The Mississippi and the mythical “Western Sea” would long capture the imagination.
Introduction
On 18th century maps, New France covers an enormous expanse stretching from Hudson’s Bay to the mouth of the Mississippi, and from the shores of Acadia to the Rocky Mountains. As the areas settled by the French represented only a minute fraction of this space, there is something misleading here. Yet these maps attest to the prodigious scope of over two hundred years of explorations and claims.
From Cartier to the La Vérendryes, with Champlain and Cavelier de La Salle, readers will retrace the steps of men pushed further and further by the stubborn hope of discovering mineral riches or a navigable passage towards Asia. The Mississippi and the mythical “Western Sea” would long capture the imagination.
Journeying in search of distant peoples, with whom they hoped to trade of among whom they wished to establish missions, men such as Des Groseilliers and Marquette laid the foundations of a crucial alliance network. Informed and guided by Aboriginal peoples, these explorers ranged the territory, measured and mapped it, and described its characteristics and those of its occupants. By allowing France and Europe to discover North America, they prepared the way for its eventual colonization.
Jacques Cartier (1534-1542)
Overview
We do not know how Jacques Cartier learned the art of navigation, but Saint-Malo, the town where he was born between the summer and winter of 1491, was at the time one of the most important ports in Europe. In 1524 he probably accompanied Giovanni da Verrazzano on unofficial explorations initiated by the king of France. Some ten years later, Jacques Cartier was a sufficiently experienced navigator to be asked by Francis I to undertake the official exploration of North America. There is no doubt that he was already familiar with the sea route that he took in 1534.
To the New Lands
On March 19, 1534, Cartier was assigned the mission of “undertaking the voyage of this kingdom to the New Lands to discover certain islands and countries where there are said to be great quantities of gold and other riches”. The following April 20, the navigator from Saint-Malo cast off with two ships and a crew of 61. Twenty days later he reached Newfoundland. The exploration began in an area frequented by Breton fishermen: from the Baie des Châteaux (Strait of Belle Isle) to southern Newfoundland. After erecting a cross at Saint-Servan on the north coast of the Gulf, Cartier tacked to the south. He first encountered the Magdalen Islands, and then set course for present-day Prince Edward Island, failing to notice that it was in fact an island.
A Lie and a Claiming of Possession
Cartier then moved on to Chaleur Bay, where he encountered some Micmacs on July 7. The talks were accompanied by a swapping of items, which history has recorded as the first act of trade between the French and Amerindians. Soon after, Cartier reached Gaspé Bay.
More than 200 Iroquois from Stadacona (Québec) were on the peninsula to fish. Initially trusting and cordial, relations were tarnished when Jacques Cartier claimed possession of the territory on July 24. The 30-foot cross he erected at Pointe-Penouille seemed improper to Donnacona, the Native chief. Fearing the consequences of this discontent, Cartier lied, describing the cross as an insignificant landmark.
Jacques Cartier in Gaspé On the 25th he left the Gaspé area, heading for the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After navigating the strait separating Anticosti Island from the north shore, he set off again for Saint-Malo, where he landed on September 5. The St. Lawrence River had not been discovered.
Revelations of the Amerindian Guides
Jacques Cartier arrived in France with two precious trophies: Domagaya and Taignoagny, the sons of Donnacona, whom he had convinced to come with him. They told him of the St. Lawrence River and the “Kingdom of the Saguenay”, the objectives of his second voyage upon which he set forth on May 19, 1535. Cartier had been persuasive: his crew had doubled and he had command of three ships: the Grande Hermine, Petite Hermine and Émérillon.
Fifty days after putting to sea, a first vessel laid anchor off the shores of Newfoundland. On July 26 the convoy was reunited, and exploration could begin again. On August 10, the day of St. Lawrence, the explorer gave the saint’s name to a little bay. Cartographers later applied it to the the “great river of Hochelaga and route to Canada” leading to the interior of the continent, “so long that no man has seen its end”.
From the Saguenay to Hochelaga
Sailing along the river to Stadacona (Québec), the ships passed Anticosti Island and the mouth of the Saguenay. Cartier established his headquarters on the Sainte-Croix (Saint-Charles) river, and five days later boarded the Émérillon to travel to Hochelaga (Montreal). Leaving the ship in Lake Saint-Pierre, he proceeded in a small craft to the Iroquois village, where he arrived on October 2.
There were nearly 2,000 people living there. The island and village were overlooked by a mountain, which he named mount Royal. He was taken there by his hosts, who spoke to him of the riches of the west, and again of the “Kingdom of the Saguenay”. The rapids north and south of Montreal Island prevented him from continuing his route to the west. Cartier had to return to harbour on the Saint-Charles river, where he found that relations with the Iroquois had become more acrimonious. The threat of an early winter lay before the Frenchmen.
Isolation, Cold, and Scurvy
From mid-November, the ships were imprisoned in the ice. December began with an epidemic of scurvy. The Iroquois, the first affected, were slow in delivering up the secret of anedda, a white cedar tea which would save them. Of the 100 Frenchmen afflicted, 25 died.
On May 3, Cartier planted a cross on the site where he had just wintered. The same day, he seized about ten Iroquois, one of them Donnacona, the only one who was able to “relate to the King the marvels he had seen in the western lands”.
The voyage back began three days later, without the Petite Hermine. Following a swerve along the Newfoundland coast, Jacques Cartier discovered the strait which bears the name of the explorer Giovanni Caboto. On July 16, 1536, Cartier was again in Saint-Malo.
The Colonization of Canada
On October 17, 1540, Francis I ordered the Breton navigator to return to Canada to lend weight to a colonization project of which he would be “captain general”. But on January 15, 1541 Cartier was supplanted by Jean-François de La Roque de Roberval, a Huguenot courtier.
Authorized to leave by Roberval, who was awaiting the delivery of artillery and merchandise, Jacques Cartier departed from Saint-Malo on May 23, 1541. He led five vessels “well provisioned with victuals for two years”, including the Grande Hermine, Émérillon, Saint-Brieux and Georges. There were 1500 people travelling with him. The crossing took more than three months.
With the exception of one little girl, all the Iroquois died in France. Cartier admitted the death of Donnacona, but claimed that the others “had remained in France where they were living as great lords; they had married and had no desire to return to their country”.
Being no longer welcome in Stadacona, the colonists settled at the foot of Cap Rouge (Cap Diamant), named Charlesbourg Royal. The experience was a disaster. In June 1542 Cartier left the St. Lawrence valley with the survivors. At Newfoundland he met with Roberval’s group, which had only left La Rochelle in April. The night after their encounter, Cartier placed the entreprise in jeopardy by slipping away from his leader. He landed in Saint-Malo in September.
Jacques Cartier would never return to Canada. As for Roberval, he continued on to Charlesbourg Royal, which he renamed France-Roi. After putting up with the climate, scurvy, quarrelling and adversity, his colony was extinguished in 1543 with the repatriation of those who survived.
Samuel de Champlain (1604-1616)
The Mystery of Champlain
Samuel de Champlain (sometimes called Samuel Champlain in English documents) was born at Brouage, in the Saintonge province of Western France, about 1570. He wrote in 1613 that he acquired an interest “from a very young age in the art of navigation, along with a love of the high seas.” He was not yet twenty when he made his first voyage, to Spain and from there to the West Indies and South America. He visited Porto Rico (now Puerto Rico,) Mexico, Colombia, the Bermudas and Panama. Between 1603 and 1635, he made 12 stays in North America. He was an indefatigable explorer – and an assistant to other explorers – in the quest for an overland route across America to the Pacific, and onwards to the riches of the Orient.
In the title of his first book, published in 1603, Des Sauvages, ou voyage de Samuel Champlain, de Brouage, fait en la France nouvelle l’an mil six cens trois… [“Concerning the Primitives: Or Travels of Samuel Champlain of Brouage, Made in New France in the Year 1603”], Samuel de Champlain indicated that he was a native of Brouage in the Saintonge region of France. But a fire in the 17th century completely destroyed the town records of Brouage, where the young Champlain was believed to have spent his childhood. Since then, historians have speculated about the birth date of the man often described as the “Father of New France.”
The name “Samuel,” taken from the Old Testament, suggests the possibility that Champlain was born into a Protestant family during a period when France was torn by endless conflicts over religion. However, by the time he undertook his voyages of discovery and exploration to Canada, he had definitely converted to Catholicism. The marriage contract between Samuel de Champlain and Hélène Boullé, dated 1610, shows that he was the son of the then-deceased sea captain, Anthoine de Champlain, and Marguerite Le Roy. On this basis, several historians have deduced that Champlain must have been born around 1570.
These are the few facts that history reveals, leaving room for all sorts of hypotheses about Champlain’s date of birth. But things were to take a different turn in the spring of 2012 when Jean-Marie Germe, a French genealogist, was examining the archives of the Protestant parish of Saint Yon de La Rochelle. In Champlain’s time, La Rochelle was a neighbouring town and rival of Brouage. What Mr. Germe found there was the baptismal record of Samuel Chapeleau, son of Antoine Chapeleau and Marguerite Le Roy, dated August 13, 1574.
Is this the baptismal certificate of the “Father of New France”? Certainly the document is difficult to read; the letters often have to be deciphered as much from their context, as from their appearance. Moreover, in that era the rules of spelling were flexible, to say the least. The different spellings used for the family name of the child and his father can be explained by the fact these names had perhaps previously been written down only rarely. A standard spelling had possibly not yet been adopted.
What are the chances of finding another baptismal certificate dating from this era where the names are identical to those we find in other historical documents? The chances are in fact very small indeed. However, even though the family names of Chapeleau and Champlain are similar, this small difference — understandable as it may be — cautions us not to jump to conclusions. Although the probability is slight, it is still possible that this document has nothing to do with our Samuel de Champlain.
If we are indeed looking at the baptismal certificate of our Samuel de Champlain, we can now say for certain that he was born into a Protestant family, most probably during the summer of 1574. But unless there is another discovery to equal the one made by Mr. Germe, a complete mystery will continue to surround Samuel de Champlain’s date and place of birth.
In the Footsteps of Jacques Cartier
In 1602 or thereabouts, Henry IV of France appointed Champlain as hydrographer royal. Aymar de Chaste, governor of Dieppe in Northern France, had obtained a monopoly of the fur trade and set up a trading post at Tadoussac. He invited Champlain to join an expedition he was sending there. Champlain’s mission was clear; it was to explore the country called New France, examine its waterways and then choose a site for a large trading factory.
Thus Champlain sailed from Honfleur on the fifteenth of March, 1603, and prepared to follow the route that Jacques Cartier had opened up in 1535. He proceeded to explore part of the valley of the Saguenay river and was led to suspect the existence of Hudson Bay. He then sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as Hochelaga (the site of Montreal.) Nothing was to be seen of the Amerindian people and village which Cartier had visited, and Sault St. Louis (the Lachine Rapids) still seemed impassable. However, Champlain learned from his guides that above the rapids there were three great lakes (Erie, Huron and Ontario) to be explored.
Acadia and the Atlantic Coast
After Aymar de Chaste died in France in 1603, Pierre Du Gua de Monts became lieutenant-general of Acadia. In exchange for a ten years exclusive trading patent, de Monts undertook to settle sixty homesteaders a year in that part of New France. From 1604 to 1607, the search went on for a suitable permanent site for them. It led to the establishment of a short-lived settlement at Port Royal (Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.)
While the settlers were tilling, building, hunting and fishing, Champlain carried on with his appointed task of investigating the coastline and looking for safe harbours.
First Route
The three years stay in Acadia allowed him plenty of time for exploration, description and map-making. He journeyed almost 1,500 kilometres along the Atlantic coast from Maine as far as southernmost Cape Cod.
From Quebec to Lake Champlain
In 1608, Champlain proposed a return to the valley of the St. Lawrence, specifically to Stadacona, which he called Quebec. In his opinion, nowhere else was so suitable for the fur trade and as a starting point from which to search for the elusive route to China. During this third voyage he learned of the existence of Lac Saint Jean (Lake St. John), and on the third of July, 1608, he founded what was to become Quebec City. He immediately set about building his Habitation (residence) there.
Champlain also explored the Iroquois River (now called the Richelieu), which led him on the fourteenth of July, 1609, to the lake which would later bear his name. Like the traders who had preceded him, he sided with the Hurons, Algonquins and Montaignais against the Iroquois. This intervention in local politics was ultimately responsible for the warlike relations that were to pit the Iroquois against the French for generations.
From the Ottawa Valley to Lake Huron
In 1611, Champlain returned to the area of the Hochelaga islands. He found an ideal harbour, and facing it he built the Place Royale (royal square), around which the town would later develop from 1642 onwards.
Even more important, he succeeded in penetrating beyond the Lachine Rapids, becoming the first European (apart from Étienne Brûlé) to start exploring the St. Lawrence and its tributaries as a route towards the interior of the continent. Champlain was so convinced that it was the route to the Orient that in 1612 he obtained a commission to “search for a free passage by which to reach the country called China.” Like most of the explorers who followed after him, he could not carry out his mission without the support of the Amerindian population.
The following year Champlain was induced to make a voyage up the Ottawa River in the course of which he reached Allumette Island. It was his initial foray along the route that was to lead him to the heartland of present-day Ontario and eventually to reach Lake Huron on the first of August, 1615.
Final Route
That was to be Champlain’s last voyage of exploration. In the years that followed, he devoted all his efforts to founding a French colony in the St. Lawrence valley. The keystone of his project was the settlement at Quebec.
When it capitulated to the English Kirke brothers in 1629, Champlain returned to France, where he lobbied incessantly for the cause of New France. He finally returned to Canada on the twenty-second of May, 1633. At the time of his death at Quebec on the twenty-fifth of December, 1635, there were one hundred and fifty French men and women living in the colony.
Étienne Brûlé (1615-1621)
Overview
The life story of Étienne (Stephen) Brûlé, interpreter and explorer, contains an element of mystery. He was born about 1591, at Champigny-sur-Marne near Paris. He is believed to have made the voyage to Quebec in the company of Samuel de Champlain in 1608. It was the decisive move in his career. He was to become an interpreter, or dragoman (truchement in French), between the French and their Amerindian allies. But he was above all a pathfinder and a scout. He played an essential role in the first documented journeys of exploration in New France by going ahead of Samuel de Champlain, Gabriel Sagard, Jean Nicolet, Nicolas Perrot and others of their ilk along the route to the Great Lakes. He appears to have been the first European to set eyes on the Ottawa Valley, Georgian Bay, Pennsylvania and four of the Great Lakes, and to give at least an oral description of them.
Getting to Know the Country and Its Peoples
In 1610, Champlain, the founder of the colony of New France, had already explored the Richelieu River as far as Lake Champlain. He now turned his attention further inland, aware that any discovery must start west of Sault St. Louis (the Lachine Rapids). At the end of June that year, he entrusted Étienne Brûlé with the task of finding a route:
“I had with me a youth who had already spent two winters at Quebec and wanted to go among the Algoumequins [Algonquins] to master their language … learn about their country, see the great lake, take note of the rivers and the peoples living along them; and discover any mines, along with the most curious things about those places and peoples, so that we might, upon his return, be informed truthfully about them.”
On the thirteenth of June, 1611, Champlain succeeded in navigating the Lachine Rapids. He stated that “no other Christian other than him, my lad” had previously made the attempt. Either below or above the rapids he met up with Brûlé:
“I saw too my lad come dressed in the manner of the savages, mightily pleased with the treatment which the savages had accorded him, according to the custom of their country, and he related to me all that he had seen during his winter among them and had learned from said savages. … My lad … had learned their language very well.”
Deep into Huronia
Brûlé left again immediately, taking the direction of the country of the Hurons. Their territory was located on the peninsula between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. To reach it he must have travelled up the Ottawa and the Mattawa rivers, then crossed Lake Nipissing, and followed French River down to Georgian Bay.
On the first of August, 1615, Champlain “discovered” Lake Huron, where he met his intrepid interpreter and gave him permission to go among the Andastes, to the south of the Iroquois country, “since it was his own desire to do so and by that means he might see their country and come to know well the peoples living there.”
And so, on the eighth of September, 1615, Brûlé departed from Lake Simcoe with his Huron guides. He made his way to the site of the present-day city of Buffalo, at the junction of Lakes Erie and Ontario. Then he went on as far as the Susquehanna River “which empties [into the sea] on the Florida side [of the continent] where there is a multitude of powerful and warlike nations.”
In the spring of 1616, our explorer left the Andastes country and made his way northwards again, only to be taken prisoner by the Iroquois. According to his own account, he was tortured and his life was threatened. He literally saved his skin by bluffing, won his captors’ respect, and held himself out to be an influential negotiator, even promising “to bring them into agreement with the French, & their foes, & to make them swear friendship to one another.”
In July, 1618, Brûlé arrived back in the colony after an absence of thirty-four months. By his own account he was the first European to explore what is now the State of Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania and Lake Superior
By 1618, Brûlé wanted to press forward to Lake Superior. Champlain commissioned him to accomplish his desire, “which he promised me to persist in, and to carry it out in a short space of time, by God’s grace, and to conduct me thither.”
From then until 1621, Brûlé made a winding journey that led him to Sault Ste. Marie at the junction of Lakes Superior and Huron. Here is the evidence from the writings of the Récollet (Franciscan) missionary Gabriel Sagard:
“The interpreter Bruslé [sic] with several Savages assured us that beyond the Freshwater Sea [Lake Huron] there was another very large lake which empties into it by a waterfall, which has been called ‘Saut de Gaston’ [Gaston Falls, i.e., Sault Ste. Marie].”
Betrayal
It was Gabriel Sagard who, in 1624, discredited Brûlé in Champlain’s eyes. The Récollet friar denounced the wandering adventurer’s loose morals, and disclosed moreover that Brûlé was playing a double game: he was working at the same time for the administration of New France and for the fur merchants, who were opponents of Champlain.
Brûlé’s reputation was blackened for ever in 1629. Champlain had capitulated to the Kirke brothers, and most of the French in the colony had returned to their homeland. At Tadoussac, Brûlé and his fellow interpreter Nicolas Marsolet admitted it was their intention to remain in New France. “We have been taken by force,” was their excuse to Champlain, “and we know very well that if we were held in France we would be hung.”
Brûlé was killed by the Hurons while the colony was still under the English. The news reached Champlain when he returned to Quebec in 1633.
Jean Nicollet (1634)
Overview
Jean Nicollet was born around 1598 in the Cherbourg region, in Normandy. By turn interpreter, explorer, public servant and colonist, Nicollet is one of the most prestigious figures in the history of North American exploration. Since the late 19th century, he has been credited as being as the first European to have sailed around Manitoulin Island to enter Lake Michigan. However, a thorough analysis of the Jesuit Relations for 1640 and 1642-1643, the only sources that allow us to follow Nicollet’s progress to the American Northwest, suggests another itinerary: Nicollet probably carried on past Sault Sainte-Marie – where Étienne Brûlé had stopped – and discovered Lake Superior.
Language Learning
On March 15, 1617, Jean Nicollet signed on with the Compagnie des Marchands to go to New France and serve as an interpreter. “His temperament and excellent memory”, wrote the Jesuits in 1642-1643, “lead us to hope for good things from him”. The same source reports that the young Jesuit arrived in Québec in 1618. As historian Marcel Trudel points out, his stay was a short one. The Nicolet Papers, conserved at the National Archives of Canada, indicate that on May 10, 1619 Jean Nicollet was in France, helping to draft the deed of sale for a property he owned in Hainneville, near Cherbourg.
Upon his return, “he was sent to winter with the Algonquins” of Allumette Island. It was at this strategic location on the Ottawa River that Nicollet was introduced to the language of his hosts and to the miseries of life in the forest. He sometimes went as long as “seven & eight days without eating, and spent seven full weeks with no food other than a little tree bark”. He also acted as a peacemaker: “he accompanied four hundred Algonquins at that time on a mission to make peace with the Hyroquois, which came to a happy end.”
Peace having been assured between the two great nations, Nicollet Nicollet “went to live for eight or nine years with the nation of the Nipissirians (Nipissing)” on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Of a liaison with a woman of this nation was born, between 1628 and 1633, Euphrasine-Madeleine, whom he later brought back with him to the colony.
In Search of the Sea People
The first lengthy absence of Jean Nicollet ended on July 19, 1629 with the conquest of the colony by the Kirke brothers. Since Champlain was no longer there, Nicollet apparently rejoined the Huron and convinced them not to trade with the British.
Various events in the interpreter’s professional and personal life allow us to situate around this time – before or after the surrender of the colony – the moment when he was “delegated to voyage to the nation known as the Sea People, & treat of peace with them & the Huron.”
Accompanied by seven guides, Nicollet departed from Huronia, moving southeast on the French River, which empties into Lake Huron. He then skirted the north shore of this lake to Sault Sainte-Marie, which took him into Lake Superior where he found what he was looking for: the Winnebago. Settled on the north shore of the lake, this people led a sedentary life. The Jesuits described them as follows:
“Some Frenchmen call them the Nation of Stinkards, because of the Algonquin word ouinipeg meaning foul-smelling water. But as this is their name for salt water, these peoples call themselves the Winnebago, since they come from the shores of a sea of which we have no knowledge, & consequently they should not be called the nation of Foul-Smellers, but the nation of the Sea.”
So Close to Japan and China . . .
Appointed the ambassador to these people, Nicollet was careful to equip himself with a ceremonial robe and two pistols, to command respect. His hosts referred to him as “Manitouirinio”, or man of wonders. He had no difficulty assembling four to five thousand men to feast and hold counsel with him. With peace established between the Algonquin and the Sea people, the route to the west was opened.
After Nicollet’s return to the colony, before the summer of 1634, the French persisted in believing that if their ambassador “had travelled three days more on a great river which flows from this lake […] he would have found the sea […]. I strongly suspect”, wrote the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, “that this sea is the Northern counterpart to that in the new Mexico, & that from it one might have access to Japan & China.”
The Final Voyage
In July 1634, Jean Nicollet left Trois-Rivières at the head of an expedition of 150 canoes making for Huronia. In that country he left three missionaries, including Father Jean de Brébeuf. A few weeks later he was back at his departure point, where Champlain supposedly met him on August 3.
Jean Nicollet settled down in Trois-Rivières. In 1637 he was granted a plot of land near this post, as well as land from a fief co-owned with Olivier Le Tardif. He had married Marguerite Couillard, who gave him two children.
The discoverer of Lake Superior, the man who had “penetrated furthest into these most remote of lands”, did not know how to swim. He died in the waters off Québec in October 1642: “On October 29, the funeral was held of M. Nicollet and three of M. de Chavigny’s men, drowned in a shallop as they were going from Québec to Sillery; their bodies were never found.”
Jean de Quen (1647)
Overview
Born around 1603 in Amiens, Picardy, Jean de Quen was about 17 years old when he joined the Jesuits. He was designated a missionary to New France, and disembarked in Québec on August 17, 1635, four months before the death of Samuel de Champlain. An explorer despite himself, Jean de Quen was the first European to see Lake Piékouagami (Lake Saint-Jean).
From the Sillery Mission to the Tadoussac Mission
Upon his arrival, Jean de Quen taught at the Québec college, a “petite école” opened that same year for French and Amerindian boys. In 1637 he was at the Sillery mission, whose purpose it was to convert and instruct the Aboriginal peoples and teach them a sedentary life. A little later he was back in Québec where he divided his time between the parish of Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance and the college. After a fire destroyed the school, chapel and Jesuits’ residence in 1640, he resumed his service in Sillery before venturing on to the Trois-Rivières post, where he was involved in the establishing another mission. In the summer of 1642, he devoted himself to the evangelization of the Montagnais of Tadoussac, where he was to remain for some ten years as the leader of the mission.
The Country of the Porcupine Nation
Since at least the turn of the 17th century, Tadoussac had been a trading site that attracted not only Amerindians from the north shore, but also those from the Gaspé and Lake Saint-Jean. Probably at ease among the Natives, Jean de Quen earned their trust, particularly that of the inhabitants of the Saguenay.
No one – whether French, Basque or British – had as yet officially explored the entire length of the Saguenay. No one had seen the great lake that appeared on a map produced in 1544 by geographer Jean Alfonse. De Quen was to succeed in the having himself taken there by the people of that country, who as Victor Tremblay points out, “avoided letting the white men know about […] Lake Saint-Jean and the inland route to the Saguenay”.
There is nothing to indicate that the Jesuit ever wanted this voyage. No doubt he simply expressed a desire to visit the members of the Porcupine nation who were prevented from coming to Tadoussac because of disease. He left the Tadoussac mission on July 11 in a small bark canoe.
“For five days,” he recounts in a text recorded a few months later in the Jesuit Relations, “from daybreak to sundown, we were constantly rowing against the current, or against torrents, […] meeting in the course of this voyage ten waterfalls or ten portages, that is to say, we disembarked ten times to move from one part of the river to another that was more navigable.”
The Great Lake Piékouagami
Victor Tremblay summarizes the itinerary of Jean de Quen and his guides as follows: they went up the Saguenay to Chicoutimi, and took the river of the same name as far as lakes Kenogami and Kénogamishish. The group then must have entered Lake Saint-Jean via Belle-Rivière, a waterway which the missionary does not mention.
However, he does describe the lake he has to cross to reach the mouth of the Metabetchouan River where the Porcupine were camped:
“So large is this lake that one can barely see its shores; it appears to be round in shape, and is deep and full of fish: pike, perch, salmon, trout, goldfish, whitefish, carp and a number of other species are fished there.
It is surrounded by flat land, ending in high mountains three, four or five leagues from its shores; it is fed by the waters of some fifteen rivers, which serve as routes for the small nations who visit the area to fish in this lake & to trade & for the friendship they have amongst themselves. After travelling for some time upon this lake, we finally arrived at the place of the Savages of the Porcupine nation. Upon sighting us, these good people came forth from their huts to see the first Frenchman who had ever set foot on their land.”
In the Shade of the Missions
Jean de Quen returned at least twice to the shores of the great lake Piékouagami. In 1652, he founded the mission of Metabetchouan and gave the lake its French name. Twenty years later, a note from Father François de Crespeuil shows that its author was not familiar with that name:
“This lake which the Savages call Piegouagami and which we have called the lake of Saint-Jean is the country of the Porcupine nation […].”
Since the Tadoussac mission was active only during the summer, Jean de Quen also dedicated himself to the Sillery mission and to supporting the colonists scattered along the Beaupré coast. Appointed superior of the Jesuit missions in New France in 1656, Jean de Quen died in October 1659: “On the 1st Father Jean de Quen took to his bed, & on the 8th he died of the contagious fevers brought by the last vessel […]. On the morning of the 9th Father de Quen was buried.”
Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers (1654-1660)
Overview
Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers , a native of Champagne, was baptized on July 31, 1618 at Charly-sur-Marne. Except for having spent some time in Touraine, nothing is known of his life before his arrival in New France in 1641. Taken into the service of the Jesuits as a servant, a donné or an interpreter, Des Groseillers travelled with them until 1646. He was the first Frenchman in New France to recognize the possibilities for fur trade around Hudson’s Bay. Despite being the person responsible for identifying the primary economic resource that could save the colony, history dismisses his as a mere adventurer trying to make money for himself.
The Early Years
After leaving the Jesuits, Des Groseilliers learns the Algonquin, Huron and Iroquois languages. He settles in Québec and marries Hélène Martin, the daughter of Abraham Martin, on September 3, 1647. One of their two children, Médard, will follow in his father’s footsteps. Widowed, Des Groseilliers marries Marguerite Hayet in 1653. She is the half-sister of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, who was 13 or 14 at the time. Des Groseilliers leaves Québec for the settlement at Trois-Rivières where many of the colony’s traders can be found.
In 1652 and 1653, murderous incursions by the Iroquois against the French living in the Saint Lawrence Valley as well as against their allies, the Great Lake Hurons, make life difficult. They are cut off from the market for their furs. On either side of the Atlantic, there is talk of abandoning the colony if nothing is done to protect the fur trade. In the spring of 1663, some Hurons show up at Trois-Rivières and reveal the existence of a cache of furs not far from the area the French call the North Bay or North Sea (Hudson’s Bay).
The Road to Lake Superior
Upon hearing this bit of good news, Des Groseilliers makes his appearance. In the months that follow, he goes to Acadia and then to Boston, trying to get financing for a trip to the North Sea by way of the Atlantic Ocean. His plans fall through. However, in early summer, 1654, the colony is ecstatic: the furs promised by Hurons a year earlier, arrive in Montréal carried by hundred or so Amerindians in canoes.
When the Hurons head back to the southern and western areas of Hudson’s Bay on August 6, Des Groseilliers and another coureur de bois go with them. They start their journey on the Ottawa River near Lake Nipissing and from there, down the French River toward Georgian Bay and Lake Huron as far as the strait which links Lake Erie to Lake Michigan. According to historian Grace Lee Nute, even though Pierre-Esprit Radisson later gave a detailed description of this trip, he was elsewhere at the time. When they return to the colony near the end of August 1656, Des Groseilliers and his companion are part of a flotilla of 50 canoes laden with valuable furs.
His Partnership with Radisson
The years that followed were uneventful. In Trois Rivières, Des Groseilliers divides his time between short trips to carry out trade and meeting his responsibilities as head of a family. Despite the opposition of the Governor, Pierre Voyer d’Argenson, he leaves again in August 1658 or 1659. This time, his brother-in-law is part of the expedition which takes them west of Lake Superior. When they return in mid-August 1660, they are leading a convoy of canoes carrying 300 men and many furs. They were the first Frenchmen to see the Mississippi, although they did not realize the importance of that find and they did not reach the North Bay although the Cree had described it to them in great detail.
The Journal des Jésuites on August 24 states that of the 100 canoes which left Lake Superior,”40 turned back and 60 made it through, loaded with 200 000 livres worth of pelts; they left 50 000 livres worth in Montréal and carried the remainder to Trois-Rivières. ” When they arrive at Québec, they are ”saluted by the cannon and batteries of Fort Saint-Louis and those of three ships anchored in the harbour.” After formally acknowledging Des Groseilliers contribution to the colony’s prosperity, the Governor has him imprisoned for having left without permission. They are fined heavily and their goods are seized.
Negotiating with England
Des Groseilliers et Radisson told no one what they knew about the Northern Bay:” We wanted to find their land (that of the Cree) and see it for ourselves before telling others about it. “They way they are treated by the Governor, who had again refused them permission to leave, greatly offends Des Groseilliers. In 1661, he can be found in France. Despite many promises made by the Minister for the Colonies in a meeting with Des Groseillers, nothing ever comes of it. In La Rochelle, an associate supplies him with a sailing ship to take him to the Northern Bay from Percé. However, after this plan falls through, Des Groseilliers heads for Boston, becomes involved with some local shipowners and attempts more fruitless journeys to the bay.
Near the end of the summer of 1665, Des Groseilliers and Radisson are in London where they will meet the king of England and tell him everything they know about the treasures to be found around Hudson’s Bay. Three years later, they will guide the first two English ships to head there. Radisson’s ship is damaged in a storm but not the one carrying Des Groseilliers, the Nonsuch, which passes through Hudson’s Strait, past Cape Diggs (Wolfenbuttel) and enters Hudson’s Bay. After crossing this inland sea, heading south, the ships reaches the Nemiscau (Rupert) River on September 29, 1668. During the winter, Chouart’s companions lay the foundation of Fort Charles.
The Hudson’s Bay Company
On May 2, 1670, under the authority of King Charles II of England, the Hudson’s Bay Company is set up under the name ”The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay“. According to Marie de l’Incarnation, writing shortly after her return to London, “des Groseillers received twenty thousand écus as a reward from the King who made him a Knight of the Garter, which is said to be a very great honour. ”
In the same year, Chouart returns to Hudson’s Bay. In New France, rumours abound that there are foreign vessels in the Bay. On November 10, the Intendant, Jean Talon, writes to the Minister of the Colonies:
“After reflecting on the nations that might have penetrated as far North as that, I can only light upon the English who, under the guidance of a man named DesGrozeliers, formerly an inhabitant of Canada, might possibly have attempted the navigation, of itself not much known, and no less dangerous… ”
Back in New France
Four years later, Des Groseilliers stops cooperating with the English as does Radisson. However, his return under the lily doesn’t last long. In 1682, the renegades lead two ships of the Compagnie française de la baie d’Hudson as far as what is now known as the Hayes River. In 1684, while Radisson returned to England to live, Des Groseilliers was chose to end his career in the colony. He died between 1695 and 1698, perhaps in New France, somewhere around Sorel.
Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1659-1660)
Overview
Pierre-Esprit Radisson was born around 1640, either in Avignon or Paris. No one knows when he first came to New France. In 1646, he is likely in Trois-Rivières, attending the wedding of his half-sister, Marguerite Hayet, to Jean Veron, sieur de Grandmesnil. Later, when she marries again, this time to Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers, on August 24, 1653, Radisson is living with the Iroquois who had kidnapped him and taken him to somewhere around Corlaer (Shenectady).
Even though he will later say that he was well treated during his captivity, Radisson escapes. He is recaptured near Trois-Rivières, subdued and tortured. Escaping a second time, he takes refuge at Fort Orange where he works for the Dutch as an interpreter. In 1654, he can be found in Amsterdam and, by late spring, he is back in Trois-Rivières. On July 29, 1657, he takes part in an expedition to help the Jesuit mission at Onondaga. The following year, when the mission is threatened with destruction, he organizes the evacuation of all the residents. He has just made his first mark on history.
In the Footsteps of Chouart Des Groseilliers
Unlike his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, Pierre-Esprit Radisson had never seen the Great Lakes nor did he seem much suited to exploration. But he had lived in the woods and had enough scars by the age of 18 or 19 to convince Des Groseilliers of his bravery. Des Groseilliers hires him and in August 1658 or 1659, they undertake their first journey together. This year-long trip takes them west of Lake Superior where Des Groseilliers knows fine-quality furs can be found.
Their stay among the Cree and their meetings with other Amerindian tribes leads them to understand that the “salt sea” that their hosts talk describe, is Hudson’s Bay. They return from their journey, convinced that the Bay can be reached by way of the Atlantic Ocean. Radisson writes, “We finally reached Québec ; (August 24, 1660) we were greeted by several cannon salvos from the fort’s battery and from some ships anchored in the harbour. These ships would have returned to France empty if we had not shown up.” Unfortunately, their furs are seized and they are fined for having left the colony without first obtaining permission from the governor, Pierre Voyer d’Argenson.
An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth
The Governor’s actions against two men whom he had so recently honoured, is not without consequences as is the failure of the Minister for the Colonies to grant reparations sought by Des Groseilliers in 1661. The following year, the two brothers-in-law go to Boston. After obtaining financing from some merchants, they attempt, unsuccessfully, to reach Hudson’s Bay. In August 1665, they set sail for London. They know that England will proved the support France refuses to supply.
Their first journey takes place in 1669. The ship carrying Radisson, The Eaglet, suffers heavy storm damage somewhere between Ireland and North America. Des Groseilliers’ ship, the Nonsuch, reaches the Nemiscau (Rupert) River where Fort Charles is located. The following year the explorer returns to England with a shipload of furs. The Hudson’s Bay Company starts to take shape. Created on May 2, 1670, the Company has three goals: fur trade, mineral exploration and finding a passage to the West.
Turn-About
Within a few weeks of the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Radisson can be found sailing on the salt sea towards the mouth of the Nelson river. The next four years are made up of many comings and goings between England and the Bay. In London, near the end of 1674, Radisson and his brother-in-law meet a Frenchman who had been captured and brought to the Rupert River: Charles Albanel, a Jesuit priest. He persuades them to return to the bosom of France. The reasons for this turnabout are unclear but it seems, having told the Company everything they know, they are no long of any value to the Company.
In France, the pair are ordered back to Canada and told to come to an agreement with the authorities on how to ensure the French flag will once again fly over Hudson’s Bay. After being coldly received by Governor Frontenac, who is more interested in explorations being carried out around the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the adventurers decide it is time for another change in direction. Des Groseilliers settles in Trois-Rivières and Radisson returns to France where he joins the Navy. Around 1680, after expeditions that took him to the coasts of Africa and the Antilles, he resigns.
A Torn Man
Radisson is torn. Both France and her colony are deaf to his plans for retaking Hudson’s Bay and he is far away from his wife, the daughter of Sir John Kirke, one of the partners in the Hudson’s Bay Company. The fact that she did not follow him in 1675, leads the French to believe that Radisson can still cross the Channel at will. He has to go and get her. In 1681, he travels to London. However, out of respect for her father’s wishes, Radisson’s wife refuses to leave the country.
Back in France, Radisson sees Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye whom he had met two years earlier and whom he had persuaded to take an interest in Hudson’s Bay. Aubert de La Chesnaye is eager to start up the Compagnie du Nord or the Compagnie française de la baie d’Hudson which will allow him and his business partners to control the fur trade around Hudson’s Bay. In August 1682, Radisson and Des Groseilliers lead two Company ships to the Monsoni (Hayes) River, at the southern tip of James Bay. They snatch Fort Nelson from the English, seize a ship from Boston and return with an impressive cargo of furs. When they are not paid fairly for their contribution to the mission, the two men finally call it quits. Des Groseilliers fades into obscurity. Radisson heads for France and, from there, to England.
At War with France
Back in England in early May 1684, Radisson signs on again with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Two weeks later, he sails for Hudson’s Bay. The Happy Return drops anchor near Port Nelson which soon is no longer in French hands. He travels to the Hayes River where he persuades his nephew, Médard Chouart, and the Assiniboines to support England. He empties the storehouses, taking with him the furs which belong to the French.
In 1686, New France entrusted the chevalier Pierre de Troyes with responsibility for retaking the forts around Hudson’s Bay and capturing Pierre-Esprit Radisson who was staying there at that time. In March of the following year, Louis XIV sends the colony’s administrators a message that showed that France finally recognized “the damage that this Radisson has done to the colony and the further harm he is likely to cause if he stays among the English[…] “. Having become a citizen of England in 1687, Radisson died in 1710, almost destitute. He had married three times and had had at least nine children.
History has judged Pierre-Esprit Radisson very harshly. He was never forgiven for leading England to the territories north of New France which helped weaken France’s position in North America.
Nicolas Perrot (1665-1689)
Overview
Nicolas Perrot was a great explorer. Although he gave four governors of New France ample proof of his talents as a negotiator and diplomat, they did not hesitate to send him back to his lands, and to a poverty due in part to his own lack of self-interest. Born in France between 1641 and 1644, perhaps in Darcey, in Burgundy, where his father was a lieutenant of justice, Nicolas Perrot was raised by the Jesuits. This, at least, is what we are led to suppose in view of his erudition, his writings and the context of his arrival in Canada, where we see him already in 1660 as an interpreter and donné with the Jesuits. According to Father François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Nicolas Perrot was “a bright young man of good family who had had some education “. The same author noted that “financial necessity had obliged Perrot to put himself in the service of the Jesuits “.
In the Service of Others
Nicolas Perrot followed his masters in the region of the Baie des Puants (Green Bay), becoming one of the first Frenchmen to come into contact with the tribes west of the Great Lakes and in particular with those of the present-day state of Wisconsin. When he stayed with the Pouteouatamis of Lake Michigan, in 1665, he had already been freed from his engagement with the Jesuits for some time. He traded furs for guns, allowing this group to defend itself on equal terms against enemies who had been taking advantage of them. Nicknamed the “iron trade”, this exchange won him the friendship of the chief, who venerated him like a god. In a few months, he strengthened the ties established during earlier travels.
Perrot returned to Ville-Marie the same year. The experience had not made him a wealthy man, since he worked as a servant for the widow of Jacques Testard before entering into the service of the Sulpicians. As an associate in a trading company he formed with three Montreal colonists, on August 12, 1667, Perrot returned to the Baie des Puants. Once again, the ties he established were more profitable than the furs he brought back.
The Interpreter
Although poor, Nicolas Perrot had a good enough reputation for the intendant Jean Talon to appoint him interpreter for Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson in September 1670. Daumont de Saint-Lusson was to seek “copper mines in the lands of the Outaouais, Nez-Percés, Illinois and other nations discovered or to be discovered in Septentrional America in the region of Lake Superior or the inland sea ” and to inquire “attentively as to the existence of a passage via lakes and rivers with the southern sea, separating the continent from China “. Two months later, Robert Cavelier de La Salle would be sent towards the southern sea to find “the passage to Mexico”.
The gathering on June 4, 1671 at Sault Sainte-Marie is attributed to the influence of Nicolas Perrot on the western tribes. That day, representatives of fourteen nations supported the taking possession in the name of Louis XIV of the territory extending from the northern and western seas to the southern sea, including lands yet to be discovered. On his return to Quebec City at the end of the summer, Daumont de Saint-Lusson called for the seizure of the furs brought back by Perrot. Deprived of resources, the explorer began to feel the pressure of his creditors.
The Vagaries of War
His influence on the tribes of the west would once again be sought out by the colony’s leaders. In 1684, he took part in the peace mission of governor Lefebvre de La Barre by recruiting several hundred warriors prepared to wage battle against the Iroquois. He was travelling with them and Daniel Greysolon Dulhut toward Niagara when he learned that, to make peace with the Iroquois, La Barre had sacrificed the western tribes.
This expedition placed him in a financial situation that he would never recover from. His distress was evident in a letter to one of his creditors in August 1684: ” I would never have waited so long to go to see you and all those to whom I am in debt, if I had brought back the pelts that I left (in Michillimakinac) through my orders to go to war […] If I had them, I would be far happier to see my creditors than is the case.”
The Man with the Iron Legs
In 1685, Perrot was made commander in chief of the territory that Daumont de Saint-Lusson had taken possession of fourteen years earlier. Even though his powers were restricted soon afterwards, he accomplished his mission. He maintained the fragile ties that existed between the peoples he knew already and ensured that their furs were reserved for the French. The man the Amerindians called ” Metamiens ” or ” the man with the iron legs ” returned to the colony in the spring of 1688. He had travelled through current-day Minnesota and Wisconsin and north on the Mississippi. At Prairie-du-Chien, in the heart of Sioux country, he built Fort Saint-Antoine.
Scarcely had he arrived went he was sent out on other negotiations commanded by governor Brisay de Denonville. Once again neglecting his own interests, Nicolas Perrot headed west again. In the spring of 1689, he had a remarkable record to his credit. At the junction of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers, he built Fort Saint-Nicolas, and on May 8 of the same year, he took possession of the territory formed by ” the Baie des Puants, the Outaganis and Maskoutins lake and rivers, the Ouiskouche and Mississippi rivers, land of Nadouesioux, Rivières-Sainte-Croix and Saint-Pierre and other, more distant places.”
Peace of Montréal
A year later, as France and England were at war, Perrot negotiated with his old allies. He obtained a guarantee that they would not follow the Iroquois in the guerrilla attacks that culminated with the August 4 and 5, 1689 assault on the village of Lachine, on Montreal Island. In a letter dated November 20, 1690 to the minister of the colonies, governor Frontenac wrote that ” Sieur Perrot has acquired, through his long practice and knowledge, the humour, customs and language of the nations, and he has much credit among them.” However, this credit was not much use to Perrot when he was not in the west.
The diplomat ended his public life in 1696, but in 1701, he made a final appearance on the diplomatic scene. This time, it was governor Louis-Hector de Callière, appointed on April 20, 1699, who needed his services. Wanting to bring an end to the Franco-Iroquois wars, Callière rallied thirty Amerindian tribes for an accord that guaranteed their neutrality in the event of conflict between France and England. As the interpreter for the western tribes, Perrot played his last public role. The ” Peace of Montreal ” was signed on August 4, 1701, before more than 1,300 Amerindian delegates. The Chief of the Pouteouatamis requested Perrot’s presence among his people to cement the new peace, but his request was refused by Frontenac.
The Memoirs
In 1671, Nicolas Perrot had married Madeleine Raclos and like many fur traders and coureurs des bois, he settled in the region of Trois-Rivières, living in Champlain and Bécancour where his wife gave birth to eleven children altogether.
When he retired in 1696, he was well and truly living in poverty. Those who had needed his services were no longer there. Those now in position refused to recognize the importance of the role he had played free of cost, even going so far as to personally ensure the salaries of his travelling companions. The contempt of the public officials meant that henceforth he was known simply by the expression ” nommé Perrot “. He accepted the position of a captain of the militia in Bécancour. The only favour ever granted him was the separation of his and his wife’s goods to protect his wife and children from a seizure of their possessions.
Nicolas Perrot died on August 13, 1717 in Bécancour. He had spent much time in writing a summary of his experiences for the Intendant Michel Bégon. The final lines of his memoirs illustrate the reality of his destitution: “Lack of paper prevents me from going on at greater length, as I would have every right to do so, if I were not deprived of even that modest means. ” Nicolas Perrot’s testimony was not made public until 1864, when it was published in Paris under the title Mémoire sur les moeurs, coustumes et religion des sauvages de l’Amérique Septentrionale.
René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle (1670-1687)
Overview
René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle was born at Rouen, in Normandy, on the twenty-first of November, 1643. He belonged to a wealthy middle-class family. At the age of fifteen, he was enrolled in the Jesuit noviciate of Rouen, and he took his vows in 1660. Five years later he asked to be sent abroad as a missionary. However, he lost his vocation and invoked “moral weaknesses” as his reason for asking to be released from his vows. On the twenty-seventh of March, 1667, he found himself a free man. This was the background to the start of a career which would eventually lead him to discover the mouth of the great Mississippi, “Father of Waters”.
The China Obsession
La Salle arrived in New France in 1667 with no trade and no money. He may have been influenced to make the journey by the fact that his brother Jean, a Sulpician priest, had been living at Ville Marie (Montreal) for a little less than a year. No sooner had young La Salle arrived than he was granted a piece of land in the western part of the island of Montreal. He became so obsessed with the search for a route to the Orient that his seigneurie (estate) became jokingly known as ‘La Chine’ (French for China.)
Exploration Frenzy
By July, 1669, La Salle was ready to start searching for the “Vermilion Sea” (the Pacific Ocean), which he hoped to reach by way of the Ohio River. Such was his enthusiasm that he who “would lief permit no other man the honour of finding the way to the South Sea and thence to China” sold his estate back to the people who had granted it to him, fitted out five trading canoes and hired fourteen men. As exploration also had its religious side, for evangelizing the Amerindians, the Church took an interest, and so the Sulpician Dollier de Casson accompanied La Salle with three canoes and seven recruits recently arrived from France. De Casson also brought along an invaluable companion, the Abbé René de Bréhan de Galinée, whose task was to draw maps of their discoveries.
It did not take La Salle’s fellow travellers long to realize that their leader was incompetent. He could speak neither Algonquian nor Iroquoian. According to Galinée, La Salle “was undertaking this journey almost in a daze, more or less not knowing where he was going.”
By September the party reached the north shore of Lake Erie. On the first of November, 1669, La Salle announced that he was returning to Ville Marie because, so he said, of ill health. He disappeared into the bush and resurfaced in the colony only at the end of the summer of 1670. He was later to claim that he had meanwhile discovered the Mississippi ahead of Jolliet and Marquette.
Emissary and Protégé of Frontenac
In 1673, the Governor of New France, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, sent La Salle as his emissary to Lake Ontario. There La Salle convened a council of the chiefs of the Iroquois nations, who granted him permission to build a fort (Fort Frontenac) at Cataracoui (Cataraqui, site of Kingston.) Having acccomplished his mission to ensure that New France would have control of the fur trade on the Great Lakes, La Salle set off for France to seek more. He returned with letters of nobility, and the seigneurie of Cataracoui was created for him in exchange for certain undertakings on his part.
La Salle was still not satisfied. Back again in France in 1677, he bribed an important person of influence and presented an untrue, self-serving report of the discoveries he claimed to have made. By such means he obtained, on the twelfth of May of the following year, the exclusive right to explore the area between Florida and Mexico. This right was later extended to allow him to “build forts at the places where he may consider them necessary and to benefit from the same conditions as at Fort Frontenac.”
Builder of Forts
La Salle was back again in the colony on the fifteenth of September, 1678, with some thirty greenhorns from France, among them Father Louis Hennepin of the order of Récollets. Hennepin became the first person to describe and draw a picture of the Niagara Falls. While some of the men were erecting the walls of Fort Conti (or Fort Niagara) at that spot, others were at work building a brigantine, the Griffon. On the seventh of August, 1679, the little vessel set sail from Niagara on a course for Michillimakinac (Mackinac) where it dropped anchor twenty days later.
After making sail towards Baie des Puants (Green Bay) the Griffon was despatched back to Niagara and La Salle continued exploring Lake Michigan by canoe. On reaching the mouth of the Miami River (St. Joseph) he built Fort Miami. In January, 1680, his party reached the site of the present-day city of Peoria, Illinois. There he began to erect Fort Crèvecoeur (Fort Heartbreak.) While the construction was underway, disaster struck Fort Niagara, which was destroyed by fire. As for the Griffon, it was never heard of again.
Louisiana
The expedition which set out from Fort Crèvecoeur in January, 1682, comprised twenty-three Frenchmen and eighteen Amerindians. They made their way southwards by the Chicagou (Chicago), Renard (Fox) and Illinois rivers. By February they reached the Mississippi near the site of present-day Memphis, and there La Salle ordered the building of a small fort, Fort Prud’homme.
On the sixth of April they finally caught sight of the mouth of the Mississippi. Three days later, near to where Venice, Louisana, now stands, La Salle, dressed up in a gold-laced red cloak, had a cross planted and a plate buried under it bearing the following inscription: “In the name of Louis XIV, King of France and of Navarre, this ninth of April, 1682.” The official report of the ceremony records the words proclaimed by the explorer who had just extended New France as far as the confines of the Spanish Empire:
“I, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, by virtue of His Majesty’s commission, which I hold in my hands, and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name of His Majesty and of his successors to the crown, possession of the country of Louisiana, the seas, harbours, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams and rivers, within the extent of the said Louisana.”
Death in Texas
The French monarch, on hearing of La Salle’s discovery, dismissed it as “utterly useless”. Nonetheless, Louis XIV was misled by false maps which placed the Mississippi near the Rio Grande and New Spain. Consequently he commissioned La Salle to establish a French colony in Louisiana. On the following twenty-fourth of July, two hundred and twenty-eight recruits, including several women, set sail from La Rochelle aboard four ships. Their objective, though they did not really know where they were going, was to find the Mississipi by way of the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Sickness, shortage of supplies and drinking water, the loss of one of the vessels and the departure of another for France, the death or desertion of many of the men, all compromised the project to found a colony up the Mississipi.
By February, 1687, La Salle’s party was reduced to thirty-six persons. Bad-tempered, haughty and harsh, he alienated even those who had remained faithful to him to the end. He died in the land that is now Texas, shot dead at point blank range. It was the nineteenth of March, 1687. Three of his companions had been murdered just before him. The conspirators who committed the murders then set about killing one another.
Charles Albanel (1672)
Overview
The Jesuit priest Charles Albanel was born in Auvergne, France, in either 1613 or 1616. It is not certain whether his parents were French or English. Indeed little is known about his life prior to his arrival in New France. He entered the Jesuit noviciate of Toulouse on the sixteenth of September, 1633, and subsequently started his career by teaching in various villages in France. In the spring of 1649 he embarked for Canada. Energetic and stubborn but obscure and undistinguished, looked down on by his superiors, Albanel nevertheless accepted the challenge of reaching Hudson Bay overland.
Jean de Quen’s Companion
Charles Albanel arrived at Quebec aboard one of three ships that moored there on the twenty-third of August, 1649. Late the following month he carried on to Ville Marie (Montreal.) There he joined a fellow Jesuit, Jean de Quen, who had explored the Lac Saint Jean (Lake St. John) area two years before. While the latter officiated at funerals of the Montréalistes (Montrealers), Albanel officiated at their christenings. The two of them spent the winter of 1650 at the Tadoussac mission, of which de Quen was then in charge.
The territory of the Tadoussac mission extended on both shores of the St. Lawrence, so it was not uncommon to see the missionaries crossing “the highway that walks” (as the Amerindians called it) and venturing out into the terrain to meet the aboriginals who inhabited it. In the course of the next ten winters Albanel endured many hardships, but he later played them down.
The Years of Wandering
A veil of silence shrouds Charles Albanel’s next few years until he surfaces again near Trois-Rivières (Three Rivers). In 1660 he was in the company of Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers when they returned from a trading expedition to Lake Superior with three hundred Amerindians and sixty canoes piled high with furs. In mid-August Albanel took leave temporarily to accompany the aboriginals who were going back to the Great Lakes.
1666 found Albanel one of four chaplains to the soldiers of the Carignan regiment commanded by Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy. That January he went with a detachment of troops who travelled on snowshoes from Quebec on a raid to scare off the Iroquois along the River Richelieu. He took part in September in a similar march by troops to the shores of Lake Champlain.
The Quest for a Route from the Northern to the Southern Sea
Just when and how did Charles Albanel come to the attention of the rulers of the colony? It is known that on the tenth of November, 1670, Jean Talon expressed his anxiety at the presence of “two English vessels overturned quite close to Hudson Bay” and the role that might have been played in their being there by “a certain Desgroseliers previously resident in Canada”. On the eleventh of November of the following year the Intendant wrote: “Three months ago I despatched Father Albanel, a Jesuit, and Monsieur de St. Simon, a young gentleman of Canada… they are to push forward as far as Hudson Bay, present written reports on all they discover, open up the fur trade with the savages, and above all reconnoitre to see whether there is cause to erect a few buildings for the winter there to make a storage from which ships might eventually be victualled if they should pass that way to discover the route between the two seas of the North and the South.”
Hudson Bay at Last!
Charles Albanel, Paul Denis de Saint-Simon and Sébastien Provencher came together at Tadoussac on the eighth of August, 1671. They were at Lac Saint Jean (Lake St. John) when they received confirmation of the English presence in the Northern Sea (Hudson Bay). Despite the risk of having to delay their departure, they sent to Quebec for passports (in those days, official letters signed by the Governor, the Intendant and the Bishop). On the first of June, 1672, after a very hard winter, the three men set out again accompanied by sixteen Amerindian canoeists.
Five days later they arrived at Paslistaskau, on the watershed “which divides the lands of the North from those of the South”. On the eighteenth they entered Lake Mistassini. With the sole exception of Guillaume Couture, who had come there in 1661, no other Frenchman had ventured beyond. On the twenty-fifth, Rupert River and Lake Nemiskau opened up in front of their three canoes. They followed the Nemiskau river until it took them to the “bay of Hutson”.
Three days later they saw a ship flying an English flag and two deserted buildings left by the English. Albanel came to an understanding with the local Amerindians, emphasizing the contribution he had made to the peace that had by then lasted five years with the Iroquois:
“I have snatched from him [the Iroquois] his Pakagan, his battle-axe, & have even rescued from the flames thy two daughters and many of thy kin. Very well, then, live in peace & in safety; I restore to thee they country, whence the Iroquois had driven thee. Fish, hunt, and trade everywhere, and fear nothing henceforth.”
The explorers set out on the return journey to Quebec on the sixth of July. After three days of travel they planted the standard of the King of France at Lake Nemiskau, “on the point of the Island intersecting this Lake.” On the first of August, 1672, Albanel left Chicoutimi for Quebec.
Prisoner of the English
Although Charles Albanel had succeeded in reaching Hudson Bay, he had not brought back with him any assurance that the aboriginals of the region would desist from trading with the English. Although Albanel was by then fifty-seven or perhaps even sixty years old, Frontenac (the Governor of New France) still thought he was the best man to handle the situation. So Albanel started out again for Hudson Bay in the late summer of 1673. He was not to return to the French colony until the twenty-second of July, 1676. Three days after his return he was appointed superior of the St. Francis Xavier mission (at De Pere, Wisconsin.)
The Jesuit Relations (annual missionary reports) for 1679 briefly describe the wanderings that Albanel endured on his second journey to Hudson Bay: “He suffered every hardship imaginable, only to be captured by the English who were in Hudson Bay, transported to England, and then to France…” The English took a great interest in him and spread doubts about his loyalty to the officials of the French colony. It seems that in fact he had reached Hudson Bay completely exhausted and virtually incapable of taking the same route back, so he asked the English for refuge. It was only after obtaining a letter from his superiors to clear him of the suspicion of treachery that he returned to the colony. He eventually died at Sault Ste. Marie on the eleventh of January, 1696. He was eighty or eighty-three years old.
Jacques Marquette (1673)
Overview
Jacques Marquette was born June 10, 1637 in Laon, in the old French province of Aisne. He was 17 years old when he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Nancy, where it was not long before he had decided what he wanted to do with his life: “Would that I be ordered to set out for foreign lands. This has been the object of my thoughts since my earliest childhood.” He revisited the idea in 1665, at the end of his university studies, when he wrote to his superior: “Previously, I felt inclined toward the mission to the Indies; today, I would most gladly venture to whichever country it might please you to send me.” In 1666, Jacques Marquette was assigned the missions to Canada, where he arrived on September 20. Little did he know he was to be the initiator of the first exploration of Mississippi by the French.
Student of Aboriginal Languages
The Journal des Jésuites reports that, the following October 10, Marquette “went up to Trois-Rivières to study the Montagnais language with Father Druillettes”. In December he was at Cap-de-la-Madeleine to learn Algonquin. “I find no difficulty with languages unrelated to ours,” he wrote on August 4, 1667; “today I am starting on that of the Manate country, and this winter I shall learn Montagnais.”
On May 20, 1668, Jacques Marquette left Québec – never to see it again – for Sault Sainte-Marie to support the Jesuit Claude Dablon in his evangelization work there among the Ottawa Indians.
Contact with New Peoples
Most of the Natives crossing between Lakes Huron and Superior would stop at Sault Sainte-Marie. It was they who, since the voyages of Étienne Brûlé, had been telling of the proximity of the Northern sea (Hudson Bay), and they who provided Jacques Marquette with a description of the “Missispi” river, whose existence had long been known to the missionaries.
In the fall of 1669, Jacques Marquette reached the western end of Lake Superior where he founded “the mission of Pointe du Saint-Esprit”, an establishment adopted by the Ottawa and Huron. They soon encountered some “new peoples”, including the Illinois, who were familiar with part of the “Missispi”. Anxious to go there in the spring, Marquette spent the winter learning the language of the Illinois. But he knew his limits: he had to have authorization to undertake such a hazardous voyage, and he had to be accompanied.
Louis Jolliet Enters the Scene
We have no records to confirm exactly when Jacques Marquette discussed his project with Louis Jolliet. Their meeting may have taken place in Sault Sainte-Marie in the summer of 1671. The explorer was there on June 4, when Simon Daumont de Saint-Lusson took official possession of the western territories. It was also at the Sault that Marquette took his perpetual vows, the following July 2. The events that followed show that the two men saw the exploration of the Mississippi as a joint project.
Unfortunately, a state of tribal warfare forced Marquette to abandon the Lake Superior mission and return to the Michillimakinac (Makinac) region. While Jolliet went back to Québec, the missionary chose Manitoulin Island as the site for the founding of the Saint-Ignace mission in late July 1671.
Where Does the Mississippi Go?
Louis Jolliet was apparently the one whose arguments transformed Jacques Marquette’s evangelization project into an official expedition to follow the Mississippi. When he left Québec on October 5 or 6, 1673, Jolliet was in possession of a letter authorizing the missionary to accompany him in the search for the source of the Mississippi. On December 8, Jolliet arrived at the Saint-Ignace mission, which in the meantime had been moved to Michillimakinac. Marquette wrote that he bore “the orders of the Count de Frontenac Our Governor and of Mr. Talon, our Intendant, to venture upon this Exploration with me. I was the more delighted at this Good news, in that I beheld my designs coming to fruition […]”
The two men set out on May 17 with a crew of five and two canoes. They crossed the Straits of Michillimakinac, and then skirted Green Bay (Baie des Puants) west of Lake Michigan. There they met with the Menominee, who exhorted them to go no further. Marquette and Jolliet continued nonetheless on their route to the west via Fox River. A portage brought them to the Meskousing (Wisconsin) river, which took them to the Mississippi, which they entered on June 17.
Continuing to the south, they saw the Missouri first, then the Ohio, and for more than 450 kilometres, the banks washed by the Mississippi. They were now convinced that by keeping west they would reach California and the “Vermilion Sea” (Pacific Ocean), and that by moving south they would come to the Gulf of Mexico. But they were to go no further: as Marquette wrote,
“We felt that we were exposing ourselves to losing the fruit of this voyage, of which we could publish no knowledge were we to fall into the hands of the Spaniards, who no doubt would have held us captive, at the least”.
The voyage back began in mid-July. The group left the village of the “Akensae” following the direction of the Mississippi. They travelled northeast on the Illinois River as far as Lake Michigan and Green Bay.
Death in the Forest
The discovery of the Mississippi was a comfort to Jacques Marquette in his desire to extend the influence of the missionaries to the west and south. In October 1674 he left Green Bay to found a mission among the Illinois, whom he and Jolliet were the first Europeans to have visited.
In December, his health obliged him to stop at Chicago, from which he set out again on March 30, 1675. On April 8, he halted at a village where he founded the mission of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. Jacques Marquette died the following May 18 “in the midst of the forest”, near the present-day city of Luddington, Michigan. He was 38 years old. A year later, his remains were exhumed and conveyed to the Saint-Ignace mission.
Louis Jolliet (1673-1694)
Overview
Louis Jolliet (or Joliet) was born near Quebec, where he was christened on the twenty-first of September, 1645. He was the son of Jean Jolliet, a wagon-maker in the service of the Company of One Hundred Associates (Company of New France), and of Marie d’Abancourt. He was enrolled in the Jesuit college at Quebec at the age of ten and studied for the priesthood. However, he renounced his clerical vocation in 1667.
He was the first important explorer born on Canadian soil, and played a very important part in the opening-up of North America.
The Lure of the Fur Trade
Louis Jolliet was twenty-three years old when he decided on the career he wished to pursue. He would become a coureur des bois (coureur de bois, wood-runner, or bush-loper, to the English,) a calling in which he was to quickly make a name for himself. On the ninth of October, 1668, he fitted himself out with trade goods from the merchant Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye: “two guns, two pistols, six packets of rassades [glass beads], twenty-four axes, a gross of small bells, twelve ells of Iroquois-style cloth, ten ells of linens, forty pounds of tobacco…” The money to buy this merchandise had been lent to him by Monsignor Laval, Bishop of Quebec, and the loan had been guaranteed the previous day by his mother. However, he actually bought the goods for his brother, Adrien Jolliet, who left with them. Hence Adrien is the “Jolliet” whom we hear of as being in the Great Lakes area during the ensuing months.
Louis Jolliet was nevertheless at Sault Ste. Marie on the fourth of June, 1671, when Simon Daumont de Saint-Lusson took formal possession of the lands of the western interior for France. Fourteen Amerindian nations attended this event, which extended the realm of Louis XIV over a territory including “this place Sainte Marie du Saut, as also Lakes Huron and Superior, the Island of Caienton [Manatoulin], and all the countries, rivers and lakes contiguous and adjacent thereunto, both those which have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, bounded on the one side by the seas of the North [Hudson Bay] and of the West [the Pacific], and on the other by the South Sea [Gulf of Mexico], in all their length and breadth.” Louis Jolliet was one of the signatories of the declaration.
Jacques Marquette’s Project
A meeting between Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet no doubt took place in the Jesuit mission at Sault Ste. Marie. People at that place were well aware of the existence of the Mississipi, and Marquette planned to journey there. Jolliet was to turn this plan into a reality.
The coureur de bois was back in Quebec by September, 1671. The following year, just before his final departure for France, the great intendant Jean Talon threw his support behind the project to explore the Mississipi and persuaded the governor of the colony, Frontenac, to approve it. However, the French state put no funding into the expedition, the purpose of which was to determine whether the great river of the West really flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, and whether, by following one of its tributaries, it might be possible to reach China.
Jolliet now had to get organized. He recruited six other coureurs de bois and entered into a formal partnership with them on the first of October, 1672. They left Quebec a few days later, heading for the St. Ignace (St. Ignatius) mission at Michillimakinac, where they arrived on the eighth of December.
Journey towards the Mouth of the Mississippi
The journey by canoe to the Mississippi began in mid-May, 1673. One month later, the Mississipi unfurled before the canoeists. Turning southward, they paddled downstream until they reached the area that is today the boundary between Louisiana and Arkansas. In the middle of July, fearing “to deliver themselves to the Spaniards of Florida if they advanced further,” Jolliet and Marquette resolved to return the way they had come. They were disappointed not to have reached the mouth of the river, but they had established that the Mississippi did indeed discharge its waters into the Gulf of Mexico. They noted the existence of other rivers flowing westwards, clinging to the belief that they flowed into the Sea of Japan or the China Sea.
Returning to the colony at the end of the summer of 1674, Jolliet’s canoe was upset in the Lachine Rapids. He lost his diary and the map he had drawn during the expedition, yet he managed to recompose both of them from memory. “I was rescued after four hours in the water, by fishermen who never usually went to that spot, and who would not have been there if the Holy Virgin had not accorded me that favour… Nothing remains to me but my life.”
North Shore Seigneur and Trader
In 1675, Louis Jolliet returned to an apparently more sedentary life. He married Claire-Françoise Bissot, played the organ in the cathedral at Quebec, and became an influential personality in the colony. The truth was, however, that his interest in the fur trade had not diminished. In 1676, he made a vain request for royal permission to go and set up a trading station in the country of the Illinois. That same year he formed a company to conduct the fur trade on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence. Three years later he received a grant of the Mingan Archipelago in the lower St. Lawrence; the harvesting of its rich wildlife enabled him to assume the title of merchant in addition to those of explorer and seigneur. Anticosti Island was added to his possessions in March, 1680. He was to spend all his summers there with his family.
Overland to Hudson Bay
The officials of the French colony were worried by the English presence around Hudson Bay and the extent of their commerce with the aboriginal peoples there. So in 1679 they commissioned Jolliet to travel overland to Hudson Bay and reconnoitre the situation. Jolliet and seven companions left Quebec on the thirteenth of April. They travelled by way of the Saguenay as far as Lac Saint Jean (Lake St. John) and thence by Lake Mistassini and the Rupert River until they reached Rupert Bay (James Bay.) The English tried to induce Jolliet to join them, but he declined, and returned to Quebec convinced that Hudson Bay was the richest source of furs in the whole country and that the Englishmen’s control over it would make them masters of “all the trade of Canada.”
The Mapmaker
By about 1690, Louis Jolliet was famous not only in New France but also in France itself and even in England. Already in 1679, Charles Bayly, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had congratulated him for the part he had played in the Mississippi expedition, which Bayley seemed to know all about . Four years earlier, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin had drawn his map of Jolliet’s discoveries, based on information provided by Jolliet himself and by Marquette, which was published in Paris by Estienne Michallet in 1681 under the title Voyage et découverte de quelques pays et nations de l’Amérique septentrionale. In 1685, a map of the St. Lawrence river and gulf drawn by Jolliet himself was despatched to the Ministry of the Colonies. The Seigneur of the Mingan Islands and Anticosti was still continuing in his work as explorer and mapmaker.
Description of The Labrador Coastline
In the spring of 1694, Louis Jolliet undertook a sponsored voyage of exploration, mapmaking, fishing and trading in the Labrador area. The expedition was funded by the merchant François Viennay-Pachot. Eighteen men left Quebec on the twenty-eighth of April aboard an armed vessel. They sailed past Mingan, through the Strait of Belle Isle and Baie des Esquimaux (Eskimo Bay) and up as far as the fifty-sixth parallel (Zoar). At that point, as summer was approaching its end, and “seeing no place where we might immediately find savages whose trade might defray the daily costs incurred by our vessel , we resolved by common consent to seek harbour, and there to prepare the ship for the return voyage to Quebec.”
It was the first time in the annals of North America that an explorer returned from an expedition along the Labrador coast with a detailed journal, embellished furthermore by descriptive sketches and notes on the peoples he had encountered there.
On the 13th of April, 1697, Jolliet was appointed professor of hydrography at the College of Quebec. He died some time between May and October, 1700, possibly at one of the two seigneuries he possessed on the North Shore.
Louis Hennepin (1678-1680)
Overview
The reputation of the missionary and explorer Louis Hennepin is very bad indeed. A companion and protégé of Robert Cavelier de La Salle, who despised the Jesuits and surrounded himself with the Récollets, Hennepin followed the explorer from 1676 to 1680. He was not highly thought of in the colony where he lived for a few months at the beginning and end of his sojourn, but he painted a portrait of himself as a daring and courageous missionary.
An exceptional promoter of the territories of North America in Europe, he lied in describing himself as La Salle’s equal in the 1678 expedition to the Baie des Puants (Green Bay). Worse still, after the death of his leader, he actually claimed to have discovered the mouth of the Mississippi two years before La Salle. By claiming for himself a merit that is still disputed to this day, the author of the first description of Niagara Falls threw discredit on his own contributions to the exploration of North America.
The Military Chaplain
Louis Hennepin was born in Ath, Belgium, on May 12, 1626, to a family which, without being rich, nonetheless allowed him to pursue his studies. These ended in 1643 with his entrance into the order of Franciscan Récollets. Years of apostolate in Italy, Germany and Holland were followed by a stint on the French Atlantic coast, where he collected for his order.
”My greatest passion,” he wrote, concerning his stay in Calais, “was to hear the stories ships’ captains told of their long voyages […]I would have spent entire days and nights without sleeping, listening to them, because I always learned something new.”
Plunged back into the ” regulations of pure and severe virtue “, he travelled in Holland where he was caught in the midst of the Franco-Dutch war that began in 1672. As chaplain among the injured and ill soldiers, he showed true devotion. At the battle of August 11, 1674 in Seneffe, Belgium, he encountered Daniel Greysolon Dulhut who would come to his rescue in July 1680.
A Dream of Adventure
In 1675, there was no shortage of new lands to discover. Designated by his superiors along with four of his fellow priests for missions in New France, Hennepin arrived in Quebec City on June 16. The journey enabled him to meet Monseigneur de Laval and Robert Cavelier de La Salle who was returning from Versailles with titles of nobility and full ownership of the fort and the seigneurie of Cataracoui created for him.
We don’t know at exactly what moment the alliance between the missionary and La Salle the explorer was sealed, but it seems it was already settled that Hennepin would be part of the next expedition. While awaiting adventure, he performed his religious duties in the posts and missions of the North Shore, from Pointe-Claire (Montreal) to Cap-Tourmente (Beaupré).
Towards Niagara
In early spring 1676, Hennepin was sent to Fort Cataracoui, renamed Frontenac in honour of the governor. There he built a chapel and a residence for the missionaries. Two years later, he was back in Quebec City. He met Cavelier de La Salle, back from France in September 1678 with the authorization to further explore as far as Florida and New Mexico. The explorer had also obtained permission for Hennepin and two of his colleagues to come along and perform their duties in the wake of the discoveries.
Hennepin and a party of La Salle’s men left Quebec City on November 18, 1678. They were joined by the explorer at Fort Frontenac, and the group travelled to the junction of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, marked by the incredible cataract of Niagara Falls. Arriving there in the first days of December 1678, the group began the construction of Fort Conti and of a brig, the Griffon. La Salle reserved Hennepin the honour of “setting the first peg in the vessel.”
On the Great Lakes
The first ship ever to navigate on Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan set sail on August 7, 1679. After a stop at Sault Sainte-Marie, at the junction of Lake Huron and Lake Superior, the brig headed toward Michillimakinac and Lake Michigan. At the end of the fall, it stationed in Baie des Puants (Green Bay) before being sent towards Niagara: “against our wishes,” wrote Hennepin, “Sieur de la Salle, who never took advice from anyone, resolved to send the ship on and continue the route by canoe.”
Things were going badly at Fort Crèvecoeur, built in January 1680, on the site of the present-day city of Peoria, Illinois. Workers and coureurs des bois had deserted, food was scarce and they were lacking the necessary materials for navigation. This was the context in which Cavelier de La Salle decided to return to Niagara. Hennepin apparently refused to give up, and even proposed to set out ahead on the Mississippi : “In this extreme situation, we both took a decision that was both extraordinary and difficult: myself to head out with two men into unknown territory, and La Salle to return on foot to Fort Frontenac, more than five hundred leagues away.” The two men would never see each other again.
At the Source of the Mississippi
Two coureurs des bois, Michel Accault and Antoine Auguel dit Le Picard Du Guay, accompanied Hennepin. In Description de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte au Sud Ouest de la Nouvelle-France […] published in Paris in 1683, Hennepin is clear that he did not discover the mouth of the Mississippi:
“We had plans to travel to the mouth of the Colbert (Meschasipi), but the nations did not give us the time to navigate up and down this river.”
If the missionary’s tale is to be believed, between February 29 and March 10, the three men affronted the ice and travelled down the Illinois River as far as the Mississippi. From there, remounting the tumultuous river, they passed present-day Minneapolis where a waterfall was named St. Anthony Falls. Advancing toward the north and west of Lake Superior, the three men reached Lac des Issatis (Leech Lake), source of the Mississippi River.
Again according to the 1683 story, Hennepin and his companions then returned toward Fort Crèvecoeur. They were still a good distance from the mouth of the Illinois when, in the early afternoon of April 11, 1680, they were captured by the Sioux who took them toward the Mille Lacs region, south of Lake Superior. Adopted by the village chief, the three men were confined there. On July 25 Daniel Greysolon Dulhut,who had negotiated the alliance of the French and the Western tribes against the Iroquois, came to demand the liberation of Hennepin, Accault and Auguel, who were only freed in September.
A Strange Silence
After wintering in Michillimakinac, Dulhut and Hennepin returned to the colony. Curiously, the missionary, who then travelled from Montreal to Quebec City with Frontenac, told him of his expedition, but kept silent on the details of his purported voyage toward the south of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. He maintained the same silence with Monseigneur de Laval. On his return to France at the end of 1681, Hennepin began writing his first book. His Description de la Louisiane […] is inspired by the tales of one of his colleagues, who took part in Cavelier de La Salle’s possession of Louisiana on April 9, 1682. Dedicated to Louis XIV, the work was an enormous success. It was translated and re-edited in its original form on three occasions.
The Secret Plans of La Salle
In 1697, Louis Hennepin placed himself under the protection of the King of England, William III, to whom he dedicated the Nouvelle Découverte d’un très grand Pays Situé dans l’Amérique […], published in Utrecht, Holland. La Salle, assassinated ten years earlier, was no longer there to contradict Hennepin who for the first time evoked the misunderstanding that he claimed characterized their relations. Nor could La Salle expose the absurdity of his claim to have travelled the length of the Mississippi, in only thirty days before being captured by the Sioux:
“If we had wanted to travel more quickly by canoe, we could have made the trip twice.”
Justifying his earlier silence about an exploit that would have placed him among the world’s great explorers, Hennepin did not hesitate to take swipes at La Salle: “This is where I would like all the world to know the mystery of this discovery that I have hidden until now so as not to inflict sorrow on Sieur de La Salle, who wanted all the glory and secret knowledge of this discovery for himself alone. This is why he sacrificed several persons to prevent them from publishing what they had seen and from foiling his secret plans.”
Louis Hennepin published his third work in 1698. Nouveau Voyage d’un Pais plus grand que l’Europe […] reaffirmed his contribution to the discovery of North America. The missionary/author was then an undesirable subject in his own community. Due to circumstances and his thirst for fame, he had been a subject of both France and England. He was authorized to return to France in 1698, but on May 27, 1699, Louis XIV ordered that he be arrested if he ever attempted to return to New France. Louis Hennepin died after 1705 and it is not known whether he was still a Récollet priest.
Daniel Greysolon Dulhut (1678-1679)
Overview
A career soldier, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut was born around 1636 at Saint-Germain-de-Laval, near Lyon. The son of Claude Greysolon and Marie Patron, he is a member of French nobility. In one of his writings, he hints that he travelled to New France twice before settling there.
In 1673, he is a horseman in the French Guard. Later, as squire to the marquis de Lassay, he takes part in a military campaign in Franche-Comté. Surviving the major battle at Seneffe (Belgium, August 11, 1674), he packs his bags and heads for New France. His uncle, the merchant Jean-Jacques Patron and his brother, Claude Greysolon de La Tourette, will soon follow him. The former is no doubt the person who finances his nephew’s first expeditions. The latter, who was born in 1660, will join his brother on his second campaign.
Western Furs
Daniel Greysolon Dulhut lands at Québec near the end of 1674. At that time, he has no particular purpose nor any obvious political mission nor any known political relatives. Settling in Montréal in the early summer of 1675, at first, he rents a furnished house, which he will eventually replace with a stone one built for him. Various notarized documents recorded over the next three years show him to be living the life of a dilettante while ingratiating himself to the most important families in the city.
In a letter sent to Minister Seigneley in 1682, Dulhut states that immediately upon his arrival in the colony, he took an interest in the French and Iroquois conflicts which where hindering the north-south fur trade. After assessing the situation, he concluded that New France had to act urgently to establish commercial relations with the tribes living to the west of the Great Lakes.
The Clandestine Journey
On September 1, 1678, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, seven Frenchman and three slaves which he had been offered, secretly leave Montréal, heading for Lake Superior. The party travels down the Ottawa River to Lake Huron. They will camp at the headwaters of the lake, just past the rapids at Sault Sainte-Marie. His goal, Dulhut will later write in 1682, is to convince the tribes living there to ” make peace with all the other nations around Lake Superior, who all live under the rule of our invincible monarch. “
How can Dulhut take it upon himself to deal, in secret, with a problem that affects everyone? There may have been three reasons for this discreet approach. On the one hand, a royal decree dated April 15, 1676, which forbids anyone from ” engaging in the trading of pelts in the Indian villages “, is still in effect. On the other hand, it is likely that the Governor, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, supported Dulhut’s undertaking but was not able to do so publicly. Finally, Dulhut leaves just two weeks prior to Robert Cavelier de La Salle’s return to the colony. Operating under the protection of the Governor, de La Salle has exclusive rights. He will be the only Frenchman to explore western North America, the area between New France, Florida and Mexico.
Dulhut’s Peace
The negotiations between Dulhut and the chief of the Saulteur Indians, the first tribe he deals with, start on December 15, 1678. They end with a promise to take part in peace talks with the Sioux, who dominate all of Lake Superior and the surrounding valley. Dulhut apparently spends the rest of the winter swapping trinkets for furs. In the summer of 1679, he heads towards the end of the lake, claiming any sites where he happens to stop. Exploring the various Sioux villages spread through the area around Lake Buade (Mille-Lacs Lake), he may have reached as far as the Falls of Saint Anthony (Minneapolis, Minnesota).
On September 15, representatives of the two nations find themselves on the site of modern day Duluth, Minnesota. The peace must last and the alliance with the French must be strong enough for the Sioux and the Saulteurs to reserve all their furs for the French. ” I could think of no better way” , wrote Dulhut, ” to cement the alliance than arranging for reciprocal marriages between the members of both tribes, one with the other, which is something that I cannot do inexpensively.” In the months that follow, Dulhut charms his allies with ” great expenditures on gifts “, hunting expeditions and communal celebrations.
The Rescue of Louis Hennepin
From the natives around Lake Superior, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut learned of the existence of the Western or Vermilion Sea. Dulhut’s companions claimed they saw salt from that sea, within twenty days travel of Lake Superior.
Dulhut wants to find this sea, which may have been Salt Lake, Utah. And so, in the spring of 1680, he heads out with two canoes and five men. On June 25, having reached the Mississippi via the Sainte-Croix River, the explorer learns that three of Cavelier de La Salle’s companions, the Recollet friar, Louis Hennepin and “two other Frenchmen, had been kidnapped and enslaved” by the Sioux.
The search for the Pacific is postponed as Dulhut and his companions go south on the Mississippi, to somewhere near the Wisconsin River. Dulhut returns Hennepin and his friends to Michillimakinac. It is uncertain which route they used but many believe that the logical path was to head east is up the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers, to Green Bay, where the Saint-François-Xavier mission was located, and then north around Lake Michigan.
Eclipse
While in Michillimakinac, Dulhut learns that he is being slandered in Québec and Montréal. The merchants are annoyed by the personal fame and power he has acquired in the West and the Intendant, Jacques Duchesneau, does not hesitate to accuse him of trafficking with the English and of being the leader of those traitors who refuse to obey the decree of 1676.
He leaves Michillimakinac for Québec on March 29, 1681. While Duchesneau refuses to see Dulhut or to listen to his explanations, Frontenac protects him and encourages him to return to France to plead his case and to ask that he be granted the ownership of a post that he would build on Lake Superior. He leaves in the fall of 1681 and returns a year later. He had not obtained what he was seeking and, in the meantime, Cavelier de La Salle had taken advantage of his absence to darken his reputation. As an explorer, he is stymied: Louis XIV has just expressed his doubts on the value of exploring the continent and wants to limit them to those started by “le sieur De la Salle to the mouth of the Mississippi River.”
Military Strategist
In 1683, knowing that he will never be the seigneur of Lake Superior, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut agrees to return to his role as peacemaker for the area. Given a three-year mandate by the Governor, Le Febvre de La Barre, Dulhut leaves Montréal in April 1683. His mission is part of de La Barre’s global strategy. While desiring peace with the Iroquois, he wants to reinforce the alliance between the French and the western tribes. He also wishes to convince the Saulteur Indians, the Sioux and the northern tribes not to sell their furs to the English, whether they come from the east or from Hudson’s Bay. In 1683, knowing that he will never be the seigneur of Lake Superior, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut agrees to return to his role as peacemaker for the area. Given a three-year mandate by the Governor, Le Febvre de La Barre, Dulhut leaves Montréal in April 1683. His mission is part of de La Barre’s global strategy. While desiring peace with the Iroquois, he wants to reinforce the alliance between the French and the western tribes. He also wishes to convince the Saulteur Indians, the Sioux and the northern tribes not to sell their furs to the English, whether they come from the east or from Hudson’s Bay.
Although an ambassador, Dulhut thought like a military man. To prevent New France’s enemies from reaching Michigan, he fortifies Michillimakinac. From the Lake Superior side, the construction of forts Kaministiquia (Fort William), La Manne and La Tourette, will block access to Lake Nipigon, the Albany River and Hudson’s Bay. In 1686, on the orders of Jacques Brisay de Denonville, de La Barre’s successor, he heads for the strait that joins Lakes Erie and Huron where he builds Fort Saint-Joseph.
A Good Soldier
Until the spring of 1689, when he is recalled to the colony, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut ensures that the authority of New France in the Great Lakes area is never questioned. Later, except for a battle with the Iroquois at Lac des Deux-Montagnes and a stay of several months at Fort Frontenac in 1695, he lives a quiet life in Montréal.
After suffering from gout for several years, he dies in Montréal during the night of February 24 to 25, 1710, bequeathing part of his fortune to the family of Charles Delaunay, a tanner who had been caring for him. His reputation as an honest man and a good soldier was never in any doubt.
Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron Lahontan (1684-1689)
Overview
Poverty drove Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, the third Baron Lahontan, towards an ultimately unremarkable career in the military. However his talents as a writer did bring him fame. Born on June 9, 1666 in La Hontan, in the historical province of Béarn, he was the son of Jeanne-Françoise Le Fascheux de Couttes and Isaac de Lom d’Arce. The family was left almost destitute by his father’s death, their lands ripe for takeover by those coveting their home. During his decade in New France, the situation continued to worry the young baron: that he would never be able to reclaim the complete control of his estate.
Introduction to a New Land
Baron Lahontan is one of the 200 soldiers sent by Louis XIV to help New France defeat the Great Lakes Iroquois. Landing in Québec on November 8, 1683, he spends the winter on the Beaupré shore. He begins his career as an observer, writer and ethnographer. In his second letter written from Beaupré on May 2, 1684, he writes:
“In truth, the peasants here live much more comfortably than do many gentlemen in France. When I say peasants, I am in error. One must say habitants, since here, the word peasant is no more welcome than it is in Spain […]“.
Later that month, Lahontan leaves for Ville-Marie. En route, he stops at île d’Orléans, Québec, Sillery, Sault-de-la-Chaudière, Lorette and Trois-Rivières.
First Journey to the Land of the Iroquois
On June 22 or 23, 1684, Lahontan leaves Montréal with a scouting party. They cross the rapids at Lachine, Cascades, Cèdres and Long-Sault and then follow the river up to Fort Frontenac (Cataraqui or Kingston), on Lake Ontario. Governor Lefebvre de La Barre, who wants to dictate the conditions for peace to the Five Nations, joins them in August. He is accompanied by more than 1200 soldiers, local militia and allied Amerindians.
Meanwhile, around Niagara, the fevers have claimed 80 people and affected many of the men. The Governor’s army soon begins to look like a “hospital on the move”. The expedition only gives the colony the illusion of peace while earning the scorn of the Iroquois who refuse to co-operate with some of the tribes traditionally allied with the French. Lahontan returns to Ville-Marie, disappointed to realize that the administrators, from the highest ranking to the lowest, are only interested in making money from the fur trade and could not care less about the Amerindians.
Second Journey to the Land of the Iroquois
In March 1685, Lahontan is an officer at Fort Chambly. Then, at the end of September, a month after de La Barre was replaced by Jacques-René de Brisay, the Marquis of Denonville, the Baron settles in Boucherville, where he stays until June 1687. The demands of his position are light so he is free to spend his time as he pleases. He travels to Lake Champlain, hunts game, both feathered and furred, fishes in the many streams and learns Algonquin.
In June 1687, he is among the 1600 men who accompany Denonville in a raid against the Iroquois. “Why are we bothering them?”, he writes in a letter dated June 8, “They have given us no cause to attack them.” He follows the army to Fort Frontenac and Niagara where the troops build a fort which is put under the command of the chevalier Pierre de Troyes.
Commander of Fort Saint-Joseph
Near the end of July, shortly before he returns to the colony, Denonville hands over the command to Lahontan of Fort Saint-Joseph (Detroit), which was founded by Daniel Greysolon Dulhut at the mouth of the strait that joins Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Although he had planned on returning to France, the Baron agrees to stay. He leaves Fort Frontenac on August 3 with Dulhut and about a hundred men. The next day, they start the portage around Niagara Falls, “that terrifying cataract”. They then cross Lake Erie, go up the Detroit River to Lake Saint Clair which they reach on September 8. Six days later, they arrive at Fort Saint-Joseph, at the entrance to Lake Huron.
Winter is hard for the detachment. It is short of supplies and is worried about an attack by the Iroquois. Lahontan leaves the fort on April 1, 1688, hoping to find supplies at Michillimakinac, northwest of Lake Huron. Later that same spring, he travels as far as the rapids at Sainte-Marie, where they enter Lake Superior. Back in Michillimakinac, he encounters the survivors of Cavelier de La Salle’s expedition who hide from him the fact that La Salle had been murdered on March 19, 1687 “We think he must be dead since he did not come out to greet us in person”, writes Lahontan.
On August 24, 1688, he is back at Fort Saint-Joseph where he learns that scurvy has been ravaging Fort Niagara and that the commander, the chevalier Pierre de Troyes, had died from fever. Having on hand only enough supplies for two months and “having received neither orders nor succor […] we razed the fort on the twenty-seventh”. The commander and his soldiers leave for Michillimakinac that same day.
The Imaginary Journey
Nothing that is known about the Baron de La Hontan explains why he is suddenly overcome by a desire to explore the Great Lakes “I am about to start another journey since I cannot stand to mope around here all winter”, he explains in his 15th letter. Accompanied by four or five “good Ottawa hunters” and part of his detachment, he leaves Michillimakinac on September 24, 1688 for a journey which may never have really happened.
After reaching Lake Michigan from the north, he enters the baie des Puants (Green Bay). South of the bay, he canoes down Fox River and portages to the Wisconsin River. Once there, he continues to head west until he reaches the Mississippi River. The convoy of six canoes follows the river until they reach the mysterious “Long” river which he says he began exploring starting on November 2nd.
Was he looking for a passage to the western sea or to Hudson’s Bay? On March 2, 1689, Lahontan returns to Michillimakinac by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio and Illinois Rivers, the Chicagou (Chicago) portage and Lake Michigan. By July 9, he was back in the colony. Even though he could have benefitted both financially and career-wise, for some reason, he speaks to no one about his discovery of the “Long” River (which may be the Saint-Pierre River). He never describes to anyone the fabulous tribes that he met: Essanapes, Gnacsitares, Moozimlek, Nadouessioux and the Panimobas and, after him, no one else ever saw the “Long” River…
Exile and Fame
On October 1689, Louis de Buade de Frontenac became governor of New France for a second time. In November 1690, a month after William Phips is routed at Québec, Lahontan finally leaves for France. A year later, after his return to Québec, he becomes part of the governor’s inner circle. Frontenac is so impressed by him that he offers the Baron a very advantageous marriage to his god-daughter. Preferring his freedom, Lahontan turns down this generous offer. Having a lot of free time on his hands, he designs a plan for a Great Lakes navigation system and recommends the construction of three forts at strategic locations on those lakes. Frontenac supports the idea and sends Lahontan to France to submit the proposal to the Minister for the Colonies.
Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de La Hontan sails from Québec on July 27, 1692 never to return . A layover takes him to Placentia where he helps with the defense of the fort. In France, there is no interest in his plan. However, his courage is rewarded by an appointment as Lieutenant- Governor of Placentia, which displeases the Governor, Jacques-François Monbeton de Brouillan.
Brouillan keeps careful track of everything Lahontan says and does, and prepares a sufficiently damning case that the 26-year old Baron decides to disappear: “the possibility of a stay in the Bastille worried me so much that, after careful consideration of the unpleasant situation I found myself in, I decided to board the last and only small ship going to France”.
After leaving Placentia on December 14, 1693, Lahontan took refuge in Holland. Using the copious notes and the diary he kept during his stay in New France, in 1703, he began publishing works that made him famous. When he apparently died between 1710 and 1715, he was one of the most respected and widely-read writers in Europe.
Pierre de Troyes (1686)
Overview
Little is known about Pierre de Troyes’ past. The man who left his mark on Hudson’s Bay, mostly around modern-day James Bay and who died at Fort Niagara was probably from Champagne or Normandy. The son of Alard and Michel de Troyes, suppliers to the Parliament in Paris, he was married in 1681 and a member of the officer corps of the Piedmont regiment. His stamina and daring indicate that he was probably less than 40 years old when he first arrived in New France.
Controlling the Fur Trade
Having been appointed, on March 5, 1685, captain of a company of marines on duty in the colony, Pierre de Troyes lands at Québec on August 1, 1685. The Governor, Jacques-René de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville, the successor to Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, is aboard the same ship.
Denonville immediately throws his support behind the Compagnie du Nord or Compagnie française de la baie d’Hudson, which had been created five years earlier at the instigation of de Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye. Like the Company’s associates, he wishes to retake Fort Bourbon, which had been set up in 1682 at Hudson’s Bay and seize the settlements occupied by or built by the English. And so, the new governor agrees that an expedition, which is assembled during the winter of 1685-1686, will be financed by the Compagnie du Nord.
The Governor’s Man
On February 12, 1686, Denonville orders “au sieur de Troyes” to leave Québec “to occupy the posts on the shores of the Northern Bay”. The troop consists of 30 soldiers and 70 Canadians chosen for their ability to travel. canoe and fight. A drummer, an interpreter, one or more carpenters and a blacksmith are part of the group which is equipped with swords, tools, pickaxes, spades and shovels. Three brothers who will be famous someday are in charge of three separate groups of about 30 men. They are Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, Paul Le Moyne de Maricourt et Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, all from Montréal.
On March 3, after attending mass at the church of Notre-Dame in Montréal, the troops head for rivière des Prairies. From the Lake of Two Mountains, they turn towards the Ottawa River. On April 9, they travel up the Long Sault (the Carillon rapids) and, two days later, they reach the portage point at Chute-à-Blondeau. On May 1st , they set up camp on the future site of Fort Coulonge where, faithful to tradition, the men plant a may tree and fire a salvo in front of the tents of Pierre de Troyes and the Le Moyne brothers.
To Abitibi and James Bay
On June 10, just as the party is about to reach the point where the Abitibi River and Moose River meet, the canoe carrying Noel Leblanc, one of the best Canadians in the troop, capsizes. Reaching James Bay itself around June 19, de Troyes must select what will be the first of three targets: Fort Monsoni (Moose Factory), Fort Rupert (Charles), or Fort Quichichouane (Albany); all are situated at the near end of James Bay. Fort Monsoni is the closest and with easy access. On June 20, after returning from a reconnaissance mission on the Monsoni River, d’Iberville confirms that it is “time to strike”. They construct a battering ram and hone the blades of their swords.
Many Battles and Many Victories
The same day, June 20, 1686, the men surround Fort Monsoni, neutralize the English cannons, recapture La Sainte-Anne, an old sailing ship which the English had seized and charge the fort, swords in hand. “I discovered that I had great difficulty,” writes the chevalier de Troyes, “trying to stop the assault of the Canadians who, screaming like savages, demanding the opportunity to use their knives.” The battle lasts half an hour.
The captain wavers between an attack on Fort Rupert, located on the Nemiskau River, Fort Quichichouane, on the Sainte-Anne River or Albany. He decides on Fort Rupert where a ship lies at anchor. It will be useful for the attack on Quichichouane. Sainte-Hélène, who took charge of the scouting mission, returns on July 2, saying that the way is clear. The troops head out in birchbark canoes and, on a date not specified in the reports of the chevalier de Troyes, they take the ship and Fort Rupert without much of a fight because they attacked in the night. After having loaded the ship with furniture and other valuables, they destroy the fort.
Back at Fort Monsoni in mid-July, Troyes plans the rest of the campaign. The next step is to send some of the men by sailing ship and Iberville’s men in the vessel they arrived in. On the 23rd , the ships lay siege to Fort Quichichouane, but the ultimatum given the governor, Henry Sergeant, does not bring about the hoped-for surrender. Supplies are running low. A prayer by the troops to Saint Anne seems to work “The wind changed suddenly and drove our vessel with its battery of eight cannons, which we had not been able to use on the 25th, the eve of Saint Anne’s day.” On the 26 th, after the usual negotiations over several bottles of good Spanish wine, the English surrender. Quichichouane is renamed fort Sainte-Anne.
The Best of our Captains
On August 10, 1686, the chevalier de Troyes entrusted d’Iberville with defending Fort Monsoni and returned to Québec. A few weeks after his return, Denonville expressed his satisfaction to the Marquis de Seignelay, Minister for the Colonies :
“The sieur de Troyes is the smartest and the most capable of all our captains. He has the kind of spirit needed to command others. There can be no better example than the behaviour he demonstrated during our Northern undertaking where he needed to be very clever to get the Canadians to deliver the kind of service and dedication they demonstrated. “
The abilities of the chevalier de Troyes explain why he commanded one of the four regiments sent to Fort Frontenac in June 1687 as part of a peace conference to deal with the kidnappings by the Iroquois. For the same reason, he was entrusted, shortly thereafter, with the command of Fort Niagara and a hundred men. He dies there, on May 8, 1688 either from scurvy or from fever caused by eating spoiled food. Ironically. a few weeks earlier, the fort’s few survivors had plotted to kill the chevalier de Troyes and elect their own commander.
Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (1686-1702)
Overview
Baptised at Ville-Marie on July 20, 1661, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville is the third of eleven boys and three girls born from the marriage of Catherine Thierry-Primot to Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, a merchant in Montréal. D’Iberville, who was trained to wield an incisive and nimble pen, was sufficiently well brought up to be comfortable in the presence of the king and his ministers and crafty enough to use both cruelty and generosity as he saw fit. If he had been the governor of New France and if death had not taken him on the island of Cuba when he was only 45, North America might have ended up being French…
Baptism of Fire
Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville was born in a time when one had to fight to survive in New France. The island of Montréal, located at the junction of the paths leading to the Great Lakes and Hudson’s Bay, since its founding in 1642, was vulnerable to Iroquois attacks. Ville-Marie is at the heart of the fur trade and the local merchants are prospering. Lemoyne’s father, Charles Le Moyne, who started with nothing and was given a noble title in 1668, was one of the richest and most influential pioneers in this new-born city. A partner in several trading companies, he took part in the creation of the Compagnie du Nord or the Compagnie française de la Baie d’Hudson in 1682.
In 1685, the investments made by the Compagnie du Nord in Hudson’s Bay are threatened but the company gains the support of the governor, Jacques-René de Brisay, marquis de Denonville. It is now in a position to finance an expedition to Hudson’s Bay in 1686. Three of Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil’s sons take part: Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène and Paul Le Moyne de Maricourt. This lightning campaign gives the French control over three trading posts located south of James Bay: Monsoni (Moose Factory), Rupert (Charles) and Quichichouane (Albany).
The Man from Hudson’s Bay
Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville is only 25 years old when, on August 10, 1686, the chevalier Pierre de Troyes entrusts him with the command of the posts which have just fallen to the French. D’Iberville becomes a freebooter. Marauding around the Nelson River, he captures two English ships. These seizures allow him to avoid starvation and to resupply Fort Monsoni. When he returns to Québec by sea near the end of October 1687, his ship is overloaded with furs and English merchandise.
While in France during the winter of 1687-1688, he manages to convince Versailles to provide support for the Compagnie française de la baie d’Hudson thereby ensuring the French presence in the north will be reinforced. His arguments carry the day. The king places Le Soleil d’Afrique, the newest and fastest of his ships, in d’Ibervilles hands. On August 3, after a detour to Québec, this vessel could be found cutting its way through the ice in Hudson’s Bay.
D’Iberville then asked to be allowed to take Fort York, which would prevent the English from using the Nelson River or reaching the territories in what is now Manitoba. With fewer than 20 men, he boards two English ships, captures almost 80 Englishmen and ensures that the French king’s flag flies over the forts on James Bay. On September 12, 1689, with a vessel armed with 24 cannons and loaded with thousands of beaver pelts, he sets sail for Québec.
Crusader and Freebooter
D’Iberville believed that the presence of the English at Fort Nelson augured the loss of New France. He draws up a simple and inexpensive plan to save the colony, once and for all. Its implementation is delayed by three events. First, the cease-fire between France and England, which had been negotiated in 1687, ended in late May 1689. Second, the repercussions of the European conflict affected the region of Montréal where, on August 5, 1689, the residents of Lachine were attacked and massacred. Finally, Governor Frontenac organized a counterattack in which D’Iberville enthusiastically took part. On February 18, 1690, an attack on Corlaer (Schenectady, New York) ends with the pillaging and burning of the town and the massacre of approximately 60 townspeople.
D’Iberville spends the winter of 1690-1691 at Hudson’s Bay but he does not accomplish anything of note. In 1693, while he is escorting the ships that shuttle between the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence and the French ports, England recaptures the forts at James Bay. In August 1694, d’Iberville returns to Hudson’s Bay holding a three-year monopoly on trade there. On October 13, he finally captures Fort Nelson. The following year, he is assigned to patrol the Atlantic, from Maine to Newfoundland.
On August 15, 1696, he adds to his mythic status by securing Fort William Henry at Pemaquid, on the coast of Maine. Without delay, he then heads for Newfoundland where, with fewer than 200 men, he takes Fort Saint John, subjugating Newfoundland by means of murderous raids. However, he is not given much time to savour his victory as he is ordered to proceed immediately to Hudson’s Bay where the forts have been retaken. On September 5, 1697, Le Pélican, leading a convoy of four ships, comes under attack. D’Iberville sinks one ship, seizes another and sends a third one fleeing.
By the time reinforcements arrive, the battle is over. All that is left to do is to retake Fort Nelson, which falls on September 13, 1697. However, his victory is in vain, since the Treaty of Ryswick, signed a week later, enshrine English dominance in Hudson’s Bay and French hegemony in James Bay. France holds on to Port Royal and Placentia but must yield Pemaquid and part of Acadia. D’Iberville’s conquests were for naught.
Louisiana Bound
Forced to look elsewhere but still dreaming of giving North America to France, d’Iberville argues for the establishment of a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi : “If France does not seize this most beautiful part of America and set up a colony, […] the English colony which is becoming quite large, will increase to such a degree that, in less than one hundred years, it will be strong enough to take over all of America and chase away all other nations.” His plan is to strangle the New England colonies between Canada in the north, the Gulf Mexico and Louisiana in the south and the Mississippi River in the west.
On March 2, 1699, he succeeds where Robert Cavelier de La Salle failed: travelling by sea, he discovers the mouth of the Mississippi. Three consecutive expeditions, in 1699, 1700 and 1701, allow him to built the forts of Maurepas (Biloxi), Mississippi and Saint-Louis (Mobile). In 1702, having won the trust of the natives, the commander of Louisiana leaves that colony, never to return.
The Death of General Dom Pedro Berbila
At the beginning of 1706, d’Iberville is spreading fear throughout the English Antilles. He terrorizes, pillages and neutralizes the island of Nevis. The settlements in New England brace themselves, expecting the worst. Shortly thereafter, he stops off in Havana, apparently to sell French iron. He dies there, on board the Juste, on July 9, 1706, laid low by an epidemic or fevers that had been weakening him since 1701.
The remains of the man the burial records identify under the name of ” El General Dom Pedro Berbila ” were laid to rest in the church of San Cristobal in Havana. He was 45 years old. The investigation which had been started shortly before his death, revealed that the “Cid” of Canada was a greedy man and that his lust for conquest had as much to do with his desire for financial gain as it did with his dedication to France.
Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe Cadillac (1694-1701)
Overview
Born on March 5, 1658 in Caumont, a village near Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Grave in Gascony, Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac was the son of simple middle-class parents. Upon his marriage in Quebec City on June 25, 1687, he glorified his origins, claiming his title was “Antoine de la Mothe, squire, Sieur de Cadillac, aged about 26 years, son of Jean de la Mothe, Seigneur of Cadillac, Launay and Montet, consultant to the parliament of Toulouse and of Jeanne de Malenfant.” His parents, however, were not nobility. A simple magistrate, his father was called Jean Laumet and was Seigneur of nothing at all.
This was far from being the last of the lies told by Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac, founder of Detroit, whose sojourn in New France began in Acadia around 1683. Without giving any proof, and contradicting himself on many occasions, he claimed to be an experienced soldier. No one knows where he studied, but the briefs he produced for Minister Pontchartrain indicated that he did have a certain level of education and culture.
An Evil Mind
Cadillac appeared in Port Royal around 1683, in the guise of an adventurer who mingled with the men of privateer François Guyon dit Després, whose career consisted in protecting the Acadian coast by inspecting and appropriating the cargo of enemy ships. In the spring of 1687, he was in Beauport, birthplace of his employer. There, on June 25, he married a niece of the privateer, Marie-Thérèse Guyon, who would follow him in his adventures and bear him nine children.
The couple travelled to Acadia, and on July 23, 1689, he was granted a fief at Port Royal and another along the Douaque River (Union River, Maine) including Monts Déserts Island (Bar Harbour, Maine). From this time on, his nasty character attracted attention. People spoke of his “evil mind” and the rumour spread that he had been “chased out of France.” Some months later, he was in France where he began his career at court. Because of the destruction by William Phips of his holdings in Port Royal, he caught the attention of the new minister of the colonies, Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, who recommended him to governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac.
A Dream of Conquest
Frontenac took an interest in this man whose knowledge of the Atlantic Coast had been praised and who wanted to take New York, “the original source and touchstone of all the Iroquois wars.” He delegated him to France, where the project of conquest received royal assent.
With this project in mind, Cadillac and cartographer Jean-Baptiste Franquelin set out in 1692 to reconnoiter the American coastline, which they studied closely. Cadillac’s first ambitious project did not come to anything, but it enabled him to climb up the ranks. Frontenac was looking out for him, and in October 1693, Cadillac was made commander of a company. The following year, Minister Pontchartrain gave him a ship’s command, and on September 16, 1694, the Gascon eclipsed Daniel Greysolon Dulhut by becoming commander of Michillimakinac.
Master of the West
His mission in Michillimakinac consisted in consolidating the policy set up by Dulhut to ensure the stability of connections between New France and the tribes of the Great Lakes of the West. However, he had scarcely arrived at the beginning of the winter of 1694 when relations with the natives began to deteriorate. Upon his return to Quebec City three years later, the colony no longer had the privileged ties with the allies that Dulhut had brought together in 1679. From then on, the natives sold to the highest bidders: the English, with the Five Nations tribes as their intermediaries.
Indifferent to the precautions taken by the authorities of the colony over a number of years, Cadillac encouraged the distribution of alcohol and, like others before him, he did not hesitate to take part in the fur trade for his own profit. “Never before,” wrote a witness at the time, “had a man amassed so much wealth in such a short time, nor caused so much disruption through the wrongs he inflicted upon those who were involved in his dealings.”
A Project for the Detroit River
In 1698, criticized on all sides but inclined to consider himself the victim of wicked plots, Cadillac travelled to France where he presented a brief for the establishment of a permanent colony on the Detroit River. On May 27, 1699, the King decreed that it be carried out. Cadillac was commanded to achieve a six-fold mandate: prevent the beaver trade from falling into Iroquois hands ; deliver the highest quality pelts, since France was saturated with skins of mediocre quality ; ensure work for the coureurs des bois ; guarantee benefits for the merchants ; reunite the allied nations at the Detroit post and, last of all, thanks to colonists and missionaries, assimilate them into the French nation.
In Quebec City, where the implications of such a project where better understood than in Versailles, there was hesitation in putting it into action and doubts as to Cadillac’s ability to carry it out successfully. Cadillac responded in these terms to Minister Ponchartrain:
“Either the plan is good or bad. If it is good, then it should be carried out. Choose a man of thought and action to execute it, and you can be assured that it will succeed, despite the secret difficulties that people want to make of it.”
The Foundation of Detroit
At the end of 1700, Versailles returned to the attack. This time, there would be no beating about the bush! The founder of Detroit left Montreal on June 5, 1701 with one hundred people, half colonists, half soldiers, and two missionaries. On July 24, the group set up on the site where the construction of Fort Pontchartrain (Detroit, Michigan) would soon begin. Three years later, after a battle against the company of the colony that had obtained the title to the fort, Cadillac became its leader.
He made an unsuccessful request for a marquisate for Detroit. Disappointed, but as ambitious as ever, he then sought to obtain an independent government for the Western posts, but governor Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil deployed all his efforts to fight the project. It was not until 1706 and 1707 that Versailles acknowledged the evidence: a colony had indeed developed in Detroit, but its presence had not consolidated ties between the tribes of the West and the French. Almost all the furs took the New York route and there was no doubt but that Cadillac had traded with the English, distributed alcohol and bribed certain Canadians who might otherwise have become his adversaries.
To the Bastille!
According to historian Yves F. Zoltvany, if the minister of the colonies had been harsh with Cadillac, he would have admitted his error. In 1710, Pontchartrain imposed disgrace by appointing Cadillac to the position of governor of Louisiana, where he did not go until June 1713. The fall was not yet over when Cadillac was already accused of having sown discontent and incited the rare inhabitants of Louisiana to leave! He is acknowledged to have attempted to establish commercial ties with Mexico, discovered a copper mine in Illinois and, above all, founded Detroit.
Recalled to France, he arrived late in the summer of 1717. On September 27, he was incarcerated in the Bastille prison along with his eldest son, awaiting judgment for having spoken “against the government of the state and the colonies.” Freed at the beginning of the following year, Cadillac returned to the good graces of the court. He was decorated with the Croix de Saint-Louis and given the governorship of Castelsarrasin, a city near his native village. He died there on October 15, 1730.
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye (1732-1739)
Overview
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye was born in Trois-Rivières on November 17, 1685. The last of the nine children of René Gaultier de Varennes, a former officer of the Carignan Regiment, and Marie Boucher, he was the grandson of Pierre Boucher. At an age when others were enjoying their retirement, he was exploring the Canadian West and having eight forts or trading posts built between Lake Superior and present-day Manitoba. Two of his sons were the first Frenchmen to see and describe the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains.
Soldier and Farmer
At the age of 11, Pierre Gauthier de Varennes was enrolled in the Jesuit seminary in Québec. Three years later, after completing part of the secondary course, he joined the army. In 1704 and 1705, first as a cadet and then an ensign, he took part in the armed struggle between France and England in New England and Newfoundland. Anxious to rise in the military ranks, he went to France where he joined the Brittany regiment. In 1709, the War of the Spanish Succession brought him a few injuries, imprisonment and the rank of lieutenant. Upon the death of his brother Louis, a sub-lieutenant in the same regiment, Pierre adopted the appellation by which Louis had been known: La Vérendrye.
He was granted permission to return to New France on May 24, 1712. In the fall he married Marie-Anne Dandonneau du Sablé, the fiancée who had been waiting for him for five years. They settled in the Trois-Rivières area, where farming became their main source of income.
The Search for the “Vermilion Sea”
By 1726 Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye was the head of a family of four boys and two girls. He then turned away from his hitherto sedentary life to join the fur trading venture formed by his brother Jacques-René, commandant of the Poste du Nord in the Lake Superior region. Upon arrival there, he accepted the post of second in command, later becoming commandant in 1728.
During these two years in the northern posts of the Great Lakes Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye became certain that exploration of Lake Winnipeg and the “great Western river” would ultimately lead to the discovery of the Pacific Ocean.
In 1728 and 1729, he applied to the governor Charles de Beauharnois to set out for the West on an official mission, arguing that he already knew the route and had a knowledgeable guide: “I have also taken care to acquire a Savage capable of leading there a convoy, in the event that it should please His Majesty to honour me with your orders to effect this Discovery.”
He pleaded his case in person in Québec, in 1730. The governor and Intendant Gilles Hocquart supported the project as if it were their own. They defended it to the minister of the colonies, emphasizing the fact that a French presence in the West would enrich New France while at the same time damaging British trade in Hudson Bay.
First Forts on the Prairie Frontier
When he left Montreal on June 8, 1731, in the company of three of his sons and some 50 engagés, La Vérendrye had no financial backing. He had eight partners with whom he shared the fur trade monopoly in the Lake Winnipeg region.
In late August, the group passed Michillimakinac and Lake Superior. Despite the defection of some engagés, part of the expedition, headed by La Vérendrye’s son and nephew, headed for Rainy Lake. Fort Saint-Pierre was already constructed before the onset of winter. In the early summer of 1732, there were at Lake of the Woods, where Fort Saint-Charles was built. The following year a secondary post was established on the Red River. In May 1734, while La Vérendrye was en route to Montreal, he had some men march to Lake Winnipeg where they commenced construction of Fort Maurepas, named after the minister of the colonies.
The Beaver Sea
Given what was expected of him, the fact that La Vérendrye had dispatched large quantities of furs to the colony did not weigh heavily in his favour. He had promised to discover the Western sea, and in three years had gone no further than Lake Winnipeg. Upon arriving in Québec in 1734, he found that his reputation had been tarnished by those who, paraphrasing Maurepas, said that he was “seeking not the Western sea, but the Beaver sea.”
When he set out again in June 1735, the explorer was virtually an employee of his associates. He undertook to devote himself solely to the search for the Pacific, and they would supervise the administration of the forts he built. Shortly after his arrival at Fort Saint-Charles, Christophe Dufrost de la Jemmerais, his nephew and the most efficient of his companions, succumbed to an illness. On June 6, 1736, his son Jean-Baptiste, the Jesuit Jean-Pierre Aulneau and 19 companions were murdered at Lake of the Woods.
Discovery of the Rockies
In greater debt than ever before, the explorer had to continue on. On September 28, 1738, he reached the mouth of the Assiniboine River and the site of present-day Winnipeg. He had Fort La Reine (Portage-la-Prairie, Manitoba) built in early October. On December 3 he entered what is now North Dakota. This was to be the farthest point of his travels.
After wintering at Fort La Reine, La Vérendrye returned to Montreal. Meanwhile his sons were exploring part of the Saskatchewan River and lakes Manitoba, Winnipegosis, Bourbon and Dauphin. Back in the west in the fall of 1741, La Vérendrye planned the construction of forts on lakes Bourbon and Dauphin.
On April 9, 1742, Louis-Joseph and François left Fort La Reine, with orders to travel as far as possible to the west. By January 1, 1743, they had ascended the Upper Missouri as far as Yellowstone River. A huge wall of stone barred their way and the view of the West. They were at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
Disgrace and Envy
In 1743 Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye left the West, not knowing that he would never come back. Shortly after his return, he resigned: France ascribed no importance to the discoveries made by his family, nor to goods they yielded.
Beauharnois, who had always supported him, made his life easier by awarding him a few honorary duties in 1744. Five years later, the governor was so successful in pleading the explorer’s case that the king recognized the value of his discoveries by assigning him the management of the Western posts and awarding him the Croix de Saint-Louis, the most prestigious distinction of the time.
Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye was preparing an expedition to the Saskatchewan River when he died in Montreal on December 5, 1749. His sons benefited in no way from what they had accomplished. “Here more than elsewhere, envy remains a passion much in fashion, from which it is not possible to protect oneself,” ,” wrote Louis-Joseph to Maurepas in 1750. “Even as my father with my brothers and myself was wearing himself out with fatigue and expenditure, his efforts were represented as directed only toward the discovery of beaver, his forced expenditures as nothing but dissipation, his communications as nothing but lies. Envy in this country does not exist in half-measures […]“
Originally published by the Virtual Museum of New France, Canadian Museum of History, republished with permission for educational, non-commercial purposes.