The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  This unusual spectacle came close to an ending when they reached a large waterfall beyond which the shallop could not go. Champlain had been most emphatically assured by his dusky allies that the river was open to navigation as far as a great lake much farther along (which he later named after himself), and he realized then how little reliance he could place in anything they told him. In spite of this he decided to go on. He directed that the shallop be headed back to where the Richelieu joined the St. Lawrence. Keeping no more than two volunteers from his company, he told his native companions that he was still prepared to go along with them. The ranks of the Indians had been thinning rapidly as a result of quarrels among themselves and of a fear which began to possess them as they came closer to Iroquois territory. More left when they realized that only three of the Frenchmen would accompany them. The stauncher decided to keep on, and places were made for the white men in the canoes. With an outward display of confidence they proceeded on their way.

  The lake, which they entered through the channel of Grande Isle, proved to be the largest body of inland water on which the three Frenchmen had ever gazed. They studied its island-studded expanse with wondering eyes, refusing to believe when the Indians asserted that much larger lakes lay westward. Proceeding now with the utmost care, they came to Lake George. On the evening of July 29 they sighted off a point of land where later Fort Ticonderoga would stand a cluster of canoes on the surface of the water. The three white men in their soiled doublets and worn leather boots realized that this meant the clash they had come to invite. To their Indian allies the fact that the alien canoes far off in the distance were heavy in the water meant that they were made of elm bark. Only one tribe used the elm canoe. Iroquois!

  It was too late to withdraw now. The warriors from the North realized that their boldness had brought them to a dangerous pass. Their savage enemies were out in great force.

  What followed bears no resemblance whatever to the established practices of Indian warfare, which were predicated on surprise in attack. The two parties approached each other openly and a challenge to battle was exchanged in jeering voices across the tranquil water. The Iroquois were too well trained in woods tactics, however, to risk a conflict on the water. Having clamored their contemptuous defiance, they took to the shore, and in a very short time there could be seen through the trees the flickering lights of their fires. All through the night the men of the Five Nations danced about the fires and sang war songs, their voices high and shrill and exultant. They were, it was clear, completely confident.

  Champlain’s companions maintained an equal show of assurance, but they did not venture to go ashore. Instead they lashed their canoes together and spent the night on the water. They returned jeer for jeer and insult for insult, but to Champlain it may have seemed that this was a form of whistling in the dark. It was hard to remain confident in the face of the uproar from the Iroquois camp.

  In the morning the three Frenchmen donned their breastplates, which were so highly polished that they caught the rays of the rising sun and sent fingers of reflected light out across the waters of the lake. Champlain himself donned a casque with a white plume as the mark of leadership. The men loaded their carbines and filled the ammunition straps slung across their shoulders. Each of them was equipped as well with sword and dagger. Their fingers were steady and their eyes did not waver as they peered into the depths of the forest where the Iroquois were preparing.

  It was arranged that the white men would go ashore in different canoes and keep apart in the battle in order to give more effect to the discharge of their guns. To make their presence a surprise for the overconfident Iroquois, they hid themselves under robes in the bottom of the canoes. On landing they remained in the rear where they could not be seen.

  The warriors of the Long House, who had nothing but contempt for their northern foes, came out to do battle with taunting laughter. Champlain estimated their number at two hundred and he was surprised, and perhaps a little dismayed, at their physical magnificence. Tall, lithe, splendidly thewed, they were superior in every respect to the braves from the North. Their voices rang high through the woods, proclaiming their victory in advance. Three chiefs, their heads topped with snowy plumes, strode boldly in the lead, their eyes fierce, their stone hatchets held aloft. The allies, whose response to the exultant howling of the Iroquois had become somewhat forced and reedy, now proceeded in great haste to carry out the plan which Champlain himself had prepared. Their ranks parted and he stepped forward slowly into the breach thus made in the line. Seeing a white man for the first time, the Ongue Honwe fell into a startled silence. Their eyes lost for a moment the glitter of tribal hate and became filled with a sense of awe. This, clearly, was a white god who had come down from the sky to fight on the side of the despised Hurons. The stone hatchets, no longer brandished in the air, hung at their sides.

  Although Champlain advanced with no sign of haste, he knew that the Iroquois pause was a momentary one, that they would recover their spirit immediately. It was clear to him also that the Huron braves lacked the fighting pitch to sustain a charge from their hereditary enemies, who outnumbered them several times over. The balance between life and death hung tautly in the air. In no more than a second of time it would be settled. Everything depended on him, the steadiness of his hand, the sureness of his aim.

  His arquebus had been loaded with four bullets. Taking aim at the three chiefs, who stood together like a group carved by some Greek master, he discharged the contents of the carbine. His eye had not failed him. The spray of bullets stretched all three chiefs on the ground, two of them killed instantly.

  The explosion jarred the senses of the Iroquois, but at the same time it had the effect of releasing them from the spell. Although an unfriendly god had brought down thunder and lightning against them, they must fight for their lives and their tribal honor. They reached for their bows and sent a downpour of arrows into the Huron ranks.

  At this critical moment one of Champlain’s men showed himself on the flank and fired point-blank at the aroused Iroquois. This was more than they could stand. Another god, another roar like thunder in the clouds! They turned and fled with a consternation which never before had been felt in an Iroquois heart. The Ongue Honwe had been surpassed at last.

  The allies now came to life. With hatchet and scalping knife they sprang in pursuit of the stunned and disorganized foe. Many of the beaten tribesmen were killed and a dozen or more were captured. The fleeing Iroquois took to the shelter of the trees and so everything they had brought with them, even their canoes (which the allies destroyed scornfully), became the spoils of the victors.

  That night the excited and madly exultant warriors picked out one of the prisoners for torture. He was a young brave and owed his selection for this grim honor to the hope of the victors that he lacked resolution for the ordeal. They lashed him to a stake set up in a glade of the forest and told him to sing his death song. The unfortunate youth gave out a dismal and quavering chant. The dancing, jeering savages did not allow him to finish but dashed forward and set the wood around the stake to blazing. While the flames licked at the cringing copper flesh they indulged in other cruelties, tearing out his fingernails, pressing red-hot stones to his writhing limbs, ripping deep strips of flesh from his hide after breaking his bones and exposing the tendons.

  Champlain stood this as long as he could and then demanded that the torture be stopped. His allies refused to listen at first. It was not until they saw that his friendship might be withdrawn from them that they reluctantly agreed to let him administer the coup de grâce. Standing some distance back, the white leader sent a bullet unerringly into the heart of the tortured youth.

  A noted historian has pointed out, in dealing with this incident, that there was inconsistency in the revulsion which all white men felt on witnessing the ordeal of prisoners at the stake. In less than a year after this the King of France would die under the dagger of an assassin and his murderer would be put to death publ
icly with as much brutality as any Indian ever suffered at the hands of his captors.

  The point is well taken. Cruelty was not a trait in which the aborigines of America had a monopoly. Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV, was subjected to tortures before he was taken out to the Place de la Grève to die, in the hope of getting from him some information as to his accomplices and sponsors. They strapped his leg in an instrument called the brodequin, an iron boot which fitted closely from knee to ankle. They they proceeded to drive stout wooden pegs between the flesh and the iron. Each blow tore the leg of the condemned man and caused him excruciating pain. By the time three pegs had been inserted the leg of the assassin was a broken, bleeding mass. Ravaillac bore the pain without telling them anything. For the best of reasons; he had nothing to tell. He was the victim of mental delusions and had no accomplices.

  In a weakened condition he was carried out to the execution square, where every inch of space was occupied by avid watchers and the housetops were black with people who had paid large sums for the privilege of standing there. Red-hot pincers were applied to the most tender parts of his body and then boiling oil was poured over the wounds. After he had been thoroughly tormented in this way, he was stretched on the ground and his arms and legs were chained to four horses. The straining animals were then driven in the four directions of the compass. His bones snapped and his limbs stretched grotesquely, but the horses lacked the strength, seemingly, to dismember the body. After more than half an hour of this, the crowds swarmed in and, with demoniac din, put an end to his life.

  The judges who determined the manner in which Ravaillac was to die and the howling, slavering spectators were not much different from maddened warriors dancing around a prisoner strapped to a fiery stake.

  Champlain had joined the northern Indians in this foray into Iroquois territory, and had enabled them to score an easy victory, as a matter of carefully considered policy. He realized that his efforts at colonization could succeed only if the fur trade proved sufficiently profitable to retain the support of the business associates of the Sieur de Monts in France. It was the Montagnais who brought the fruits of their trapping to Tadoussac, and it was the Algonquins who made up the long flotillas which came down the Ottawa River to trade at Hochelaga. His support must be given to these natural and convenient allies in their never-ending feud with the Iroquois, and the support must be more than passive. He must fight beside them.

  In pursuance of this bold policy Champlain took part a year later in a second attack on the Iroquois. They found the enemy, one hundred strong, in a barricade of logs a league or more up the Richelieu. This time the northern allies far outnumbered the warriors of the Long House. The terror inspired by the firearms of the white men paralyzed any attempt at defense, and the screeching allies broke through the barrier, killing all the Iroquois save fifteen, who were carried off to be burned at the stake.

  No other policy seems to have been open to Champlain. Propinquity made the northern tribes his natural allies and he needed their immediate friendship. But espousing the cause of the Montagnais, the Algonquins, and the Hurons against the Five Nations was to have bloody repercussions later. The Iroquois could not face the deadly guns of the white men at the beginning. These were years of easy victory for the less vital tribes of the northern woods. But the Long House never forgot nor forgave. They nursed a hatred for the French which the years did not diminish nor the spilling of white blood stale. For more than a century the smoldering wrath of the Iroquois braves would vent itself in furious raids on the settlements of New France. They ranged themselves with the British in the wars between the two white races and struck blow after blow at Montreal and Quebec. Even after the Hurons had been exterminated and the Montagnais had ceased to count, the feud went on. The blazing fires of Lachine were the result of the course which Champlain initiated in the difficult first years of colonization.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Champlain, Organizer, Diplomat, Explorer, and Indian Fighter

  1

  THE assassination of Henry IV was a serious blow to the Sieur de Monts and his associates. What hope would there be for a Huguenot to retain any shred of influence at a court over which Italian-born Marie de’ Medici, the King’s widow, would preside as regent? The new ruler, Louis XIII, was too young to have any voice and there was no reason to assume that, had the power been his, the boy King would have looked with a lenient eye on the enterprise of the merchant adventurers.

  Champlain sailed back to France in 1611 to take counsel with Monts and found the latter acting as governor of the city of Pons, a mere dot on the map of Saintonge. This was the clearest indication of impending disaster, that the resourceful Monts had found it necessary to leave court and bury himself in the humdrum details of a provincial post. The truth was that his personal fortune had been dissipated and that he stood on the threshold of bankruptcy when Champlain sought him out. This last glimpse of him which history affords shows him in a favorable light. He did not complain of his misfortunes. He wore his plumed hat as jauntily as ever and his handsome eyes still glowed with resolution. He transferred to Champlain full power to make such arrangements as he might for the struggling colony and urged him not to desist or lose heart. The latter, emboldened by his old comrade’s tenacity in the face of adversity, went to Fontainebleau to plead for continued support.

  At this point the haughty and sometimes vindictive regent was seated firmly in the saddle of state, with her Italian favorites, the Concinis, pulling strings and amassing a great fortune for themselves. A certain very young bishop from the see of Luçon, “the poorest and nastiest in France,” to quote his own phrase, one Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, was most certainly not at court at this juncture, as his election to the States-General would not come about for three years. In any event, this almost adolescent cleric, who one day would rule France with steel-clad hand and put his whole weight behind the colonizing of America, was very discreet and very, very poor (he had to buy a secondhand bed when he took over the bishopric), and the questing eye of Champlain would have passed him over without so much as a pause.

  Champlain was working on a plan which no doubt had been hatched in the course of his talks with Monts. The colony must be placed under the wing of someone close to the throne in order to command further help and patronage. The man from Quebec looked about him and his eye became fixed on a cousin of the late King, the Comte de Soissons, a dissolute and supercilious nobleman who was continuously in need of funds. Champlain showed himself in this matter a most resourceful negotiator. He first canvassed the members of the royal council and won support and authorization there for his plan. Then he approached the comte and made a bargain with him by which the noble spendthrift would receive a thousand crowns a year for the use of his illustrious name and his influence at court.

  The Comte de Soissons, who was to be named viceroy, did not live long enough to profit from this arrangement. The organization of the new company had not been completed, in fact, when he was struck down with a fever and followed his cousin, the much-mourned Henry, to the grave. Champlain cast about for a successor and fastened his choice on the Prince de Condé, a nephew of the deceased comte and the possessor of one of the proudest names in France. The record of the noble house of Condé was like an agitated sea, majestic heights and wallowing depths following each other in quick succession. It was the lot of the heads of the family to be either sublimely great or completely mediocre and venal. The representative of the line who listened agreeably to Champlain’s arguments was to be the father of the greatest Condé, the victor of Rocroi, but he himself was a vain and greedy man who entertained ambitious plans but lacked the capacity to carry any of them out; but who possessed enough influence to put through a matter as relatively small as this. In the spring of 1614, after long negotiations, the merchants of the great ports were brought into one organization under the distinguished, if sterile, patronage of Condé. The latter was to be viceroy with Champlain acting as his lieutenant i
n Canada. Condé was to receive his thousand crowns a year and the associated members were to send out six families as settlers each season. The monopoly was to extend for eleven years from the signing of the charter.

  Champlain, who had been running back and forth between the two continents while the negotiations simmered, returned to Canada now in a jubilant mood. The success of the venture seemed assured at last. The little settlement clinging so tenaciously to the foot of the great rock at Quebec would prosper. Other posts would be started at strategic points. Champlain himself would be able to pursue his explorations and his work with the Indians. And finally the objective which had always been prominent in the minds of those two resolute pioneers, Champlain and Monts (the latter was being given a very humble holding in the new company), would at last be realized. The cassock and breviary of the missionary would be seen along the great rivers and lakes and in the palisaded villages of the savage tribes.

  2

  In the corner of Ontario which extends northward from Lake Simcoe and takes in all the beautifully wooded and lake-bespangled land around the great arm of Georgian Bay, and which laps over on the east into the present-day playground of summer enchantment known as Muskoka and in the other direction into the northern area of fertile Western Ontario, was the home of the Hurons. It was small indeed to hold a nation of such relative greatness. The Hurons, who numbered about twenty thousand, had provided themselves with more than thirty villages in this irregular triangle of peaceful country. That they were crowded for hunting grounds goes without saying, but the location provided them with one great advantage: they were widely separated from their enemies of long standing, the ambitious and predatory Iroquois. Between the Huron country and the Finger Lakes was Western Ontario, which belonged to the Tobacco Nation, and the western arm of New York, where the Cat People lived. This was neutral land, and although it did not serve as a defense against Iroquois raids it helped considerably.