Part 3 (1/2)
Did France realize that Cartier had found a new kingdom? Not in the least; but the home land gave heed to that story of minerals, and had the kidnapped Indians baptized. Donnacona and all his fellow-captives but the little girl of Richelieu die, and Sieur de Roberval is appointed lord paramount of Canada to equip Cartier with five vessels and scour the jails of France for colonists. Though the colonists are convicts, the convicts are not criminals. Some have been convicted for their religion, some for their politics. What with politics and war, it is May, 1541, before the s.h.i.+ps sail, and then Roberval has to wait another year for his artillery, while Cartier goes ahead to build the forts.
From the first, things go wrong. Head winds prolong the pa.s.sage for three months. The stock on board is reduced to a diet of cider, and half the cattle die. Then the Indians of Quebec {19} ask awkward questions about Donnacona. Cartier flounders midway between truth and lie.
Donnacona had died, he said; as for the others, they have become as white men. Agona succeeds Donnacona as chief. Agona is so pleased at the news that he gives Cartier a suit of buckskin garnished with wampum, but the rest of the Indians draw off in such resentment that Cartier deems it wise to build his fort at a distance, and sails nine miles up to Cape Rouge, where he constructs Bourg Royal. Noel, his nephew, and Jalobert, his brother-in-law, take two s.h.i.+ps back to France. While Cartier roams exploring, Beaupre commands Bourg Royal.
In his roamings, ever with his eyes to earth for minerals, he finds stones specked with mica, and false diamonds, whence the height above Quebec is called Cape Diamond. It is enough. The crews spend the year loading the s.h.i.+ps with cargo of worthless stones, and set sail in May, high of hope for wealth great as Spaniard carried from Peru. June 8 the s.h.i.+ps slip in to St. John's, Newfoundland, for water. Seventeen fis.h.i.+ng vessels rock to the tide inside the landlocked lagoon, and who comes gliding up the Narrows of the harbor neck but Viceroy Roberval, mad with envy when he hears of the diamond cargoes! He breaks the head of a Portuguese or two among the fis.h.i.+ng fleet and forthwith orders Cartier back to Quebec.
Cartier s.h.i.+fts anchor from too close range of Roberval's guns and says nothing. At dead of night he slips anchor altogether and steals away on the tide, with only one little noiseless sail up on each s.h.i.+p through the dark Narrows. Once outside, he spreads his wings to the wind and is off for France. The diamonds prove worthless, but Cartier receives a t.i.tle and retires to a seigneurial mansion at St. Malo.
The episode did not improve Roberval's temper. The new Viceroy was a soldier and a martinet, and his authority had been defied. With his two hundred colonists, taken from the prisons of France, commanded by young French officers,--a Lament and a La Salle among others,--he proceeded up the coast of Newfoundland to enter the St. Lawrence by Belle Isle. {20} Among his people were women, and Roberval himself was accompanied by a niece, Marguerite, who had the reputation of being a bold horsewoman and prime favorite with the grandees who frequented her uncle's castle.
Perhaps Roberval had brought her to New France to break up her attachment for a soldier. Or the Viceroy may have been entirely ignorant of the romance, but, anch.o.r.ed off Belle Isle,--Isle of Demons,--the angry governor made an astounding discovery. The girl had a lover on board, a common soldier, and the two openly defied his interdict. Coming after Cartier's defection, the incident was oil to fire with Roberval. Sailors were ordered to lower the rowboat. One would fain believe that the tyrannical Viceroy offered the high-spirited girl at least the choice of giving up her lover. She was thrust into the rowboat with a faithful old Norman nurse. Four guns and a small supply of provisions were tossed to the boat. The sailors were then commanded to row ash.o.r.e and abandon her on Isle of Demons. The soldier lover leaped over decks and swam through the surf to share her fate.
Isle of Demons, with its wailing tides and surf-beaten reefs, is a desolate enough spot in modern days when superst.i.tions do not add to its terrors. The wind pipes down from The Labrador in fairest weather with weird voices as of wailing ghosts, and in winter the sh.o.r.es of Belle Isle never cease to echo to the hollow booming of the pounding surf.
Out of driftwood the castaways constructed a hut. Fish were in plenty, wild fowl offered easy mark, and in springtime the ice floes brought down the seal herds. There was no lack of food, but rescue seemed forever impossible; for no fis.h.i.+ng craft would approach the demon-haunted isle.
A year pa.s.sed, two years,--a child was born. The soldier lover died of heartbreak and despondency. The child wasted away. The old nurse, too, was buried. Marguerite was left alone to fend for herself and hope against hope that some of the pa.s.sing sails would heed her signals. No wonder at the end of the third year she began to hear shrieking laughter in the lonely cries of tide and wind, and to imagine that she saw fiendish arms s.n.a.t.c.hing through the spume of storm drift.
{21} Towards the fall of 1545, one calm day when spray for the once did not hide the island, some fishermen in the straits noticed the smoke of a huge bonfire ascending from Isle Demons. Was it a trick of the fiends to lure men to wreck, or some sailors like themselves signaling distress?
The boat drew fearfully near and nearer. A creature in the strange attire of skins from wild beasts ran down the rocks, signaling frantically. It was a woman. Terrified and trembling, the sailors plucked up courage to land. Then for the first time Marguerite Roberval's spirit gave way. She could not speak; she seemed almost bereft of reason. It was only after the fishermen had nourished her back to semblance of womanhood that they drew from her the story. On returning to France, Marguerite Roberval entered a convent. It was there an old court friend of her chateau days sought her out and heard the tale from her own lips.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ”DAUPHIN MAP” OF CANADA, _CIRCA_ 1543, SHOWING CARTIER'S DISCOVERIES]
{22} A colony begun under such ill omen was not likely to prosper.
Roberval had proceeded to Cape Rouge, where he landed in July, and before winter had a respectable fort constructed. Fifty of his colonists died of scurvy. As many as six were hanged in a single day for insubordination, and the whipping post became the emblem of an authority that trembled in the balance. Roberval, in troth, was not thinking of the colony. He was thinking of those minerals which the Indians said were at the head waters of the Saguenay. Leaving thirty women at the fort, he ascended the Saguenay with seventy men in spring and explored as far as Lake St. John, where the village of Roberval commemorates his feat; but he found no minerals and lost eight men running rapids. When Cartier came out in 1543, Roberval took the remaining colonists home, a profoundly embittered man. Legend has it that he either perished on a second voyage in 1549, or was a.s.sa.s.sinated in Paris.
So falls the curtain on the first attempt to colonize Canada.
{23}
CHAPTER II
FROM 1600 TO 1607
English voyages to North America--Sir Humphrey Gilbert--Henry Hudson--Champlain's first voyage--Founding of Ste. Croix--The colonists in Acadia
The second attempt to plant a French colony in the New World was more disastrous than the first.
Though my Lord Roberval fails, the French fis.h.i.+ng vessels continue to bound over the billows of the Atlantic to the New World. By 1578 there are a hundred and fifty French fis.h.i.+ng vessels off Newfoundland alone.
The fis.h.i.+ng folk engage in barter. Cartier's heirs ask for a monopoly of the fur trade in Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly, with many high-sounding t.i.tles as Governor, and the added obligation that he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is 1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred people taken from jails, all but sixty have obtained their freedom by paying a ransom. With these sixty La Roche follows the fis.h.i.+ng fleet out to the Grand Banks, then rounds southwestward for milder clime, where he may winter his people.
Straight across the s.h.i.+p's course lies the famous sand bank, the graveyard of the Atlantic,--what the old navigators called ”the dreadful isle,”--Sable Island. The sea lies placid as gla.s.s between the crescent horns of the long, low reefs,--thirty miles from horn to horn, with never a tree to break the swale of the gra.s.s waist-high.
The marquis lands his sixty colonists to fish for supplies, while he goes on with the crew to find place for settlement.
Barely has the topsail dipped over the watery sky before breakers begin to thunder on the sand reefs. Air and earth lash to fury. Sails are torn from the s.h.i.+p of the marquis. His {24} masts go overboard, and the vessel is driven, helpless as a chip in a maelstrom, clear back to the ports of France. Here double misfortune awaits La Roche. His old patrons of the court are no longer powerful. He is thrown in prison by a rival baron.
In vain the colonists strain tired eyes for a sail at sea. Days become weeks, weeks months, summer autumn; and no boat came back. As winter gales a.s.sailed the sea, sending the sand drifting like spray, the convicts built themselves huts out of driftwood, and scooped beds for themselves in the earth like rabbit burrows. Of food there was plenty.
The people had their fis.h.i.+ng lines; and the stock, left by the Baron de Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl, too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ash.o.r.e on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge.