One little French barque got away. Later Champlain was told by Indians of what he called the Canadien nation that “a small French vessel coming up while it was going on, and not wishing to take part in it, made its escape, partly by rowing and partly by sailing; and it was learned that it was the vessel of the Jesuit father Noyrot, who had separated a good while before from the sieur de Roquement.” Champlain observed that “they could easily have run up to Quebec to help us; as it was, they returned to France.”33
After the battle, the Kirkes spent ten days at Gaspé refitting their ships. They had failed to take Quebec, but they succeeded in their other purposes and realized a very large profit on their investment in war. Altogether they captured eighteen vessels in the coastal waters of New France and burned another dozen that they were unable to carry away. They had spared two ships “to take the French families, crews, women and children back to France. The largest colonizing effort by the Hundred Associates had ended in a complete loss.34
The Kirkes returned in triumph to England with many large prizes and much plunder, including 138 cannon, large quantities of supplies, and trade goods. It was a highly successful business venture. The choices they made throughout the expedition, especially the choice to turn away from Quebec and attack the French ships down the river, had the effect of minimizing losses and maximizing profits, at considerable cost to the imperial purposes of England.35 Even so, David Kirke would be knighted by Charles I, and his coat of arms was augmented by a canton with the arms of French commander Claude de Roquement—the lion “couchant and collared with a chain, prostrating himself to the mercy of his vanquisher.” In 2003 archaeologists in Newfoundland discovered a gold seal bearing Kirke’s new arms and the emblem of a flaming heart.36
While the French and the English squadrons were meeting in battle, the small French shallop got past the enemy force, and hugged the riverbank in a patch of fog. The crew dragged the boat ashore until the British were gone, then continued upstream to Quebec.
The arms of David Kirke, British conqueror of Quebec. In 2003 archaeologists in Newfoundland found three very small enameled gold seals. Charles I added a rectangle to them, with the arms of French Admiral de Rocquement, whose fleet Kirke captured in battle on the St. Lawrence River in 1628.
They found the French commandant in a towering rage. Champlain was under heavy strain. He furiously upbraided the young captain of the shallop, and told him he should have sailed downriver to find out who won the battle. The officer replied that he had no orders to do so. Champlain complained that the arrival of eleven men only increased the number of mouths to feed from their dwindling supply of peas. It was a rare moment when Champlain lost control of himself, and treated a junior officer with cruelty and injustice. But he recovered his self-discipline and wrote, “There was no remedy for it; I gave them the same ration as everyone else.”37
What followed was a year of agony for Champlain and the habitants of Quebec. Approximately seventy-three people had been living there in the winter of 1627–28. About fifty-six lived in the habitation, of whom eighteen were laborers. Another six lived at the Hébert-Couillard farm, three with the Récollets, and eight in the Jesuit compound at St. Charles. In the summer another six or eight had returned from the farm on Cap Tourmente, and eleven arrived in the shallop that so displeased Champlain. With various interpreters, traders, waifs, and strays, the population of Quebec was probably between ninety and a hundred souls in the winter of 1628–29.38
Champlain had little food for them. They still had a supply of dried peas and beans, enough for a ration of seven ounces a day, “and so we had to go through a very wretched time.” Even in the previous summer, Champlain wrote, “we were eating our peas very sparingly, which diminished our strength greatly, most of our men becoming feeble and sickly.”39 He put the entire colony on short rations and took the smallest share for himself. The opposite had been done in other starving colonies. At Virginia in its first terrible year, the leaders took the lion’s share, and most survived the winter. Colonists of lower rank at Jamestown received much less, and most of them died. In Quebec, Champlain wrote, the smallest share went to “those who were with me in the fort, we being the worst provided of all in every respect.”40
Champlain looked for other ways of stretching the rations by grinding peas into meal. He tried it first with wooden mortars, but it was slow work. He asked the artisans if they could make a millstone. They found suitable materials, shaped the stones, and set them up. “The necessity we were in,” Champlain wrote, “thus caused us to devise what in the previous twenty years had been considered impossible. The mill was finished with diligence, and each man brought his week’s allowance of peas … from which he got good peasemeal, which made our soup stronger, and did us much good, and put us again in a little better condition than before.”41
In the fall came the season of eel fishing, “which helped us considerably,” Champlain wrote. The French had still not mastered the art of eeling, which often was done in the dark, by two Indians in a canoe—one holding a torch to attract the eels, and the other spearing them with a long weapon much like a harpoon, or a whaler’s lance. The Montagnais were “skillful fishers” of eels, but they guarded the secrets of their fishing. Champlain wrote that they “gave us few and sold them very dear, our men giving their coats and other possessions for fish. We bought 1200 with goods from the storehouse, giving new beaver-skins in exchange … ten eels for one beaver…. These were distributed to all, but it did not amount to much.”42
When the season of winter hunting arrived, some of the Indians helped them, in particular the Montagnais captain Chomina, who supported his friend Champlain. Other Indians brought in “a few moose, although only a small number for so many persons.” Champlain sent out French hunters, who killed a very large moose but kept most of it themselves, “devouring it like ravenous wolves.” Champlain reproached them for their selfishness and did not let them go hunting again.43
In the cold months of 1628–29, the people of Quebec were growing weak with hunger. On top of everything else, the winter was long and hard. The habitants had to bear the heavy labor of cutting firewood and hauling it more than a mile. It made for “fatiguing work all the winter,” but they stayed warm through the coldest part of the year, and scurvy did not return.44
By the spring their meager supply of vegetables was almost depleted, and no word had reached the starving settlement from France. Champlain wrote of “children crying with hunger.” The habitants lacked bread, wine, salt, butter—and hope. They had dry provisions for only a month, and Champlain was deeply worried. “All this caused me great anxiety,” he wrote.45
They had to live by hunting and gathering. Champlain urged his companions to devote themselves to fishing. He wrote that “the others did their best to catch fish, but owing to the lack of nets, lines, and hooks, we could not do much.” He added, “Powder for hunting was so precious that I preferred to suffer rather than use what little we had, which was between thirty and forty pounds, and that of very poor quality.46 Our only recourse, though a miserable one, was to go in search of herbs and roots,” Champlain recalled. “While awaiting the harvest we went every day to look for roots for food, which was very fatiguing.” They searched the forest for anything that could sustain life. “We had to go six and seven leagues to get them at a cost of great trouble and patience, and without finding enough to live on.” Still, they harvested plants and roots such as solomon’s seal, clintonia borealis, and bulbs of wild lilies.47
Starvation proved a great stimulus to agriculture in Quebec. They had enough seeds to sow crops both at the Hébert farm and the Jesuit garden. By the spring of 1629, many fields were cultivated around the settlement. The Jesuits tilled their own fields, but Champlain wrote that they “had only enough cleared land in seed to support themselves and their servants, to the number of twelve.” Even so, they gave Indian corn and turnips to the habitants, and shared enough food to sustain the children in the settlement.48
The Récollet fathers had more land in crops, and they were only four in number. Champlain wrote, “They promised us that if they had more from their four or five arpents of land sown with several sorts of grain, vegetables, roots and garden herbs, they would give us some.” There were several small Montagnais farms near the settlement. One of them was tilled by the Indian convert La Nasse, who had a cabin near the Jesuits, and he helped too.49
The Hébert-Couillard farm was also beginning to become productive. The widow Hébert and her son-in-law “had between six and seven acres sown,” mostly in “peas and other grains.” They produced enough to meet their own needs and supply a small surplus of seven barrels of peas and barley for the settlement. In the summer, they also contributed each week a small basin of barley, peas, and Indian corn, “about nine ounces and a half of weight, which was a very small quantity among so many persons.” It was mixed into a “potage of farina,” half peas, half barley, mixed with roots that they found in the woods, and flavored with forest herbs, “which helped a little.” Even on the edge of starvation, these French habitants gave some attention to gastronomy. The Héberts held back part of the produce to feed their family and Champlain looked the other way. He wrote, “I pretended not to see what was going on, though I was enduring considerable privation.”50
The French habitants had garden plots as well. Champlain was very active in promoting them, and it is interesting to see how he went about it. In this, as in other realms, he tried to encourage individual enterprise, and understood that confiscation and forced labor would be counterproductive. He encouraged people throughout the colony to raise crops for themselves, and asked them to contribute their surplus to others. In this period of adversity he was developing an agricultural base for Quebec, by an open method of mixed enterprise, which was more successful than the conscription and collective labor that prevailed in other colonies. It was also more effective than laissez-faire.51
In this desperate moment, the Indians supported the French in a very substantial way. Champlain had asked the Huron to take in twenty Frenchmen “so as to lighten our burden.” They agreed, and fed them through the winter and the spring of 1628–29.52 The Huron also gave Father Brébeuf fifty pounds of cornmeal for the colony. The Récollet fathers added two sacks of corn meal from the Huron, and Pont-Gravé traded for another.53 In midsummer, the Huron sent the Frenchmen back to Quebec. On July 17, 1629, Champlain wrote, “Our men from the Huron country came in twelve canoes.”54
There was no food for them in the settlement. Champlain turned to another Indian nation and sent them “to the settlement of the Abenaki to live on their Indian corn till spring.” He dispatched others to the Etchemin in the south, and a few to the nation he called the Canadien in Gaspésie. On June 15, Thierry Desdames took the shallop downriver to Gaspé, met Juan Chou, a captain of the Canadien Indians, who “did their best to welcome them” and promised that “in case our ships did not arrive, we would want nothing that their hunting could provide.” Chou also gave the French a barrel and a half of salt, and offered to take “twenty of our companions and distribute them among his own people to spend the winter, where they would be secure against hunger, at a cost of two beaver skins per person.” Champlain wrote that the Canadien strongly supported the French, and “had a great aversion to our enemies.”55
The Montagnais were divided. Their leader Choumina and his brother tried to help. Champlain wrote that Choumina “offered to go to the coast of the Etchemins where the English live, to barter for powder. Choumina also asked that a Frenchman who lived two day’s journey inland from that coast to be given to him [as a companion], which request was granted in order to try every possible expedient for holding our ground.” He started July 8, left the great river, and went some distance into the Etchemin country, but “found the water so low that they were obliged to return.”56
Champlain charged these French emissaries with another assignment. Even in deep adversity, he continued to gather knowledge about the new world. He could not leave the settlement with so many uncertainties and hardships there. Instead, he sent interpreters in many directions to gather information on the countryside, study the rivers and waterways, and get to know the “peoples and nations inhabiting those regions, and their modes of life.”57
While Champlain was struggling with these problems in the late spring of 1629, the English returned.58 The Kirke brothers, all five of them this time, arrived at Gaspé on June 15, 1629. Their attack in 1628 had whetted the appetites of British entrepreneurs. The wealth of the fur trade and fisheries was vastly attractive, and the small settlements of New France seemed ripe for the plucking. To that end, William Alexander and a group of Scottish investors had joined the Kirkes to form the Company of Adventurers to Canada, also called the English and Scottish Company. In February of 1629, Charles I gave them a monopoly of the fur trade in the St. Lawrence Valley and adjacent places. They also received a commission to destroy all French settlements.59
This time they were stronger than before. Two fleets came to North America. Alexander led one to Acadia; the other under David Kirke sailed to the St. Lawrence. They intercepted the small French vessel that Champlain had sent in search of aid. The Kirkes learned in detail about the condition of Quebec, and its shortage of food and ammunition. There could be no bluff this time.
On the morning of July 19, 1629, Champlain’s servant went out of the fort to gather a breakfast of roots and berries. At about ten o’clock he came running back and said that English vessels were behind Point Lévis, a league away from the settlement. Champlain mustered his men and “put in order the little we had to prevent a surprise at the fort and the habitation.” The Jesuits and Récollets “came as fast as they could on hearing the news.”
Champlain convened a council of “those I judged proper to advise as to what we should do in this extremity.” After a short discussion, “it was agreed that considering that we were powerless, without provisions, powder or matches, and destitute of help, it was impossible to hold out, and that we must therefore seek the most advantageous terms that we were able to get.”60
When the tide came in, the English crossed to Quebec and sent a boat with a white flag to seek a parley. Champlain hoisted a flag on the fort to let them know that they could approach. An English gentleman with impeccable manners came ashore and handed Champlain a letter from the Kirke brothers—Louis Kirke who had come to take command of the fort, and Captain Thomas Kirke, his brother and “vice admiral” on the river. Their letter was drafted with exquisite courtesy. It began by reminding Champlain of his correspondence the year before, and reported that David Kirke “has instructed us to assure you of his friendship, as we assure you of ours.” They added with an air of regret that they knew well the “extreme destitution in which you are with respect to everything.” The Kirkes invited Champlain to “place the fort and habitation in our hands,” and assured him of “the best treatment for yourself and your people, and also of as honorable and reasonable a settlement as you could desire.” There was no threat, no abuse, no expression of hostility or contempt.61
Champlain responded with the same courtesy. “Gentlemen,” he wrote, circumstances “have put it out of our power to prevent the carrying out of your design,” but he added “Your claims … will only be realized now on condition of your carrying into effect the offer you made to us, of terms which we will communicate very shortly.” In the meantime, he insisted that the English should not come ashore “until everything has been resolved between us, which will be for tomorrow.”62
Champlain’s surrender of Quebec to Louis Kirke, July 19, 1629. In the foreground is a British mercenary with a boarding pike. An elderly but very fit Champlain is immaculate in black velvet, white lace, slashed sleeves, and a scarlet sash. The habitants salute their defiant leader, who promised to recover the colony.
Champlain did not wait for terms to be offered. He drafted them himself. First on his list was that Kirke should produce his commission as proof that their ca
mpaign was an act of legitimate warfare. He also asked that a ship be assigned to take all the people of Quebec (nearly a hundred persons) back to their country, including the Jesuits and Récollets, and two of the native Montagnais girls who “were given to me two years ago.” Third, he asked that the French “be allowed to leave with weapons and baggage and other articles of every kind, and that in exchange for furs a sufficiency of provisions be given to us; and no violence towards anyone.”63
The Kirkes granted most of Champlain’s demands. They promised to produce their Royal commission in Tadoussac, offered passage to England and then to France, and allowed the officers to keep their arms, clothes, and furs. Others were given their clothing and one beaver pelt; but the fathers were allowed only their “cassocks and their books.” Only one of Champlain’s requests was refused, but it was one that he cared deeply about. He was denied permission to take his adopted Indian children to France.64
Champlain and his officers discussed the terms and decided to accept them as “the best to be done in these extremities.” On July 20, the English sailed up to Quebec in three vessels, a flyboat and two pinnaces, with twenty-two guns and 150 men. Champlain went aboard the flyboat and talked with Louis Kirke about his Indian girls. Champlain made clear that his relationship with them was paternal and that the girls wanted very much to go to France. “I managed to dispel the doubts that Captain Louis [Kirke] had entertained on the subject, so that he granted me permission to take them away, at which the girls greatly rejoiced.”65
Then Louis Kirke came ashore with his men, and in Champlain’s words “acquitted himself of the duty like a man of character.” He insisted that Champlain should retain his quarters, and sent English guards to protect the chapel, the Jesuits, and the Récollets. Champlain requested that the fathers be allowed to say a mass, and Kirke agreed. Champlain asked for an inventory of all that was in the fort and the habitation, and Kirke agreed once again. The inventory survives and gives us a clue to the armament of Quebec, which made it a place of considerable strength, but with only forty pounds of powder, not enough to stand a siege. Kirke offered his provisions to the hungry people of Quebec.66
Champlain's Dream Page 49
