In the early modern era, it was not quite the same. A deep belief in fortune (which we possess) coexisted with a spirit of fatalism that is alien to our world. Champlain and many mariners never learned to swim, even though they lived their lives on the water. In the seventeenth century most European seamen seemed to believe that they were destined by fate and fortune to float or sink, and there was nothing much that they could do about it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries those feelings were deepened by a religious belief that a man’s fortune was not a matter of random chance—not a throw of the dice or a turn of the wheel. It was a sign of divine purpose. A verse in Tyndale’s Bible summarized that idea in a sentence: “The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.”11
Champlain shared that way of thinking. So did his shipmates, from the grizzled captain to the greenest hand. He tells us that when the Saint-Étienne dropped anchor at Tadoussac on May 25, 1615, the first act of all these men was to fall on their knees and “offer thanks to God” for their good fortune, and for having guided us so seasonably to this haven of safety.” The men who sailed with Champlain on yet another fortunate voyage were coming to believe that the Lord was with their leader. Like Joseph, he was a “luckie felowe.”12
In 1615, Champlain brought four Récollet missionaries to New France. They were followed by Gabriel Sagard, who lived among the Huron (1623–24) and published his Long Voyage to the Land of the Hurons in 1632. Its title page combines icons of his Franciscan order with images of Huronia. The text borrows from Champlain, and adds excellent ethnography and a Huron glossary. His Histoire du Canada (1635) includes Huron sheet music and more details of Champlain’s life.
• • •
In Tadoussac harbor, the ship’s carpenters aboard the Saint-Étienne went to work on Champlain’s flotilla of river craft. Masts were stepped and rigged for sails. Locust tholepins were driven into gunwales and adjusted for oars and sweeps. Merchants checked inventories of trade goods. The holy fathers polished their communion silver and made preparations for their mission to the Indians. Champlain adjusted his instruments. All were eager to be on their way.
The first boats were ready on May 27. That very day, Champlain and the Récollets departed, heading upriver from Tadoussac to Quebec. The journey took nearly a week against the winds and currents on the St. Lawrence River. They arrived on June 2 and found the settlement in better condition than they had expected. Champlain wrote that the Récollet fathers “were greatly encouraged to find a place that was completely different from what they had imagined.”13
Good as it may have been, Champlain was never satisfied. He assembled the habitants and ordered them to make it better. As always, he was full of energy and purpose, and he imposed his will on the settlement. This was not an open system. Champlain conscripted the labor of the habitants for what he believed to be the general good. He ordered some to clear land. Others were told to build a new residence for the Récollet fathers, with a chapel where they could celebrate mass.14
When these projects were well begun, Champlain was off again, sailing upstream from Quebec. With him went Pont-Gravé, several Récollet fathers, a party of soldiers, and the seamen who worked the boat. The Récollets were amazed by the scale of the river, and overwhelmed by the beauty of the countryside. Champlain wrote of the “delight of our Fathers” on seeing “the extent of so grand a river, filled with many beautiful islands, and bordered by the banks of a fertile land.”15
They continued to their destination, a large island that is now part of the city of Montreal. Just beyond was the head of navigation on the river—the wild rapids that Champlain had run in his shirt.16 Below the island was the Rivière-des-Prairies. Its open meadows became a meeting place for Europeans and Indians of many nations. Champlain and his party came ashore and found that a crowd was already waiting for them. They were Huron, Algonquin, and others. All greeted the French warmly, Champlain especially. “As soon as I reached the rapids,” he wrote, “I visited among these people, who wanted very much to see us, and were joyous at our return.” He recorded the surprise of the Récollet fathers, who were astonished to meet “a very large number of strong and hardy men, who made clear that their spirit was not as savage as their customs.”17
This gathering, warm as it may have been, was a collision of cross-purposes. The Indians had a particular object in mind. They complained that their ancient foes “were continually along their trading paths, and prevented them from passing.” This time they were not speaking of the Mohawk, who had stopped their northern attacks after Champlain’s campaigns against them. These raids came from central Iroquoia. The Onondaga and Oneida nations were plundering fur routes along the upper St. Lawrence Valley and the Ottawa River. The Huron and the Algonquin were deeply concerned about security in their own country.18
Champlain discussed the subject with Pont-Gravé, and they agreed that “it was very necessary to assist them, both to engage them the more to love us, and also to provide the means of furthering my enterprises and discoveries, which apparently could only be carried out with their help, and also because this would be to them a kind of pathway and preparation for coming to Christianity.” They were convinced that another quick campaign against the central Iroquois was a path to peace in New France, as it had been with the Mohawk five years before.19
At the Riviére-des-Prairies Champlain convened a tabagie: “We summoned them all to an assembly,” he wrote, “in order to explain our intentions.” Working through an Indian interpreter, Champlain explained that he hoped to go beyond the Sault-Saint-Louis and visit the western nations. He wanted to “examine their territory” and explore the way to the “western sea.” Once again he offered to “help them with their wars.”20
Champlain and the Indian leaders discussed these questions. They agreed to send a strong force against the central Iroquois. It would be a grand alliance of Indian nations in the St. Lawrence Valley, with others near the Great Lakes and even beyond. The Indian leaders at the assembly promised to muster 2,500 warriors. Champlain offered to go back to Quebec and return with as many Frenchmen as possible.
They also discussed strategy and tactics, on which the Indians and Champlain had different ideas. He wrote, “I began to explain the means we must employ fighting.” The speech does not survive, but to judge from words and acts that followed, he proposed a bold campaign against one of the large fortified towns in the very center of Iroquoia. Champlain had in mind a punitive expedition, executed with great power and speed. He favored campaigns of rapid movement with strong concentration of force. The object was to strike a hard blow against an important target, take a heavy toll of their warriors, and make a quick retreat. This was not a war of conquest or extermination. Champlain’s purpose, whenever he took up arms, was never to make war on women, children, and the elderly. He warred only against warriors. The object was to deter future attacks and to create a foundation from which peace could grow.
His Indian allies were thinking in other terms: not a punitive expedition in the European sense, but a revenge raid to retaliate for old losses, and a mourning raid to replace them with new captives. Their differences with Champlain did not emerge at the tabagie. The emphasis was on combined effort, and all agreed on the main lines of the campaign.
The Indians were eager to get started, but Champlain pointed out that the expedition “could not take less than three or four months,” and he had to go back to Quebec and settle some “essential matters.” He promised to return in four or five days.21 Champlain sailed quickly down the river to Quebec on June 26 and found that all was well. Two Récollet fathers, John and Pacifique, had fitted out the chapel and celebrated Holy Mass on Sunday, June 25, which Champlain believed to be the first there.22 Unhappily, a third Récollet, Father Joseph Le Caron, had gone up-country with twelve Frenchmen. “This news troubled me a little,” Champlain wrote. He had hoped to take the men on his expedition. “I could have ordered many things for the voyage which now I was not able to do, becau
se of the small number of men, and also because not more than four or five knew how to handle firearms.”23
Undeterred, Champlain left Quebec on Tuesday, July 4, and hurried up the river to the rapids for his rendezvous with the Indians. He was late, and they were gone. After two weeks with no sign of him, the Indians had despaired of his arrival and departed for their homes. A rumor spread that he had been killed by the Iroquois.
Champlain arrived just after they had gone and went racing after them. He took his servant, an interpreter, and ten Indian paddlers in two big canoes. They left the Rivière-des-Prairies and went up the river, determined to go forward with his expedition. It was a hard journey. From the great rapids of the St. Lawrence River to Huronia, the distance was nearly five hundred miles upstream against the current and prevailing wind, with many painful portages. They did it in twenty-three days, the Indians bending over their paddles and singing their rhythmic canoe songs, as their glistening blades flashed in the bright summer light.24
For the first part of the journey, Champlain followed the line of his earlier travels in 1613–14. Then he detoured far to the north to keep clear of the western Iroquois and especially the Onondaga, whose war parties were much feared. Beyond Morrison Island, Champlain’s party left the Ottawa River and entered “an ill-favored region full of pines, birches, and a few oaks, very rocky, and in many places rather hilly.” They were crossing the Laurentian shield of Canada, which Champlain described as “a wilderness, being barren and uninhabited,” full of “rocks and mountains and not ten arpents of arable land.” But even in this “frightful and abandoned land,” Champlain found an abundance of sorts—a “grand quantity of blueberries,” blüets as he called them, “in such plenty that it is marvelous.”25
Along the way he met many Indian nations, talked with them, and encouraged alliances with the French. He visited again with the Morrison Island Algonquin, whom he knew well. In another poor region, he met a group called the Otaguottouemin, who lived by hunting, fishing, and harvesting a huge abundance of blueberries, which they dried and ate through the winter.26
Champlain portaged around several rapids to Lake Nipissing, where the nation of that name gave him “a very kind reception.” Then he went yet another thirty leagues to the French River and made his way to Lake Huron, which he called the Lake of the Attigouautan, after the Bear clan of the Huron nation. He traveled forty-five leagues along its shore, marveling at its size. He called it la mer douce, the sweet-water sea. It was a disappointment to him that way, as he was he searching for salt water that promised a route to China. But he felt better when he caught lake trout that were four and a half feet long. The pike were of the same size, and the sturgeon reached as much as nine feet, “a very large fish and marvelously good eating.”27
Near the lake he came to yet another Indian nation called the Cheveux-Relevés or High Hairs, with pierced nostrils and ears fringed with beads. Their hair was “raised very high, and arranged and combed better than our courtiers.” Champlain became especially fond of the Cheveux-Relevés and delighted in their ways. He gave their senior chief a metal hatchet and quizzed him about his country, “which he drew for me on a piece of bark.”28
From Lake Huron, Champlain crossed Georgian Bay and entered the country of Huronia. Measured against the vast distances of Canada, it appears very small on a map of this great nation, but Champlain explored it on foot and had a different impression. “The whole country which I visited on foot extends for some twenty to thirty leagues,” he wrote, “and is very fine.” He reckoned that it had an area of about forty by sixty miles, roughly 2,400 square miles. Champlain calculated the latitude of Huronia at approximately 44 degrees, well south of the lower St. Lawrence Valley. Its growing season was long enough to produce abundant crops of corn, and he was impressed by the quality of its soil. “This country is very fair and fertile,” he wrote, and he took pleasure in traveling through it.29
If he was surprised by the extent of Huronia, Champlain was amazed by its population. He described the land as “a well cleared country” and “well peopled with a countless number of souls.” He tried to count them and came to a rough estimate of thirty thousand inhabitants.30 He was astonished by the number of towns, and still more by their size and strength. The town of Carhagouha (not the largest) impressed him with its massive triple palisade, thirty-five feet tall, as high as a four-storey building.31
The Huron villages were surrounded by big cornfields, some larger than a thousand acres. He found bumper crops in the fields, much of them nearly ripe in mid-August. The production of corn exceeded consumption. Champlain observed that the Huron raised crops for export to other Indian nations. He wrote, “They are covered in the pelts of deer and beaver, which they acquired from Algonquins and Nippissing for Indian corn and meal.” Huronia became the breadbasket of other Indian nations. It also produced an abundance of squashes and sunflowers, plums and small apples, raspberries, strawberries, and nuts.32
Champlain tells us that he visited most of Huronia’s major towns and many of its villages in a systematic way. He became increasingly aware of the open structure of politics in Indian cultures. Each Huron village had separate sets of leaders for every clan that lived there. Champlain met with many of these men. It was an extraordinary effort in frontier diplomacy that consumed much of the month of August. In the end, it may have had two consequences, one of them unintended. Champlain broadened his own base of support among the Huron, but at a price. In the process, he may have weakened the already limited authority of the most eminent leaders in Huronia. That problem would come to haunt him in the weeks to follow.33
On August 17, 1615, Champlain reached the town of Cahiague, “the chief village of the country,” larger than Carhagouha. Here the warriors of Huronia were asked to gather for the campaign against the central Iroquois. He wrote: “I was received with great joy and gratitude by all the natives of the country, who had abandoned their project, thinking that they would never see me again, and that the Iroquois had captured me. This was the cause of the great delay which had happened in this expedition.”34
It was agreed that they would make a long march from Huronia into the center of Iroquoia and launch a bold attack on a major town of the Onondaga nation, which Champlain called Entouhonoron or Antouhonoron. These people had been raiding to the north across Lake Ontario, which he knew as the Lake of the Entouhonoron, the Lake of the Onondaga.35
While Champlain waited for the war parties to gather, he explored the town of Cahiagué. It was an extraordinary place. He counted two hundred large lodges, with a population in the range of three thousand to perhaps six thousand people. It was protected by a massive palisade with seven rows of posts. The strength of its defenses was a measure of the scale of fighting between the Huron and the Iroquois.36
By the last week of August the Huron warriors had assembled. They set off on September 1, passing from Cahiagué to the land near the attractive modern town of Orillia between Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe, where they paused for the Algonquin war parties to join them. Champlain’s visits had borne fruit. The Algonquin Petite nation turned out in force, with their war chief Iroquet. So did the Morrison Island Algonquin and their chief Tessoüat. Other nations also came forward.37
The Huron and Algonquin hoped that yet another major Indian nation would join them from the southern side of Iroquoia. These were the Susquehannock, who lived in what is now Maryland, Pennsylvania, and southern New York. The Iroquois were at war with them as well. The Susquehannock were allies of the Huron and had heard good things about the French. They had captured three Dutch traders who were with the Iroquois and let them go, thinking they were Frenchmen. They offered to join the attack on the central Iroquois with five hundred men. The Huron told Champlain that the Susquehannock were good fighters, but they could be reached only by a long detour around the country of the Seneca. The Huron decided to send a delegation of twelve of their best warriors. Champlain’s truchement, his interpreter Étienne Br�
�lé, asked to go along, and it was agreed.38
On September 1, the main force of Huron and Algonquin warriors was at last ready, and off they went together. Champlain had between ten and thirteen French arquebusiers; the Indians mustered at least five hundred warriors, probably more.39 The size of the expedition is not clear, but it was large enough to cause a major problem of logistics. Champlain wrote, “we advanced by short stages, hunting continually.” He described a hunt by “400 or 500” Indians, who formed a line and drove the deer onto points of land surrounded by lakes and rivers. The deer threw themselves into the water and were killed with sword blades attached to long poles. Champlain wrote, “I took a peculiar pleasure in watching them hunt in this manner, noting their skill.”40
The French joined the hunt with their firearms, and caused an accident. An arquebusier aimed at a stag and wounded an Indian warrior, which threatened to disrupt the expedition. Indians did not believe in accidents. Champlain wrote that “a great clamor arose.” It was settled with presents to the wounded man and his family, “the ordinary method of allaying and ending quarrels.”41
It was a very long distance from Cahiagué to the center of Iroquoia, a journey of forty days from their departure on September 1. Most of it was done by canoe. Indian guides led them through a long chain of lakes with short portages: today’s Cranberry, Balsam, Cameron, Sturgeon, Pigeon, Buckhorn, Deer, Clear, and Rice lakes, and the Otonabee and Trent rivers. That route took them south from Huronia to the northeast shore of today’s Lake Ontario.42
Champlain's Dream Page 37
