by Conrad Black
This growing moral and martial success aroused the envy and suspicion of the king and the Catholic factional leader, Henry, Duke of Guise. War erupted yet again, as the king and Guise tried to repress Henry of Navarre in what became known as the War of the Three Henrys. Henry of Navarre defeated both his rivals, separately, in the field. The king and the Duke of Guise were assassinated, and in 1589 Henry of Navarre, the friend and patron of the Champlain family, was the genealogical successor to Henry III, as a distant cousin and a brother-in-law, and founded the Bourbon dynasty. In 1593, Henry of Navarre became a Roman Catholic for the third time, while assuring tolerance of Protestantism. He would be one of France’s greatest monarchs as Henry IV (from 1589 to 1610). He allegedly said, “Paris is worth a mass,” one of the most famous utterances in French history.*
Samuel de Champlain was a man of exceptional talent and interest for any time or place. He was a master seaman, experienced at both naval and commercial navigation, a soldier, a colonial administrator and entrepreneur, a courtier and adventurer, a cartographer, explorer, gifted and prolific writer, scientist, and agronomist; born a Protestant, he became a robust but very tolerant Roman Catholic, and he was a sociologist and anthropologist. He was a Cartesian man of reason, but also a dreamer and visionary – grandiose but not absurd in his plans and practical in his methods. And it must be said that he was successful and will rank forever as one of the very greatest Europeanizers of North America. He crossed the Atlantic approximately thirty times, from 1599 to 1633, and never lost a ship, other than once when he replaced an incapable captain in a tempest and deliberately grounded the ship and saved the entire complement. Yet he never learned to swim.
Champlain was born and raised in Brouage, a fortress town near the sea in the southwest of France, thirty miles south of La Rochelle and fifteen miles north of the mouth of the Gironde estuary. In the religious wars that wracked France after the middle of the sixteenth century, Champlain’s family was loyal throughout to the local Protestant faction head, Henry of Navarre.
Champlain’s father received a commission as a navy captain from the king, and his cousin was the “chief whipper-in of the royal dogs,” a serious position in those fervent hunting times. Samuel himself received a pension from an early age and was so evidently favoured by the king that there were persistent rumours, never in the slightest substantiated, that he was the king’s illegitimate son. Certainly, Henry’s swashbuckling romantic life would make such an event possible (he had nearly sixty women who were durable enough to qualify as mistresses, and countless more hurried liaisons, and was often in the Champlains’ area during what he always called his “peasant youth,” a reflection on his free-wheeling conduct rather than the modesty of his circumstances.)
Champlain emulated his monarch, who lived well but not with the grandiosity of subsequent French rulers, from Louis XIV to Napoleon, nor with the distant austerity of Robespierre or de Gaulle. He was informal and popular and frequently travelled around the country incognito acquainting himself with common opinion.
Henry IV’s best efforts to bury the religious factionalism in a patriotic quest for unity and prosperity did not immediately bear fruit. The worst of all the religious wars of the time broke out, unleashed by the Catholic extremists known as the Catholic League. Again, the Spanish and Italians were invited to intervene. Henry became a rallying figure for all France against invaders and domestic fanatics. In a bitter campaign of five years, from 1594 to 1598, Henry led in the field and defeated his enemies in one region after another, starting in the south. Samuel de Champlain joined the king’s forces and quickly graduated from a trooper to a logistics officer and aide to one of the king’s regional commanders. At Crozon in Brittany, Britain’s redoubtable Queen Elizabeth sent a force to assist Henry in expelling the Spanish from the fort they had seized there. The Spanish fought to the last man, and the only prisoners taken, when returned with honours, were hanged by their commander.2 Champlain’s bravery in fierce and close combat was conspicuous. Among the British whom he met and with whom he became friendly was the explorer-adventurer Martin Frobisher. Henry won the war of the Catholic League and then, in April 1598, promulgated the Edict of Nantes, establishing Roman Catholicism as the established religion of France, but guarantying toleration of Protestant worship. In May, the Peace of Vervins with Spain equitably ended forty years of violent religious conflict. It also opened increased possibilities for all the maritime powers to focus again on the New World. For their own convenience, the British and French professed amicable competition north and east of the Azores, but acknowledged their rivalry beyond and to the south, declaring their non-acceptance of the Spanish and Portuguese effort to proclaim a monopoly of legitimate interest in what became Latin America.
The king took up the Catholic rites, visited the sick, touched the afflicted, and once a year washed the feet of paupers. Henry used his treasury to reward those who rallied, while crushing those who resisted and pardoning the defeated, provided they then adhered. He was a populist king who spoke of assuring that even the poorest in the very rich country of France would “have a chicken in his pot,” a phrase that would ricochet through the centuries even unto American president Herbert Hoover on the eve of the Great Depression of the 1930s. He embarked on major public works, including the beginnings of the great parks and quais and boulevards of Paris and a vast improvement in roads and canals to pull the country physically together. It had been a terrible sequence of religious violence; only in the German states in the Thirty Years War would sectarian violence be more sanguinary, and there it was more powerfully assisted by marauding foreign armies.
In Britain, while there were perturbations, they were relatively easily endured. Henry VIII was succeeded by his underage and sickly son, Edward VI, who died at age fifteen after a reign of six years in which a regency council presided. He was succeeded by his half-sister, Henry’s eldest daughter, Queen Mary, who was a Roman Catholic, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, whom Henry had divorced in the controversy that led to the apostasy from Rome of the Church of England. She burned the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, at the stake after wringing recantations from him and conducted a vengeful sectarian persecution. At the suggestion of the ubiquitous Charles V, she married his son Philip, who on his father’s abdication in 1556 would become King Philip II of Spain and lord of the united Netherlands, while Charles’s brother, Ferdinand, succeeded him as Holy Roman emperor in Austria, Germany, and Italy. (This was a victory for the rival powers, as the Empire, like Diocletian’s, was too unwieldy and too subject to competing local national ambitions to continue. Britain and France rose in relative strength.) Mary’s Spanish marriage was unpopular in England, and her religious policies divisive, but she died childless in 1558, and was succeeded by Elizabeth I, a Protestant, who reaffirmed her father’s religious independence but ruled with firmness and intelligence for forty-five years and was a great English nationalist. (In the perversity of these times, Henry VIII had executed Anne Boleyn, the wife he broke up the Roman Church in England to marry, on a trumped-up charge of adultery and because she could not bear him a male heir, and the heir she did produce, Elizabeth, would be the greatest monarch in British history.)
Henry IV quickly evinced the interest Francis I had had in exploration and foreign trade and empire. He set up companies to lay claim to the North Pole and the presumed Northwest Passage, sponsored voyages down the coast of Africa, and reasserted the French interest in New France, as Canada was called, and in Acadia and Newfoundland, where several countries were drying and salting their fishing catches on land before shipping them back to Europe. Norman and Breton merchant seamen went as far afield as Archangel in the Russian Arctic and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. But his particular emphasis was on New France, where he hoped to found a prosperous new colony, feudal but rich and generously governed. His minister, the capable Maximilien de Sully, disapproved of all colonial activities as a waste of resources from which France would never derive the
slightest benefit. France was never entirely to rise above this ambiguity in overseas policy, which particularly asserted itself whenever, which was often, there were pressures or temptations on France’s frontiers.
Imbued with the Breton spirit of the sea and exploration, and with the patriotic fervour and catholicizing passion of the convert, Champlain considered how to make himself useful and important to King Henry IV’s overseas designs. He determined that the first step was to sign on to a Spanish ship and get a glimpse of how communications with its American empire was organized. Foreigners were generally banned from making this passage by the Spanish, and unauthorized entry to New Spain was punishable by death. Champlain’s uncle, Guillaume Allène, was a remarkable shipowner and captain from Marseilles who was a captain in the French navy and a pilot-general in the Spanish navy, held himself out at different times as Catholic and Protestant, and was a wealthy landowner in Spain and France. He was engaged after the War of the Catholic League to evacuate a Spanish garrison back to Spain from Brittany, and at his nephew’s request invited Champlain to join the expedition to Cadiz, where it remained for some time, and where Allène and Champlain hoped it would be assigned to one of the great treasure fleets sent to New Spain to collect booty. Champlain “reconnoitred” Cadiz and Seville and recorded his impressions. This was not exactly espionage, as he did not unearth secrets, but it was intelligence. Allène’s ship (he was a part-owner of it) was hired by the Spanish to join a treasure fleet; he was unable to make the trip himself but successfully requested that his nephew be permitted to do so.
The fleet was to clear the British freebooter the Duke of Cumberland out of Puerto Rico, where he had done much damage with a squadron of twenty ships. Champlain was interested at first sight in the natives they encountered at island stops on the way, and was very impressed at the prosperity and extent of Spanish operations in Puerto Rico, which the British had departed by the time the fleet arrived there, in 1599. Champlain took the unusual step of chatting at length with natives and African slaves, and was appalled at the severity and frequency with which they were whipped by their Spanish masters, to the point that the slaves sometimes were forced to wear wooden gags to stifle their cries of pain as the lash was laid on them. Champlain’s trip lasted for two years and took him to Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba. He was everywhere disgusted by the brutal Spanish use of forced labour to pillage the native lands of their subjects, and after observation, and an unusual amount of socializing with the locals, believed that they were of “a very quick intelligence,” not at all inferior to that of Europeans, a revolutionary opinion at that time. He was particularly unimpressed by the priests who beat the natives with sticks on the steps of the churches for trivial offences, especially for non-attendance at religious services. Champlain was barred from visiting the Mexican silver mines, and so could not advise the French government exactly where they were, but he was a very observant informant, and combined his talents at affability with great natural skill as a writer, sketcher, and cartographer. Champlain saw the potential for an isthmian canal, and much admired the fortifications and harbour of Havana.
He returned to Cadiz in 1601, and finding his uncle in poor health, he helped him clean up his tangled affairs and obtain proper medical attention. Allène died in July 1601, leaving his thirty-year-old nephew as heir to his considerable, if complicated, assets. Champlain lingered in Cadiz and wrote what he titled an intelligence report for the personal attention of the king of France, then he returned directly to the French court, was granted an immediate audience with the king, and submitted his findings, replete with sketches and maps. Henry was much pleased and augmented Champlain’s pension and directed him to remain at court.
Henry built an impressive gallery attached to the Louvre along the Seine, and in the ground floor of it he created offices for his overseas activities. The court astronomers, surveyors, cartographers, navigators, and geographers were installed there. Champlain became one of the king’s geographers. His particular field was the study of the failure of past French efforts at colonization in North America, those of Cartier, Chauvin, and the Marquis de la Roche, which have been mentioned, and also the unsuccessful efforts of Jean Ribault and René de Laudonnière in Florida in the 1560s. Champlain considered that the Spanish had written the book on how not to colonize, treat the natives, manage the resources discovered, or impart the benefits of Christianity. Champlain was effectively the king’s supreme colonial planner, and carefully developed, as none of his predecessors had, the outline of how to proceed. He recognized the need for meticulous preparation and careful exploration before choosing the place to settle (Sable Island, barren, perpetually wet, a hundred miles off the Grand Banks, treeless, and sandy – hence its name – was the quintessence of where not to start). The natives had to be approached with respect and induced to cooperate in their own constructive interests, and always transacted with honourably. Champlain was convinced that part of the problem had been disorganization and dispersed authority, and he required that henceforth such missions had to have a virtually military structure and discipline. He recognized that supplies of all kinds had to be assured and that a generous food supply was essential. And he saw that only a tolerant religious policy would succeed, as in Henry’s France, and that Christianity would have to be imparted by example and not by sword and lash.3
There was a constant debate in Henry’s time over any overseas effort, prompted by Sully. The king generally overruled him, as he felt a spirit of adventure and believed that the world was a vast canvas on which France had to project itself as a matter of national security as well as prestige. This was a little like the debates between the British imperialists and Little Englanders or continentalists, such as Disraeli and Gladstone, or, in the United States, expansionists and isolationists, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland, nearly three hundred years later. The king gave Vice Admiral Aymar de Chaste, a venerable and distinguished officer and former governor of the port city of Dieppe, a commission to establish a colony in New France. Champlain gave de Chaste a copy of his “Brief Discourse on the West Indies and New Spain,” and de Chaste invited Champlain to accompany him to New France as his deputy commander, an appointment the king happily endorsed. This was how things stood when Samuel de Champlain sailed on a return mission with the colourful Breton François Gravé Du Pont in 1603. Champlain would conceive, energize, and execute a new and continental French strategy. Here, at last, was the founder of New France, of Quebec, and of Canada. The history of Canada, tenuous and tangled, but gradually flooding into the story of a great nation, was about to begin.
2. Samuel de Champlain, the First Canadian and Founder of Quebec, 1603–1616
Champlain went to Honfleur at the mouth of the Seine and hired the well-travelled old ship of about 140 tons Bonne-Renommée (Good Renown). He had hired Gravé Du Pont as captain for the voyage and rounded up two Montagnais Indians as interpreters. The expedition was financed by groups of merchants from Saint-Malo and Rouen, who provided two smaller ships. The French kings rarely paid more than a modest part of the cost of these missions, which put intense commercial pressure on the colonists. The little flotilla departed on the Ides of March, and after a stormy crossing and close encounters with towering icebergs, and after almost grounding on the Grand Banks, it traversed the hundred-mile mouth of the St. Lawrence, cruised along the Gaspé coast, and then returned into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and dropped anchor at Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, on May 26, 1603. They arrived in the midst of a Montagnais celebration of one of their rare victories over the Iroquois. The Indians were displaying more than one hundred scalps and torturing prisoners, who accepted their gruesome fate resignedly and apparently without reproach. Champlain had one of his Montagnais give an uplifting speech of solidarity on behalf of the great French king and recount the kindness with which he and his colleague had been treated in France. The leading native, who was styled a sagamore, responded in very welcoming words. Champlain was partic
ularly impressed with the Indian birchbark canoes, so light a single man could carry one and yet able to carry a cargo, human or otherwise, of a thousand pounds. Champlain showed his customary interest in and courtesy toward the Indians, and opened what proved a solid alliance with the Montagnais that would continue (and good relations with the French Canadians endure yet).
Champlain went up the Saguenay, a mighty river, but which flows from and through rather sparse country. He noted the profitable fur trade that the Montagnais conducted as middlemen between European buyers, who came for that purpose but had no interest in settling, and tribes to the north such as the Mistassini and Peribonka, and learned of Hudson Bay. On June 22, the exploratory party moved up the St. Lawrence from Tadoussac and came to the fertile and picturesque (then as now) Île d’Orléans, as Cartier had named it, near Stadacona. This became Quebec, after the Indian word kebec, meaning a narrowing of the river, and Champlain realized at once that this was the appropriate place for the settlement to be launched. He carried on to the southwest and was advised by his Indian companions of a river that flowed toward “Florida,” by which they meant Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River. He continued on to Montreal, and ascertained from the local natives the approximate distance to and proportions of the Great Lakes and Niagara Falls before returning to Tadoussac. The party spent the next month exploring and mapping and sketching the Atlantic coast along the Gaspé. They returned from the Grand Banks to Le Havre in the astounding time of fifteen days, not even four times as long as the crossings between Europe and New York of the great Blue Riband liners of three centuries later – Mauretania, Europa, Rex, Normandie, and Queen Mary. This implied a steady speed of about seven knots.
