Part 1 (1/2)

Old Quebec.

by Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan.

NOTE

The student of the history of the ancient capital of Canada is embarra.s.sed, not by the dearth but by the abundance of material at his disposal. The present volume, therefore, makes no claim to originality. It is but an a.s.similation of this generous data, and a simple comment upon the changing scenes which were recorded by such ancient authorities as the Jesuit priests and pioneers in their _Relations_, and by the monumental works of Francis Parkman, whose researches occupied more than forty years, and whose picturesque pen has done for Canada what Prescott's did for Mexico. Admiring tribute and grat.i.tude must also be expressed for the years of careful study and the unfaltering energy by which the late Mr. Kingsford produced his valuable _History of Canada_. Nor can any one, writing of Quebec, proceed successfully without constant reference to the historical gleanings of Sir James Le Moine, who has spent a lifetime in the romantic atmosphere of old-time ma.n.u.scripts, and who, with Monsieur l'Abbe Casgrain, represents, in its most attractive form, that composite citizens.h.i.+p which has the wit and grace of the old _regime_ with the useful ardour of the new.

THE AUTHORS.

PRELUDE

About the walled city of Quebec cling more vivid and enduring memories than belong to any other city of the modern world. Her foundation marked a renaissance of religious zeal in France, and to the people from whom came the pioneers who suffered or were slain for her, she had the glamour of new-born empire, of a conquest renewing the glories of the days of Charlemagne. Visions of a hemisphere controlled from Versailles haunted the days of Francis the First, of the Grand Monarch, of Colbert and of Richelieu, and in the sky of national hope and over all was the Cross whose pa.s.sion led the Church into the wilderness. The first emblem of sovereignty in the vast domain which Jacques Cartier claimed for Francis his royal master, was a cross whereon was inscribed--

_Franciscus Primus, Dei Gratia Francorum Rex, Regnat._

In spite of cruel neglect due to internal troubles and that European strife in which the motherland was engaged for so many generations, the eyes of Frenchmen turned to their over-sea dominions with imaginative hope, with conviction that the great continent of promise would renew in France the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. How hard the patriotic colonists strove to retain those territories which Champlain, La Salle, Maisonneuve, Joliet, and so many others won through nameless toil and martyrdom, and how at last the broad lands pa.s.sed to another race and another flag, not by fault or folly or lack of courage of the people, but by the criminal corruption of the ruling few, is the narrative which runs through these pages.

For at least the first hundred years of its existence, Quebec was New France; and the story of Quebec in that period is the story of all Canada. The fortress was the heart and soul of French enterprise in the New World. From the Castle of St. Louis, on the summit of Cape Diamond, went forth mandates, heard and obeyed in distant Louisiana.

The monastic city on the St. Lawrence was the centre of the web of missions, which slowly spread from the dark Saguenay to Lake Superior.

The fearful tragedies of Indian warfare had their birth in the early policy of Quebec. The fearless voyageurs, whose canoes glided into unknown waters, ever westward--towards Cathay, as they believed--made Quebec their base for exploration. And as time went on, the rock-built stronghold of the north became the nerve-centre of that half-century of conflict which left the flag of Britain waving in victory on the Plains of Abraham.

When Montcalm in his last hours consigned to the care of the British conquerors the colonists he had loved and for whom he had fought, he proclaimed a momentous epoch in the world's history--the loss of an Empire to a great nation of Europe and the gain of an Empire to another. Within a generation the Saxon Conquistador was to suffer the same humiliation, and to yield up that colonial territory from which Quebec had been a.s.sailed; but the fortress city was always to both nations the keystone of the arch of power on the American continent.

When she was lost to France, Louisiana, that vast territory along the Mississippi--a kingdom in itself--still remained, but no high memory cherished it, no national hope hung over it, and a hundred years ago Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to the new Western power--the United States. As a nation the labours of France were finished in America on the day that De Ramezay yielded up the keys of the city, and Wolfe's war-worn legions marched through St. Louis Gate from the Plains of Abraham.

Yet scores of thousands of the people of France remained in the city and the province to be ruled henceforth by the intrepid race, with which it had competed in a death-struggle for dominion through so many adventurous and uncertain years. Victory, like a wayward imp of Fate, had settled first upon one and then upon the other, and once before 1759 England had held the keys of the great fortress only to yield them up again in a weak bargain; but the die was thrown for the last time when Amherst securely quartered himself at Montreal, and Murray at the Chateau St. Louis, where Frontenac and Vaudreuil had had their day of virile governance. Never again was the banner of the golden lilies to wave in sovereignty over the St. Lawrence, though the people who had fought and toiled under its protection were to hold to their birthright and sustain their language through the pa.s.sing generations, faithful to tradition and origin, but no less faithful to the Canadian soil which their fame, their labour, and their history had made sacred to them. Frenchmen of a vanished day they were to cherish their past with an apprehensive devotion, and yet to keep the pact they made with the conqueror in 1759, and later in 1774 when the Quebec Act secured to them their religious liberty, their civic code, and their political status. This pact, further developed in the first Union of the English and French provinces in 1840, and afterwards in the Confederation of 1867, has never suffered injury or real suspicion, but was first made certain by loyalty to the British flag, in the War of the American Revolution, and piously sealed by victorious duty and valour in the war of 1812. The record of fidelity has been enriched since that day in the north-west rebellion fomented by a French half-breed in 1885, and in the late war in South Africa, where French Canadians fought side by side with English comrades for the preservation of the Empire.

These later acts of imperial duty are not performed by Anglicised Frenchmen, for the pioneer race of Quebec are still a people apart in the great Dominion so far as their civic and social, their literary and domestic life are concerned. They share faithfully in the national development, and honourably serve the welfare of the whole Dominion--sometimes with a too careful and unsympathetic reserve--but within their own beloved province they retain as zealously and more jealously than the most devoted Highland men their language and their customs, and faithfully conserve the civil laws which mark them off as clearly from the English provinces as Jersey and Guernsey are distinguished from the United Kingdom. They have changed little with the pa.s.sing years, and their city has changed less. In many respects the Quebec of to-day is the Quebec of yesterday. Time and science have altered its detail, but viewed from afar it seems to have altered as little as Heidelberg and Coblenz. Lower Town huddles in artistic chaos at the foot of the sheltering cliff, and, as aforetime, the overhanging fort protrudes its protecting muzzles. Spires and antique minarets which looked down upon a French settlement struggling with foes in feathers and war-paint, still gleam from the towering rock on which their stable foundations are laid; and after five sieges and the pa.s.sing of two and a half centuries the mother city of the continent remains a faithful survivor of an heroic age, on historic ground sacred to the valour of two great races.

OLD QUEBEC

CHAPTER I

EARLY VOYAGES

Living in the twentieth century, to which the uttermost parts of the earth are revealed, and with only the undiscovered poles left to lure us on, we cannot fully appreciate the geographical ignorance of the Middle Ages. The travels of Marco Polo had only lately revealed the wonders of the golden East, and in the West the Pillars of Hercules marked earth's furthest bound. Beyond lay the _mare tenebrosum_, the Mysterious Sea, girding the level world. England was not then one of the first nations of the earth. She was not yet a maritime power, she had not begun the work of colonisation and empire: the fulcrum of Europe lay further south. But as our Tudor sovereigns were making secure dominion in ”these isles,” the Byzantine Empire was moving slowly to its end, and favouring circ.u.mstances were already making Italy the centre of the world's commerce and culture. There the feudal system, never deeply rooted, was declining slowly, and Italian energy and enterprise now having larger opportunity, seized the commerce of the East as it received vast impulse from the Crusades, and this trade became the source of Empire.

Venice, Genoa, and Pisa were now great emporiums of Oriental wares, were waxing rich on a transport trade which had no option but to use their ports and their vessels. Inland Florence had no part in maritime enterprise, but was the manufacturing, literary, and art centre of mediaeval Europe. Her silk looms made her famous throughout the world, her banks were the purse of Europe, and among her famous sons were Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Amerigo Vespucci. For the development of their commerce, the cities of the North had grouped themselves into the great Hanseatic League, with branches in Bruges, London, Bergen, and Novgorod. Commercialism had everywhere become the keynote of the closing Middle Ages, inspiring that maritime enterprise which was soon to outline a new map of the world.

The main route between the West and East had hitherto been by way of the Red Sea and the Euphrates, and it was controlled by the Italian cities. Italy had, therefore, no interest in finding a water route to the East which would rob her of this profitable overland traffic. But the experience of her sailors made them the most skilful of the world's navigators and the readiest instruments of other nations in expeditions of discovery. Thus Columbus of Genoa, Cabot of Venice, and Verrazzano of Florence are found accepting commissions from foreign sovereigns.

”The discoveries of Copernicus and Columbus,” says Froude, ”created, not in any metaphor, but in plain language, a new heaven and a new earth.” The new theory of Copernicus was, indeed, one of the choicest flowers of the Renaissance, and though timidly enunciated, it revolutionised the world's geography. Further, the discovery of the polarity of the magnet, and the invention of the astrolabe, gave to the mariners of the fifteenth century a sense of security lacking to their fathers, while the kindling flame of the New Learning led them upon the most daring quests. The Portuguese were the first to enter on the brilliant path of sea-going exploration which distinguishes this century above all others. By 1486 they had already found Table Mountain rising out of the Southern sea, and hoping always for a pa.s.sage to the East, had named it the Cape of Good Hope. Spain soon followed her rival into these unknown regions, a policy due mainly to the enthusiasm of Isabella of Castile, who, in spite of the conservative apathy of the Council of Salamanca, was eager to become the patroness of Christopher Columbus.

Although the Northmen of the tenth century had been blown almost fortuitously upon the sh.o.r.es of Nova Scotia, by way of Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador, the discovery of North America must always be set to the credit of Christopher Columbus. From the age of fourteen he had been upon the sea, and his keen mind was stored with all the nautical science afforded by the awakened spirit of the time. To this practical equipment he added a romantic temperament and a habit of reflection which carried him to greater certainty in his convictions than even that attained by his correspondent, the learned Toscanelli.

a.s.suming that the world was round--no commonplace of the time--he determined forthwith to reach India by sailing westward. His bones lie buried in the Western hemisphere, which his intrepidity revealed to an astonished world.