The tide still ebbed and flowed in the river as far as Three Rivers, but not many miles beyond. We disembarked about twenty miles below this place, where the left-hand bank was flat, and much corn and fruit was grown. This was June 5th, and we marched along the river-road all day, with the regimental music ahead of us, funding great enjoyment in the use of our legs. We remarked upon the extraordinary speed with which the crops sprouted and the trees leafed, soon as winter had departed, as also upon the very slovenly manner of farming here in use. It appeared that manure was seldom put upon the fields, considered already rich enough by nature, but was instead thrown into the river. The sandy earth was merely turned up lightly with a plough and the grain scattered in furrows which were far from regular. More than half the fields also had been left without any fences, exposed to the teeth and hooves of cattle. However, the Habitants were beginning to be more industrious and better farmers; because, since the English came, the greed and rapacity of their feudal landlords, the Seigneurs, had been somewhat curbed. Beforehand, it was not worth their while to accumulate any surplus of corn or maple-sugar or fuel, because it would all be taken from them under one pretext or another; but now they counted on the protection of the Governor and were assured of a steady market for their produce, owing to the energy of the English merchants of Montreal and Quebec, who sent boats to collect it on fixed days. Yet for their Seigneurs they still had a habit of reverence, and were bound to them by certain ties of vassalage, such as being obliged to take their corn to be ground only at the Seigneur’s mill, under payment of a heavy fine, however inconvenient the journey.
The Seigneurs lived in a simple style and were often poorer than their vassals, for they were forbidden by pride to engage in the tilling of the soil or any mechanical task; but at the sight of a beaver hat, however shabby, every red night-cap was doffed. This disgust of mechanical employment was shared by the vassal, who was usually related by marriage with a Seigneurial family, and, though he condescended to till the soil, would hold it beneath him to set up as a blacksmith or boot-maker. In consequence, the Canadians had great scorn for the invaders from New England when they were aware that even their officers were tradesmen and artisans.
The women of the Seigneurial class affected long cloaks of scarlet silk, in contrast with those of a similar colour, made of cloth, worn by the plebeians, and a kind of worsted cap with great coloured loops of ribbon. If any woman without a right to these distinctions were to be seen attired in them, they would be torn from her, even in a crowded gathering.
The peasant girls were very pretty, but only the young ones; for their beauty closed prematurely. They wore charming sleeveless bodices in blue or scarlet, petticoats of a different colour and wide-brimmed straw hats. Some sat spinning in the open air outside their house doors. They did most of the farm labour, the men being in general indolent, except when on some adventurous expedition in search of furs. The farms were not in general large, grazing thirty or forty sheep, and about a dozen cows, along with five or six oxen for the plough. The cows were small, but very good for the farmers’ use. The people seemed not only immeasurably better circumstanced than the peasants of Ireland, but (a comparison I was able to make in later years) a great deal better than most of the English themselves. Every dwelling-house had a small orchard attached and at evening the return of the herds and flocks from the woods was a very pleasant sight. The swine were also allowed to roam wild in the woods; these were very fierce, and the hardy manner of their life greatly improved the flavour of the flesh and the quality of the bristles for brush-making.
We halted in a small village about an hour after disembarking, and Lieutenant Kemmis, who knew a little French, asked a French farmer, who had come out of his house to watch the troops go by, how far it was to Three Rivers. ‘Oh,’ replied he, ‘about twenty pipes, sir.’ This strange method of computation, which was the common one on the river, represented time rather than distance: the time that it would take to smoke a pipe, according to the element which one used, land or water, and in the latter case according to whether the journey was upstream or down. For men walking along, in the leisurely stroll used by these Frenchmen, ‘a pipe’ was about three-quarters of a mile.
The same farmer, who, in spite of the warmth of the weather, wore a coarse blanket coat tied about his body with a worsted sash, and the habitual red woollen night-cap, invited the Lieutenant and myself into his house for a drink. It was of a single storey, with three or four compartments and a large garret a-top, where in winter he stored his frozen provisions.
I looked about me with interest. The interior of the living-room was neatly boarded and the furniture plain and solid. There was a close iron stove with a long line over it for the drying of dish-clouts and clothing. Strips of stout paper were still tightly pasted about the window to keep out the blasts and snow of winter. A crowd of about thirteen people, seated at a long table on stools, were eating their dinner with wooden spoons from wooden bowls (hollowed out from the knots of the curly maple-tree) and drinking cider from tankards of unglazed earthenware. Their bread was sour and black, and the dinner was a great pot of potatoes, cabbage, and beef boiled to shreds. The smell in the room was a curious admixture of sweat, stew, garlic, tobacco, and sulphur. We had not been there above five minutes when we felt our heads beginning to swim, for the stove was roaring hot and giving off noxious fumes.
‘Good God, my friend,’ exclaimed the Lieutenant, ‘do you never open the window even in the hottest day of summer?’
Our host ruminated a while and then shook his head.
‘And why not, pray? Would it not benefit your health?’ For the Lieutenant was aware that the French were much subject to the consumption, which these stoves invited.
He puffed at his pipe. ‘It is not a custom of the Habitants,’ he told us at last; and I was to learn that this same reason was habitually given by his countrymen for many other eccentric refusals to behave in a common-sense manner. So we drank off our cider, which was very rough in the mouth, thanked him, and staggered out again into the road – a very good one too, because the Corvée of France was still in operation hereabouts, which provided forced labour for the maintenance of public works. This road was ditched on both sides and curved in the centre for dryness, and the ruts constantly filled up with stones. A pleasant breeze blew off the river, which was about two miles broad, so that vessels of considerable size sailing in midstream appeared like wherries.
We had the luck to observe two sea-wolves sporting in the river, within musket-shot. To have disturbed them by a volley would have been a wanton act, for had we wounded or killed them we should not have been able to recover their bodies; nor did we need fresh meat, being abundantly supplied with very good beef. The sea-wolf, so-called from his howling, is an amphibian creature. His head resembles that of a dog. He has four very short legs, of which the fore ones have nails, but the hind ones terminate in fins. The largest animals weigh upwards of two thousand pounds and are of different colours. Their flesh is good eating, but the profit of it lies in its oil, which is proper for burning and for currying leather. Their skins do excellently for travellers’ trunks, and when well-tanned make shoes and boots that do not admit water, and lasting covers for seats. I never saw a sea-cow, though this animal was also found in the river: larger than the sea-wolf but resembling him in figure. The sea-cow is as white as snow and has two teeth, of the thickness and length of a man’s arm, that look like horns and are of the finest ivory. These beasts were seldom taken at sea, and on shore only by a stratagem. The people of Nova Scotia used to tie a bull to a stake fixed on the shore to the depth of about two feet of water; they then covertly tormented him by twisting his tail until he roared. As soon as the sea-cows heard this they would take it as a signal from one of their own kind and swim towards the shore; when they reached shallow water they would crawl to the bull on their short, awkward legs and be taken without difficulty.
I later saw several schools of porpoises playing about in the
river: each was said to yieId a hogshead of oil, and of their skins were made warm musket-proof waistcoats. They were mostly white and when they rose to the surface had the appearance of hogs. At night, if I may use an Irishism (being Irish born), they often caused beautiful fireworks in the water, especially when two schools crossed each other, a continuous stream of light gliding with each member and curving in and out.
It must not be thought that we were so distracted by the interesting sights of our march that we forgot the purpose for which it was made; namely, to throw back the American invaders out of Canada. We felt indeed an unquestioning assurance that the Americans, fighting not in defence of their homes but as invaders of a foreign country with which they had nothing in common, would have no chance against us. They would lack the opportunity to shoot from behind stone walls at a column in line of march as at Lexington, or to defend a prepared position against frontal attack as at Bunker’s Hill; nor could they count upon the assistance or even the neutrality of the Habitants. They were accustomed to fight as individuals not as an army; and in battles in open country, as this was, victory must always attend the side which shows the most perfect discipline and the closest subordination to the instructions of its commander – so long as he be not a perfect fool, as very few of our generals happened to be.
The Americans who opposed us consisted of three several expeditions. First, the two thousand besiegers of Quebec, who upon General Carleton’s sortie early in May – ‘to see’, as he said, ‘what these mighty boasters are about’ – had fled almost without resistance, abandoning the whole of their artillery and stores. To these were added two thousand new troops under General Tomson, who had been sent up from Boston to assist at the capture of Quebec; they could be spared for the service because General Howe had in March been forced to evacuate Boston, bag and baggage. That they arrived too late was due to mismanagement and dissension. Besides these, three and a half thousand men had arrived under General Sullivan, and Colonel Benedict Arnold from Montreal with his three hundred veterans. This was a respectable force in numbers, but we had thirteen thousand men to set against their eight thousand, and were far better served with artillery. The Americans were reported to be concentrated at Sorel, some forty miles up the river from us and on the other bank. Between them and us lay the broad Lake of St Peter with its thousand islands, which would be the next stage of our journey up to Montreal.
We arrived at Three Rivers, after being ferried over the intervening stream on batteaux, a sort of barge peculiar to Canada, flat-bottomed and with both ends built very sharp and exactly alike. The sides were about four feet high and there were benches and rowlocks for oarsmen; the batteau also carried sail, though it was very awkward either to sail or row. Its advantage was that it drew very little water and could be propelled by poles, where there was no wind and where oars would not serve. The poles were about eight feet in length, extremely light and shod with iron. The current in the centre of the St Lawrence River was so strong that to stem it a crew must keep close to the shore and use their poles in unison. The batteau was steered by a man with a pole in the hinder part, who shifted it from side to side to keep the course even.
We found Three Rivers a place of disappointing size, though the third town, in point of importance, in Canada. It contained but two hundred and fifty houses, most of them built of wood and indifferent in appearance, two extinct monasteries, an active convent of Ursuline nuns, and a barrack with capacity for five hundred troops. The town used to be much frequented by Indians, who brought furs thither down the rivers after which it is named; but by this time the trade had been diverted to Montreal as being a more accessible market to the Indian trapping-grounds, and Three Rivers was no more than a port of call between Montreal and Quebec.
My company were lodged for the night in a barn belonging to the Ursulines and were shown great kindness by the Chaplain of the sisterhood. He invited Lieutenant Kemmis and myself to enter a part of the convent which could be visited without leave of the Bishop – as the part where the nuns dwelt could not. We were conducted to a handsome parlour with a charming view of the convent gardens, and presently in came gliding the Mother Superior and a bevy of lay-sisters, who were not bound by the same strict vows as the other women. I could only nod and smile, but Lieutenant Kemmis offered a number of gallantries in halting French, which greatly pleased the old woman. The dress of the Order, a poor one, consisted of a black stuff gown, a handkerchief of white linen with rounded corners looped about the throat, a head-piece of the same material which allowed only the centre part of the face to show, a black gauze veil which screened half even of that and overflowed the shoulders, and a heavy silver cross suspended from the breast.
We were shown specimens of the handicrafts of the Sisterhood, by selling which they helped to support themselves; and were expected to purchase some specimens, which we did. It is unusual for soldiers on the eve of a battle to fill their pockets and knapsacks with a heap of keepsakes in fancy-work to send to their friends – but we could not disappoint these poor women. We bought from them two pocket-books, a work-basket, a dressing-box, all of which were made of birch-bark embroidered in elk hair, dyed in various brilliant colours; also some models of Indian tomahawks, scalping-knives, calumets, and those birch-bark canoes for the manufacture of which Three Rivers was famous. They packed them up for us very neatly in little boxes kept for the purpose, of the same bark.
The next day we spent in drill, both by platoons and companies, and Major Bolton impressed upon us that what we had perhaps regarded hitherto as idle ceremony had a practical and deadly purpose. He declared that we must show the same steadiness and unanimity upon the field as upon the parade. In the afternoon I went from curiosity to watch a number of Indians at their canoe-making, a work performed with the utmost neatness. They began with a framework of thick, tough rods of the hickory nut-tree, bound together with remarkably stout strips of elm-bark. Over this they sewed, with deer sinews, large strips of birch-bark, which resembles that of the cork-tree but is of much closer grain and far more pliable. A thick coat of pitch was laid over the seams between the different pieces. The inside was lined with two layers of thin pieces of pine, laid in a contrary direction to each other. A canoe of this sort was so light that two men without fatigue could carry one on their shoulders, with accommodation for six persons. It was wonderful to see with what velocity these canoes might be paddled: in a few minutes a keel-boat rowed by an equal number of men with oars would be left behind, a mere speck on the river. But they were very easily overturned by the least improper movement; and the Habitants preferred more solid canoes hollowed out from a single log of red cedar.
The work was entirely performed by women, who undertook all the labour of the tribe: such as procuring and transporting fuel, planting corn and vegetables, cooking, dressing skins, doctoring, making household instruments and utensils. The men supplied the food and defended the camp, but considered it beneath them to undertake any other labour.
I observed a number of men lounging about on the bank, smoking their calumets, a combination of pipe and axe. One of them, sitting cross-legged in his blanket-coat with a black face and untrimmed locks, which I was told signified mourning and unsatisfied revenge, offered me a handsome otter-skin pouch. I opened it and found inside a lump of tobacco in one compartment and dried leaves in the other. Upon my looking puzzled, he took the pouch from me, extracted the tobacco lump, cut it into shreds in the palm of his hand with his scalping-knife, rubbed it together with the dry leaves, which were of the sumach-tree, and finally, drawing my pipe from my waist-belt, where I had put it, stuffed the bowl with the mixture. He struck fire into a bit of touchwood with his flint and steel, kindled the pipe and put it between my lips. These were simple and familiar actions but performed with indescribable harmony and grace. Except in their war-dances or when they were intoxicated, I never saw an Indian make any movement or gesture that was not beautiful to the eye. I sat for some minutes watching this man, who appeare
d to be a very sincere and honest smoker. He never removed or replaced his pipe in his mouth without due solemnity, and the act of inhaling the smoke seemed to be closely akin to some religious ceremony. He remained all the time in the profoundest melancholy. A squaw who could speak a little English, of the simple ungrammatical sort used by the Montreal traders, told me his story. He had lost three children from the smallpox, and his brother had been scalped during a fur-getting voyage in the far north. He wished to go to war himself in order to change his luck, but his Sachem had restrained him. His name was Strong Soup, and he wore tied on his legs the furs of polecats, which were the insignia of acknowledged valour. The polecat furs he had won for a deed of desperate daring against the Algonquins, undertaken to erase the stigma of a previous misfortune: when he had fled from the same Algonquins weaponless and leaving his breech-clout in their hands. His revenge was to kill three Algonquin warriors, two squaws, and the only infant child of their chief; lifting four scalps in the act. The popular jeer against him in the matter of the lost breech-clout was there-upon forbidden by his war-chief by means of the public crier.
One other incident of interest occurred while I was here. The woman who told me Strong Soup’s story had two children with her, an infant and a girl of perhaps seven years old. The infant was swaddled in a blanket and bound tightly to a piece of board somewhat longer than itself. Bent pieces of wood protected the child’s face, lest the board should fall, and it was suspended upon the branch of a birch-tree within reach of the mother’s hand: she kept it swinging from side to side like a pendulum while still engaged in her canoe-making. The little girl was covered with a loose cotton garment and was very forward. She came behind me and fingered my accoutrements in a way that the mother regarded as unmannerly. The punishment was not a string of curses or a slap, as it would have been in Ireland, but a stern look and a handful of water scooped from the river and flung in her face, which abashed the child so much that she crept away and hid beneath a canoe. To comfort her, I presented her with a sewing-box that I had bought from the nuns; which she gazed at with evident exultation, and said an eloquent speech of thanks.
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