1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  La Salle was so pleased that he decided to claim the whole vast region for France – the entire length of the Mississippi (even though he didn’t know where its source was) and its tributary, the 1,500-kilometre-long Ohio River, which led northeast to the very edge of the English colonies. So he put on a red coat with gold embroidery that he had brought along in case he met the Chinese Emperor, and held a naming ceremony. In a picture of the occasion (admittedly drawn after the event) he even seems to be wearing a curly wig.

  In the presence of a lawyer, a plaque made out of a melted cooking pot was nailed to a giant crucifix to inform the world (or its French-speaking inhabitants, anyway) that this was now officially the southern border of the new territory of Louisiane.

  La Salle returned north and bullishly decreed that one of the areas he had travelled through – Illinois, west of the English colonies – should become the new centre of French colonization. He rightly judged that its climate was far more clement than Canada and that the land would therefore be much more productive. It was also teeming with beaver.

  The region was used by the Iroquois as hunting grounds, but they were generally on good terms with the French, so La Salle saw no reason why an immediate colonization programme should not begin. His initial plan was to implant 15,000 people, who, he predicted, would have far fewer problems getting established than the poor freezing fishermen and trappers up north. The numbers he suggested were plausible, too – France had the biggest population in Europe, nineteen million compared to Britain’s eight million, with plenty of peasants to spare.

  The ambitious plan never got off the ground, though, and for the Frenchest of reasons.

  The priest who always accompanied La Salle on his travels, and who blessed all his discoveries, was not a Jesuit (the most powerful Catholic group in France) but a Récollet; the Récollets were a branch of the Franciscan order. The Jesuits were very active in the colonization of Canada (as we read in Chapter 7), and saw the Native Americans’ souls in much the same way as the secular settlers saw beaver skins – they wanted a monopoly in the trade. To make things worse for La Salle, the Jesuits had influence over the Governor of Nouvelle-France, a sixty-year-old called La Barre who knew he would soon be meeting his maker, and they all wrote to Louis XIV demanding that this excitable La Salle should be discouraged from any more colonization. Sadly for La Salle, Louis agreed, and wrote back to the Governor that this exploration outside Canada was ‘completely pointless, and similar expeditions should be prevented’.

  Even more negative waves were being generated by the French-Canadian merchants who didn’t want competition from new southern territories. Some bizarrely un-American gene seems to have stopped the French merchants thinking, Formidable, we can open up new trading centres in Illinois!

  All in all, the French reaction to La Salle’s idea was like saying, ‘No, I don’t want your lottery prize money. For a start, you ticked the numbers with the wrong brand of pen. And secondly, I’d have to walk at least a kilometre to pick up the winnings.’

  All washed up

  Amazingly, La Salle didn’t abandon hope. He returned to France to pitch a scheme for attacking the Spanish colonies in the Gulf of Mexico and Texas so that they wouldn’t pose a threat to French colonization in the region. All he needed, he said, was 200 soldiers. The rest of his manpower would be recruited amongst the friendly Iroquois, who were probably even more friendly now that their Illinois hunting grounds were not going to be invaded.

  This was a message Louis XIV was willing to listen to – one thing he liked was sending French armies to attack people. So the King gave the plan his backing, and in July 1684 La Salle left France with 5 ships, 200 soldiers and 100 civilian colonists. Typically, though, instead of giving command of the expedition to the man who knew the region (La Salle), the navy appointed its own leader, an aristocratic sailor called Tanguy le Gallois de Beaujeu, the son of a royal valet. At the time, a Frenchman without at least one ‘de’ in his name was considered incapable of leading anything more complicated than a visit to the rubbish tip.

  Rivalry between La Salle and Beaujeu festered throughout the transatlantic voyage, and became even more toxic when one of their ships was lost to pirates in the Caribbean. And as soon as the surviving vessels arrived at their destination, any resemblance to Love Boat came to an end. According to which version of the story you believe, either La Salle couldn’t find the mouth of the Mississippi or Beaujeu refused to follow his directions. In any case, they sailed on westwards looking for a suitable place to land, until disaster struck and one of the ships got caught up in treacherous currents and sank, taking its cargo of provisions with it.

  When La Salle finally set foot on dry land he was so furious that he apparently told Beaujeu to ‘sail off back to France’, or words to that effect. If this was the case – and other accounts of the expedition accuse Beaujeu of simply dumping the colonists onshore and hightailing it – it was a temper tantrum that La Salle would not live long to regret.

  He built a fort and unloaded some of the supplies from his one remaining boat, La Belle, which was generously stocked with dried meat (2,000 kilos), wine and brandy (10 barrels), gunpowder (4,500 kilos) and guns, as well as plenty of salt, vinegar and oil (they were obviously planning to find some potatoes and start producing crisps). A secure outpost was soon established and things seemed to be looking up – even if they had mislaid the Mississippi.

  Leaving a party of soldiers and settlers at the fort, La Salle set off east to locate the river. Some of his men paddled through the shallows in canoes while La Belle followed in deeper water. And their misfortunes started almost immediately: first, La Belle’s captain choked to death on the spines of a prickly pear, and soon afterwards a group of men, including the ship’s replacement captain, were killed by Native Americans while sleeping onshore.

  La Salle decided that their only option was to leave the ship at anchor with a crew of twenty-seven men, women and children while he and some of the soldiers went on alone in the canoes. He would return, he said, as soon as he had found the mouth of the Mississippi. But La Salle was gone for weeks, and the drinking water on board La Belle started to run dangerously low. Five men were sent out on the ship’s longboat to fetch fresh supplies, but they never returned, so the skeleton crew began to drink the wine and brandy they had on board. Sadly though, even French livers can’t last long on an alcohol-only diet, and when people began to die of dehydration, the survivors decided to sail back to the fort. They didn’t have an experienced captain or pilot, however, and soon lost control of the ship, which ran aground on a mudbank and sank into the goo. Only six of the twenty-seven survived and made it to the fort.

  As soon as La Salle returned to the fort and found out what had happened, he made the only logical decision, which was to start walking to Canada in search of help – a 1,500-kilometre trek through the wilderness that makes modern-day TV survival programmes look like armchair chat shows.

  He took thirty-six men with him, promising the people he left at the fort that he would hike back to rescue them as soon as possible.

  Unsurprisingly, though, by this time confidence in his leadership was not running high, and he became one of the first men ever to be gunned down in Texas, receiving a single bullet in the head from one of his own men, apparently in an argument about the share-out of meat. The French have never been good at vegetarianism, and it seems that American blueberries just weren’t enough for them.

  In a cruel irony, the career of one of France’s most ambitious and far-sighted explorers was ended with a musket ball that he had brought all the way from France. If La Salle had time for one final thought before his brain stopped working, he probably wished he had listened to Louis XIV and ended his ‘pointless discoveries’.

  Meanwhile back in the wilds of Texas, the survivors struggled on northwards, their numbers continually depleted by the elements and hostile Native Americans. In the end, five men reached a French settlement in Canada, all of them cla
iming that it was someone else who shot La Salle, of course. None of those who stayed down on the Gulf of Mexico were ever seen again.

  Sugar is not so sweet

  La Salle’s death didn’t end French attempts to colonize North America. They still sent out raiding parties from Canada to annoy the New Englanders, and in 1689 they even launched an attack on the large and prosperous colony of New York, which the Brits had recently swapped with the Dutch for Suriname. Luckily for the New Yorkers, though, the French fleet got lost in the fog and sailed back to Canada.

  The French were also still interested in settling the Gulf Coast, mainly because they had realized thanks to La Salle that the Mississippi would be a great trading route between Canada and their Caribbean island colonies, which were becoming very rich indeed thanks to sugar plantations.

  Ever since Europeans had stumbled across America, they had thought of it as a possible El Dorado, and with sugar they had found liquid gold. Even better, they didn’t have to mine it or pay for it – it grew on trees. Well, in plants, anyway.

  The Brits were especially fond of this exotic natural sweetener that had suddenly become plentiful and relatively cheap. As well as putting it in desserts and pastries, they used sugar for making alcohol and to sweeten their new national drink, tea. The French didn’t use sugar quite as much in alcohol – they had wine – or in their cooking,* but they loved to sell it, which is why sugar was the product of the New World that, much more than tobacco, financed the wars in America and made the Brits determined to hang on to their American colonies.

  The sugar that the Brits bought or produced wasn’t all shipped back across the Atlantic – it was a vital part of a hugely profitable trade network between the colonies and England. Often referred to as the triangular trade, it was much more complex than that. English-manufactured goods like cloth were shipped down to Africa, where they were sold and the money used to buy slaves. This human cargo was hauled across the Atlantic and the survivors were sold to the sugar planters. The profits went on sugar that was either shipped back to Europe or sent up the Atlantic coast to the rum-thirsty colonists. The colonists in turn would often fill the same ships with their salted cod, which Africa was willing to trade for slaves that the northern colonies could either use on their own tobacco plantations or sell to the French.

  All this had a very high cost in human misery, but generated enough profit to make everyone ignore it – it even made the Brits and the French forget when they were at war. There was a fair bit of mutual piracy going on, and some attempts to grab each other’s Caribbean islands, but at the end of the seventeenth century, business was generally allowed to carry on as usual so as not to cut off the flow of easy money. The Brits were the biggest slave merchants, and the French their biggest customers because of the need for labour on their sugar islands – Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Martinique and Guadeloupe.

  Thus it was that between 1687 and 1701 the number of slaves bought by the French planters rose from 28,000 to 40,000, with sugar production and the consequent profits rising accordingly.

  Despite France’s failure (as yet) to push the Brits into the Atlantic, and despite the painfully slow development of Louisiane, it looked as though America was going to be a source of considerable wealth for the cash-strapped French.

  Which was when a Scotsman stepped in and sank their hopes in a quagmire of debt.

  Beware of letting a banker run your economy

  John Law of Lauriston is remembered by French historians as the man who was responsible for the Mississippi Bubble. This sounds like a painful tropical disease, but was in fact like Britain’s South Sea Bubble – the same sort of crazed investment scheme that contributed to global economic meltdown in 2008.

  Law was born in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a goldsmith who, like many goldsmiths of the time, also acted as a banker. When John was only seventeen, he inherited his father’s money, and immediately decided to devote his life to spending it. He cultivated an image as a young dandy, chased after society ladies, and frequented Edinburgh’s fashionable gambling dens. And he soon found that instead of spending money, he was actually accumulating it, because he had a brilliant mathematical brain and an eye for a good scam.

  According to William Harrison Ainsworth, author of a nineteenth-century novelized biography with an almost superhero title – John Law: The Projector – Law became adept at a high-betting card game called faro, which was a favourite amongst punters because they stood a much better chance of winning than at other games. However, it was also very popular with seasoned gamblers because it was easy for the banker/dealer to cheat invisibly, which is why it later became notorious in the Wild West as a quick way of relieving gold prospectors and cattle men of their earnings.

  Ainsworth defends Law against charges of dishonesty and quotes a French aristocrat who says that Law was ‘so skilful at play that without the slightest trickery, he could do that which appears incredible – win enormously’. But as Law toured Europe hosting faro games, he was politely asked to leave several cities, including Paris, where King Louis XIV personally signed the expulsion order. Strange, then, that when Law returned to France in 1715, almost as soon as Louis had been put in his tomb, he was hired by the regent, the duc d’Orléans, as his chief economic adviser.

  The Duke was not planning to fill the nation’s coffers by organizing faro tournaments (although more modern governments have realized they can do the same thing with lotteries). Law, a friend of the Duke from gambling soirées in the old Louis XIV days, had come back to Paris with the news that he had conceived a foolproof way of making money, not just for himself but for whole countries. It didn’t bother the duc d’Orléans that several other European monarchs had already said no thanks, nein danke, no grazie and similarly negative things to Law’s ideas. France was desperate – Louis XIV had got the country into massive debt with his warmongering and the new regent needed a miracle.

  Law’s system was simple, new and very convincing. His theory was that money generates wealth by changing hands. Especially by entering his own grasp, of course, but more generally by passing through several sets of fingers, thereby enabling each person to sell their wares or services. For example, rich Parisian A has 1,000 livres (the French currency of the time) and spends it on a high-class prostitute. The prostitute spends her money on a diamond ring, the jeweller buys Champagne, the wineseller gets himself a wig and a suit, the tailor treats himself to a new treatment for syphilis, and so on, until the money no doubt ends up back in the pocket of rich Parisian A. Everyone has benefited.

  It was the opposite of what often happened to French money at the time. The rich aristocrats would usually sit on their cash, living off the interest. They had to spend large amounts to maintain a show of wealth, but left even larger amounts dormant. Law’s plan would wake up the dormant cash and get it out into circulation. It would, he told the regent, make France rich again.

  The Duke agreed wholeheartedly with the idea that had got the Scotsman thrown out of less gullible countries, and in 1716 Law was allowed to launch the Banque Générale, which began to issue banknotes, the value of which was backed up with a supply of royal gold and silver. The bank was such a raging success that in 1718 its name was changed to the Banque Royale, the ultimate seal of approval. By this time, though, it was issuing far more notes than it could honour with gold or silver, and confidence in its reputation was only kept high by the Duke’s very public support for the scheme.

  Meanwhile, Law created a company, the Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West), and had friends in such high places that he was given exclusive trading rights between France and Louisiane. At the same time, he began to buy land near the Mississippi, which was ridiculously cheap – bits of the untamed swamp were trading at around a zillion square metres for one beaver skin. He had no intention of doing anything with the land – it was pure speculation – but the news that Law himself was buying boosted confidence in his company’s shares, which began to sell to the enthusiast
ic get-rich-quick French at rapidly rising prices. And Law took a personal 4 per cent commission on every deal.

  On the strength of this success, Law was given control of all the other colonial compagnies dealing with Africa, China and India, and in 1719 he merged them into the optimistically named Compagnie perpetuelle des Indes orientales. Cleverly, he fixed a new share price, obliging investors to give four old shares to acquire one new one, and justified this massive inflation by exaggerating the imminent riches to be had in these undeveloped continents: gold, diamonds, timber, furs and spices, not forgetting cod.

  He also deluged France with tales of huge mineral finds around the Mississippi,* trying to tempt new settlers. When none came forward, he (or his representatives) tried less subtle recruitment tactics, rounding up tramps, prostitutes, convicts and lunatics and kidnapping children. All told, some 4,000 potential French-Americans were shipped out and dumped in ‘forts’ that had been set up along the Gulf Coast, notably in Biloxi, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and wasn’t much more hospitable back in 1719 because the French had built their settlement practically on top of a Native American village.

  Soon, the purely speculative nature of the colonization began to tell, and the forty-odd settlements in Louisiane – along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, in Texas and the prairies – were all close to extinction, mainly because the Compagnie had a nasty habit of not paying for the furs and other goods that it bought. As a result, almost all the new immigrants died or drifted away to set up their own independent communities.