A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs | Page 9

making things profitable. If he can be induced to continue his services, it will be a benefit to his employer. But he is not contented. Last year he could not make it pay and wished to leave. Nearly all his wages are used in the support of his family. He has three grown-up daughters who help in carrying on the establishment, and a boy for the stables. The best paid of these gets only 50 livres (about $10) a year; she should get at least 80 livres, M. Coquart thinks. Dufour has on the farm eight sheep of his own but even of these the King takes the wool, and actually the farmer has had to pay for what wool his family used. Surely he should be allowed to keep at least half the wool of his own sheep! If it was the policy of the Crown to grant lands along the river of Malbaie there are many people who would like those fertile areas, but there is danger that they would trade with the Indians which should be strictly forbidden. So runs M. Coquart's report. It was rendered to one of the greatest rascals in New France, the Intendant Bigot, but he was a rascal who did his official tasks with some considerable degree of thoroughness and insight. He knew what were the conditions at Malbaie even if he did not mend them.
After 1750 the curtain falls again upon Malbaie and we see nothing until, a few years later, the desolation of war has come, war that was to bring to Canada, and, with it, to Malbaie, new masters of British blood. After long mutterings the war broke out openly in 1756. In those days the farmer at Malbaie who looked out, as we look out, upon the mighty river would see great ships passing up and down. Some of them differed from the merchant ships to which his eye was accustomed. They stood high in the water. Ships came near the north shore in those days and he could see grim black openings in their sides which meant cannon. Already Britain had almost driven France from the sea and these French ships, which ascended the St. Lawrence, were few. Then, in 1759, happened what had been long-expected and talked about. Signal fires blazed at night on both sides of the St. Lawrence to give the alarm, when not French, but British ships, sailed up the river, a huge fleet. They stopped at Tadousac and then slowly and cautiously filed past Malbaie. On a summer day the crowd of white sails scattered on the surface of the river made an animated scene. In wonder our farmer and his helpers watched the ships silently advance to their goal. There were 39 men-of-war, 10 auxiliaries, 70 transports and a multitude of smaller craft carrying some 27,000 men; it was the mightiest array Britain had ever sent across the ocean. New France was doomed.
The French fought bravely a campaign really hopeless. Montcalm massed his chief force at Quebec and there awaited attack. In vain had he appealed to France for further help; he was left unaided to struggle with a foe who had command of the sea, whose fleet could pass up and down before Quebec with the tide and keep the French guards for twenty miles in constant nervous tension as to where a landing might be made. Wolfe carried on his work relentlessly. He warned the Canadians that he would ravage their villages if they did not remain neutral. Neutral it was almost impossible for them to be for the French urged them in the other direction. With stern rigour, Wolfe meted out to them his punishment. He sent parties to burn houses and destroy crops and Malbaie was not spared. On August 15th, 1759, Captain Gorham reported to Wolfe that with 300 men, one half of them Rangers from the English colonies, the other half Highlanders, he had devastated the north shore of the St. Lawrence. The soldiers did their work thoroughly. From Baie St. Paul, the last considerable village east of Quebec, they went on thirty miles to Malbaie where they destroyed almost all of the houses. We do not know whether the competent Dufour was still the farmer at Malbaie. But all the fine pictures of better cattle, better pigs and sheep, better farming, better fishing, ended with the applying of the British soldiers' torch to the wooden buildings: much of the settlement went up in smoke. Some of the cattle, pigs and sheep found their way perhaps to Wolfe's commissariat. But a good many were left and no doubt they are the ancestors of many of the cattle, sheep and pigs we see at Malbaie still. This first visit of Americans and Highlanders to Malbaie has