1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  The same author mentions that ‘fishermen from Bayonne’ (in the southwest of France) had long been going to Newfoundland on the Canadian coast on whaling trips, but shoots himself in the foot by mentioning that they called the island Baccalaos, a transcription of the Spanish term for cod. These fishermen were in fact Basques, not Frenchmen, who had been drying and salting fish there for centuries, and keeping the rich fish stocks secret for obvious reasons.

  Monsieur Blet adds that fishermen from Normandy, Brittany and La Rochelle had also been going to Canada for decades before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, and concludes that ‘the French were not absent from these great discoveries. But their voyages were discreet …’ Surely the first (and last) time in history that the French have ever been discreet about their achievements.

  Anyway, as Signor Borgia, alias Pope Alexander VI, probably said, ‘Quid. Semper.’ (Latin for ‘What. Ever.’) The New World was to be Portuguese and Spanish, by divine decree. Which is slightly ironic because one of the discoveries that Columbus brought back was syphilis, a disease that the unchaste Pope would later catch.

  Henry VII of England braved papal disapproval and sent out the explorer Giovanni Caboto (an Italian, like Columbus), changing his name to John Cabot so that his discoveries would sound more convincingly British. Cabot duly ‘discovered’ North America (Columbus had been no further north than the Caribbean) in 1497, although he probably waved to the Basques when he arrived in Newfoundland – if he did at all. His charts were not accurate enough for anyone to be sure. Which probably explains why he disappeared completely on his second mission in 1498.

  The French, meanwhile, contented themselves with whinging about the Pope’s ruling. According to Henri Blet, King François I did little more than protest to the Spanish that ‘the sun shines for me just as it does for other people, and I would like to see the article in Adam’s will that excludes me from the share-out.’ Which was witty but not very productive, because the Spanish simply ignored him.

  Sorry, wrong address

  It wasn’t until 1524 that a Dieppe ship-owner called Jean Ango convinced King François to put his money where his mouth was and support an expedition designed, quite literally, to put France on the map of America.

  Ango was not only interested in mapmaking, of course. Like everyone who had ventured west of the Azores, he was in it for the money. They all wanted to find a quick sea route to Asia and its spices, which usually had to travel through pirate-infested seas around the Cape of Good Hope and up the west coast of Africa, or overland, where a chain of merchants would add their commission to the prices.

  Ango therefore hired yet another adventurous Italian, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to do the actual transatlantic sailing for him, and told Verrazzano to explore the coast of this new continent and find a way through it to Asia. Verrazzano set off in 1524, and discovered a lush, uncharted peninsula that he called Arcadia because it reminded him of the region of the same name in Greece. It was, we now know, the part of North America to the north of Chesapeake Bay.

  Continuing north past the mouth of the Hudson River, which he thought was a lake, Verrazzano finally reached Newfoundland and Nova Scotia before returning to France. There, he proudly announced to Ango and King François that France now possessed the vast new continent of Gallia Nova, which encompassed the whole of North America, known and unknown, above the Spanish territories of Florida and Mexico. Ango probably answered, ‘Très bien, but what about my spices?’

  Verrazzano made two other trips looking for the route to the east, and is said to have met an untimely end in 1528 at the hands of cannibals, who might or might not have eaten him as revenge for his telling them that they were now French.

  Still, at last France had an official foothold in the Nouveau Monde, and set about mapping it. The only problem was that when later French travellers found the tree-lined peninsula that is now Nova Scotia, they thought they’d arrived in Verrazzano’s Arcadia, and the name began to appear on maps in the wrong place. It was also misspelt, appearing as Lacardie, Accadie and Cadie before settling down as Acadie.

  It was hardly a good start for the colony – both its geographical location and spelling were wrong. Verrazzano must have been turning in his grave. (Except that he didn’t have one because he’d been eaten.)

  Cartier takes over the watch

  Verrazzano’s successor on the French exploration scene was a Breton sailor called Jacques Cartier, who had probably accompanied the Italian on at least one of his missions, and who, it is said, had already been on fishing expeditions to Newfoundland. He was commissioned by King François I to go and find a passage to Asia, deposits of gold or at the very least a nice piece of fresh cod.

  In April 1534 Cartier crossed the Atlantic with two ships and sixty-one men, located Newfoundland with no trouble at all, and began to map the gulf of the St Lawrence River. There, he encountered some Native Americans, the Micmacs, with whom he traded knives and cloth for animal skins. The Micmacs, incidentally, remained on friendly terms with the French settlers throughout the troubled history of Acadie, and even helped to protect the Acadiens against British invaders. In return, un micmac has entered the French language as a slang term for dirty dealings. Talk about gratitude.

  Before leaving the area in July 1534, Cartier erected a 10-metre crucifix with the inscription ‘God Save the King of France’, and formally claimed the territory for his country. But, like Verrazzano, who had flattered the King with his ‘Nova Gallia’ ploy, Cartier essentially returned empty-handed apart from a few bits of beaver skin, and was promptly sent back again.

  In 1535, he took a small forced of armed men up the St Lawrence River in canoes as far as an Iroquois village called Hochelaga (‘beaver dam’). It was set on a hilltop that Cartier renamed (presumably without informing the Iroquois) Mont Royal, or ‘royal mountain’ – later to become Montreal. Perhaps out of guilt for appropriating their hill, Cartier decided to give the whole region an Iroquois name, and asked them what they called it. ‘Canada,’ they replied, and this was duly written on the French map, with Cartier presumably not realizing that his question had been misunderstood – it was a word meaning village.

  The chief of the Hochelaga Iroquois gave Cartier good news. It was, he said, possible to continue a long way upriver, and if the strangers travelled for three moons, they would eventually arrive in a land rich in gold. In view of what happened next, however, this might well have been a mistranslation of the Iroquois for ‘bugger off and leave us alone.’ When Cartier was given gold nuggets and diamonds, he rushed home to the King with this proof that his missions were worthwhile, only to be told that the stones were iron pyrites and quartz. Poor, intrepid Cartier was branded a loser and lost his job. Though he did leave his mark on contemporary France – his experiences inspired a new expression that became very popular at the time, ‘as fake as a Canadian diamond’.

  Colonization is cut off in its prime

  France now embarked on a round of bloody religious conflicts between the Catholics and the Huguenots (Protestants), which would have diverted attention and money away from transatlantic exploration except that the persecuted Huguenots, who formed a large and very influential section of French society, began looking for places to hide. Like the Pilgrim Fathers, who would set sail from England in 1620, the Huguenots thought that the Americas might be a good bunkhole.

  One of the most ambitious and powerful of them was called Gaspard de Coligny, and in 1562 he organized an expedition to set up a colony in what is now South Carolina. He sent over a Dieppe sailor called Jean Ribault, who built a settlement near present-day Charleston and left twenty-eight men to guard it while he returned to France to tell the Huguenots that he had found their promised land.

  Unfortunately, back at home, religious conflict had turned into outright war, and Ribault was forced to take refuge in England. But the Brits had heard what he was up to, and arrested him on suspicion that he would steal English ships and use them to supply his new French
colony in America.

  After a year, the twenty-eight men stranded in South Carolina eventually realized that no one was coming to relieve them, so they built some boats and set off back across the Atlantic. Unbelievably, they reached the coast of England, and were rescued just in time, because the survivors had resorted to eating their shipmates.

  Ribault was eventually released, and returned to Carolina with 600 French soldiers and settlers. There, he was pleasantly surprised to find his fort intact, and to see that he’d arrived just in time because some Spanish ships were nosing around. Leaving a few men to guard the settlement, Ribault sailed off to scare away the Spaniards.

  What he didn’t know, however, was that the Spanish had also sent up an army by land, and the soldiers captured the fort and massacred the male inhabitants.

  At the same time, a hurricane smashed Ribault’s fleet, killing many of his men. A few hundred shipwrecked survivors surrendered to Spanish soldiers, only to be tied up and interrogated about their religion. Anyone who said he wasn’t Catholic had his throat slit, and all but a handful of the Huguenots told the truth and died on the continent that was meant to be their refuge. Ribault was among the truthful dead. His backer, Gaspard de Coligny, was soon to follow him along the path of religious martyrdom.

  Back in France, Coligny was making himself highly unpopular with the Catholic establishment. In 1568, he recruited an army of English privateers and launched a fleet of fifty ships to rampage up and down the Channel attacking Catholic shipping, including French vessels. These Protestant privateers weren’t out to slash Catholic throats, however. They stole the ships’ cargoes, which they took to Plymouth or Coligny’s home port of La Rochelle, and set the captured vessels and their crews free so they would come back to be robbed again. It was, it seemed, an early example of recycling.

  Given this level of high-profile anti-Catholic activism, it was only a matter of time before the religious question caught up with Coligny, and in 1572, it did so in the most spectacular way possible.

  On 22 August of that year, he was the victim of an assassination attempt in Paris. A shot was fired from a house belonging to the Guises, Mary Queen of Scots’ family, who were prominent Catholics. Coligny was not seriously wounded, suffering only a severed finger and a broken elbow, and went to recover at his house nearby. Here, he was visited by the King, Charles IX (a Catholic), who promised to punish the attacker and even brought his physician along to treat Coligny’s wounds. A later visitor wasn’t quite so caring, though – one of the Guise family’s servants, a Bohemian called Charles Danowitz, came to the house and stabbed Coligny in the chest. Half dead, he was thrown into the street, where he was beheaded, castrated and disembowelled, all of which amply made up for the earlier marksman’s failure.

  With rumours of a Huguenot uprising being spread by King Charles IX’s mother (and Mary Queen of Scots’ ex-mother-in-law), Catherine de’ Medici, a massacre began, and up to 15,000 Huguenots were killed by mobs throughout France, most of them on 24–5 August 1572 – an event which is remembered in France as St Bartholomew’s Massacre, as if Jesus’ apostle were himself responsible for the killings.

  In any case, Coligny, the man behind France’s drive to explore and colonize the Americas, was left lying, minus a few vital body parts, in the street near the Louvre. The French weren’t going anywhere for the time being, except into a deep pit of bankruptcy caused by their religious wars.

  The French get cold feet

  In the race to divide up the riches of the New World, the English were taking full advantage of the power vacuum north of the Spanish territories. Queen Elizabeth I granted Sir Walter Raleigh the right to colonize and exploit any American lands he could grab – in exchange for 20 per cent of the profits – and in 1584 Raleigh sent out two explorers, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, to do the grabbing for him. They ‘discovered’ what is now the Carolina coast and claimed the whole unexplored region for England as Virginia, conveniently ignoring the fact that much of it was already in Spanish hands and that France had claimed it as Nova Gallia.

  At the same time, English ships were trading with Huguenot refugees who had fled to Newfoundland and were eking out a living there despite an astonishing lack of support from France. Colonization was just not fashionable amongst French politicians. Even when relative stability was restored in France in the 1590s, the country’s chief financial minister, a man with the glorious name of Maximilien de Béthune, baron de Rosny et duc de Sully, was fiercely opposed to gallivanting about overseas in search of potential income. ‘Ploughing and grazing are the nipples of France,’ he famously said, referring of course not to nipples’ sexiness but their ability to feed the country.

  Unlike Sully, though, the new French King, Henri IV, saw the way the New World was being divided up, and had no doubt heard about this new trend called ‘smoking’ that was being popularized in France by a monk called Frère André Thévet, who declared that it cured ‘humours of the brain’ (he didn’t know about the tumours of the lungs).* King Henri duly began to grant licences to set up companies to trade with the Americas.

  Canada, Henri decided, looked like a good proposition – for a start there were plenty of Norman, Breton and French Basque sailors who knew how to find their way there and back. And the French Huguenot refugees were already over there, trading in furs and fish. Admittedly, so far they had been trading mainly with the English, but surely they would welcome overtures from their king?

  There were just two minor problems with the contract that Henri began to offer his trading companies. First, it demanded that his land in the New World be turned into Nouvelle-France – literally, a new France, with the same agriculture and society as there were back home. This meant that the colonists would be peasants who were to clear the land and then hope that it was suitable for growing wheat, vines and animal foodstuffs. Which brings us to the second point: Henri had decreed that French settlements were to be started above the line of 40° latitude, safely north of interference from the Spanish. In doing so, he was assuming that the climate at 40° latitude in North America is the same as that in Europe. To say that some of the future French colonists were going to get cold feet is a cruel understatement. They were in danger of losing all their extremities …

  A French colony is pillaged … by the French

  Thus it was that in mid-1604 Pierre Dugua, sieur de Monts, a Protestant from the Vendée coast of western France, was named viceroy of a chunk of Nouvelle-France, and set off with a hundred peasants and craftsmen to colonize a section of the Canadian coast. They settled in an inlet that they dubbed French Bay (now the Bay of Fundy), where half of them died during the first winter, their faint cries of ‘hang on, aren’t we on the same latitude as Venice?’ being swallowed up in the arctic gales.

  As soon as it was possible to travel, the survivors moved across the bay to the slightly more temperate climes of a place they patriotically named Port Royal, which became the first settlement on Acadie. Finding that life was actually possible here, de Monts returned to France to fetch more colonists.

  However, when he got home, he hit an iceberg. Not a real one, which would have been bad enough, but a political one with a much greater capacity to inflict damage. The problem was that de Monts’s royal licence to colonize had included a monopoly on the trade of furs and cod from his new territories, which had enraged merchants back in France so much that they persuaded Henri IV to revoke the monopoly. De Monts was told that he could keep his colony as long as he agreed to carry on sending out settlers to cultivate the land and convert the Native Americans to Catholicism. Understandably, the Protestant de Monts told France where it could stick its farm implements – which he had already realized were going to be of little use in the permafrost anyway – and abandoned his plans to colonize. The Acadiens were on their own.

  Miraculously, they hung on, largely thanks to some Native Americans who took pity on the stranded Europeans and taught them to fish and trap efficiently. And they might actual
ly have made a go of it if the French mainlanders hadn’t sabotaged things for them.

  Yet again, it all came down to religion. The Acadiens surviving on cod liver oil and beaver meat were, as we’ve seen, Protestants, but the regime back home was Catholic and was convinced that the New World had to be saved by saying Catholic Mass. In 1610 it was therefore decided that supply ships taking provisions out to Acadie should also carry Catholic priests to help with the conversion of the Native Americans. This didn’t go down too well with the Protestant shipowners, however, who refused to let the priests on board. No problem: a Catholic royal attendant, Antoinette, marquise de Guercheville,* bought out the shipowners, thereby obtaining the licence to supply Acadie as well as a large batch of shares in the colony itself.

  Inevitably, tensions arose between the colonists and the priests because of their incompatible priorities, and soon settlers began to abandon Port Royal to set up small independent communities on their own. The formerly thriving colony of Port Royal fell into a steep decline, and was effectively killed off by Antoinette just three years later.

  In 1613, she sent over a ship called, interestingly, the Fleur de Mai (Mayflower), with ten Jesuit priests and 120 workmen on board. They docked in Port Royal, where the remaining colonists were waiting anxiously for supplies. But when the Fleur de Mai’s passengers came ashore, they declined all offers to exchange moose heads for bottles of wine, and set about stripping Port Royal of everything useful. The ship simply loaded up with Antoinette’s legal share of all the timber, crops, furs and fish in stock, and sailed away again to found a new colony.

  The site the pillagers chose was a place that had been baptized Saint-Sauveur (St Saviour) on an island off what is now Maine. Here, the Fleur de Mai’s crew immediately split into two factions: those who wanted to build a fort first, and those who thought it wiser to clear land for planting. The French love a good intellectual debate, and were still theorizing about how to colonize North America when the deciding argument sailed over the horizon in the form of an Englishman called Samuel Argall.