A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs | Page 8

"porpoises" or white whales. When
he died in 1708 he left money to the Seminary at Quebec on condition
that from this endowment, forever, two boys should be educated; for
the intervening two centuries the condition has been faithfully observed;
one knows not how many youths owe their start in life to the gift of the
former seigneur of Malbaie. There, however, no memory or tradition of
him survives. In his time some land was cleared. The saw mill and a
grist mill, begun by Comporté, were completed and stood, it seems,
near the mouth of the little river now known as the Fraser but then as
the Ruisseau à la Chute. Civilization had made at Malbaie an inroad on
the forest and was struggling to advance.
On Hazeur's death in 1708 his two sons, both of them priests, inherited
Malbaie. Meanwhile the government developed a policy for the region.
It resolved to set aside, as a reserve, a vast domain stretching from the
Mingan seigniory below Tadousac westward to Les Eboulements, and
extending northward to Hudson Bay. The wealth of forest, lake, and
river, in this tract furnished abundant promise for the fur and other
trade of which the government was to have here a complete monopoly.
Malbaie was necessary to round out the territory and so the heirs of
Hazeur were invited to sell back the seigniory to the government. The
sale was completed in October, 1724, when the government of New
France, acting through M. Begon, the Intendant, for a sum of 20,000
livres (about $4,000) found itself possessed of Malbaie "as if it had

never been granted," of a saw mill and a grist mill, of houses, stables
and barns, gardens and farm implements, grain, furniture, live stock,
cleared land, cut wood and all other products of human industry there
in evidence.[1]
Within the reserve, in addition to Malbaie, were a number of trading
posts--Tadousac, Chicoutimi, Lake St. John, Mistassini, &c. In this
great tract the government expected to reap large profits from its
monopoly of trade with the Indians. Some of the fertile land was to be
used for farms which should produce food supplies for the posts. The
Intendant had sanguine hopes that the profit from trade and agriculture
would aid appreciably in meeting the expense of government. It was,
we may be well assured, an expectation never realized.
We get a glimpse of Malbaie in 1750 as a King's post. There were two
farms, one called La Malbaie, the other La Comporté. The two farmers
were both in the King's service and, in the absence of other diversions,
quarrelled ceaselessly. The region, wrote the Jesuit Father Claude
Godefroi Coquart, who was sent, in 1750, to inspect the posts, is the
finest in the world. He reported, in particular, that the farm of Malbaie
had good soil, excellent facilities for raising cattle, and other
advantages. Only a very little land had been cleared, just enough wheat
being raised to supply the needs of the farmer and his assistants. The
place should be made more productive, M. Coquart goes on to say, and
the present farmer, Joseph Dufour, is just the man to do it. He is able
and intelligent and if only--and here we come to the inherent defect in
trying to do such pioneer work by paid officials who had no final
responsibility--he were offered better pay the farm could be made to
produce good results. The old quarrel with the farmer at La Comporté
had been settled; now the farmer of Malbaie was the superior officer,
rivalry had ceased, and all was peace.
Coquart gives an estimate of the farming operations at Malbaie which
is of special interest as showing that, if the old régime in Canada did
not produce good results, it was not for lack of criticism. Better cattle
should be raised, he says; at Malbaie one does not see oxen as fine as
those at Beaupré, near Quebec, or on the south shore. The pigs too are

extremely small, the very fattest hardly weighing 180 pounds; in
contrast, at La Petite Rivière, above Baie St. Paul, the pigs are huge;
one could have good breeds without great expense; it costs no more to
feed them and [a truism] there would be more pork! Of sheep too
hardly fifty are kept at Malbaie through the winter; there should be two
or three hundred. From the two farms come yearly only thirty or forty
pairs of chickens.
Father Coquart's census is as rigorous and unsparing of detail as the
Doomsday Book of William the Conqueror. He tells exactly what the
Malbaie farm can produce in a year; the record for the year of grace
1750 is "4 or 6 oxen; 25 sheep, 2 or 3 cows, 1200 pounds of pork, 1400
to 1500