan, Governor of New York, wrote of them: 'The Five Nations are the most warlike people in America, and are a bulwark between us and other tribes. They go as far as the South Sea, the North-West Passage, and Florida to war.'¹⁷ Their interests as well as their pride demanded that on the upper St. Lawrence, as well as on Lakes Erie and Ontario, their power should be paramount. As far as other groups of Indians were concerned, they ensured their object, conquering and in great measure exterminating the Hurons, the Neutral Nation, and the Eries; but they knew well that the few Frenchmen in Canada were more dangerous to their ascendency, and possibly to their existence, than any native tribe or race, however numerous. The French began by making the Iroquois their foes. Champlain had hardly settled at Quebec, when he joined the Hurons and Algonquins in an expedition against them. Thenceforward the Five Nations were the enemies of France. This result would probably have followed in any case, and it is difficult to suppose that one early action determined all succeeding history. It was rather the beginning of an inevitable struggle for the control of the upper St. Lawrence and of the Canadian fur trade. On all sides of their own country the Iroquois, like other masterful peoples, extended their sphere of influence; but their real outlet was to the north, towards the lakes and the great river. On this side the white men were most active and restless, ever sending their emissaries a little further on, ever putting themselves in evidence in some new tribe or village.¹⁸ The French were not content to live outside the Indians; nor were they content, having found a resting-place, to stay there. To be in and among the natives, to control and to convert them, to be the recognized protectors of the land and its peoples, to be the ultimate recipients of the produce of the country, and the guardians of the channels by which the produce was conveyed—no smaller aims sufficed for the French in Canada. In the pursuit of these objects they directly competed with the Iroquois Indians. Great was the territory, few in number were the Frenchmen and Iroquois alike; but they were rivals for ascendency on the same river, and there was not room for both.

¹⁷ Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1685-8, No. 1160, pp. 328-9, Dongan to the Lords of Trade, March, 1687.

¹⁸ 'But this justice must be done to the French, that they far exceeded the English in the daring attempts of some of their inhabitants, in travelling very far among unknown Indians, discovering new countries, and everywhere spreading the fame of the French name and grandeur' (Colden, p. 35).

Because they were enemies of the French, the Iroquois naturally became the allies of the English; but before they had much, if any experience of the latter, they had come into contact with a third European people, the Dutch on the Hudson river.

In 1609, the year after the founding of Quebec, Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the Netherlands service, sailed at the beginning of September into the river which still bears his name, seeking, as he sought till his death, a North-West Passage to Asia. The name of New Netherland was formally given to the scene of his discovery in 1614, and in 1615 a small fort was built on Manhattan Island—the first little seed of the city of New York. In 1621, the Netherlands West India Company came into being; and in the following year New Netherland, with the beaver trade, which was its chief attraction, was placed in the hands of the company. In settling on the Hudson the Dutch conflicted with English claims, and the Government of the Netherlands seem to have recognized that there was a flaw in their title. However, the existence of New Netherland as a Dutch possession continued till the year 1664, when it was surrendered to an English force sent out by the Duke of York, who had obtained from his brother, Charles II, a grant of the territory. The English occupation was confirmed by the Peace of Breda in 1667; and though a Dutch fleet recovered the colony in 1673, in the following year, by the Treaty of Westminster, it was finally given up to the English.

New Amsterdam, afterwards New York, was the chief settlement of New Netherland; but Dutch trade and colonization extended up the valley of the Hudson, where tracts of land were obtained by patroons or large landowners, who were granted exclusive privileges by the company on condition of planting families of settlers upon their holdings. The chief inland colony was Rensselaerswyck, called after an Amsterdam merchant of the name of Rensselaer, and its centre was Fort Orange, now Albany; while on the Mohawk river, about twenty miles above its confluence with the Hudson, and rather less in a direct line from Albany, was the settlement of Schenectady.¹⁹

¹⁹ For an account of the Dutch on the Hudson see A Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam, Frederick Müller, 1868), referred to above. See also Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iv, chap. viii.

Traders wherever they went, all the world over, the Dutchmen were at pains to keep peace with the Iroquois. Their dealings with them were on the same lines as the dealings of their countrymen with the Hottentots in the early days of the Cape Colony.²⁰ They bought and sold, and got good value for their money, paying, for instance, no more than forty florins for Manhattan Island. But the mere fact of paying for what they took was in their favour, for it was a recognition that the natives were the rightful owners of the land. In course of time they came into conflict with the Mohican Indians along the banks of the Hudson; but with the Five Nations, the nearest of whom were the Mohawks, they were ever in friendship. They were not actually in the Mohawk country, but on its borders; they were neighbours, not intruders; they took the furs which the Indians had to barter, giving in exchange European goods, and notably firearms. Thus Albany became a friendly meeting-place between the Iroquois Indians and the white men of the Hudson colony. The two peoples did not clash with one another in any way, but met as friends and equals, and supplied each others' wants.

²⁰ See vol. iv of this series, chap. ii, p. 43.

The one object of the Dutch being to trade, and the whole people being traders, a twofold result followed, promoting friendly relations between them and the Mohawks. Not only did the Indians realize that they had nothing to fear, and much to gain, from having for their neighbours Europeans who had no views of war or conquest, and through whose agency they could arm themselves against the more aggressive Europeans on the Canadian side; but also, as we may well suppose, the Dutch traders included the best of the Dutchmen, which was not the case with either the French or the English. At any rate, we read that the Dutch in the Hudson valley 'gained the hearts of the Five Nations by their kind usage',²¹ and in memory of a Dutchman named Cuyler, whom the Indians held in special honour, the Iroquois in after years always gave to the British Governor of New York the title of 'Corlaer'.²²

²¹ Colden, vol. i, p. 34.

²² Parkman's Count Frontenac (1885 ed.), p. 93, note.

Into this kindly heritage the English entered;²³ and, though their treatment of the Indians left much to be desired, the alliance, if often strained, was, in the case of the Mohawks at any rate, never sundered; and finally, at the close of the War of Independence, many of the Five Nation Indians, after fighting for England, migrated into Canada, and were assigned lands in the province of Ontario, where their descendants are still to be found. In the words of the Indian orators, a chain of friendship held together the English and the Iroquois. 'Our chain,' they said, 'is a strong chain, it is a silver chain, it can neither rust nor be broken';²⁴ and it would be difficult to overrate the advantage which accrued to the English colonies from their traditional alliance with the strongest natives of North America.

²³ Colden, as above, 'In 1664, New York being taken by the English, they likewise entered into a friendship with the Five Nations.'

²⁴ Colden, p. 125.

In the summer of 1608, Champlain founded the first French settlement at Quebec. A year before, the English had settled at Jamestown in Virginia. A year later, the Dutch found their way to the Hudson. Till his death, at the end of 1635, the story of Champlain is the story of Canada. His colleagues in the new enterprise were men with whom he had already worked in Acadia—De Monts and Pontgravé. De Monts had obtained from the King one year's monopoly of the Canadian fur trade, and two ships which he sent to the St. Lawrence were in charge of Pontgravé and Champlain respectively. Pontgravé, the merchant, stayed at Tadoussac through the summer, bartering with the Indians and coming to blows with Basque traders, who held the French King's patent of little account. Champlain, the explorer, went higher up the river, and erected wooden buildings by the water-side, on the site of the lower town of Quebec. There he stayed through the winter, while his friend went home, and, when Pontgravé returned in the following summer, travels and adventures began which made Champlain's name great among the Indian tribes of Canada.

His first expedition, in 1609, was to the lake which is still called after him. He went as an ally of the Huron and the Algonquin Indians against their enemies the Iroquois. Up the St. Lawrence, up the Richelieu, and on to Lake Champlain he took his way, and at the head of the lake, somewhere near the site where Fort Ticonderoga afterwards stood, the white men's firearms dispersed the warriors of the Five Nations and won a victory. The summer of 1609 ended, and Champlain went back to France, returning to Canada in the following spring.²⁵

²⁵ Canada was first known as New France after Champlain's return to Europe, in 1609 (Charlevoix's Histoire Générale de la Nouvelle France, 1744 ed., vol. i, bk. iv, p. 149).